JON, IN REAL LIFE WHAT JON FEELS LIKE
Hello all! Jon from the Evansville Music Academy here! I was asked to start writing a blog for Moore Music, to which I happily agreed. There are a lot of topics I will want to write about, but I thought I’d start with a bit of my background and how I ended up where I am today. Though it’s been a long journey, I’ll stick to the most important bits.
I have always loved music. I can remember my first favorite song was “Jackie Blue” by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. This was way back in the early 70’s and when it would come on the radio my mother would say, “it’s your favorite song” and turn it up for me.
So many different styles of music caught my ear when I was very young. Kenny Rogers, Sha Na Na, Billy Joel, Queen, Kiss; it was all great!
It was around my 8th birthday when I began to beg for piano lessons. My grandmother had a player piano (you youngsters will have to look it up) and me and my sister would love to sit and watch the piano play itself. So naturally I wanted to learn how to play for myself. I begged and begged and my parents gave in and bought me a piano and signed me up for lessons. I wish the rest of this story had a happy ending, but sometime during my first few lessons I started begging to not have to go back. LOL! The good news is that I still have that piano and my love for music and the desire to make it did not fade; though it did shift.
I began playing trombone in the 4th grade. My reasons for picking the trombone were that I thought it looked cool and I was told that having braces would make playing the trumpet uncomfortable. I played all the way through school right up to the night I graduated from high school, and to be honest, I was good at it. But it really wasn’t ever a passion for me.
I was always fascinated by the guitar. My dad plays guitar and he would often be the entertainment at family get-togethers. He had a nylon string classical guitar and he played finger style and sang. Watching him and others play guitar always mesmerized me. Even before I could play the guitar, I would “air” guitar to my favorite songs. Eventually playing the air guitar bloomed into a desire to play the real thing. My dad always left his “gut-string” laying around, so I’d grab it when nobody was around and started learning chords from a cheesy guitar method book that my Dad acquired in a trade.
Over time I began figuring out how to play cool riffs by Boston, AC/DC, Zeppelin, and other classic rock bands (though they weren’t “classic” back then). This was a time when a kid who lived outside a small town didn’t really have many learning resources, and I know that those years helped me develop a good ear. Being able to learn music by listening has, in my opinion, become a lost art, but that’s a blog for another time.
For most people around me, I think they thought my love of playing guitar was more of a hobby for me. But to me, it was everything. I never wanted to put it down. And the better I got, the more I played. I can’t say that learning to play has ever been easy for me, but I’ve enjoyed every step and have never felt that learning or practicing was ever a burden.
By my 20’s I was gigging around Evansville, doing the classic rock cover band thing. This was the 90’s and there seemed to be no shortage of good paying gigs. The things I learned from gigging and performing were huge to my growth as a player. Over time my musical tastes grew as I let myself be open to different styles. Around this time, after a series of “real life” events, I found myself enrolled at Oakland City University in the Music Education department. It was perfect timing. I minored in Guitar Performance which meant I had to (gasp) learn to read music for guitar. I already could read from piano and trombone, but I had never had the need to read for guitar. I did a crash course a few months before my freshman classes and was able to hold my own.
After four years, my music education had come to a close and I was a bit lost on what would come next. I was still gigging, playing with a few different bands and writing some music, but I knew that wasn’t going to pay the bills. Once again fortune and good timing shined down on me. Two of my closest friends and bandmates were working at Moore Music and they convinced me I should teach some lessons as they were in need of another guitar instructor. I thought it’d be a great way to make some extra money. Within one or two months I had a full schedule and was teaching six days a week. It was then that I realized that I had found my true calling. People had been telling me that I should be a teacher my entire life, I guess they were right.
So here I am, 17 years later, still doing what I love to do. And of, course, I left out some other major turning points in my playing and teaching skills, but I’ll save all that for the movie. Over the next few months I’ll focus my blogs on many different ideas and topics that I come face to face with every day as a teacher. I welcome any questions or suggestions that any of you might want to ask me. Thanks for reading and I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you again soon.
Jon