The seminars are for educating talent…to let them
know, “Yo, this is how you gotta do it!” I run into
these situations where people are paying money through these various outlets to get their stuff heard, and that hurts
our industry too. Man, that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard; they charge a $1,000 fee, but you can put your $250 down! People are getting cheated like that, and that doesn’t have anything
to do with the music industry! Either you have something going on, or
you don’t! It’s like one of the first things you learn, “You
don’t pay the publisher, the publisher is suppose to pay you!” So
are you going to go pay somebody else to “hear” your song… to get your song placed or whatever? It doesn’t work like that! There
are just a lot of problems plaguing our industry right now, and there are a lot of people that are feeding off of it too. And they make a living off of that kind of thing.
But to me though, that just further says that the ones who “do know,” are not doing their job. Or, we all got to come together and start saying, “These problems are plaguing us.” Because that’s what part of business is too, “solving problems.” So first we have to identify and define the problems, so we can deal with them. If we never identify and
define the problems, then become responsible, we won’t have anything to pass down.
My point in doing the music seminars is to also raise the
“art” factor in production and songwriting. Whatever you’re doing musically is an art… like sampling.
“Sampling is an art!” And learning how to put all of those things together
is an art form. “That” process of creativity is a beautiful thing. But
a lot of people don’t understand that…if they don’t develop that process. For example, when you can understand the process, you can do things like take
someone else’s humming, and then know “how” to make it work. Or just take someone else’s guitar
idea, and then “you” understand how to make that work. When you
understand the creative process, you will know how to hear it, and know how to put what you hear into perspective and how to use it. That’s the skill and
ear training that I learned from Church. In the Church, someone might be singing,
and then holler at the musicians, “Catch me!” …And that developed my ear.
And then once you get it to a point where you start hearing melodies in your head, and you start learning the “how
to” in the creative process; putting the harmonics with the melodic, you then put those two things together, and it
all becomes easy. So once you learn this, when you do the music production, you can “build” from any piece;
a drumbeat, a guitar line, a vocal part, a bass line, or even a string line. We
can then put together the “whole song,” from just one little thing. And
that’s what the seminars are all about… learning.
