by Matt Baamonde.

It’s a beautiful October day in Boston.

It’s been a long day at Berklee College of Music and I’m sitting in my dorm room on Massachusetts Avenue surrounded by dozens of broken guitar strings, Allen wrenches, and guitar parts, as I try to resurrect what was once my Fender Stratocaster. After an incident with a rebellious guitar cable, pandemonium and destruction ensued.

My roommate has Rush playing their classics on the Rush in Rio DVD and I’m trying to block out the almost melodic call and answer patterns of city noise and traffic from outside my window. Instructional jazz guitar videos are playing on my laptop, as I try to decide how I’m going to balance the ridiculous amount of homework, classes, performances and shows, attempts at a social life, and finding time to feed myself.

Mid-terms are right around the corner…

Needless to say, I’m very busy. The intensity of the daily grind was to be expected, but I guess I speak for every busy college student when I say the workload and responsibility of going to school and living on your own is unrelenting and unexpectedly unsettling.

The week begins smoothly enough with my Ear Training 1 class on Monday, a fifty-minute class from 3:10-4:00, which repeats Wednesday and Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays are rough with four classes, starting with Writing Skills at 9:00 am, my private instruction at 11:30, my Guitar Lab at 3:00, and my Introduction to Music Tech class at 6:00. Wednesdays I have Harmony 2 and Ensemble Class, in addition to Ear Training. And then Thursdays and Fridays I have repeats of my other classes.

I often have discussions with my roommate and friends on how the workload at Berklee is very different from other schools. Here you are forced to practice extensively- just to be prepared for class. Outside of Harmony and Writing Skills there are not many set homework assignments that can be ‘completed.’ When you have to ‘perform’ your Berklee homework is always a higher level you can achieve, so you never feel like you are done.

In addition to solo homework, there are extensive time requirements for group practice. Both my Ensemble and Guitar Skills Lab require that I meet with other students outside of class and practice the material, exchange ideas, and discuss and solve problems, hang-ups, and difficulties. This involves coordinating schedules and dealing with personalities. I am sure anyone who has ever been in a band knows about the issues that can arise when there are four or five musicians with different commitment levels and no clear leader in the group.

Difficulties…. like the ones I have with Ear Training, by far the most challenging class in my schedule. I’ve had to arrange meetings with a private tutor to help overcome my troubles.

Ear Training is just that, a class designed to specifically help our ears be more aware, sensitive and attuned to certain pitches and ranges of sounds, as well as rhythmic patterns in music. But it’s not just that. In addition to conducting in various rhythmic patterns, a large portion of the class is also focused on singing the pitches back. Singing has been an area of music I’ve never worked very hard at, but after only a few weeks of classes my vocal range has opened up to a surprising degree and I can even hum a few tunes now, in time, on pitch, and while conducting.

As the semester has been moving on, however, the class has been getting more difficult with odd time signatures, a wider range of pitches, new keys, and different conducting and rhythmic patterns. Again, I’ve been finding that a tutor has been a necessity for keeping up with the class.

Writing Skills is just like the musical equivalent of an ‘English’ class with focus on maintaining proper penmanship and musical grammar. We’ve gone over all the basics of how to draw clefs to contextual analysis of proper note choice, (using a Gb instead of an F#.) Berklee places an accentuated focus on drum and bass notation as well, and the value in writing an easy-to-read piece of music.

While most of my classes are comprised of students from various musical backgrounds, with different instrumental majors, my Guitar Performance Skills Lab is a class of just six to ten guitar majors of similar levels. Hear we emphasize all the basics of how to be a working guitar player, from sight-reading to chord comping to basic fretboard techniques.

My private instruction course allows for specific study on my individual needs as a guitarist. Though I still think the class is too short at half an hour, I have learned tremendous amounts due to the fact that it is one-on-one instruction, where you can have easy question and answer sessions, as well as direct focus on my specific strengths and weaknesses.

Music and Computer Technology is one of the more interesting and fun classes, where we focus on learning how to compose, record and mix musical arrangements on our new and expensive Macbook Pro laptops. Each is loaded with Berklee-specific programs, such as Reason, Garageband, Finale, Logic, and a few others with which I have yet to tinker. My background includes two years of training in this area, in the Fairfax (Virginia) Academy’s Music and Computer Technology program, which may be why I feel very comfortable in this class, despite the fact that my previous training involved Windows/PC based applications, and not Mac apps.

Harmony Class is similar to a ‘math’ class where we learn the basic construction of the musical language. Things began easily enough, with simple triadic chord analysis and how to notate and build chords in both treble and bass clef. As time has progressed, we have discussed scales, modes, inversions and more recently seventh chords and secondary and extended dominants. Voice leading will be our next focus as we get into studying real musical examples and breaking them down with analysis.

My ensemble is essentially band practice where every other week we watch master class instructors perform a song or two out of a required repertoire and then break us up, based on instrument, and go over the individual parts. The following week, after extensive practice, we split up and reform into bands and jam to the pieces together. At our mid-term we will perform two pieces that we have selected for the rest of the class.

Now pile that combination on with homework at least two to four hours a night in addition to whatever else you have going on and you have the basic lifestyle of a Berklee student.

What else do I have going on?

I am trying to work out at a local gym three to four times a week. I have been on several dates, and may have a girlfriend. I am still making friends and learning about Boston, and so I try to go out with the gang on weekends once in a while. While I really want to stay in my room, or meet with my ensemble, and practice constantly (because I am determined to succeed in this difficult industry), the school reminds us that networking is just as important, so I am trying to make friends, participate in school events, make a name with my teachers, and experience Berklee in every way.

The teachers are phenomenal at what they do and easy to work with. There are no old crones with yardsticks and too much free time here. Instead, we have real performing musicians with extensive experience and training, almost reverse-engineering their skills to us. They love to watch when they see you really feeling the music and getting into it, essentially ignoring what you have been taught, because it is already ingrained into you. My ensemble teacher had us stop reading the music out of our books, closed the shades, turned off the lights and had us jam in the dark based on feeling and emotion, so we could understand exactly what all this was for….

The Berklee Hockey team is still going strong, by the way, with a four and one record in its inaugural season!

So, the eXperience deepens and broadens. Homework beckons. Talk to you next month.

All the best,

Matt Baamonde
“Baazar”