When working with my private students, one of the most important things that I focus on is defining their musical influences. This helps me to really understand what styles of music they have an interest in playing, but more importantly, it helps me to lead them down the path to finding their own style or "voice" as a player. I tell all of my students that developing their own personal style will come from the constant repetition of this simple three step process:

1. Imitation
Defining your musical influences and learning to imitate their unique style of playing. This group of influences can include musicians of any style (blues, jazz, rock, folk, classical, metal, etc.) as well musicians of any instrument. For example, even though I'm a guitarist, my influences include players like Miles Davis (trumpet), John Coltrane (Saxophone) and Bill Evans (piano).

2. Assimilation
Understanding WHAT it is about each player that you study that gives their playing a unique sound. Is it the choice of notes or scales they use? The types of chords they use? The techniques they use? The rhythmic sounds they use? This is the step where you try to ‘get inside' of the specific style of each player.

3. Innovation
Once you've learned to play ‘in the style of' your influences, and you actually understand WHAT it is that  gives them their sound, can you now go BEYOND that and actually create something new and original based on all that you've learned? This final step is where true musical growth comes from.

I first heard this concept from trumpeter Clark Terry (Clark has played with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, and the Tonight Show Band among many others). One interesting thing that I've found with many of my private students is that their initial reaction to this approach is often something like this: "The first step is Imitation? Oh no, I don't want to imitate anybody, I want to have my own sound, I want to be unique."

I always chuckle when I hear comments like this because it seems that so many players don't realize the long standing tradition of "Imitation" that exists in all forms of music. I've mentioned before that I look at music like a language, and learning to imitate the "voice" of other players is a big part of finding your own "voice". I often illustrate this with my blues students by showing them how one simple T-Bone Walker blues lick from the 1940's was imitated and then "reinvented" by so many other great blues legends, including Albert King, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The most important part of the lesson is that each of these players still has their own unique musical "personalities", and yet they all share the same type of language and they also shared many of the same influences. You will find that this is true for so many of the great players in history, whether it's Jimmy Page stealing Scotty Moore's country licks from early Elvis records, or Eddie Van Halen learning every one of Eric Clapton's early blues solos note-for-note, or Charlie Christian's influence on Wes Montgomery who then had an influence on George Benson, and so on. What it comes down to is another one of my favorite quotes: Good musicians borrow, but great musicians STEAL. After 25+ years of playing I've found that the players who are often referred to as the most "innovative" are quite simply the musicians who have stolen the most, and in the process, they have developed a much broader understanding of the language of music. That type of "deep understanding" of their instrument along with their own unique set of "dialects" within the musical language is what leads them to being such revolutionary players.

What does all of this mean? Well, as you can imagine from the title of this post, it's time for you to make some important choices about your musical influences. We are all a product of our environment in one way or another, and having a steady "diet" of good musical influences is one of the most important but overlooked aspects of true musical growth. Remember that you're going to be spending a lot of time trying to imitate, understand, study, and learn from your influences, and you're not just going to sit there and listen to them. I once had a student interested in learning to play jazz guitar, but he had never listened to jazz outside of our lessons (he hadn't established his influences), which made the process of trying to learn jazz so much more difficult for him. Once he got on a steady diet of really good jazz guitar (both listening to and playing jazz all of the time), he progressed very rapidly. Now it's your turn to figure out who YOUR influences are! J

Good Luck,

Nate