Well, you know you are already good looking and the life of the party, but did you ( all you readers, posters and lurkers) have Secret Skills! not Secret Squirrel* -but Secret Skills.
So says this recent article and a psychologist!

In Synopsis, they are, and I quote, as follows:

#1 Learn a New Language
#2 Meditate and Focus
#3 Memorize Movie Quotes

http://blog.musicnotes.com/2014/01/30/three-skills/?om_mid=022214_World&om_rid=YMMZ9K9D5UVS43YWYLCBC8NFN09V5KW7&ca=0&cmpid=eml_newsletter

here's the article:
[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/eyes-the-brain/201006/do-musicians-have-different-brains

So aside from all that good good above, we are of the highest caliber of musicians- Stickists!
revel faithful ones, revel!
Dave Brosky

for you 60's Saturday Morning Capt Crunch munching fans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Squirrel

It bothers me that neuroplasticity is still so unfamiliar a concept to the average person in the first world, given its age relative to more recent scientific discovers which are in the vernacular. A certain "brain training" website misuses the term to such a degree that it borders on grammatical error, and there is a seemingly endless flow of "surprising" research to show that our plastic brains are...wait for it...capable of being molded (i.e. plastic).

Protip: Everything in the Universe is changing, all the time.

Corollary: Unlike Neptune, you have control over how your brain changes.

love this post!! Look at the life of Joe Zawinul (RIP) he was playing better @ age 75!!! Still on the road……Still a power of nature!! May we all live our lives with such passion for our instruments, life etc. As long as you have breath, take the next step!!

....was there ever any doubt?

cheers,
kev

A while back I looked up the frequency of the 12 most often used letters in English and mapped them to the frequency of pitches and frequency of intervals and combined them, then took out a book and used the letters to determine pitches and intervals alternately.

The same can be done with note lengths. Event lengths tend to congregate around quarter notes or eighths depending. In any event, the closer you get to really short or really long note lengths, the less likely they will occur. The music that came out of my experiment was good enough.

I've created alphabets and even tried creating my own language. Has anyone else here done those too?

"If there are 12 named notes within an octave, why are there only 7 letters? After centuries of being forced to eat in the servants quarters and use the back entrance of the castle, this may just be an invention by musicians to make non-musicians feel inadequate." - Daniel J. Levitin, "This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession". great book by a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, before becoming a NEUROSCIENTIST. yeah, no shit. one of my faves. now, if i could only replace my $15 copy of George Russell's "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization" for under $200. on Amazon. bought it at Berklee in '79. didn't understand it back then, lost it. bummer.

It's available new from the publisher for $125 http://www.lydianchromaticconcept.com/buyit.html.

You said under $200...

Hey Android,

many libraries have a copy of the Lydian Chromatic Concept. That's where I ever saw my first copy. If a little podunk town like Flagstaff can have one at their university's Cline library. Yours might too, and if they don't, you could convince the head librarian of how important it is for jazz musicians in your town to have access to it so they should order one.

I believe the only secret needed is not actually a skill(though skill helps you along at first), but rather desire. And it is desire that colors our brain differently for the doctor/scientist to see. Desire to pass something along that can't be seen outside the skull. Only felt and heard. Or believed. It is the Dr. and Scientist who want to see it(not the musician that makes the music). Maybe they will someday. But you still have to have the desire to make it happen. Music is neat!

What helped me the most in my musical life is "The Berklee Correspondance Course"...25 lessons of basics skills at the beginning and ending with a lesson about an arrangement for big band...5 saxes, 4 bones, 4 tpts and a rythm section.

Still have this correspondance course but I think this programm is over, they don't sell it anymore...and, of course, there is no more corrections of your work.

I learned a lot about focussing on "target notes" and then look what happen around these notes. Target notes are (for me) basically the root, the third, the fifth and the seventh. When you know perfectly these 4 possibilities with every chord, every tonality, then you can look around and check how is the neigbourhood. Easy to see where are the 9th (b9 and #9), fourth, b5 and #5, etc...