Nashville Guitar Guru | Guitar Lessons in Nashville, TN

Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

Musicianship

Learning the notes: navigating the matrix

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One of the great challenges of learning the guitar is that the logic of the notes on the neck isn’t easily apparent. By contrast, think of the layout of a piano keyboard. Low notes are on the left, high notes on the right. Move from one white key to the next and move up or down through the musical alphabet. Skip a key and you skip a letter. To find a sharp or flat, replace a white key with the adjacent black one. It’s very clear and simple, strictly linear.

On the other hand, a scale fingering on guitar seems arbitrary and random. How many notes per string? When do you change strings? Why do the fingerings change so much from one scale to another, and why are there so many of them? The challenges this presents are enough to intimidate some people away from learning to play melody or “lead”. But fortunately, there IS logic to the guitar neck. It’s more complex than the layout of a keyboard, but there’s actually a direct relationship.

 

The notes on every string of the guitar are linear, in the sense that we progress through the scale as we move along the string.

So moving from an open string up the neck is like moving along a keyboard from left to right. Note that “up” in this sense means rising in pitch, moving away from the headstock. The frets divide the string up into a series of half-steps, just like the white and black keys of the keyboard. To play a chromatic scale, start with the open string and simply move along the string from one fret to the next. This is like striking every key of the keyboard in sequence from left to right.

The piano, of course, has a wider range than the guitar. A full 88-key keyboard spans just over seven octaves, while the average guitar will reach a little below four. (An octave is the distance between a given note and the next higher or lower note with the same letter name). Some electric guitars go all the way up to 24 frets to complete that fourth octave. A single string has a total range of just under 2 octaves, but the frets above the 12th are used fare less often and rarely on the bass strings. So for the most part, the average skilled player is working within an octave-plus on each string.

 

You can explore this by trying to play simple melodies on a single string.

The first lesson I would often give a young child would be to play “Hot Cross Buns” by sliding a finger along the first string, starting at the third fret:

example - single string

This puts the melody in the key of F, but you can play the same melody anywhere on the neck by starting on any fret above the 4th, dropping two frets, and then two more. This will change the key, of course, but not the melody itself.

Now look at an open position fingering across two strings:

example across 2 strings

At first, it might seem arbitrary why we change strings when we do. But consider two factors. One, we’ve established that every string has the same linear layout as a keyboard. Two, each of the six strings is tuned to a different pitch, getting gradually higher as we move from thicker to thinner strings. The distance between each pair of strings is a perfect fourth, which works out to 5 frets. (The only exception is the third and second strings, which are a major 3rd apart or four frets).

Given that even a short-scale neck has at least seventeen frets, there’s obviously going to be some overlap between the pitch ranges of different strings. So you could think of the guitar neck as six overlapping keyboards, each sharing notes with adjacent strings. With this in mind, take a look at the next diagram:

C scale with alternate fingerings

Here, we have a C major scale spelled out on the 5th string, with duplicate note locations indicated in the tab. From each note locations, there’s at least one other possible place to play the same note. So playing the scale is essentially navigating a matrix, in which you can choose one move or another to arrive at the same note.

Obviously, it takes time to learn the neck well enough to be able to navigate all the possibilities comfortably. But understanding the nature of the guitar neck helps move that process along. Memorize scale fingerings to acquaint yourself with how some of the patterns fall. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that those finger patterns are where the music is. That comes with time, exploration, and listening.

Professional skill vs personal style

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I believe I developed a personal style as a player in spite of my education. This might sound like a flip statement, but it’s taken many years to understand. I’m grateful to have had the training I did, but I didn’t fully understand how working to become a professional could also slow the process of becoming an artist.

It’s a product of the training and trajectory of an educated musician.

From young fan imitating my heroes, to music student, to working player just trying to be prepared for the next gig, a good portion of my musical life has centered on imitating and reproducing familiar sounds. You could probably say the same for most people who play, especially those with formal training. After all, that formal education is meant to build the basic skills you need to play any style of music. You can choose to focus on a particular genre or specialty, but a professional player doesn’t always know what the next gig will be and therefore needs to be able to function in a variety of musical settings.

I used to embrace this philosophy fully, both as a player and a teacher. It’s like the “liberal arts” model of music: regardless of where you land professionally, a well-rounded education is the best preparation. This is certainly true of the freelancer and pro side player, and as a gigging musician that background kept me working. Rock, blues, jazz, country, folk, classical – whatever the gig called for, I wanted to be prepared for it. When I was devouring the pages of Guitar Player magazine as a teenager I read every article and every lesson column, whether I understood it or not, and I meant to learn more if I didn’t. My goal was to be the best and most well-rounded musician I could be.

 

An artist doesn’t share the same imperatives as a working pro player.

A performing artist needs a distinctive style and sound in order to stand out, and the most successful are often the most strikingly original. When I look back at the musicians that had the biggest impact on me as a player, you could say that about virtually all of them. Even the instrumentalists have an identifiable “voice”. Pioneering Latin rock guitarist Carlos Santana once said in an interview, “your tone is your face. Why would you want to look like someone else?”

When I was first learning to play I was a student and a fan first, learning by imitating my heroes. They taught me what was possible, expanding my concept of what a guitar could do, and I built my vocabulary by stealing from them all. But while many of these players were and are great masters of their instrument, they were not chameleons. They may have started off as I had, imitating their inspirations, but eventually began to stake out territory of their own. This became style as it solidified into a vocabulary and an overall approach.

 

Developing an individual style may not be a high priority for the average student or hobbyist.

Learning to play favorite songs is satisfying enough for many people. But even if your musical tastes as a listener are diverse, you might find that you have a musical “home base” that you return to even as you explore other, different sounds. So style is defined by musical preference and genre, as well as your own aesthetic sensibility. We all gravitate towards sounds we find pleasing and compelling.

The finer technical points of style develop over time. Every aspect of your technique has an impact on your sound, including the way you breathe and carry your body. So even if you’re not consciously trying to be an individual, you already are. When you start to recognize this, you become faced with an important choice: how much do you allow your predispositions to shape your style, or do you consciously try to absorb things you admire in other players?

This is not necessarily a conscious decision. Intuitive players are naturally guided by what they hear and find pleasing, so individual style often takes care of itself. The player that chooses to develop more wide-ranging skills is also choosing to have more control over their options. When you have more control and a larger vocabulary, a player’s style can change according to the demands of the music. This is a must for the professional session player and most working musicians in general.

 

For a creative artist, though, this kind of versatility has a downside.

A distinctive voice can be obscured by stylistic “masks”. Again, this can be a conscious choice if the player is being called upon to reproduce a sound. But the most distinctive artists’ style comes through in any musical setting. These can be a product of the player’s physical approach to the instrument – touch, attack, energy – or their musical choices.

You may not have begun to develop a “sound” of your own. As you continue to learn, though, you will find that some things come more naturally than others. Don’t shy away from the challenges, they will help you grow! But do start to recognize your comfort zone, and get to know that territory as well as you can. There’s always more you can do to develop your style with confidence and authority. You might find yourself gravitating to a certain style of playing. Explore the nuances that make great players sound the way they do.

 

Style is ultimately a product of our influences, but also of the choice to be an individual.

For some people this occurs naturally. If you’re still a beginner or long-term beginner this process may not have begun yet. But the more you play and the better you listen, a sound will begin to take shape. When that begins to happen, embrace it and dive in deeper. Sometimes that means working with and around your limitations. but that won’t stop you from growing. What it will do is allow you to grow as an artist, not just a player.

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.