Ignorance is not bliss.

There is a LOT of guitar instruction material on the internet. I’ve been exploring lately, looking to see what other teachers are up to as I organize my own thoughts. And while there are plenty of smart and talented people out there with something to offer, they sometimes seem to be islands floating in a sea of….well, fill in the blank.

To make a sweeping generalization instead of a blanket indictment: there are no magic bullets. Learning to play an instrument is a lifelong journey, there’s always something else to learn, and all of those things are going to take work. Anyone who promises you shortcuts, secrets, or tricks is minimizing that fact, but it’s a common thread I keep seeing in so many of these courses.
There ARE simple ideas that can make a huge difference in how quickly and how efficiently you learn, but these are concepts – a mental approach that pave the way for the work to follow. My issue with a lot of what I’m seeing out there is the repeated assertion that it’s not important to know about music….that these so-called shortcuts do so by eliminating pesky details like vocabulary and musical literacy.

You certainly CAN choose to learn that way, and there are plenty of working professionals….even stars….who did just that. We all did in the beginning: here’s a chord, memorize it, here’s a lick, memorize that. And it’s true that you don’t need to know how to read music or how to spell a minor 11th chord to be a songwriter, or an artist, or even a professional musician. There are many who don’t, they just do what they do and some people do it amazingly well.

But realistically, unless you are a genius savant and really don’t need to (and even then), knowing more about what you do can only help. Musical knowledge gives you more choices and more options. Musical literacy makes it easier for you to communicate your ideas to others and to absorb theirs. Even Mozart had teachers and went through a process of musical education. (He may have mastered it all by the time he was ten, but that’s a separate point).
This is not the sexy stuff, this is the grunt work. Not instant gratification but a payoff that comes down the road. Like any investment, it takes time to mature. See the shortcuts for what they are: a means to get a little taste of the good stuff, and enjoy them…..but don’t mistake morsels for a meal.

The great jazz pianist Bill Evans had this to say on the subject:

“It is true of any subject that the person who succeeds in anything has a realistic viewpoint at the beginning in knowing that the problem is large. He has to take it a step at a time, and he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure".

We’re talking about applying a small idea to a big thing: be aware of the big picture, but process information in snapshots.

It’s not a secret or a trick, just the recognition that music is an interconnected system with many, many interwoven relationships. Start by knowing these relationships are there, and then start looking for them, one by one. Be aware that this is going to take a long time to really get to know the material….but the beauty of it is, you don’t need to know everything to make music. Every one of these small pieces can be put to use right away. Learn a chord, use it in a song, then use it a different way and it will lead to another new chord. Every piece of the puzzle brings you closer to seeing the whole picture.

Adopting this mindset will keep you from getting stuck; stagnation in any aspect of life happens when you no longer see possibility. Acknowledging how big a thing we’re tackling here should make it clear that you’ll never know everything, so there’s no way to run out of possibilities…unless, of course, you decide some things aren’t worth knowing.

Phrasing & Space

In writing a lyric, one mistake many beginners make is not following a recognizable meter or pattern of stressed beats. (Think back to ninth-grade English class, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, etc). No matter the style of music, if you want your lyric to be understandable when set to music it needs to be musical to start with…..and like most poetry low and high, from limericks to sonnets, nearly all music follows some kind of meter. The meter of a lyric can strongly suggest the feel and tempo of the music that goes with it, just as the words you choose determine the attitude and tone of the song.

Inherent in the idea of meter and its stressed syllables is the opposite idea: unstressed beats and open space. Think of rhythm as operating on several levels at once: the steady pulse at the foundation, the stressed beats that define the meter, the unstressed beats that make the accents “pop” and complete the line, and the spaces between the lines that define the form.

This is the essence of phrasing, in both the lyrical and musical senses. Phrasing is the organizing principle in speech, poetry, and music, and makes your message easier to deliver by giving the brain a pattern to connect to. That’s not to say that phrasing is repetitive by nature, it doesn’t have to be…but the complexity of your phrasing is going to be determined by what’s appropriate to the style. Country music as a rule uses simple, short phrases:

Hey, (beat)(beat) good lookin’ (beat)(beat)(beat)
wha- (beat) (beat) -tcha got cookin’ (beat)(beat)(beat)
hows about cookin’ (beat) something up with me? (2-3-4-5-6-7-8)

Notice how the held notes and spaces complete each eight-beat line….in other words, how the phrasing comes from a combination of the natural stresses of the words (good LOOKin’) and the added beats (the spaces between) to complete a coherent, symmetrical 4-line form of 8 beats per line.

Now, if you have a strong innate sense of rhythm (and many songwriters do) you might work these things out without any effort or conscious thought at all. But looking at phrasing and stress patterns in a lyric can open up new possibilities in a song, taking it in a musical direction you might not have thought of initially. Here’s an example, from Travis Tritt’s “Great Day To Be Alive”, written by Darrell Scott:

It’s a great (beat) DAY to be alive
I know the sun’s still shinin’ when I close my eyes
There’s some (beat) hard times in the neighborhood
but why can’t every day be just this good?

Notice how the added beat before the word “day” not only emphasizes the word but also makes it into a memorable part of the hook. The pause before “hard times” not only does the same thing, it adds a two-count “knock-knock” motif that is established by “there’s some” (pause) followed by the words “hard times” in the same rhythm. The contrast of the breaks in lines 1 and 3 with the unbroken lines 2 and 4 also gives the lyric added balance and musicality.

It’s worth mentioning as well that Darrell Scott is an instrumentalist of the highest order, and as strong a case as you could make for the added dimension instrumental ability brings to songwriting. But just as in lyric writing, strong phrasing is essential to great music, as any great musician will tell you: just ask Darrell, or B.B. King, Miles Davis, or Floyd Cramer. Too often we try to separate writing ability from musical ability, but the two go hand in hand….after all, we’re talking about SONGwriting.