Freak When Spoken To by Anastasia Jonsen

Author:Anastasia Jonsen [Jonsen, Anastasia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9789188153159
Publisher: Bullet Point Publishing
Published: 2015-09-20T22:00:00+00:00

Freak Guitar Camp

IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, IA tried out a new idea. He had been holding guitar clinics (a combination of a lecture, spontaneous stand-up comedy and practical examples) regularly for many years, but what about intensifying it a little? It could work! He named it Freak Guitar Week and it was held in a school which was closed for the summer holidays.

The idea proved successful, and it got IA thinking. Sweden has a long tradition of sending city kids to the countryside during the summer, so what about gathering more enthusiastic guitar students in the woods for six days and stuffing them full of food and quirky guitar playing? Freak Guitar Camp was born and became a thundering success. Location changed to a residential study centre in the middle of nowhere – or as specific as it gets: Härsjösand, surrounded by miles and miles of trees and lakes, about half an hour’s drive from Gothenburg.

IA admits that the two camp weeks are the highlight of his year.In 2015, he held his 17th camp, and over a thousand guitarists from all over the world have attended so far. A large number of campers have returned several years, which makes the total number of filled seats even greater.

But what makes the camp so in demand? For six days, a group of eager students are immersed in odd time signatures, polyrhythm techniques, unorthodox scales, tips about song writing and how to make it in the world of music. If it sounds intense, it’s because it is. In fact, IA says that if anybody leaves, thinking “yup, nailed it!”, he’s not done his job properly. There is no way a camper can take in and process all the material they work with during the week, and that’s IA’s intention: he wants to sow a seed which will grow during the rest of the year. And apparently, this approach works, because it seems impossible to find campers who didn’t enjoy their week in the woods with IA.

One such camper is Linus “Mr. Gul” Abrahamson, who as an eager 18-year-old attended the very first Freak Guitar Camp in 2000 and for several consecutive years. He started as an attender, but would come to play a much larger part in IA’s life in the area of music theory.

“What I do for IA is to transcribe his music, mostly for his annual Freak Guitar Camp where the campers get a fairly thick booklet with notation and tablature for all the material they’re about to learn. IA does know how to transcribe music, but he hasn’t had any formal education, so some of the stuff he transcribes isn’t always the common way to write it – although it may be theoretically correct. Also, the more high-end notation software tends to be quite difficult to master, and it’s sometimes tricky to make it look really good while simultaneously being efficiently transcribed or written. You can think of it as Photoshop for notation – you can do pretty much anything, but it ain’t always a walk in the park and there are plenty of rules to follow.

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