...things were a lot simpler.
I first started getting serious about playing the guitar when I was about 17 around 1974. It seemed resources for learning guitar - especially popular music were pretty slim. Not to mention growing up in a small town didn’t really help matters on that account either. Other than buying sheet music arrangements for popular tunes, there wasn’t much in the way of tutorials around. If you wanted to learn popular or rock music accurately, by gosh you had to do it the old fashioned way - by ear.
My first instrument wasn’t guitar - it was cello and I had been indoctrinated into a formal way of learning classical instruments - even the Suzuki method was not popular yet - so there was very little “ear” playing experience for me. Consequently, all of my guitar playing peers and buddies were far ahead of me in the playing by ear department.
I remember the first time I saw a Guitar Player magazine. Holy cow, a magazine just for guitar players? I couldn’t believe it! A drummer friend of mine who also played guitar gave it to me. There was a lesson in there by Joe Pass. I memorized that little lesson and still use it to this day.
I also remember when to my knowledge the first accurate transcription of rock guitar soloing was published - the Led Zeppelin “Complete” songbook had solos by Jimmy Page actually written out. I seem to recall a general feeling at the time that blues and rock guitar soloing couldn’t really be notated. Yet magically someone had pulled it off.
Curiously, it seemed to me that most of my local guitar playing buddies had an attitude that if someone learned a piece of music by reading it instead of by ear they were somehow cheating. Just seemed like a means to an end to me. How else was I going to learn “Mood For A Day” by Yes’ Steve Howe? Heck I was just starting on guitar. And, there was no guitar arrangement available. I ended up learning it off of a combination of reading a piano reduction on sheet music and listening to the recording. Piano reductions with little guitar chord grids above the legit notation was the popular way of publishing at that time. Leave it to music publishers to take a solo guitar piece and publish it as a piano reduction. Ah, 1974.
With the proper tutelage I came to better understand how music composition worked and what to listen for and gradually after much practice got pretty good at learning songs by ear. Definitely something every guitarist should do. It’s turned out to be handy to have as many tactics for learning as I could get together.
I guess what I’m getting to is that now, there is a virtual flood of guitar information available. How in the world is any 17 year old supposed to wade through all that’s available and figure out what’s worth spending time on on their own? It was easy for me, there practically wasn’t any. Problem solved!
I brought in some recent issues of Guitar Player magazine to my teaching studio recently and had one of my students pick one for himself. It’s been weeks now - he hasn’t even looked at it. I wonder if when he does, will he find a timeless treasure that he uses for a lifetime like I did when I was his age, or will it be one more piece of information overload he doesn’t select to absorb?
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Self Taught
What does it mean when people claim to be “self taught”? I’ve heard this from and about musicians of all calibers throughout the years. I think non-musicians may have a different view of what it means than musicians do.
A lot of the world’s greatest musicians have claims of being self taught. It applies all the way from world class musicians from the past. I’ve heard that such classical music luminaries as guitarist Andres Segovia and cellist Pablo Casals were self taught as well as Eric Clapton, your “uncle who can play anything” and that kid that lives on your street who’s starting a garage band. Yet what do we find when we look deeper?
Eric Clapton reported to Guitar Player Magazine in 1970 that “The way I learned to play was, I picked up the guitar and pieced together a chord out of the sounds without knowing they were chords that had names like E and A. I was inventing those things when I first started to play.” It’s not something that seems that unusual to me. I think a lot of musicians, guitarists in particular, do a lot of experimentation. Maybe it’s the nature of the instrument.
Both Segovia and Casals had some formal study if only for a short while and sometimes on different instruments than than the ones they were famous for. One of the key elements of these outstanding musicians, as true now as then, is originality. They both made major original breakthroughs in music by assessing the current state of their respective instruments and finding new and better ways to do things.
In the case of Segovia, among other breakthroughs, he introduced they idea of using the right hand fingernails to get a bigger tone. No classical guitarist today would even consider playing without nails but yet until he saw the need and addressed it, it was uncommon. He also asked for bigger guitars and better strings. Seems pretty obvious now, but he had enough influence, insight, and originality to ask for those things and get them.
Where would our current crop of rock guitarists be without Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, etc.? Listening to these past guitar heroes now, the uninitiated may wonder, what’s so special about those cats? The thing is, the styles they brought to the table were original at the time, and so well liked, that now there influence is ubiquitous and taken for granted.
Everyone has influences and early on, musicians tend to mimic their heroes. I used to joke that I learned to play from Billy Gibbons of Z.Z. Top. Never having had the honor of meeting the man however, I made do with learning from his recordings. Wes Montgomery studied and memorized the solos of Charlie Christian - yet later on he managed to develop his own style. When Chet Atkins was getting started in the record business he was told he sounded too jazzy - his early influences included the original gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt - yet Atkins turned things around for himself devoting himself to creating and developing a new style of playing (based on a different artist - Merle Travis).
Wes and Chet, Hendrix, Page, Clapton and probably Billy Gibbons too, were undoubtedly all self taught (as were their main influences Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt) yet they had to learn from somewhere, if only by observation. Clapton recounts “I did a lot of listening—particularly to blues. I never took lessons, but I always wanted to jam a lot.” Jamming can be thought of as a trial and error means of learning and something that goes on a lot in music that is traditionally improvised to some degree like blues and jazz. A form of discovery and self-teaching.
We listen, we observe, we get together and trade licks and information with our friends, and read and apply articles from guitar magazines, from the web, etc. If we have the benefit of formal lessons from competent instructors then all the better. In a way all of my students over the years have all been self taught. Some learned a lot and still others learned little. I’ve just given them information and tried to open their eyes to possibilities. Led the horse to water if you will. If anything was actually learned they’ve done it all themselves. Plus they’re the ones who got the ball rolling with guitar lessons.
Is anyone self taught? In a way both everyone is and no one is. No one is because no man is an island, we all work from our influences to some degree, but in the end, everyone is because it’s all up to the individual.
A lot of the world’s greatest musicians have claims of being self taught. It applies all the way from world class musicians from the past. I’ve heard that such classical music luminaries as guitarist Andres Segovia and cellist Pablo Casals were self taught as well as Eric Clapton, your “uncle who can play anything” and that kid that lives on your street who’s starting a garage band. Yet what do we find when we look deeper?
Eric Clapton reported to Guitar Player Magazine in 1970 that “The way I learned to play was, I picked up the guitar and pieced together a chord out of the sounds without knowing they were chords that had names like E and A. I was inventing those things when I first started to play.” It’s not something that seems that unusual to me. I think a lot of musicians, guitarists in particular, do a lot of experimentation. Maybe it’s the nature of the instrument.
Both Segovia and Casals had some formal study if only for a short while and sometimes on different instruments than than the ones they were famous for. One of the key elements of these outstanding musicians, as true now as then, is originality. They both made major original breakthroughs in music by assessing the current state of their respective instruments and finding new and better ways to do things.
In the case of Segovia, among other breakthroughs, he introduced they idea of using the right hand fingernails to get a bigger tone. No classical guitarist today would even consider playing without nails but yet until he saw the need and addressed it, it was uncommon. He also asked for bigger guitars and better strings. Seems pretty obvious now, but he had enough influence, insight, and originality to ask for those things and get them.
Where would our current crop of rock guitarists be without Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, etc.? Listening to these past guitar heroes now, the uninitiated may wonder, what’s so special about those cats? The thing is, the styles they brought to the table were original at the time, and so well liked, that now there influence is ubiquitous and taken for granted.
Everyone has influences and early on, musicians tend to mimic their heroes. I used to joke that I learned to play from Billy Gibbons of Z.Z. Top. Never having had the honor of meeting the man however, I made do with learning from his recordings. Wes Montgomery studied and memorized the solos of Charlie Christian - yet later on he managed to develop his own style. When Chet Atkins was getting started in the record business he was told he sounded too jazzy - his early influences included the original gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt - yet Atkins turned things around for himself devoting himself to creating and developing a new style of playing (based on a different artist - Merle Travis).
Wes and Chet, Hendrix, Page, Clapton and probably Billy Gibbons too, were undoubtedly all self taught (as were their main influences Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt) yet they had to learn from somewhere, if only by observation. Clapton recounts “I did a lot of listening—particularly to blues. I never took lessons, but I always wanted to jam a lot.” Jamming can be thought of as a trial and error means of learning and something that goes on a lot in music that is traditionally improvised to some degree like blues and jazz. A form of discovery and self-teaching.
We listen, we observe, we get together and trade licks and information with our friends, and read and apply articles from guitar magazines, from the web, etc. If we have the benefit of formal lessons from competent instructors then all the better. In a way all of my students over the years have all been self taught. Some learned a lot and still others learned little. I’ve just given them information and tried to open their eyes to possibilities. Led the horse to water if you will. If anything was actually learned they’ve done it all themselves. Plus they’re the ones who got the ball rolling with guitar lessons.
Is anyone self taught? In a way both everyone is and no one is. No one is because no man is an island, we all work from our influences to some degree, but in the end, everyone is because it’s all up to the individual.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Unexpected Influences
They come from all over. Sometimes it’s a performance. Sometimes you know right away. Sometimes it takes some looking back.
Once when I was probably somewhere between the ages of 17 or 18 (around 1974-75) the local university (NSU of Louisiana) sponsored a concert featuring the Buddy Rich Big Band. Everyone had heard of the famous Buddy Rich and I was anticipating the concert with great excitement. It was really a good experience for me - I had never seen anything like that before. The way he worked his playing into the arrangements was so exciting! And the way he connected the tunes to each other setting up segues so that the music didn’t stop. The tunes just flowed right into each other. Around that time I was starting to get passionate about guitar playing and being unfamiliar with big band jazz I was anxious to see if they had a guitarist and what his role might be.
There was a little guy with a big guitar and when his turn came to solo - wow! The notes came out of the guitar like it was on fire. Long phrases of incendiary lines but with none of the rock sounds I was used to hearing. Who was this guy? No one I knew had any idea. What I did know was that I had never seen or heard anything like that before and it introduced me to a whole different way to think about guitar and music.
I can imagine the band rolling from town to town playing hundreds of these little gigs on campuses everywhere never giving a thought to much else besides making it through this gig and heading for the next. What they probably never imagined is the impact they may have on one person and what a difference it can make, even at a university or a whole community.
To my delight when I graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1980 who was on stage to shake my hand and give me my diploma? Along with composer John Williams, it was Buddy Rich! Yes!
Years later in my forties, I discovered the music of a guitarist Jimmy Bruno. As I learned more about him, I found out he had played with The Buddy Rich Big Band. It was him! He was the guy tearing it up in the Buddy Rich band when I was a kid! When Jimmy Bruno started his Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute (JBGI) a few years ago, an online approach to guitar study, I was eager to see what I could learn from him. In that first round of study, I stayed with it for only about 3 months, but in that time I learned critical information that I now incorporate into my playing all the time, and also share with my own students. My students at the university. Where the Buddy Rich Big Band played. So long ago. When I was seventeen.
I guess one of the morals of this story is when you’re performing, whether you’re touring the country or just playing locally, your never know who you’ll influence or what that will lead to. So try to be your best whenever you perform.
I’ve had a whole host of influences, and there are many people I need to say thank you to. In this case - thank you Jimmy Bruno. Your dedication has personally affected me and those I influence as well.
Once when I was probably somewhere between the ages of 17 or 18 (around 1974-75) the local university (NSU of Louisiana) sponsored a concert featuring the Buddy Rich Big Band. Everyone had heard of the famous Buddy Rich and I was anticipating the concert with great excitement. It was really a good experience for me - I had never seen anything like that before. The way he worked his playing into the arrangements was so exciting! And the way he connected the tunes to each other setting up segues so that the music didn’t stop. The tunes just flowed right into each other. Around that time I was starting to get passionate about guitar playing and being unfamiliar with big band jazz I was anxious to see if they had a guitarist and what his role might be.
There was a little guy with a big guitar and when his turn came to solo - wow! The notes came out of the guitar like it was on fire. Long phrases of incendiary lines but with none of the rock sounds I was used to hearing. Who was this guy? No one I knew had any idea. What I did know was that I had never seen or heard anything like that before and it introduced me to a whole different way to think about guitar and music.
I can imagine the band rolling from town to town playing hundreds of these little gigs on campuses everywhere never giving a thought to much else besides making it through this gig and heading for the next. What they probably never imagined is the impact they may have on one person and what a difference it can make, even at a university or a whole community.
To my delight when I graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1980 who was on stage to shake my hand and give me my diploma? Along with composer John Williams, it was Buddy Rich! Yes!
Years later in my forties, I discovered the music of a guitarist Jimmy Bruno. As I learned more about him, I found out he had played with The Buddy Rich Big Band. It was him! He was the guy tearing it up in the Buddy Rich band when I was a kid! When Jimmy Bruno started his Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute (JBGI) a few years ago, an online approach to guitar study, I was eager to see what I could learn from him. In that first round of study, I stayed with it for only about 3 months, but in that time I learned critical information that I now incorporate into my playing all the time, and also share with my own students. My students at the university. Where the Buddy Rich Big Band played. So long ago. When I was seventeen.
I guess one of the morals of this story is when you’re performing, whether you’re touring the country or just playing locally, your never know who you’ll influence or what that will lead to. So try to be your best whenever you perform.
I’ve had a whole host of influences, and there are many people I need to say thank you to. In this case - thank you Jimmy Bruno. Your dedication has personally affected me and those I influence as well.
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