By Matt Hopkins
John Mayer visited his alma mater, The Berklee College of Music, to give a three hour clinic about his experiences in the music industry. He gave the artists some strongly worded advice about using social media.
John Mayer was known for a while as a prolific tweeter, but left behind his more than 3.7 million twitter followers behind almost a year ago. At the time there was a lot of speculation why he decided to leave the microblogging site, but he explained his true reasoning to the Berklee students.
According to the school sponsored website, berklee-blogs.com, Mayer warned to avoid finding “joy in little, tiny statements — little, tiny applause hits.” Mayer went on to share his experience with what he called the social media of the early 90s.
“I remember playing the guitar through the amplifier facing out the window of my house onto the street in the summer time,” Mayer said, according to the website. “That was social media in 1992.”
The website explained that after his last album, Mayer decided to get rid of the temptation to publish himself because he believed it was hindering his creativity.
“As you start playing music you’re going to stop thinking about getting better,” Mayer said. “As soon as you flip the switch into showing other people your music, for some reason, the other brain sort of goes away.”
Local musician, Aaron Eskaran, who sings and plays trumpet for The Vibrant Sound agreed for the most part with Mayer.
“I totally think thats good advice,” Eskaran said. “There are millions of people out there, and everybody has the same tools now. If you put yourself out there and you’re horrible, theres a chance that people won’t come back to you.”
Eskaran credited the dedication of local venues to the success for many musicians that have come out of Utah County.
“Musicians out here in Provo do so well because we have the venues that we frequent a lot,” Eskaran said. “We can build our foundations that way, the old fashioned way. Playing the open mic nights, just really getting your craft down, putting yourself out there in front of live people.”
However, Not every musician agrees with Mayer.
“You don’t have to ignore social media to be able to focus on music,” said local musician and student Brian Turley. “I think that having a broad spectrum of creative writing is going to make music better. I think in the end, it’s something for every individual to decide for himself. For Mayer, that didn’t work but I don’t think that would affect me at all.”
