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Okay, it’s finally done! Some of you may be wondering why I
took the time to transcribe this all out. I had received a copy
of this show a couple of days after it happened, and I threw it
in my CD player in my living room. The first thing I noticed
was that the sound quality was not that great, so I had to turn
the bass down real far to be able to understand the
recording. I really didn’t know what to expect, and as I was
cleaning house and trying to interpret it, and I finally found
myself having to go sit down and just… listen. I remember
sitting there going, “wow, this is good!” Being a musician at
heart, I got a whole different aspect to the music industry that
I’d never even thought about. John gives some priceless
advice here. But you can find out all about it… so read on.

I also want to thank the person who recorded this show on
their iPod. I heard that they were very strict with not allowing
any taping or photographs of the performance, so I am very
grateful to the person who stealthed this. I know that a lot of
people complain about the sound quality of this show, but in
my opinion, we are very lucky to have even that. I hear
there's a videotape of it in the Berklee library, and it cannot
be checked out. What I would give to get a hold of that! So
that’s part of the reason I wanted to have it all written out, for
those people who couldn’t make it through the recording.

So here’s the other information I’ve received about the clinic.
It was held at the Berklee Performance Center at the Berklee
College of Music (http://www.berklee.edu/) on September 17,
2004 in Boston. Pretty basically it was a Songwriting clinic
that was held for the students, and during the two hours,
John spent most of the time discussing his music
philosophies, and then answering questions. He played a
few songs also. If you’ve actually listened to the
performance, you might notice that they mention several
times about it being webcast to California. Upon further
research, I was able to find out that what the host is referring
to is that the clinic was simultaneously webcast to the Dolby
Laboratories in Burbank, CA. You can also find a good little
article about the clinic at http://www.berklee.
edu/news/2004/10/jmayer.html, which is where I got some of
these pictures from. Enjoy!

UPDATE: I added links so that you can download the vocal
and music tracks, along with the MS Word document. Please
let me know if you have any problems with anything on the
site.