[Newsletter] Become a stronger player by knowing the history of your favourite music
Using verbal phrases to help your musical phrases; connecting note names with keys
Hello all!
I played music in front of people for the first time in about 2 years this week.
It was a little porch concert. There were maybe 50 people there and it was nerve-wracking because I usually play bass with this group, but my bass shit the bed. I played guitar instead. Three things were on my mind: I hadn’t played these songs at all for a long time, I had never played them on guitar, and I hadn’t performed live in so long. I was genuinely curious if I still knew how to do it.
Happily, everything went well. Not perfect, but perfectly good.
Welcome to new subscribers this week! If you have any questions or problems with learning your guitar right now, feel free to respond to this email. I will get back to you.
Something to think about
All your favourite music stems from something else. Learn what it stems from.
Everything makes more sense the more you know about the last 120 years of music.
I noticed a big uptick in my understanding when I started looking at my favourite artists' influences. I was really into Led Zeppelin and my guitar buddy said to check out this guy named Robert Johnson. At the time, I was in between guitar teachers. I turned to YouTube and found all of Johnson's famous songs and some tutorials on how to play them.
The tutorials were from a channel called deltabluestips. When I think about it, I can trace a lot of my playing back to this guy.
Here's what I learned from this channel:
Focus on the style and feel
He always tells you how to mute the strings in a weird way or be aggressive with your thumb - that kind of stuff. He teaches Blues guitar as if learning the language is the most important thing.
The chord structure
He teaches different voicings for the chords in the structure. He has nicknames for different chords, like "Long A." He plays chords and changes with his influences in clear view (Johnson and Eric Clapton), but it’s still his own thing.
How to be a musician
Teaching Blues guitar this way doesn’t mean he is just teaching the genre, he’s showing you how he became a musician. All of his influences come into his playing and there are clues how he takes some parts of another person's playing and adapts it to his own style. It’s never, "Here's how to play like Clapton." It’s always, "Here's a Clapton-esque kind of thing."
There and back again
Hearing all these influential songs and learning how to play some in a close approximation of the original style made everything else I already knew more clear.
I went from Led Zeppelin back to Robert Johnson. Johnson led to Willie Dixon, who led to Muddy Waters, who led back to Led Zeppelin. All this music led to Motown, which led to James Brown, who led to Prince, who led to D'Angelo, and so on.
Going back to the source was the foundation on which I could build a more clear understanding of all the music I like and now I'm a smarter musician because of it.
Something to watch
This video finds the trifecta of great guitar education: simple, intuitive, and extremely effective.
This video is made for guitarists feeling like they are just playing scales, not really playing music. It's pretty common to feel this way - it's hard to connect the guitar in your hands with the music in your head. StitchGuitar Method has the cure.
There are several great concepts here (from basic four note phrases to the idea of call and response). These concepts come from the idea of verbal language.
When you're speaking to someone, you might want to sound clear, know what point you're making, use elegant words, and avoid starting and stopping with lots of "uhs" and "ums". Or maybe you talk with lots of slang, hushed tones, and veiled meanings. Either way, there's a style to the way you speak and, over time, it becomes unique to you.
So it is with guitar playing.
This is a great way for guitarists to start finding the relationship between verbal language and musical language. You will avoid the paradox of choice by cutting down on possibilities and, with such a limited palette, you'll be forced to think about playing simple motifs in a phrase.
Something to practice
Two things that go well together: learning to play in a specific key and learning note names on the fretboard. Combine these two concepts into one exercise.
I’m a fan of spending time in one key just to get the feel of it. The way the fretboard is laid out, there are things you’ll play in the key of D that just aren’t ergonomic in the key of C, and vice versa. As a result, hanging out in one key for a while gives you a chance to explore its idiosyncrasies.
So try this:
Pick two keys you’d like to know better to alternate between over the course of the week
Find scales and chord shapes (CAGED, perhaps) to play around the fretboard in each key
As you’re working on scales and chord shapes, make your effort more impactful by thinking about note names while you do it. Especially higher up the fretboard where you might not know the note names as well
Play open chords in those keys and see if any weird stuff is possible with open strings (strange dissonances or suspensions)
Even if you don’t learn every note on the fretboard, what you will notice is that certain notes will stick out in certain keys. For example, if you’re playing a bunch in the key of D, the 10th fret of the A string might really stick in your brain as G.
The more you do this is in different keys, the more one single note might stick better and better in your mind because it’s now associated with different keys in different contexts.