A friend of mine is a musician and always seems to be learning new instruments, new tunes, and new ways of making music in cool ways. At the weekend, he loves to go into Central Park in the center of Nagoya during the daytime where lots of Japanese bands perform. Now, some of these bands are really really good, and some of them are – how shall I say this – a little less good. One of the things that my friend likes about watching all the bands is that it is free! And as he says to me, „Because something is expensive, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good… and if something is free, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has no value. You have to listen and look yourself and find out what is valuable for you. And of course, as you listen and look, you may learn very different things to someone else.“
So my friend goes every week when the weather is fine, and he says that he learns something from every single band! When he watches and listens to the really good bands, he says that he learns new riffs from the guitar player and cool rhythms from the funky drummers. I guess that it’s not surprising that you can learn a lot by watching excellent performers.
But what’s really interesting is that my friend says, „You can learn by watching and listening to the bad performers, too. When I watch a bad performer, I think to myself – wow, that’s another thing that I’m not going to do.“
So my friend gets better and better, learning from both good and bad performers. And he says that „you can have so much fun learning and improving in ways that you never even imagined!.“