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I’ve held the belief that listening to and learning from musical styles that are different from your own, has always been beneficial. However, early in my musical career this wasn’t so apparent to me or some of my students. In fact, some of my students had the misconceived perception that going outside of their “strength” would harm them musically in some way. So in their mind, they thought that learning something like music theory would be completely harmful to their creative process. Mike Philippov (a colleague of mine) has a great article on this subject which can be found here. (Should You Learn Music Theory?) They also were worried about the issues of being unique and having their own sound or style. One of my first articles “Are YOU Unique” explains on how to deal with this issue and even delves a little bit into the topic I will cover in this article. So to deal with these student’s doubts and misconceived perceptions, I asked them to read the articles I linked above and I told them this personal story about the Importance of Musical Exploration. A few years ago I would have considered myself a fairly decent Blues/Rock/Metal guitarist and I was pretty content with the level I was at and the pace I was progressing at. Then one day, one of my colleagues who is big into Jazz, asked me to attend a week long workshop with him to study Jazz. Needless to say I was a little bit skeptical, because I was not familiar with Jazz nor did I ever see it being useful in the music I would ever compose. After a while of thinking and eliminating the risk of being called a hypocrite (because I always tell others to have an open mind to new things), I decided to attend this week long Jazz workshop without any expectations of learning more than a cool lick or two. Boy was I wrong… After only the first day there (which was mostly listening to other musicians play), I was already coming up with new phrasing and composition ideas. Nothing had been taught to me yet, but by just listening to something so new and different to me, my mind was opened up to a world of new possibilities. As the week went by, I learned more and more from the great instructors there and from personal observation of the performances. My old phrasing and melodic ideas started to transform and fuse with all of the cool things I was learning at this Jazz workshop. Compositionally, I was introduced to new theories, scales, and techniques that I had not know to exist before. I hope this story has opened your mind to the “Importance of Musical Exploration,” and until next time… Take care and keep composing fellow artists!
Copyright 2007 Kole All rights reserved.
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Kole has finished two years studying music composition and classical guitar at Indiana University and is currently attending Musicians Institute (GBM). He has also studied with guitar virtuoso, 
