Saturday special 'stack
Very deep testimonial.
Hey creative music-makers,
Yesterday I recorded a testimonial with my student Pat. Pat’s been in a lot of the social media content I’ve shared lately. He joined Create Interesting Music on January 31st, 2025, so we’ve been working together for a little over 4 months, now.
The intent for this substack is to share tips on creative music-making, and this post does dip a little bit outside of that, but it was just so good to hear some of the things that he was saying that I wanted to share it.
Here’s the full video:
I was considering trying to present it non-linearly, and I did some light editing, in that I moved the part about guest workshops from the very end to the middle.
Here are some choice quotes from Pat’s testimonial:
“Everybody that I play with, or I play in front of, because I play guitar a lot, are noticing changes in the style of music that I’m playing, which is cool.
“There’s a lot of muscle memory, there’s stuff that’s locked in, where I can quickly and easily discover different positions in which I can play something, and pay attention to register.
“Before this, it was all gut-based; I would just make stuff and be like, ‘this sounds awesome, but I’m also stuck, and I can’t break out.’ The structures of songs that I was making were pretty uniform throughout, and now I can experiment with variety a lot more.
“[Before joining,] using non-guitar instruments was a lot more of a shot in the dark. So, now that I understand how to make music with intention on the guitar, I can apply that to any other instrument. I started playing shakuhachi, and because I understand intervals, I can create a series of notes that’s more interesting.
“[On the topic of guest workshops]: being able to talk to artists about a specific topic that they’ve spent a lot of time in, outside of just music theory, so — this is everything that I do in order to prep a release; here’s all the prep I do going into a session, or going into post[-production]; here’s how I think about the current climate of production and mastering and sound, from someone who’s won a Grammy — it’s pretty sick.
“It’s worth a lot more than the price tag. Going into the institutions, doing the work, and taking the knowledge back, [as Cole has done,] is a long process, and being able to get that in a straight shot, without having the rigidness of music school, is a perfect fit for people who don’t want to pay 6 figures and bend over backwards and do all these late nights, putting in all the work that the professor needs.
“If you’re like — I want to learn, but I don’t want to do it all on YouTube, I want to have a teacher, I want to get feedback, I want to have challenges that apply to what I’m learning, and a group of people around me who are doing the same thing, it’s really beneficial.
“If I was talking with someone who was hesitant, face-to-face, I’d say — talk to Cole. […] There’s so much flexibility with what you’re learning, and also there are standardized learnings. It’s truly the best of both worlds. There’s never a moment where we’re talking about something where [Cole] doesn’t immediately know what I’m talking about, and have like 5 things to say about it.
What [Cole] has done is created a model that I’d love to use for other things I’d like to learn. I’ll have to go into the Shakuhachi world and see if I can find a teacher as good as [Cole].”
Happy Saturday,
Cole