We recently connected with Brian Park and have shared our conversation below.

Brian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

The most important thing is to maintain a healthy relationship with the craft. No matter how skillful you are, if you can’t enjoy the time you’re spending with your craft, it will eventually fall apart. Whether it’s your partner, work or passion.

I started playing guitar in Seoul, Korea, where many musicians devote their early years of their craft preparing to get into music schools. It’s a tough road where you prepare a 1-minute piece for a whole year and only very few of them will get selected. Many of my friends got discouraged in the process after trying for many years and failing to get into music schools, but that’s not surprising considering that nobody would want to do that on their own(I thought the whole point of perusing arts was to not do things like that?). It was the first time that I saw social pressure and insecurity overpowering their love for their craft, ruining their relationship and eventually making them to leave the path.

We must connect our craft with love. At some points of our lives, we all practiced because of insecurities, financial and social pressure or maybe simply because we feel like we’re obligated to do so. However, we all started our own journeys because there was joy in it. Even in the most wrecked marriage, at some point there was love. I wonder if it’s possible to shape our relationship with our craft to be motivated simply and only by joy, love and curiosity.

On a more technical side, often times learning a craft has to deal with learning vocabulary. A common question in linguistics is “how many words do you need to know to speak a new language?”. For obvious reasons, it depends on who you ask, but many linguists seem to agree that it’ll be around 10’000 words to be able to be conversational, but you need more in order to achieve fluency. It might seem like a lot, but in this case, every variation of a word is counted as a different word (for example, the words “normal” and “normally” would be counted as separate words). So, if you know many variations of a word, with a small amount of vocabulary, you can reach to a conversational level. I think this applies to any craft. If you are learning a new craft or style, it might be a good idea to get as much vocabulary under your fingers in the beginning phase. Once you reach a certain amount of vocabulary(or patterns, melodies or sequences), the human brain starts to mix, match and deconstruct them in a very linguistic way. Find and learn the patterns that excite you the most and collect them with joy. Trust the process and your intuition.

On an ending note, here are some small notes that I hope will help you be more mindful about your craft related to music.

-Are you critical enough about your time and feel as much as you should be?(or are you too critical?)
-Does your melodies sound like a song?
-Do you make other people feel comfortable when you play?
-Try rejecting your first intuition and go for your second intuition(a small habit of editing can change a lot).
-Are you playing in the right dynamic?
-Record and listen back to what you played and try playing it again EXACTLY the way you originally intended to.
-Do you rely on electronic devices on stage?
-Good playing requires concentration, but great playing requires passion (Mick Goodrick).

Brian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Brian A. Park and I’m an improvisational artist. I’m completely devoted to the guitar and I write songs. I write songs that are the most fun musical environment for me(and hopefully others) to improvise. In a lot of ways it’s similar to how jazz musicians will improvise over tunes.

Currently I’m living in LA playing shows honing my skills and songs. I also host the “Venice Beach Jam” with my friends where we play music in nature.

As of now, I just finished a “poor man’s tour” in Japan playing 4 shows in Tokyo and Yokohama and I’m heading to Korea to play 5 more shows with my original music. My girlfriend(NYC) and 4 of my friends(Korea) flew to Japan to play these shows and make music with Japanese artists. One of my biggest ambitions is to be able to travel, hear more musicians all over the world and share my joy towards music. For the Korean tour, my good friend from Japan and fantastic bassist Takuro Tsubaki will be joining us as a special guest artist.

Also, I’m working on a record. Which will be released later this year.

In terms of my career, I never said no to an opportunity related to guitar/music. I played for wedding bands for many years. I play for many churches and I’ve been teaching guitar to kids and adults. I take a lot of inspiration from jazz and I play standards at local jazz bars in LA. I’ve recorded dozens records as a sideman.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I’m building an international community of musician. I want great musicians(which you can only be by being a kind person) to be able to travel and explore music from other parts of the world.

I would like to be able to book shows all around the world and get my friends paid good money. Explore the world and get drunk in nature with my friends.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When I was younger, I was confused and I struggled to find purpose. At some point of my life, through music I felt so much love. The thing about love is that, once you experience, you don’t try to keep it all to yourself but you want to share with others. I was certain that if I could make people feel the way I felt, there would be meaning into it.

Writing and performing for others makes me feel heard and that is the most rewarding thing for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tr.ee/VrPdnqIyoa
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brian.a.park_guitar?igsh=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@brianapark?si=PaQOPLYgaY53ng_d

Image Credits

Mikaela Veracruz
-Venice jam photographer