Podcasts – Twilight Guitar: Recent Episodes
M.J. Murphy
Guitar solos have long been part of what makes a good song great. They have inspired millions of us to pick up a guitar (or a broom, or a hockey stick) and get busy learning our scales. The guitar is such an expressive instrument that is can sound like like many different instruments, not in...... Continue Reading →
“The true art of memory is the art of attention.” — Samuel Johnson A good memory is the single most important skill a musician can have. If you haven't been blessed with a great memory, don't worry, it is something that can be improved and enhanced. Memories are like muscles and they can be developed...... Continue Reading →
A few years ago I went to see the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra perform Beethoven's Symphony Number 3, "Eroica". I had heard it many times before on the radio and on CD but when the lights went down and the orchestra hit those first two monster chords, I thought to myself that Beethoven was surely...... Continue Reading →
"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein Mention "classical guitar" to many beginning guitarists and you will get a whole host of reactions, from "What's that?" to "Do you mean classic rock?" to "Why would you want to play that on guitar?". Despite a brief...... Continue Reading →
We can thank the Internet; it is now possible to listen to nearly every piece of music ever recorded. This is staggering to think about, but it is true. Today, there are millions if not billions of recordings available for download or streaming over the Internet. I haven’t done the math, but it’s a fair...... Continue Reading →
"I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out." -Jimi Hendrix Nikola Tesla, great scientist, inventor of alternating current (AC), bringer of man-made lightning, pioneer of radio, and all around electrical visionary, once described his thoughts upon witnessing static electricity...... Continue Reading →
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson The musical instruction "adagio" comes from the Italian phrase "a dagio" which means "at ease". It's a good word, and it got me thinking. The question always comes up: “How long will it take me to learn to play guitar?” as...... Continue Reading →
Image of Ancient Egyptian stringed instruments, including a lute. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) “When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.” - Yo Yo Ma A few years ago I attended a cello concerto...... Continue Reading →
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings. - Gustave Flaubert The ability to read music well is part of every musician's eternal quest for proficiency. If you want to improve on your current abilities (and who doesn't?) this post is for you. Two Types of Reading...... Continue Reading →
This article is about how you can maximize your productivity during practice sessions. It is also about rediscovering how to enjoy practicing again. We all know that having clear goals is the most important thing you can do to accelerate your rate of learning. But what exactly does it mean to say that we should...... Continue Reading →
Over the years (and there have been many) I have found myself returning and listening to many of the same rock guitarists and saying "wow." This is a list of those players. I have narrowed it down for now by sticking to rock guitarists as opposed to traditional blues, jazz, classical, etc. (No need to...... Continue Reading →
Need to finish that writing or studying assignment but finding it hard to focus? Playing carefully chosen music in the background can help create the perfect atmosphere for concentrating while working and may even help inspire you to write that new novel or short story. There are a couple of things to consider when picking...... Continue Reading →
"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen." - Ralph Waldo Emerson If you are reading this, it is likely that you play music at some level. Maybe you're a solo performer, maybe you're in a band, or used to be in a band, or maybe you are practicing hard and...... Continue Reading →
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." - Michelangelo This is an excerpt from the ebook, "Midnight Arpeggios". Did you ever notice how right everything seems when you are busy doing something you love to do? At those times it doesn’t matter how much money, power or status...... Continue Reading →
"Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time." - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist There are three definitions of Alchemy in Webster's Dictionary, the second one is my favorite: "A power or process of transforming something common into something special." The first definition is longer...... Continue Reading →
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek. ” Joseph Campbell
In the basement of my childhood home there was a big, dusty, menacing piece of furniture that nobody ever went near. My first memory of it was being warned to stay away from the “monster” because it would crush my fingers if I tried to play with it. I soon discovered the mouth of the monster was really just the hinged dust cover that protected the piano keys, and my protectors were just looking out for my fragile fingers.
But for some reason nobody else touched the piano either (there must have been a bloody dust cover accident in our family history) but I remember being drawn to it. I think at first I felt sorry for it. Someone must have played it at some time, some place, because it was beat up pretty good and had ivory broken off a few of the keys. It must have had some stories to tell. I know it could make glorious music because my sister’s friend would come over once in a while and make it thunder like they did on TV.
Every once in a while I would sneak over, open the lid on the wooden bench, pull out some ancient sheet music, lift the deadly dust cover from the keys and just start pretending I could play. I would just bang away rhythmically trying to make something that sounded like music, not trying to play any specific song at all. The sheet music was just there for show. I was just randomly pressing keys listening to the way they sounded one after another or together. I clearly remember trying to imitate the sound of a thunderstorm on several occasions.
I had to stand up and play in order to reach the pedals. I had no idea what they were actually for but I remember falling in love with the pedal on the far right. It made everything sound big and echoey and kept the notes ringing for a long time. The other pedals seemed completely useless. To this day my foot goes right to that pedal and stays there. I would sit there and improvise for hours sometimes. I don’t know if what I was playing was any good, but I was having big fun and I don’t remember anyone complaining or telling me to stop (unlike when I got my first electric guitar…). Maybe they were complaining and I just ignored them.
I still don’t consider myself a “real” piano player, I play just for fun. I play the way I always have, just improvising away with no specific song in mind other than what I feel like doing at the moment. Because of what I have learned about music theory from my guitar studies I know enough about building chords, rhythms and melodies that I get lucky sometimes and play something interesting. In fact the reason for this post is that just last night I played something I couldn’t believe was coming from my fingers. It was an improvisation of course, and will never be heard by anyone again including myself, but it doesn’t matter. To me, that’s what a piano has always been about – pure uninhibited musical adventure and experimentation. I’m not sure I want to know how to play it right.
When it comes to teaching yourself music, it really doesn’t matter if you haven’t got a clue what you are doing. In fact it can often be for the best. Solo guitarist Tommy Emmanuel often tells the story about how not knowing the “right way” can sometimes pay off big. When he was first learning guitar by copying notes from records he learned how to play the bass line and the guitar part at the same time. He didn’t know at the time that there were actually two kinds of guitars on those records! Today he is a master at finger-style guitar and simultaneously incorporates moving bass lines, rhythm parts and melodies into his playing. Because he was never afraid of doing it wrong he was able to develop a unique and exciting style all his own.
The point of telling these stories is that music doesn’t have to be something you fear to explore or something you necessarily have to study as you would a school subject. When you approach it from a basic primal level there are absolutely no rules to follow. This is a tricky thing to teach any music student. It’s probably more accurate to say that it can’t be taught. It can be demonstrated. You can inspire someone to try. You can lay out some general principles. But when it comes to improvising you just have to enter the dark cave of uncertainty and start lighting it up with notes. Let them hang in the air and listen to them bang into each other. Don’t judge them to be good or bad at first (that comes later).
You don’t know which ones you will like or dislike until you try them all, in all possible combinations. To restrict the notes you play would be taking someone else’s word for it, and what kind of artist would you be if you just followed all the rules set down by music teachers. The composers we consider the greatest are always the ones that broke the rules. (Granted, the best reason for learning them is so you can more deliberately break them).
Playing or practicing without fear of doing it wrong isn’t just good advice for beginners. It is something musicians need to continually remind themselves of. Joseph Campbell’s quote: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” is an even better way for advanced musicians to re-examine their methods and discover new ways to untangle the knots of musical stagnation or complacency.
Joseph Campbell and other mythologists teach us how myths are the time honored stories and legends that we pass on from generation to generation. These stories help us understand the crazy complexity and contradictions in the world around us. There are are ancient and modern tales of our battles with monsters, evil empires, psychological tortures and moral dilemmas. In his quote Campbell addresses a certain kind of fear that keeps us from pursuing what we are truly passionate about in life. This type of fear hides our desires in dark caves that promise failure, ridicule and criticism. If you explore writing, art or music with any depth you risk getting lost in a maze of imagination, or even worse: having your heart and soul exposed for all the world to plainly see and laugh at. So how do we go about pursuing new creative challenges when our doubt’s and fears are holding us back?
Campbell might say that our myths and legends demonstrate how confronting our fears directly is the best way to overcome them. Psychiatrists treat fear of heights by exposing patients to gradually increasing levels of height. A fear of snakes may require a patient to practice being in a room next to a caged snake, then entering the room, then looking at the snake, then, eventually, touching the snake. It is all done very gradually until any irrational fear is completely gone. The healthy, rational fear hopefully still remains.
We all have experienced that great sensation when fear turns to pure adrenaline. Some people deliberately seek this sensation out by jumping out of airplanes or off steep cliffs – on purpose. Exploring music or the arts creates a different kind of fear but it is no less intense. We have all heard stories of great performers who had to overcome crippling episodes of stage fright. I never had it as bad as some, but every time I perform in public (and sometimes even when deciding to practice) I experience a level of this sensation. I eventually came to expect it and then to even look forward to it. It tells me that something is about to happen. It’s a little bit like the feeling of just starting down a steep ski slope. It is this sensation that either provides the energy and motivation needed to hit the slope, or sends you shuffling back to the lodge for a cup of coffee.
If you are tackling a new technique or instrument, stuck in a musical rut, or find that music is becoming less exciting or fulfilling than it once was, it is likely that fear is standing in your way of taking the next step. You will know it’s fear when you find yourself avoiding the very thing you love. Take this as a sign that you are about to make a breakthrough. Take the smallest step you can toward moving forward. If you a songwriter with writers block, buy a new notebook and just start brainstorming titles. If you are a rhythm guitarist who wants to learn lead guitar, practice just one scale. If you have been avoiding practicing, take your guitar out of its case and put it on the stand where you can see it.
We all have a certain fear that prevents us from progressing; but we can use this to our advantage because it leads us straight to the mouth of the cave. We just need to light a torch, take a deep breath and storm right in.myth music monsters
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
https://twilightguitar.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/music-and-mind-mapping_rev.mp3
The ‘Bounty’, Tall Ships Belfast 2009, near to Newtownabbey, Ireland. Photo by Ross. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
For those brave, maybe crazy people we call explorers, the best part of the map is where it ends. They know the adventure truly begins where the map trails off into a blurry obscurity. For a musician who wants to advance, it’s really the same thing. But in order to know where the map ends, and where the adventure begins, you may want to have a map of some kind to start with.
We are all encouraged to set goals. You hear it from everyone, all the time. But, before setting lofty expectations isn’t it just as important to understand what kind of learners we are? Where have we succeeded in the past? What do we love to explore? What inspires us to ask the tough questions and to actually set out looking for some real answers?
It’s obvious that a teacher needs to be concerned how different individuals learn. It is less obvious, but just as important, that a student should study his or her own methods of learning. Where did this all this music stuff start? What has lead to what? How have I managed to accomplish these things? Where should I go from here?
Questions like these aren’t easily answered. At least not without a little introspection. You might hear a song and say to yourself “man I wish I could play like that,” or “how does someone write something so beautiful?” But you usually leave it right there and go on playing the same old chords, licks and lines that you feel comfortable with.
Mind Mapping with Reference Points
I have been experimenting recently with mind mapping as a way of deciding on a subject for my next book. When I set out to do this blog post, I hit on the idea of mapping out some musical concepts as a way of thinking about new subjects. This led somehow to the realization that everything we learn is built on the foundation of something else. We use these bits of knowledge or understanding as points of reference, like a sailor navigating by the stars and charting a course as he goes.
To a navigator, stars are reference points, reliable guides, confidence givers. They are welcome assurance that no matter where we wander we can find our way back.
NASA Public Domain Star Chart
To a musician reference points are simply things you have achieved: songs you have learned, concepts you have grasped, and techniques you have mastered. When you are just starting out, they may be as basic as a fingering for a new chord, a particular scale pattern, or a power chord riff. When you are more advanced, it may have more to do with theoretical concepts such as harmony, chord construction or composition.
Regardless of your proficiency or knowledge of music theory, you can use these reference points either as springboards to propel your playing to the next level, or as safe ports in a storm to fall back on when you need to just play some good music.
“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it. ” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Example of a Reference Point
As an example, I will use the concept of the pentatonic scale. I use this example, because for me, the pentatonic scale was the beginning of my understanding of several key musical concepts.
When I was just starting out, I was in a band with a drummer, a bassist, and two other guitar players. When it came to the three guitarists, each of us had strengths and weaknesses: one was a master at learning chords and fancy riffs by ear, one was an excellent rhythm player, and one of us was pretty good at coming up with improvised solos. I was the one that had the knack for the solos, so I got the job of lead guitar, at least in the sense that when a song called for an extended jam, I was usually the first to take a crack at it.
The reason for this was that I had learned the most basic form of the pentatonic scale and could improvise with it. It was my reference point. At that time, I think I knew exactly one and one half of the five pentatonic scale shapes. It’s amazing how much soloing you can get done with that much under your belt!
I eventually learned by experimentation that I could add certain notes to this scale and some would sound great at times, while others would sound horrible. I had no idea why, I just took my chances here and there and tried to avoid hitting those klunkers. It was no way to play lead guitar, I had to learn why notes worked sometimes and sometimes not.
“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. ” – Leonardo da Vinci
The point in this story is that the pentatonic scale became my first reference point. It was where I shoved off on a musical expedition. It allowed me to ask questions and to venture out from the shallow waters of what I understood, into the deeper ocean of what I didn’t know. It was also like a safe harbor, or a star I could rely on to find my way back if I got lost.
There were other reference points too, we all have many of them; but in a sense everything we learn about music evolves from these first tentative steps we take into the unknown.
By piecing things together somewhat randomly and little by little, we begin to understand the larger picture. It works the same way for any subject of study, be it astronomy, engineering, archeology, architecture or map making.
Now for the practical part of this post. To understand where you are in your musical growth, it’s a good idea to make yourself a flow chart, or mind map, of your current progress, your inspirations, these are your reference points.
Making a Mind Map
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Begin by listing the very first things you accomplished or understood musically. Put down a few things that inspired you originally, what you were initially good at or that you now feel you understand about music.
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Examine for a while and look at how the items are related. Attach items to this that you feel resulted from that understanding or ability. Keep going and draw connecting lines to related ideas until you have a matrix of your musical understanding. Don’t worry if it is entirely accurate or not, this is just a tool to get you thinking about how your mind works and how to go about setting and achieving new goals for yourself.
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Draw some new branches and add areas where you would like to improve your execution or understanding. Depending on your current level, you may be surprised at how complex and interesting this can become.
Sample Music Mind Map
Above is an example of how I have begun a mind map. It is not even close to finished. I include it here as an example of how charting out your own musical growth in this way can open your eyes to so many important areas in your musical life such as:
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How you learn things by association
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What you have already accomplished
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Where your strengths and weaknesses are
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How small things can lead to bigger and better things
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What you have yet to explore
You can see how thinking in this way is very natural. I think it is because building networks like this is how our mind actually works: nonlinear but logical, random but associative, coincidental and synchronistic.
The connections we make in our mind and the routes we take to true understanding are hardly ever, maybe never, like the ways lessons are laid out in books. It is best to understand this early on in the learning process and embrace the power of this randomness, because in that very chaos you will find a certain order.
The pattern reveals the shape of your mind’s network, your own personal and idiosyncratic method of learning, and may help you understand how you learn and become inspired. Hopefully, the process of reliving your adventure in learning will push you ever further into the unknown.
Each time you add a node to your network, your understanding and inspiration will increases a little bit. This is because each link strengthens the logic behind those formerly random connections you have made. After a while it may start to resemble a constellation of stars, a sprawling city or a computer logic diagram. Whatever it looks like, you can be sure it is your own.
“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” – John Steinbeck
“The whole problem can be stated by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.'” -Aaron Copland
Photo by M.J. Murphy
https://twilightguitar.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/winters-promise-composing-for-christmas.mp3
This post is partly in words, and partly in music because it is about my recent adventure in writing and recording a short instrumental Christmas piece. Download or Stream “Winter’s Promise”.
Instrumental music, that is, music without lyrics, is often said to have meaning, but as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and others have gone out of their way to point out, it really doesn’t, and can’t mean anything – at least in the same sense that a song, poem or novel can have a meaning. A composer can however suggest a literal meaning for their music by titling a piece with something that evokes a time, a place, a scene, an event, or emotion, but the music itself is, in the end, just notes and sounds. A title can hint at what the composer intends the music to be about, and sometimes, the power of suggestion will take over in the listeners mind.
Leonard Bernstein addressed this in an episode of his long running TV series Young People’s Concerts. The series ran from 1958 all the way to 1973. In one of his earliest shows, he played the opening theme from The William Tell Overture and then asked an audience of kids “now, what was that music about? The kids all yelled out “the Lone Ranger!”. Bernstein then went on to explain that the music was actually written long before the Lone Ranger show ever conceived. it was from an opera by an Italian composer named Rossini. The music had come to be associated with the Lone Ranger because it was used in the show, not because it was written with masked heroes of the American West in mind. So what happens when, a composer sets out to write a piece of instrumental music that is intended to mean something specific?
Even though most composers will admit that music doesn’t have a literal meaning, they often attempt to create specific imagery, emotions, atmospheres, and moods, and that’s at least pretty close to having what we call meaning isn’t it? Think of all the composers that write music for movie soundtracks. They are intentionally using sounds, textures and rhythms to evoke specific images and moods. Think about all that music written for special occasions: patriotic events, weddings, graduations, parades and holidays like, for example, the subject of this post, Christmas.
If you have ever tried to write a piece of music for Christmas, or for that matter a song for any holiday or special occasion, you may have discovered that it is harder than it seems. How exactly do you capture a sense of what the occasion means ? After all, we’ve just admitted that an instrumental piece of music cannot really be about anything since it has no words. The best you can do is try to capture the feeling or emotion in the holiday or event and attempt to put it into the music. So you consider the rhythm, the melody, the speed, intensity and dynamics of the piece and hope that when you’re done you’ve captured something that represents the essence of the occasion. But even still it will be a foggy kind of “aboutness”.
“Music is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.” ~Arnold Bennett
So recently, when I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing a Christmas rock instrumental, I had to think about what exactly I needed to do to get that special sort of sound. There has always been something about Christmas music that I can’t put my finger on. How does a Christmas song always manage to sound “Christmassy”.
Christmas songs seem to be written both in major keys (such as Jingle Bells) and in minor keys (such as “We Three Kings”) just to name a couple. It makes sense that the happier, more upbeat songs are in major keys and the slower, more mysterious songs are in minor keys or modes. But this is just as true for any other type of song, so the tonality of the key or the mode doesn’t seem to be a determining factor all by itself. Likewise, christmas songs are composed in all variations of meter: 3/4, 4/4, 2/4, 6/8, cut time, it’s all over the map. Nothing magical about the choice of time signature. Maybe it’s in the instrumentation? I thought about that for a while. Nope. You could play a christmas song on a violin, a piano, or a kazoo and it would still sound like a Christmas song.
I soon realized this was one of those things that I wasn’t going to figure out scientifically. The only thing to do was to use a few general assumptions and just start playing something that felt Christmas-like.
Here are some of the guidelines I used. Keeping in mind the immortal words oh Greg Allman “There are as many ways to write songs as there are songs.” Since I was looking for a bright sounding major key tonality, I chose D major. Most christmas songs keep the chord progressions rather simple. A Christmas song after all should be easy to learn and to play. Most of the great ones have very simple melodies too. As usual, the melody is the hardest part, just because it is intended to be simple doesn’t mean the melody will be any easier, in fact, the simpler the intended melody, the harder it becomes to write.
The intro came fairly easy because I knew I wanted a chimey, bell like sound so I chose to just arpeggiate three simple chords. It consists of very simple A D and G triad arpeggios played high up on the guitar neck. To add some bottom end, texture and harmony, I used a D cello drone below the arpeggios. Since D is my key tone it sounded great below the G D and A triads.
I struggled with a thematic melody for what seemed an eternity until I decided to just improvise until something evolved. I’m not sure a good theme ever did evolve, but at least I ended up with something that worked harmonically over the chord progression.
“There are as many ways to write songs as there are songs.” – Greg Allman
Eventually, the improvisation seemed to be headed somewhere, so I decided to make the tune a series of short solos that built on each other. I ended up with the following sections.
A Intro with classical guitar solo
B Clean electric guitar solo
B Overdrive guitar solo
C Piano section
B Heaviest guitar solo
A Outro with classical guitar solo
So the resulting song structure is ABBCBCA.
Here are the instruments used in the recording:
Fender Stratocaster Guitar:Opening “Bell like Melody” and all guitar parts
Yamaha Classical, nylon string guitar: Intro guitar lick:
LTD 4 string bass guitar: Bass guitar parts
Yamaha Arius digital piano/synthesizer: Piano and strings Drums:
Apple GarageBand drum samples (played live and looped)
As a finishing touch, I added some strings by playing the Yamaha piano using the strings setting. I mostly stuck to the roots and since the chords change every measure it added a nice variety to the mix.
The only conclusion I came up with in this little experiment is that there is no really good way to formulate what a Christmas song should sound like. It’s an abstract thing and the best way is, as usual, to just play what you feel. In the end, I think this song does a good job summing up what Christmas feels like to me, even without any words, maybe, especially without any words.
“The gate is straight, deep and wide break on through to the other side” – Jim Morrison
Ebino Plateau in Miyazaki, Japan. Photo by Ray Go, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
https://twilightguitar.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-musical-plateau-just-a-phase.mp3
Anyone who has ever attempted to play a musical instrument will eventually reach a phase we like to call a “plateau.” The place where progress seems to stop dead in its tracks. This is a useful metaphor because it allows us to visualize our musical progress from a place where we can see both the valleys below (as past accomplishments) and the hills in the distance (as future challenges).
This phase is frustrating only if we feel we need to continue climbing when the landscape requires walking on level ground. When this happens we feel we are trying and trying without getting anywhere. If it lasts too long our motivation can evaporate in the heat, and we may give up altogether. If, on the other hand, we recognize a plateau it for what it really is, we can use it to our advantage. It can become a place of great satisfaction where we recharge our stores of energy and inspiration for the challenges ahead. It is the part of our journey where the landscape levels off and we we stop climbing, take a few deep breaths, examine where we have been, and evaluate our progress.
From a plateau we can see that we have achieved a level of competency and begin to rely on pieces that we know we can handle easily enough. Some of us prefer to camp out on a plateau for a long time, or even forever. An accomplished songwriter may feel they know enough chords and theory to write the types of songs they want to write and then go about using those same chords in newly creative ways to record song after song, album after album. A lead guitar player in a rock band may have mastered the scales and speed required to play any song they wish and feel they can now coast along for the rest of their career.
I respect these people and at times wish I was more like them. It must be liberating to feel you have all the tools in your toolbox that you will ever need. But some of us keep climbing when we should be walking. We will keep pushing on in the never ending quest to explore a new style or technique that we haven’t yet mastered. It can be frustrating at times because in a very real sense, you always feel like a beginner.
“There must be some kind of way out of here,”
Said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion,
I can’t get no relief. ”
– Bob Dylan, from “All Along the Watchtower”
Bob Dylan at Lida Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1996. Photo by Henryk Kotowski. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
If you teach guitar for a living as I do you will continually be challenged by songs a student will ask you to teach them. In this situation, your very livelihood depends on being able to constantly push yourself and learn new things well enough to demonstrate them to someone else.
When it come to stagnation, one of my favorite quotes is by the drummer and lyricist of Rush, Neil Peart:
“Am I in a groove now, or is this a rut?” – Neil Peart
I like to paraphrase this by saying “there is a fine line between a groove and a rut. The truth is that when we are in our comfort zone, we are just cruising along, doing what we know how to do. It feels good, it is natural, and it is beneficial, but linger too long and you have stopped growing. Sometimes learning new things requires deliberately pulling ourselves off the well worn path and steering in a new unexplored direction. If it’s not happening either naturally or accidentally then you may need to shake things up deliberately.
Distant Hills
If you are a guitar player, its likely that you have at one time or a other had a style crisis. In other words, you suddenly realize that you only really know one thing well, and you have a burning desire to become more versatile. What style or area of study should you expand into: rock, jazz, blues, classical, country, flatpicking, fingerstyle? You think you are getting pretty good at what you do until you see someone at a concert or on YouTube that is playing a completely new style or technique that is blowing you away, and your heart either sinks into depression and envy, or you are inspired to go learn something new for yourself.
But we have all heard words of wisdom like: “a man cannot serve two masters” and “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” These aphorisms apply so well to the life a music teacher. There are so many musical styles that it makes the mastery of any one of them a difficult task sometimes. This unfortunately just goes with the territory. And a difficult task is exactly what we are after if we want to move off our plateau right?
The advice here is simple, if you are stuck, find a new, exciting style to explore. You will be forced to think about your instrument in an entirely new way. This can be frustrating and extremely liberating at the same time.
The Rear View Mirror
If new and challenging pieces aren’t being requested of you, either by your band, your students or yourself, and you are locked in to your chosen style of music, there is another way. You can look into the rear view mirror and still set lofty goals for yourself.
When I think back to the music that inspired me to want to play guitar in the first place I realize that there is a great deal of it that I never learned to actually play. Now that I am older and accomplished enough to actually play that music, I wonder why I don’t go back more often and learn to play some of those songs that once seemed. so elusive. Part of it may be that I enjoy listening to it so much that I don’t want to “ruin” it by learning how to play it. It’s a funny thing. Once you learn to play a song, it becomes something else entirely. Some of the magic disappears. It stops being a mysterious ethereal creation and starts being something on your practice schedule. It’s as if learning how to play a favorite song takes some of the luster off of it. I don’t know if this is the same for everyone, but I have have heard others say the same thing.
Somewhat humbling is that I have found that even after years of practice, some of the songs I once hoped to be able to play still pose a significant challenge. I am always amazed at the depth of musical technique and understanding that was involved in many of the songs I loved as a kid.
For example, I had always assumed that when I finally learned to play and became a real guitar player, that I would set about learning much of the music of some of my favorite progressive rock bands. The reality is that, although I have mastered most of the techniques involved, there is still much of it that is really challenging. The genius of progressive rock music and the imagination, skill and care that went into making it still astounds me to this day and those bands continue to earn my deepest respect.
Back to the Future
If exploring exciting and inspirational music can be liberating, the reverse can also be true. Sometimes when learning a cheesy, modern pop song for a student that I may have initially considered to be boring or something I didn’t like, I will be struck by the genius of the structure, the melody or the chord progression. Something about the song will fascinate me and it becomes a favorite only because I have understood what is under the hood, how it is put together, what makes it tick, so to speak.
“Breaking on through” requires first recognizing that you are stuck and secondly taking steps to get yourself to the next level. Sometimes this means practicing things that you have learned but not yet worked up to performance level, other times it means starting something new that challenges you. In either case it takes courage, because you are leaving your comfort zone.
A Musical Landscape
It is well understood that growing as a musician requires frequently challenging yourself with new material. This doesn’t only mean finding new, more challenging songs to play; it also means cultivating a new and deeper understanding about the world of music.
Guitar players tend to forget that there is more to music than just learning how to play a guitar. A sure fire way to get out of a musical rut is to dive into the deeper waters of music in its more general, traditional or expanded sense.
Some areas where you might seek to grow musically include:
Sight reading
Playing by ear
Improvising
Composing
Lyric Writing
Performing
Arranging
Recording
Understanding Music Theory
Technique
Music History
These are just some of the areas you can explore. Each one of them presents an opportunity to learn. Many people make entire careers out of specializing in just one or two of these areas, others dabble in many or all of these areas. It doesn’t matter what areas interest you, it only matters that some of them do. For example if you are a performer in a rut, why not try songwriting? Or if you have mainly played by ear all of your life, why not try to learn how to read music?
Charting a Path
As any teacher knows, it is not enough to simply learn the part that you intend to teach your students. That’s just the first step. The more important step is to communicate to them (or to yourself) how to go about learning it. Whether you are a teacher or a student, the following approach will help you expand on nearly every area of musicianship. For the serious, self taught student, it provides a way of proving to yourself how much you actually know and reinforcing that knowledge so you can build on it and perhaps choose a teaching career.
Many instructors rely on using published sheet music, chord charts, or free tablature off the Internet as source material for their students. This is a good approach and students need learn how to use all these things for themselves eventually. For classical pieces this approach is essential. But what about the importance of teaching a student how to play popular songs by ear? In examining the teaching style that I have evolved over the years, I think I have found an effective way to combine teaching a student how to learn by ear with how to create original song charts.
It is not a unique or revolutionary way, but it is simple and effective. Instead of learning a requested song away from the studio and then coming in the following week with the song written out for the student, I listen to the song and chart it out during the lesson while the student listens with me and adds input. This way the student can see how it is done and what is involved in the process. They soon begin to be inspired to try it themselves. I can’t think of a better way to teach playing by ear than by simply doing it together lesson after lesson, song after song.
The resulting charts are most often a hybrid of different types of musical notation. I write them on traditional staff/tablature paper. They include chord diagrams and symbols, rhythmic notation, strumming patterns and tablature for important riffs, melodies and solos. They also include traditional (and sometimes not so traditional) musical directions such as repeat marks, De Capo, Del Segno and Coda.
This approach to transcribing music helps both myself and my students break free of the plateaus that result when you are simply reading music that is published for you. It forces you to engage with the music at the deepest possible level, really listen closely, and figure out what is going on harmonically, melodically and rhythmically.
Charting out songs in this way doesn’t just develop your ear for music, it also aids memorization, teaches notation, and reveals the underlying patterns and structure in the music. It can also inspire a student to write their own original music since the “writing” part suddenly becomes way less mysterious.
New Horizons
We all carve out our own little corner of the musical universe. For most of us, being able to participate at all in this awesome art form is reward enough for the many hours of practice that it requires.
So when you find yourself in a rut, step back and take a look at all that you have accomplished since that first day when you decided to attempt those first painful chords. be grateful for the perseverance that took you this far. That is the surest way to realize that even though you have a long way to go, you sure have come a long way to get where you are.
“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world. ” – John Milton
“If it works, it’s obsolete.” – Marshall McCluhan
https://twilightguitar.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/mcluhan.mp3
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian social scientist/prophet who lived from 1911 to 1980 and published most of his work from 1950 to 1970. He once famously said, “The medium is the message.” Gallons of ink have been spilled about what he really meant, but if you have ever read any of McLuhan’s work, the meaning of this phrase would be clear enough.
He did not intend to say that the content of a message was of no value, although many of his critics took it that way and he was often called a charlatan. What he did intend to say is that we consistently overlook, or underestimate, the transformational effects that any new technology has on us and our culture.
Marshall McLuhan holding a mirror. Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. While studying for a Masters degree in Communications in the early 1990’s, I read nearly all of McLuhan’s work and was captivated by it. He didn’t discuss history as a string of people, places, events and dates as most scholars did. He saw history as a series of technological advances each one bringing with it a whole new way of understanding and interacting with our environment. Any change in technology changes the way we experience our world, which changes the way we think, which in turn changes us at a fundamental level. – you might even say at the species level.
“The medium is the message…the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” – Marshall McCluhan
He proposed that the nature of any civilization is shaped by the form of its communications technology and that the “how” humans communicate is ultimately more consequential than the “what” that is communicated.
A real discussion of McCluhan’s theories would require an entire book, of which there are many. I wanted to begin this post by mentioning him only because when thinking about something as simple as the music devices in my lifetime, it is interesting to see how his theories play out even if they remain somewhat abstract. McLuhan includes all types of technology in his theories, but I will look mainly at my personal experience with sound and music media here. I write only from my own experience, but know that much of it will be familiar to anyone in my generation who loved music and the radio.
Radio and TV
“The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.” – Marshall McCluhan
Like most of us, my earliest experience with electronic music was the radio. Being born in 1961 meant that the radio was a firmly established technology everywhere and had been since the early 1900’s. There were car radios, radios in the living room, kitchen radios, bedroom radios, portable radios, and radios in stores and public places.
I can remember three important radios in my life. The first one was an RCA Victor solid state tabletop model that was in my family’s living room. My parents were a bit old fashioned and didn’t allow the TV to be in the living room. All of our TV watching was done in the basement. The living room did have this radio however, so I would spend evenings sitting on the floor (and later a beanbag chair) curled up next to it listening to the top 40 sounds of WLS in Chicago on the AM band and later to WKQX on the FM band.
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RCA AM/FM Radio from around 1970. Photo by M.J. Murphy I still have this radio today and am still amazed by how warm it sounds. I turn it on once in a while just for old times sake and to see that awesome golden glow from the bulb that lights up the dial. A bulb, by the way, that is still the original – has never been replaced and still works.
Radio and TV opened me up to a world of music, but also to the unavoidable, brief news reports from places like Vietnam, and of course, the moon. I can remember the only time a TV was allowed in our living room was when my Grandpa insisted that we watch the moon landing upstairs. He was too old to hobble down the stairs so Dad brought up the TV for that one.
As for music on the radio. At first it was the big band and jazz that my Mom listened to in the kitchen, and then it was the top forty. It was what all the kids were listening to. I soon found that I could talk to others at school about this or that song. I could talk to kids I couldn’t otherwise talk to. I could be part of a new crowd.
New years eve was a huge radio event for my friends and family because Dick Clark would count down the top 100 songs of the year in ascending order and we could all hang out and try to guess which song would be next on the list.
The Transistor
“Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.” -Marshall McCluhan
The second memorable radio was a small transistor unit handed down to me by one of my brothers or sisters. It was so great to be able to put on headphones and walk around the yard, or ride my bike, or do chores while I listened as loud as I wanted without bothering anyone else.
The best part about the transistor was listening at night while falling asleep with the radio under the pillow. I would listen to music, or to sports like the Cubs or White Sox baseball games, or to Blackhawks hockey games. On a clear night I could even pick up stations from St. Louis, Milwaukee, or Atlanta. I’ll never forget how exciting those games were, lying in the dark and imagining being at the stadium.
The games took place visually inside my mind and were just as vivid if not more vivid than actually being there. I can remember more than a few nights being wrapped up in hockey games and being amazed by how loud the crowd was inside Chicago Stadium. During those times I was there in those stadiums, not home in bed. It was that simple.
This same transistor radio would expose me to bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Yes, and to acoustic songwriters like Jim Croce, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel. And then there were the one hit wonders; I remember titles like “I’m So Dizzy”, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”, “Jackie Blue”- that amazing slide guitar solo….(Why do I remember THOSE specific songs right now, I don’t know?).
There were so many places that radio went with me. I wasn’t stuck in this room or that. I wasn’t even stuck in the house. Lying in bed at night this music could work it’s magic on me where I was truly succeptable to its powers – in the dark and barely conscious.
“For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.” -Marshall McLuhan
The Shortwave
The third radio was a shortwave radio that my brother had built from a kit. It was housed in a metal box and had an eerie green light up dial that I loved. Because it was a shortwave I had the added adventure of running all kinds of crazy configurations with antennae wire. I remember stringing it all over the room and needing to run a ground wire out the window to the back yard where I had attached it to a metal stake pounded into the ground. I even had a pair of headphones that my Dad had used as a radio operator in the air force during WW II. (Not that I ever pretended to be an American spy who single handedly brought down the Nazis with my powers of deduction and ability to tune in any radio transmission in the world or anything like that…)
I would stay up all night turning the dial and listening for far off stations. I would hear foreign languages and try to guess what they were. I didn’t stay too long on them unless they were playing some exotic music. When I found a music station I was captivated by how strange yet familiar it was. I usually didn’t know where it was coming from so I would try and listen to the lyrics and to the announcers and try to guess at what the language was.
I got a kick out of the movie “Contact” based on the Carl Sagan novel when Jodi Foster’s character was doing the same thing. She was way more into it though – she had a two way radio – and had the great idea of marking each station she contacted on a giant world map on the wall.
With these radios, the world was getting stranger and smaller, and yet more familiar and bigger at the same time.
The Console Record Player
In addition to the radios, there were of course the record players. Things are a bit fuzzy for me here but the first one I remember using was mounted in a big square cabinet with four legs and a hinged lid. One by one, you could stack records up like pancakes, and when one was done playing the needle would move out of the way and another would drop on top of the turntable and begin to play. If you were jumping around too much, the vibrations from the floor would make the record skip. We fixed this by placing a penny on top of the needle to add some weight to it and keep it more firmly in the groove. A high tech solution for sure.
With a record player, you could play the records you wanted to play, not just what the DJ’s were playing.
“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.” – Marshall McCluhan
The Portable Record Player
Another early record player I remember was a portable one that was my grandfather’s. It was contained in what looked like a small suitcase. I think it arrived with him when he moved in with us after his stroke. I discovered it one day in the basement along with boxes of records. There were some 45’s, some 33’s, and lots of 78’s too. They were mostly classical which to me just meant old people’s music, but I was curious so I dug in for a listen whenever I could.
I can’t remember too many of the records I found there but I do remember a few. There was a special one called “Peter and the Wolf” complete with a booklet that described all the instruments and which animals they represented. There was also a Disney record called “The Sorcerers Apprentice” with some pretty awesome artwork too. I’m pretty sure there was some opera, because I passed on those, and I know there was lots of Beethoven and Mozart and Stravinski, because those became some of my favorites.
This music was from another world. It was ancient, strange, and usually had no words. Though I had heard things like it before on TV and in the movies, it was very different to be just listening with no pictures. Everything about it said it was from another time and place. Listening to these records was like having a time machine in the basement.
A Personal Stereo
When my older sister went away to college (she was the eighth of ten and I was the ninth) there was just me and my little sister. My older sister must have gotten a new stereo to take with her because I was handed down my own system and could put it in my own room. This was a big day. The prize was a Panasonic combo AM/FM receiver turntable with separate stereo speakers. The turntable had a tinted plastic hinged cover, a glowing tuner display, and loads of knobs and switches on the front to twiddle – always the best part.
I started buying my own albums and listening to whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I think the first album that I ever owned was the first Boston album. My brother bought it for me one Christmas. (He’ll probably never forgive himself). I loved that album and played it until the grooves were as wide as the grand canyon. It was the start of my personal record collection. I still played plenty of records borrowed from my siblings, but from then on I was on a mission to get my own.
The music was starting to define how I saw myself. My clothes got a little weirder, my hair got a little longer, I started to learn guitar…
“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.” – Marshall McLuhan
The Eight Track and Cassette
In high school my neighbor and friend who was a couple of years older had a car and would give me a ride to school. He had a job at the local grocery store too and had lots of money to buy 8-track tapes. We could listen to whatever we wanted (or could afford to buy) in the car. We played Rush, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Yes, Genesis.. We would leave for school early and take the long way just so we had enough time to listen to our favorite songs.
When I finally got my own car it didn’t matter that it burned oil by the quart, or that I had to pull over and crawl under it every once in a while to tighten a bolt on the transmission linkage; what mattered was that it had a killer stereo system in it and I could park it anywhere, open the windows and crank the tunes.
My friends and I would drive round aimlessly for hours at a time just to listen to each other’s tapes, and nobody told us to turn it down.
We were mobile.
Before long the cassette came along and now we were buying LP’s, taping them onto blank, recordable tapes and sharing them with friends. We didn’t need to buy the albums, we could borrow them and record them. I would spend hours cueing up tapes in the cassette deck on the home stereo, lowering the stylus, pressing play and record, and while the album was playing I would carefully copy the album information onto the cardboard inserts: the album title, the artist, the song names… Sometimes I would create tapes with a mix of songs from different albums – a mix tape. Other times I would record shows off the radio like live concerts or interviews or album sides.
Then there was the boom box. I recall reading somewhere that this was the fastest selling gadget of all time. It could go anywhere, was way loud enough, and played AM/FM shortwave and cassette. It was truly the Swiss army knife of music. More than any other player, this is what I used to learn guitar: listen, pause, copy, play, repeat. I wore out several boom boxes this way, but it was well worth it to learn how to play guitar by ear.
My friends and I weren’t just listening anymore, we were recording LP’s, producing mix tapes, recording songs off the radio; the record companies would say we were stealing. Don’t they always?
“Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. ” – Marshall McLuhan
The CD
By the time CD’s came out I had amassed several hundred albums and was wondering what all the fuss was about. I was happy with the quality of vinyl LP’s and cassettes. To be honest I wasn’t really interested in buying everything all over again. I bought them anyway as record companies phased out vinyl, but would never have as many CD’s as LP’s.
I ended up losing my whole collection one day anyway in a freak accident (left my leather 200 CD library case on the roof of my car and drove away from a rest stop somewhere between Chicago and Springfield. I ended up with a bunch of empty jewel cases on my shelf at home. I always hated jewel cases. For some reason, the CD’s seemed to hate them to: they were never together. Oh well.
CDs were supposed to be higher quality than vinyl, and were supposed to be indestructible. Right. You can argue for the sound quality, but they were far more fragile if you ask me. A scratch on an LP and you got an annoying pop. A scratch on a CD and the entire CD became unplayable.
Liner notes and artwork on CD’s became so small as to be unreadable (at least to my aging eyes) so I was happy to see the birth of the MP3, at least at first….
“Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.” -Marshall McCluhan
The MP3 and Streaming Audio
This has turned out to be a long story, I know, but here we are in the age of the Mp3 and steaming internet audio. We can now play any song, any video, or view any printed document, anytime anywhere on our computers, laptops, cellphones, or tablets. I have to admit it. Some of the magic is lost without that great album art.
We can also self publish, distribute, give away or sell, our own recorded music, or pictures, or voice, or videos, or novels, or anything else that can be digitized on this global web of data. We are connected instantly in high definition from one point on the globe to any other point on the globe.
Today we witness political revolutions that were organized using networked “social media”. We are the global village that Marshall McLuhan said we would return to.
Are we wiser, happier or somehow more evolved for all this technology? Does it matter what the “content” of all this communication is. Who knows?
Are we different as human beings because of this technology? That’s an easier one to answer; and that is what McLuhan was exploring. He was simply trying to wake us up to what was happening in the hope that we could make decisions about whether we really wanted the effects a certain technology would bring or not. Today we assume that the ways of technology cannot be stopped or altered in any way. Maybe they can; maybe they can’t. Who would get to decide?
It does make you wonder who is in control? Us, as individuals born into this maelstrom, or the technology we set in motion long ago that seems to be dragging us headlong to somewhere…else.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” -Marshall McLuhan