Nashville Guitar Guru

Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

Musicianship

Chops vs technique

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When you think about “technique” or technical playing, you probably think of what musicians call “chops”. It’s a general term but it’s almost always used to refer to difficult or physically challenging music. Using your chops means playing fast, intricate parts, beyond the reach of players that don’t work to develop that ability.

This isn’t inaccurate, but it’s unhelpful to the average guitar student or even the average guitarist. There’s no question that developing good technique is important. If you develop your technique properly, speed comes as a natural result. But a focus on the “chops” aspect of technique can be a misleading distraction from finer points that are essential to really playing well.

Let’s define playing “well” as the ability to play deliberately with confidence.

That means you have enough fine control to execute what you need to consistently without mistakes. It also means that your playing isn’t automatic. You need to know the music with your mind and not just your fingers. The more subtle aspects of technique are often applied more intuitively than consciously, but a good player can choose to zero in on one of those aspects just by paying attention to it.

When you first learn how to play, it’s easy to downplay some of the technical aspects as you simply try to memorize what to do. But since any action on an instrument calls for good technique, paying attention to mechanics early on is helpful and powerful. Ultimately, it will make it easier to get your hands to do what you want them to.

Good technique isn’t difficult, per se, in fact it’s the most natural approach. It takes time to be able to apply good technique on command in the moment, but that’s a separate point. Relaxed, mechanically sound movement are the most fluid and natural, and easiest to control deliberately when you take the time to build the coordination.

 

A focus on flashy playing and “chops” makes it tempting to rush ahead and play things faster but less controlled.

Odds are, you can move your hands faster than you can fully control the movement. So it’s possible to be able to hit most of the notes quickly, but without enough fine coordination to make sure you can hit them all. Because of this, the lure of speed becomes a distraction for many people.

That’s not to say that the pursuit of accurate speed and obvious “chops” isn’t a worthwhile goal. First of all, it’s not necessarily gratuitous: you ultimately want to have more ability on the instrument than your music demands most of the time. So the more demanding the music is to play, the higher your bar needs to be in order to keep a solid comfort zone for performing. Consistency breeds confidence, so you want to be able to play the part well every time. That’s challenging when the part is at the edge of your ability. So there’s a strong imperative to be able to play more difficult parts than you generally have to. And even so, there’s really nothing wrong with developing virtuosity for its own sake. It’s nice to have power under the hood even on an easy Sunday drive.

 

Why does this matter to the player with modest musical needs and goals?

The details of expression that make a good player great are not obvious, and sometimes practically invisible. You might not even be able to articulate what was different if they were missing, other than that the music is somehow less dynamic and compelling. But that’s exactly the point: the subtleties that really make music speak are also technical. They require greater attention to detail and greater fine control. We develop this kind of ability the same way we acquire speed and fluidity, through deliberate technical practice.

The player with more modest goals might find it easy to dismiss the importance of technical practice once a basic comfort zone develops. If you can basically to what you need to do, what’s the point of putting in more effort? But that additional effort makes your playing more accurate, more controlled, and more confident. Finer control allows for greater subtlety of things like articulation and phrasing: not just what notes you play but the way they sound.

Think of an actor’s ability to change the impact of a line by changing the way they say the words. You have the same ability as a musician, and giving yourself more expressive power is a worthwhile goal no matter what kind of music you play. More expressive power means better ability to communicate and connect, which should be every player’s ultimate mission.

 

So if your music doesn’t require speed and flash, don’t fall into the trap of thinking “chops” aren’t important to you.

If it does, don’t let the pursuit of speed distract you from developing real accuracy. ALL technical practice builds your control, consistency, and confidence. And any virtuoso will tell you that even highly advanced technique operates in the service of the music, enhancing your ability to speak to your audience.

What’s your motivation?

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What’s your motivation to play? What made you start playing, and what makes you continue?

For most of us, the answers were pretty simple to start with. Some people just fall in love with music. I know that I was hooked pretty much from the start, and I knew after the first year that I was going to devote my life to it. I loved to play and wanted to play better. It was all I wanted to do and I wanted to be great at it.

That commitment was my driving force for the next ten years of my life. Music school, long hours in the practice room, and just as many hours of hustle to find places to play. Ten years later I had earned two degrees in guitar performance and was playing steady gigs and learning to write music. The satisfaction was built in, the rewards of momentum and commitment.

 

There’s a good chance that you might have made a different set of choices but still love to play.

Most people don’t make quite such an intense commitment, but still strive to be better players. Part of the beauty of playing music is that there’s always the possibility for growth. You might find, though, that after a while your progress seems to slow down.

This happens to everyone. You might find that playing is still enjoyable but has become a little frustrating. There are all kinds of resources available to you that can help you get better, but it’s hard to know which will help the most. There’s so much information that it can be overwhelming, and learning to use it even more daunting. All of this can make motivation more of a challenge.

 

You might think that the biggest difference between you and a professional is the amount of hours dedicated to the instrument.

That’s true, but there’s another factor you might not have considered. A professional musician’s life is generally a series of projects. Sometimes that means one long-term band, sometimes one short-term gig after another. Each of these has its own repertoire and dedicated immediate goals: a rehearsal, a recording date, a performance, a deadline. This ongoing series of short-term goals becomes the pro’s motivation. That doesn’t mean the love of playing diminishes, but it does mean that there’s a constant imperative to learn and refine new music.

The pro has an ongoing imperative to learn and master a specific set of material. The challenge for the amateur or student is that lacking specific short-term goals, most people eventually start to spin their wheels. Only the most devoted (or obsessive, depending on how you look at it) are able to maintain momentum without it. And even then, success in staying motivated does come from personal goal-setting.

 

The bottom line is that almost everyone needs a reason to keep practicing that goes beyond the simple desire to.

In order to keep from coasting, most of us need an additional boost. This can come in the form of jam sessions with friends, a performance at a local open mic, or recording your own songs. You don’t need professional aspirations, or even a desire to do anything other than have the experience. The act of creation is its own reward, and most of all when you give yourself a reason to create and refine.

By necessity, this means narrowing your focus to a specific set of music. Some practice is broad, in the sense of general skill- or vocabulary-building. That means the information you absorb doesn’t have an immediate, specific application. This is an important part of practicing, but it’s wide knowledge rather than deep. To really play the way you want to, you need to get to know specific songs in detail. That means committing yourself to a repertoire and refining it as far as your abilities allow.

 

There’s another built-in trap here, but understand what matters most.

You can get tired of playing the same songs after a while. Recognize that when this happens, that particular short-term goal may have been reached and it’s time for a new one. There might be more work that could be done: maybe you still can’t play the songs as well as you’d like to. But when your enthusiasm for the project starts to wane, you need to start the process over again with something else. The spark and motivation matter more than the pursuit of perfection. After all, we know that learning music is an ongoing process, and that there’s always another level to reach.

It can be challenging can find people to play with and places to play. It can be hard to choose a particular area to focus on, or get a group of people to agree on what to do. You might prefer to work alone, and that’s fine. But be aware that the goal-setting process and resulting growth are the most important things. All of the specifics are variable: what you do, who you do it with, and how well you can pull it off. The thing that’s certain is that the process makes you a better player and a stronger musician. Once you recognize this, the pursuit of those short-term goals becomes its own motivation. Best of all, you will certainly see your skills and confidence improve. There’s no greater motivation than that.

Making intentional choices.

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You make choices all the time when you play.

If you are trying to duplicate something exactly, that’s a choice. If you learn a song as a basic framework, that’s a choice as well. And most of all, every time you learn or create a song you choose how you’re going to express a particular note or chord. And once you’re developed a level of comfort with your playing, many of those choices can be automatic. But should they be?

Now, I’m coming at this from the perspective of a player that generally doesn’t play note-for-note renditions of songs. As a songwriter and creative interpreter I prefer to leave myself as much room as possible to explore the different ways a song might be played. There are times when playing a song faithfully is the right choice. Some people are most interested in learning to duplicate sounds that inspire them, and that’s fine. But if that’s all you do, you won’t develop the kind of creative flexibility that helped make your musical heroes inspiring in the first place.

 

There’s always another way to play a particular note or chord on the guitar.

Think of a song as a framework filled in by specific details. Different performances might fill in those details differently. If you’ve ever learned a simple “strummer’s” version of a song, you understand this concept. If you can strum the chords and sing the melody, you’re performing the song even if you aren’t playing the specific guitar part from the recording. A C chord is made up of the same three notes no matter how they are played: C, E, and G. The guitar gives us lot of different ways to put those notes together, and each can create its own a distinctive sound. So why would you want to choose the same one every time?

Many people do, though. It might be because they only know one way to play a C chord, but it also might mean they just didn’t think to try another. It’s an easy trap to fall into, even for a skilled player. I have caught myself being thoughtless many times, taking the easy or obvious choice. But when I put some thought into my choices, I often find something more interesting. That first obvious choice still might turn out to be the best one, but there’s no way to know if you don’t ask the question.

 

There are more options to consider than which fingering to use for a given chord, or where to play a specific note.

Dynamics, tone, and phrasing are all artistic choices a musician needs to make in performing a song. Every aspect of the music is a product of chance or choice. These choices can be intuitive, and that’s ok. As an improvisational player I’m a firm believer in flow and the wisdom of intuition. We’ve all seen how amazing sounds can simply flow out of a gifted artist. But at the same time, when you hear someone onstage there’s no way to know how much time and effort they spent working out and developing the performance.

What does this mean for you? It’s a simple idea, really. There are two ways to create, or two aspects to the creative process. One is the flow that allows the idea to appear, and the other is the evaluation of whether that idea expresses the artist’s intent. The music benefits from both sides of the process, regardless of how gifted or skilled the artist might be.

 

Wherever you are in your musical journey, there will always be something new you can learn.

If you only know one way to play your basic chords, learn some new ones. If you find you’re using the same rhythm or strum pattern again and again, simply ask yourself how you could change it. This is especially relevant to songwriters. Is the feel of the song right for what you want it to say? What about the tempo? Do your chord choices and voicings match the overall feeling? You may not know the answers to these questions, or you may not have thought to ask about at least some of these aspects.

The bottom line is that as a creative musician or writer, you want to be able to work both sides of the process. You should be able to let ideas flow, but also to step back and question each choice. You should have the means to make other choices and try other options. And you should recognize that every aspect of the music is flexible and can benefit from this process. Ultimately, your goal should be to maximize your expressive options so that you can confidently stand behind every choice you made.

Many of the best musicians are never completely happy with their choices, but that ongoing desire to reevaluate and question is part of what makes them great. You don’t need to be a great instrumentalist to take this idea to heart. Just know that the goal is not perfection but to make the best choice you’re capable of in each moment. This is what allows you to grow and keep growing as a musician and an artist.

Learn concepts from the songs you play

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If you really want to keep growing as a player, look for bigger musical concepts in the songs you learn.

We all start out memorizing songs as finger patterns, but that way of looking at things will only take you so far. That’s far enough for some people, but if you find yourself feeling limited you might be surprised by how much more there might be to what you think you already know.

Practicing ultimately breaks down to just two basic areas, technique/theory and application/performance. We can practice exercises to build technique or to illustrate musical concepts, but what we all really want is to play music. So an ideal way to put these two things together is to look more closely at the songs you learn.

From a mechanical perspective, anything you might do to play a specific song can be broken down to the techniques it requires.

For example, a difficult chord change can be deconstructed into a finger exercise. Part of the difficulty in anything new is that it’s unfamiliar, not simply that it’s hard to do. We often tend to assume that when we can’t accomplish something that it’s just beyond us. But even the most advanced techniques are a combination of simpler ones. Getting clear on what those simple things are sets you up to be able to accomplish the more complex ones.

From a musical perspective, it’s really valuable to understand how the songs you play are put together. Not everyone sees the value in this right away, but chalk that perspective up to impatience. It’s also shortsighted. Every song you learn should be a step towards making the next one easier, for both technical and musical reasons. First of all, there are particular patterns that show up again and again in every style of music. That repetition is part of what defines the sound of a style in the first place. Think of it as a specialized vocabulary or dialect within the greater language of music. When you learn to organize sounds into categories they become easier to recognize and understand. So if you learn a song that follows a particular chord pattern, you’ll be more likely to recognize that same pattern when you hear it in a different song.

This musical understanding works on many levels.

On one level, there’s the simple sequence of events: one note or chord followed by another. When we first learn to play, this is often all we’ve got to work with. So we memorize the patterns until we can repeat them from memory. But beneath that mechanical level is the musical relationship that creates the pattern in the first place. Some people can hear those relationships intuitively, but even the naturally gifted can benefit from knowing how to name what they hear. For those of us that have to learn to recognize these things, the naming and categorizing helps the learning process. In fact, the speed of your learning might be directly tied to the depth of your understanding!

Listen for form

Form is the deeper level beyond the specifics of licks, melodies, and chord sequences. All music has structure of some kind: even the absence of form is an organizing concept. Good musicians are able to hear these larger patterns, and understand the specific details in context.

If you’ve ever learned to play or sing a song from beginning to end you understand that songs have sections. This might be articulated mostly by the words: verses that tell a story as it unfolds, choruses that repeat a refrain. But these sections are usually musically distinct as well, and the chorus is recognizable because of its melody as well as the repeated lyric. That’s simple enough, and not news to anyone.

But think about how we often learn songs, especially from the internet. The most common online format is to have the song lyrics accompanied by the chords that match them. This should make it easy to recognize the patterns, but the focus is on the words. It can really be challenging to follow a chord chart without the lyrics, try it and see! We’re used to the form of the song being organized by the words. But the music articulates form as well, and your ability to hear and follow musical form really enhances your ability to learn new songs.

Perhaps most importantly, every new song you learn gives you an opportunity to practice your flow.

“Flow” is something every performer and player needs to master. It’s simply the ability to play a song confidently from beginning to end. This goes beyond your ability to execute each specific change or musical gesture. It extends to things like concentration, focus, and the ability to recover from mistakes. In the larger sense, it’s the ability to communicate a piece of music as an unfolding story without ever breaking the spell. This is something many people miss, even long after they’ve built the skills to actually play the music.

This has very little to do with the relative difficulty of the song. Ideally, you should be choosing music that’s a good mix between technical challenges and musical expression. So the music you use to practice flow should be within your reach enough that you don’t struggle with too many details.

Ultimately, you do want to divide your practice between focused technical work and the more musical expression of flow. So there will be things you practice that aren’t close to being ready for performance. But you should make an effort to use both mechanical and musical practice to work towards building a repertoire. You may find that you become more motivated, progress more easily, and learn more quickly.

How do scales become melodies?

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How do scales become melodies?

Most guitar students practice scales at some point. It’s a good way to build chops and learn to navigate the fretboard at the same time. With a little extra thought you can also use your scale practice for ear training, and to learn to apply music theory to the guitar neck. But one of the major challenges many students face is learning how to make music out of scales.

A scale can be a musical statement, but simply listening to scales alone is not very interesting. This is because there’s no variety, nothing distinctive for the ear to catch on to. Scales are a good way of organizing notes, but from a musical perspective it’s useful to think of them as raw materials: collections of notes to choose from. In order to create a memorable melody, we need to add more musical elements.

 

Rhythm

A good melody has some kind of distinctive rhythm. One of the traps students often fall into when learning to improvise is to play steady repeated notes with no sense of phrasing. Thinking rhythmically, “phrasing” means that notes are grouped into discrete sets, often separated by some sort of pause. It’s an organizing force in music, just as punctuation is for language.

I often start lessons on improvisation and soloing by asking the student to just play rhythms on a single note. This removes the question of which notes to play, and leaves only the choice of whether to make a sound or not. If the choice is not to play, the question is how long to wait. If the choice is to play, the question is how long to let the note sound. You can play notes on each beat, notes that extend over multiple beats, or notes that fill in the space between them. Playing more notes creates more activity, while using fewer notes creates a sense of space. This is a fundamental aspect of improvisation that’s hard to master when you’re busy trying to follow a finger pattern.

 

Shape

A scale goes one direction, up or down. A melody has contour, rising and falling in pitch. Standard music notation is essentially a graph of the melody, in which the horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is pitch. You can think of the notation as a drawing of what you hear, making it understandable even if you don’t read music. If you’re a visual person, imagining this can be really helpful.

Scales always move in steps (whole or half), moving through the musical alphabet from letter to letter. Different scales will have different sequences of whole and half steps; you can imagine this clearly enough by picturing a piano keyboard. The combination of black and white keys may be different from one scale to another, but the sequence will always follow the musical alphabet without skipping letters. A melody will generally have more variety, moving up and down using smaller and larger intervals.

 

Improvising melodies

The way guitarists learn scales actually makes it a little harder to learn to improvise with them. It’s convenient to organize the patterns by position, staying within the same four or five frets across all six strings. This is a great way to organize the neck, but it breaks up the linear aspect of the scale. You can probably imagine the movement of notes on a single string pretty easily, rising in pitch in half-step increments as you move from fret to fret up the neck. Move in one direction, notes go up, move in the opposite direction they go down. Move more frets at once, larger change in pitch. Simple, right? But add the aspect of crossing strings and the mental map becomes a whole lot less clear. Combine the position model with the linear, single string model and things get exponentially more complicated!

To get past this, we need to see the scale as a simple sequence that rises and falls rather than a fingering matrix.

One good exercise is to start to identify the tones of the scale as scale degrees, numbering them according to their position in the sequence. This is great for ear training as well as a reinforcing the theory, in that you begin to learn the sound of each scale tone. A fifth sounds like a fifth, once you know what to listen for. Play the scale as a series of gradually increasing intervals, singing along if you can: 1 – 2, 1 – 3, 1 – 4, and so on. Then fill in the steps between each interval: 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 1. Treat each octave separately, and if the fingering pattern doesn’t cover a complete octave just go as fall as the pattern will allow. Don’t forget to practice descending intervals as well!

For another useful practice sequence, check out this related post.

It will take some time before you really begin to absorb the information. You’ll start to hear similar sounds in different places right away, though. Remember the goal is to get to the point where you can think in terms of musical gestures rather than fingerings. To practice that aspect, we can take another approach.

Limiting your note choices is a great way to put the focus on other musical aspects.

Choose a small segment of a scale instead of the entire thing. Working with or without a backing track, experiment with very small musical ideas. Don’t play more than a few notes at a time, but focus on the ideas of line and phrasing. Remember, we really just have a handful of variables:

– up or down
– how much
– how long to wait for the next note

You might be surprised to find how easy it is for musical intuition to kick in when you start to apply these ideas. As you become more comfortable with directing your ideas rather than leading with your fingers, you can add more complexity. But the exercise in the beginning is to focus on making musical decisions as you play. That’s why we want to keep it simple at first, because even the most complex music can be broken down into series of simpler ideas.

If you’d like to explore this idea some more, take a look at this video applying the concept to rudimentary blues soloing:

 

Learn new ways to play familiar chords.

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When was the last time you learned a new way to play a familiar chord?

It’s relatively easy to learn the primary “cowboy” chords. If we include the F chord, there are nine: A, Am, C, D, Dm, E, Em, F, and G. This plus a capo is enough to serve the most basic strummer, and there are songwriters that get by on less.

I meet people all the time that say they never get above the third fret. Legendary country songwriter Harlan Howard supposedly had a guitar with just three frets on it. This might just be legend, but classic country is a lot like the blues in that there are simple patterns that are used again and again. The old adage “three chords and the truth” really does apply when story and melody are king. If you add a fourth chord we could say the same about modern pop music, where simplicity and economy in songwriting are (usually) key.

But there are many styles of music, each with its own vocabulary and norms. And every genre has songs that are simple and others that are more complex. So to really be able to play what you want to play, it’s good to know more chords. Not just more types of chords, although that’s good too. But there are multiple ways to play even the most basic chords, and learning some of them will add a lot of variety to your playing. And you don’t even need to get out of the first three frets to find some of them.

The way we learn chords actually creates its own problem when it comes to learning new ones.

Since it’s relatively easy for a beginner to just memorize shapes, you can learn the basic vocabulary quickly. It doesn’t take long to get to the point where you can play a simple song well enough for someone to sing along. But because we don’t need to understand anything about how those chords are formed, many people never bother to learn it. When you do, the logic can still be tricky to apply. It’s much easier to follow on a keyboard, which is why all music students are required to at least get familiar with the piano. The simple, linear nature of the keyboard makes relationships easier to see. Not so much on guitar.

You might already know the basic theory. It takes three notes to make a major or minor chord. When we put those notes in sequence as close together as we can, we get a root position triad. This means the lowest of the three notes is the root, the note the chord is built on. If we start from the root and just climb the scale, we add the third and fifth notes we find to complete the chord. Easily enough, we refer to the other two notes as the 3rd and 5th of the chord.

You almost always learn chords on piano as root position triads first.

This is the simplest way because there’s a consistent pattern from chord to chord, even if the combination of white and black keys changes: root note, skip a letter, skip another letter. But on the guitar, we just memorize box shapes. There’s rarely an explanation for why a D chord has four notes but an E minor has six – it’s just the way it is. We don’t even pay attention to the different in sound and are used to hearing it this way. But it’s helpful to understand what’s happening if you want to expand your vocabulary. It only takes three notes to form a chord, but guitar chords duplicate notes to create a fuller sound.

For example, a C major chord on piano looks like this:

The notes are C, E, and G.

On guitar, the familiar C looks like this:

C chord

Leaving off the low E string, there are five strings being played. This produces a 5-note chord, C – E – G – C – E. It’s the same three letters are the piano chord, but the the C and E notes doubled.

At this point the light bulb might come on.

It only takes three notes to make a chord and we often double notes when we play basic chords. So we can find variations of a familiar chord by doubling different notes!

For example, play the familiar C chord again and add your little finger to the third fret of the 1st string. The fingering now looks like this:

alternate C chord fingering

The C can be played either way, with or without the pinky. It’s still the same chord, but now the notes are C – E – G – C – G. We’ve just doubled the G instead of the E. It still sound like a C chord, but with a different note on top.

Now play each version of the C chord going to a D. Notice that the difference in the sound is melodic! Using the traditional C makes the “melody”, the high note, move up when going from C to D. Using our variation, the high note moves down. It’s a subtle difference but clearly a different sound.

Not every variation is this easy to find, but there are a lot of them.

Some are simple rearrangements of the notes of the triad. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re playing an inversion, which means moving the lowest note of a triad to the top or vice versa. Inversions will still contain the three notes of the chord in ascending order. In other words, C – E – G inverts to E – G – C or G – C – E. The C chord we created by adding the pinky is what we would call a new voicing of the chord: C – E – G – C – G.

Sometimes adding a finger adds a different note and creates a new type of chord. This is a big topic and best left for its own lesson. For now, it’s enough to simply recognize that a chord is not a single thing but a collection of notes that can be rearranged in a variety of ways. Some of these fall more naturally on the guitar than others, and a little exploration is worthwhile. It’s helpful to get to know the note locations in the open position so you have an idea of where to look. Notice the note sequence on each string: this diagram omits the sharps and flats, just move one fret up from a letter to find the sharp and one fret down to find the flat.

open notes on the guitar

Rather than getting overwhelmed by the options, look at this lesson simply as an introduction to the concept. We’ll explore more specifics in subsequent posts.