Did you ever stop to think about how lucky we are to be born at this time in the history of mankind? Especially as musicians?
An amazing and very moving book that I recently read, A Brief History Of Mankind, showed me some perspective and opened my eyes slowly as to why we are so lucky to be living and playing music in 2015.
Human beings like us have been on this planet for approximately 100,000 years, yet only in the last 500 years rich music that transformed into today’s music started becoming very widely spread with the appearance of pianos and other potent western instruments like the guitars that first appeared only in 1801! (although archeologists have found simple flutes and percussion instruments dating back to about 50,000 years ago!)
We are always looking and fantasizing on the next fancy guitar and the newest gadget, but today I want to invite you on a fun ride of appreciation. A “Musical Thanksgiving” if you wish.
Let’s just stop for a moment and think about all the wonderful things that we can enjoy in our music lives today and make our days so wonderful and filled with joy that all of our ancestors could not have even dreamed about.
Lets appreciate our musical riches we can all enjoy.
25 Reasons to Be Grateful For Living In The 21st Century As Musicians
1: We can build a humongous music collection with hundreds of different albums from many utterly different music genres that all fit right in our pockets, and there will still be room in there for small, high quality earphones as well.
2: We can listen in high quality to all of our music collection easily while driving our car. Oh, cars! How cool are those 4 wheeled boxes that gets our asses to anywhere we want… (:
3: We can use YouTube to get infinite inspiration with new music, cool covers, music lessons and much more. Nobody had such things in their caves 7000 years ago…
4: We will never have to wait again for our favorite music clip to show up on MTV, we can just youtube that shit…
5: We can tune our guitar in a snap. Those weird forks are not needed anymore.
6: We can easily look up any chord shape or guitar scale using fancy, smart and colorful guitar apps.
7: Instead of going to the store to look for a “Rolling Stones chords and sheet music collection” for 29$ like they did till the 90’s, now we can just look it up on Ultimate Guitar…
8: Never miss another musical happening, show or an open mic that’s happening in our town tonight, and always find good live music to go and listen to.
9: Musicians can independently promote their music and get their word out to millions without having to be owned by a music corporate.
10: Thanks to the huge abundance, the price of online music lessons with the best teachers in the world is either free or very low: the amount you usually had to pay for one lesson in real life now gives you hundreds of hours of lessons from world renowned teachers and guitar players!
11: The prices and availability of the hundreds of instruments in your nearest music store is something that 19th century musicians (and all centuries before that…) were only dreaming about deep into their sleep. Remember this the next time you walk into a Guitar Center…
12: We can use highly effective ear-training apps to become the trained musicians that we want to be. People used to have to ask a partner to play intervals for them on the piano… (:
13: We can easily connect with musicians from every corner in the world on community forums, specialized websites, etc…
14: We can use services like CoverWithMe, that connects live between a drummer in Australia who can collaborate for creating a cover, or just jam with a guitarist in Paris or a pianist in Rio. Or both of them. We are living in the future, and it never ceases to amaze me!
15: We can watch video guitar lessons / singing lessons on our smartphones no matter where we are.
16: We can jog in the park while enjoying higher energies thanks to the music playing in our ears. Neanderthals never had that privilege when they were chasing zebras in the wilderness…
17: We can easily discover new music from all over the world that is customized to our personal tastes thanks to internet radio services such as Jango, YouTube, Pandora, etc.
18: The amount of recorded music you can put your hands on is unreal, and more good stuff keeps on coming out all the time.
19: We can save some extra money and fly to a different country to watch a live concert of our favorite artist. This one’s especially useful for music lovers who do not live in the US or other places where big name musicians usually stop on their tours.
20: We can use YouTube to upload our covers, get our music to travel all over the world, and get instant feedbacks on our performance from many different countries. When my dad was playing his guitar in his room he could barely get his sister next door to listen to it…
21: There are more than 1500 musical instruments available in the world and at the reach of your Amazon account… As opposed to mostly just Pianos in Europe, mostly just Percussion instruments in Africa and other examples that ruled the musical world for hundreds of years. It’s a true multi-instrumentalist heaven!
22: We have access to an insane amount of info about anything that’s music related. You have a question? Give it a goog and it will be answered in less than a second. No more leafing through hundreds of pages of magazines and books to find small pieces of info about your favorite musical heroes or songs.
23: You can find local musicians and form bands through specific Facebook Groups and Craigslist ads. I have done this myself and met some great music pals this way.
24: We can create our own worldwide musical adventures thanks to the relatively cheap price of air fares and the ability to take vacations.
25: We got banjos, flutes, guitars, electric guitars, pianos, trumpets, huge drum sets, harmonicas, melodicas and many many more. The quantity of different sounds we all know is unmatchable to any other times in those 100 thousand years our relatives have walked on this earth.
I am very grateful to be living in this golden age of music. How about you?
Thank yoiu for reading. Please share more interesting and funny things to be grateful about in the comments.
Photos are thanks to www.beyondrealitypack.com, future.wikia.com
