Special Project 06

Transitioning

The level of effort Tuning the Air required is pretty easy to muster in short endeavors. But for a project that was of no determined duration, it was really, really tough. We tried to ease this by “breaking up the band” at the end of every season; everyone had honored the commitment they made, and that was that. We were free to move on. Those who wished then came together and committed to the next season, and we began again. It was a useful fiction, and only mildly successful. What Tuning the Air needed to realize its potential was going to take years, whether we could see that or not.

I would never be so bold as to imagine I know what any individual’s personal reasons were for joining, staying or leaving the Tuning the Air company. What can be safely said in general is that Tuning the Air asked a lot of everyone who contributed, and we all had to do pretty difficult calculations when considering our own participation. If my own experience at all reflects what others were working with, it could be said that where ever the line between staying and leaving lies, we lived perpetually within inches of it.

The run of Tuning the Air, from early 2005 through the end of 2011, coincided with a significant shift in the demographics of my teaching practice. From my arrival in Seattle in late 1997 through the Level 3 course in Atlanta in 2003 an influx of guitarists with a specific interest in Guitar Craft had been the core of my work. By 2005 that had waned. The guitarists in that first wave were maturing, and they needed to find ways to apply and assimilate what they had learned in order to move forward. That is to say, they needed Tuning the Air, not more guided circles or weekly individual lessons. For me, this meant working more and more with guitarists with no GC interest. 

In the summer of 2005, about half-way through the first season of Tuning the Air, I began teaching a couple days a week at a little music store/studio in the outskirts of Seattle. Mixed blessing, this. On the purely practical side, it helped to stem the relentless and borderline desperate negative cash flow I was struggling with. But only just; the economy of that system is based on trading the bother of finding and scheduling students for a little more than half of the money you would have earned. It gave me small but reliable income in my otherwise hand-to-mouth personal financial situation, which afforded me a little freedom to continue saying “yes” to the show, while working to expand my private teaching practice. The more far-reaching value of the experience for me, though, was that it very quickly honed my teaching chops. I got to work within a purely traditional music teaching structure, learning a great deal about what people who are shopping for a guitar teacher are looking for and expecting; meanwhile I was able to very explicitly explore what of my Guitar Craft experience was translatable and transferrable. And, it gave me the opportunity to work with a lot of school-aged kids, which really is a very specialized skill that was completely new to me. So is working with the parents of school-aged kids. I stayed there for almost 5 years; 2 days, and later 1 day a week. When I let it go, I was very happy to be out of that “system”, but I had gained a lot.

The other thing that came from this experience was the re-acquaintance with the “old standard tuning” that I spoke of in "Prologue 2”, and the points of seeing regarding what had changed within me during the years of Guitar Craft Only. And it was through this work that I began to see some things about my own aspirations that I had not anticipated.