Five Years Nomadic: What I Was Actually Doing

When I tell people I spent five years traveling the world studying music, the response is usually some version of "that sounds amazing." And it was. But the story most people imagine is pretty different from what actually happened.

They picture a guy with a guitar backpacking through beautiful places, jamming with locals on beaches. There was some of that. But most of it was sitting in small rooms with old musicians who didn't speak my language, trying to absorb things that can't really be taught in words. It was frustrating and slow and deeply uncomfortable. I'm still not sure I absorbed half of what was offered to me.

Why I left

I left Patreon because I knew I wanted a change in life trajectory. I wanted to take some risks. I moved to Thailand to focus on music, and Sonora started organically from there. Some friends who played guitar wanted to follow the path I'd followed to get to fluency on the instrument, and that turned into a real thing. Because Sonora was remote-first and fully online from day one, I could run it from anywhere.

At some point I realized that the best way to teach other people is to be a student myself. I kept meeting musicians from other traditions who played things I couldn't even parse. I thought I understood music pretty well, and then I'd hear someone play something that made me realize how small my frame of reference actually was. I wanted to understand how they thought.

So I followed the thread.

Nepal

The first stop was Nepal, to study Indian classical music with Roshan Sharma, a master Mohan Veena player. I literally lived on Roshan's floor, and we'd spend hours every day in deep study. Raga was the most intellectually demanding music I encountered anywhere. The melodic system is vast and deeply codified. Each raga has rules about which notes you can use, how you approach them, what time of day you play them, what emotional quality they carry. Learning even one raga properly takes years.

Living with your teacher is the guru-shishya tradition. You don't take a lesson once a week. You absorb the music by proximity and repetition over years. I recorded a series of lessons with Roshan on konnakol, the South Indian tradition of rhythmic vocal percussion. It was my first real encounter with that immersive model of education, and it rewired how I think about teaching.

Spain

From Nepal I spent time in Bali, then went to Granada to study flamenco. Flamenco nearly broke me. The rhythmic system, the compás, is something you either feel in your body or you don't. And I didn't, for months. I could intellectually understand the 12-beat cycle. I could count it. But counting it and feeling it are completely different things.

The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to understand it with my brain and started trying to understand it with my feet. Flamenco is dance music. Once I started learning basic footwork, the rhythm locked in. It was humbling to realize how much my jazz training had biased me toward thinking about music from the neck up.

A couple of years later I went back to Seville to go deeper. By then I had enough foundation that the second round of study landed completely differently. Things that had been opaque the first time started to make sense in my body.

Ireland

Irish traditional music taught me about sessions, which is a completely different model for how musicians relate to each other. There's no stage. There's no audience, really. You sit in a circle in a pub and you play tunes together. The social structure is the musical structure. Who sits where matters. When you join in matters. When you shut up and listen matters.

France

From Ireland I went to France to study Gypsy jazz. This one felt like coming home in a way, because Gypsy jazz shares DNA with the jazz I grew up playing. But the technique is completely different. The right hand, the pompe rhythm, the way the melodies are ornamented. It's a tradition that was passed down through Romani families, and the players who carry it have an approach to the guitar that you simply can't learn from a book. You have to sit next to them and watch their hands.

Brazil

From France I went to Rio de Janeiro to study choro and maracatu. Choro is this incredibly sophisticated instrumental tradition that most people outside Brazil have never heard of. It's like jazz in complexity but it evolved completely independently. The way choro musicians think about melody and counterpoint changed how I hear everything.

Argentina

From Brazil I went to Argentina for tango. Tango was a different education entirely. The music is inseparable from the dance, which means the phrasing is inseparable from human movement. You can't understand tango guitar by sitting in a practice room. You have to watch people dance. You have to feel where the music breathes and where it suspends. I'd never encountered a tradition where the physical and musical were so tightly woven together.

The Amazon

From Rio I went deeper into Brazil, to the Amazon, where I studied with the Ashaninka and the Yawanawa. This was the most different from anything I'd experienced. Music there serves functions I'd never considered. Healing rituals. Communication across distances. Marking seasons. Music as technology, doing real work in the world. It was the furthest I'd ever been from a stage or a practice room, and it stretched my understanding of what music even is.

There were other stops along the way. Portugal, Morocco, and a handful of other countries where I wasn't studying formally but couldn't help absorbing whatever music was around me. Some of those detours taught me as much as the dedicated study periods did.

Coming home

The last stretch was back in the US. I spent time in Appalachia studying bluegrass, which felt surprisingly similar to Ireland. The same emphasis on tunes, on sessions, on learning by ear from the people around you. I learned a lot of tunes and took lessons from some phenomenal players. I ended up buying a house in Nashville to be closer to these traditions and the roots of American music.

Sonora Expeditions

After years of following this process on my own, I wanted to open it up to my students. That became Sonora Expeditions, a program where I guide Sonora students to different places in the world to study music traditions firsthand. The same immersive approach I'd been using for years, but shared. I co-lead it with Jayme Stone, a Juno Award-winning banjoist who's spent his own career tracing the instrument's roots across West Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. Our first expeditions have gone to New Orleans and Nashville. There's something about watching students have the same experience I had, arriving somewhere and realizing how much they don't know, that makes the whole journey feel worth it in a different way.

What I brought home

Five years is a long time. People kept asking me when I was going to "get back to real life." But this was real life. This was the most real my life had ever felt.

I didn't go on this trip to improve Sonora. I went because I was obsessed. But what I saw changed how I think about learning whether I intended it to or not. The musicians I studied with around the world all had one thing in common: they learned by immersion. By proximity. By being around the music all the time, for long enough that it seeped into them. There was no curriculum. There was just presence and repetition and years.

Some of that has found its way into how we do things at Sonora. The intensive format, the emphasis on mentorship, the belief that you learn faster when you're fully inside of something. I can't always trace a straight line from a specific experience to a specific decision. But the trip is in there, underneath everything.

There are still recordings on my phone from those years that I listen back to and can't fully understand. Patterns I can hear but can't reproduce. Concepts I got close to grasping in the moment that slipped away once I left. I'm grateful I went, and I'm grateful I stayed long enough in each place to realize how much more there was to learn.