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Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

The Perpetual Beginner

The Perpetual Beginner: the Nashville Number System, practical theory, and your capo.

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The Nashville Number System is a method of musical shorthand devised in the late 1950’s by Bill Matthews of the Jordanaires (most famous as the vocal quartet backing Elvis on his early recordings). It’s a great example of the practical use of music theory. With a little knowledge you can use the concepts behind the NNS to learn a song by ear, figure out a capo position to play in, or transpose a song to a new key.

The basic concept to understand is that a song is generally said to be “in a key”. That means that there are certain notes that are most likely to be used, and others that are likely to be omitted. The particular pattern of the notes creates a “key center”: a musical home base that determines how you hear the relationships between notes. Once this is established in your ear, you will perceive (consciously or unconsciously) that the patterns in the music will generally lead you “home” at the end of the song or sequence.

To illustrate this point, play the following 7 notes. Use the tab if you don’t know the note locations:

C    D    E    F    G    A    B

 

 

 

You’ll probably notice that the last note sounds unresolved, that the musical idea feels incomplete. You’re right! Now play this example:

C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C

 

 

The difference between the two examples is one note, but it makes all the difference! Notice how the final C note in the second example creates a sense of completion that was missing from the first one. This sense of resolution – of a return to home, to stability – is the essence of how our musical system works, and the most important conceptual meaning of the term “key” or “key center”.

Understanding this puts the math in a whole new light. The numbers we use in the Nashville Number System come from the position of a note in the scale sequence: in the key of C, C is 1, D is 2, E is 3, and so on. That’s the math. When a musician reads the number chart, they determine the chords by counting the scale tones up from note 1, and playing the chord that corresponds to the resulting letter. (There’s more to know than that, but for our purposes it’s the main thing to understand).

The trick is to realize that because of this “gravitational” property of our musical system – the sense of “pull” we feel from note 7 of the scale when it isn’t allowed to resolve to note 8 – the numbers also stand for relationships between notes and chords. Accomplished musicians know what those relationships sound like simply by looking at the numbers. No matter where we start, we know what 4 will sound like as soon as we hear 1. This is because the numbers show a relative relationship that is both mathematical and sonic, and we can learn to recognize the sound of each one.

 

So what does this mean to the perpetual beginner? You already know that a capo allows you to change the key of a song by raising the pitch of all the chords equally. This preserves the sonic and mathematical relationships between them. When you start to learn the number system and the basic layout of the guitar neck, your capo suddenly becomes a much more useful and versatile creative tool – NOT a cheater!

This is the point where we need to start memorizing some things. To keep things simple for now, let’s start with three chords in 3 keys:

C 1F 4G 5
D 1G 4A 5
G 1C 4D 5

Read from left to right and play the 3 chords in each row, ending by repeating chord 1. Try this in all 3 keys and you’ll hear the common relationship.

If you memorize the 1, 4, and 5 chords in these 3 keys, you’ll have multiple ways of playing in other keys by using the capo in different places and starting on different chords. For example, you can play 1-4-5-1 in D without the capo by just playing D-G-A-D. Now capo the 2nd fret and play C-F-G-C. Then capo the 7thth fret and play G-C-D-G. The notes are different, but the overall effect and sound are very much the same!
Obviously the specifics will take time to learn, and we’ll explore this further in subsequent posts. For now, start by memorizing the 1, 4, and 5 in the keys of C, D, and G. Experiment with different combinations of numbers, plugging in the appropriate chords. For example, 1 4 1 5 in C would be C F C G, while the same pattern in G would be G C G D. Listen for the similarity in the relationship between the chords. After a while, this becomes easy, and you can learn by hearing the those relationships instead of doing the math. Ear training is a process that takes time, but the skills are something everyone can learn.

The Perpetual Beginner: chord inventory and the horse with no name.

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How many chords do you think you know?

How many chords are there, anyway?

The average basic strummer uses a vocabulary of about eleven chords, and has probably learned quite a few more that they don’t often use or might even avoid. (Barre chords, anyone?)


If we go through the familiar open position “cowboy chords”, we get five major chords: A, C, D, E, and G. Let’s go ahead and add F to that, since it’s so common that even people who struggle with the barre forms usually have some sort of workaround for it. So that’s six. The open position only gives us 3 primary minors, though, Am, Dm, and Em. That’s nine…add a workaround version of B and B minor and there’s eleven.

 

So how many keys can you play in comfortably with eleven open position chords? First of all, we’re going to be limited to the keys that use mostly open chords to begin with. Let’s say for argument’s sake that the most commonly used chords in a major key are the 1, 4, 5, and 6. The 2 and b7 show up often as well, while the 3 is more unusual and the diminished 7 so rare in pop music that we can leave it out for now. So plug our eleven chords into this formula and we get:

Key:12m3m456mb7
A:ABmDEG
C:CDmEmFGAm
D:DEmGABmC
E:EABD
G:GAmBmCDEmF

 

Clearly, there’s a lot missing! And it’s easy to see why so many strummers opt to stay in C, D, or G and just use the capo to get around to other keys.

The truth is, though, there’s still a lot that can be done with this set of chords. A song might use chords that are outside the major key but still sound good…for example, a change from A to C goes outside the key of A but is still a common progression, as is E to G in the key of E. This chord would be considered a b3, borrowed from the relative minor key. (The C chord belongs to the key of A minor, not A major. The Beatles were masters of this kind of “mode mixture” but it’s something we hear all the time in all kinds of music).

So this leads us to three big points for the perpetual beginner:

1. Clearly, barre chords are important and a hurdle everyone needs to get over. See last week’s blog and related video for more on this subject.

2. There are probably more possible combinations of the chords you already know than you might think.

3. There’s also the entire world of “color chords”: the various kinds of 7ths, add9 and suspended chords, and others that don’t really need or even have conventional names. These are all worth adding to your vocabulary piece by piece, as you encounter them in songs.

For example, one of my favorite songs to teach an absolute beginner is the 1971 hit “A Horse With No Name” by America. It uses basically just two chords: a familiar E minor, and then this one:


This chord could be called Dadd6add9/F#, or “D six-nine over F#”, which sounds complicated. It’s not – just look at the fingering! It’s really just a D chord with the notes rearranged, plus the open high E and B strings. Try playing it after an E minor and you’ll see what a simple finger move it is: use the same two fingers for both chords, and all you need to do is move them apart and then back together.

Now, the song was actually played in an alternate tuning, so the fingerings and “voicing” are slightly different on the recording. But the basic move is very similar: all the fingers on the same fret, changing to a different set of strings and then back. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt songwriter Dewey Bunnell decided to use a “D 6-9 chord” intentionally. He was probably just messing around with tuning and fingerings and stumbled on a cool sound. Obviously it worked out well!

You can explore in a similar way. Yes, a chord dictionary is a useful tool to have around. Yes, it’s good to know the names of the chords you use. But if you’re looking to grow your vocabulary, you should ideally be doing it two ways:

1. Learn new chords and their names as they appear in songs
2. Explore! Lift a finger, move it somewhere else, or add a finger.

When you get your fingers around a sound you like, strum and listen. Visualize the shape on the fretboard, and practice “seeing” it before you plant your fingers. Don’t worry about the theory or the names yet, that will come later. Concentrate on the formation and the finger movements first. If the chord is part of a song, practice getting there from the previous chord and then getting to the next one. Move the fingers slowly and deliberately at first, the speed will come if you focus on accuracy first.

5 Tips To Help You Stop Avoiding Barre Chords!

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Lots of people do it, maybe you do too: avoid learning a song because it requires barre chords, or limiting your songwriting vocabulary because you struggle with them and it’s easier to just avoid them. I’m not going to suggest that barre chords aren’t a challenge, for most people they are at least in the beginning. But here are some things you can do to make the learning process easier.

 

1. Make sure your guitar is properly set up. If the your guitar has high or uneven “action” (distance of the strings from the fretboard) it can make everything harder, not just barre chords. If you struggle with chord changes in any way, you should make sure your guitar is set up with the action set as low as possible without any buzzing. Higher action helps the guitar project and can allow you to produce more volume, but it’s not worth fighting while you’re learning to master barre chords. You can always have the action raised later if you find you need more projection.

 

2. Try going to lighter strings. A light gauge set on an acoustic generally has a .012” string for the high E. I use a .013 set on my smaller-body guitar and 12s on the larger dreadnought. Know what you have on your guitar now, and try moving one gauge lighter if you feel like you need to press too hard to make the notes sound. Again, you can always work your way back up.

 

3. Detune your guitar a whole-step and then place a capo on the 2nd fret. This will reduce the string tension significantly. Yes, it displaces some things visually, and if you use a capo a lot you’ll need to move it two frets higher than normal. This is a temporary solution, unless you find you like the sound of the lower-tuned guitar…some people do. Listen to some of Neil Young’s early 70’s solo performances to hear how sweet a down-tuned guitar can sound.

 

 

4. Stop working so hard. Even if the guitar is set up perfectly, many people mistakenly believe they’re supposed to grip as hard as possible. Some well-intentioned but misinformed teachers contribute to this problem. Your goal with guitar technique is to learn to use less effort, not more. The next time you play, think about lightening your touch and letting your grip soften. This can be really challenging, and you might find that your whole upper body is trying to clamp down on those strings without your even noticing. Ideally, the position of your fretting hand should allow you to balance or “hang” on the strings rather that squeezing them: index finger extended, the rest of the fingers more or less curled with the fingertips resting on the strings.

If you do identify this as a problem, developing a routine of SIMPLE exercises to improve finger balance and coordination will really help. (I’ll dig into this in depth in a subsequent blog post). Be aware of how important hand and finger position is…changing the position of your wrist or thumb can make an instant difference. (Many people drop the wrist too far, or don’t drop it enough when they should. In general, a straight wrist is better because it produces more grip with less effort. Drop the wrist when you need to extend your fingers or stretch, but no further than you need to).

 

5. Recognize that in most cases a barre does NOT mean a flat finger. To play a 6-note F barre, the index finger should actually lean a little to the side…consider that the side of your finger is much straighter than the underside. The best leverage comes from the base segment of the finger, exactly where your thumb would land if you simply touch the thumb to the side of the index finger. Hold your hand up in this position with the thumb pointing up, and just envision the guitar neck in between the thumb and finger. Most of the power and force should come from the curled fingers, not the extended index.

 

All of these tips should help you develop your control, strength, and confidence in playing barre chords. Yes, it’s a big topic and a legitimate challenge for most people, but it shouldn’t be the barrier to improvement that it is for so many. Forge ahead and you’ll get there!

Droning or dynamic: be more compelling onstage!

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When we refer to someone as a dynamic performer, we mean that person commands attention. They draw an audience in and make a lasting impression. You might see this as pure talent, and sometimes it is. But these dynamic performers all make use of an important musical tool, also called dynamics.

“Dynamics” in music refer to degrees of volume: soft and loud sounds, and the gradations in between. In written music, “dynamic markings” indicate how loud a passage should be played: from “pp” (pianissimo, or very soft) to “ff” (fortissimo, or very loud). Actually the dynamic range for orchestral music can be even wider than that: pppp to ffff! Imagine an orchestra of a hundred musicians, and the difference between one softly played flute and the full ensemble (including brass, mind you) playing at full volume. That’s a lot of range!

An acoustic guitar is never going to match that, plugged in or not. Most acoustic instruments are capable of making more sound: a piano or violin played fortissimo can easily overwhelm most acoustic guitars. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use dynamics in your playing and performances. The trick is to recognize that since most of your audience isn’t listening with a decibel meter, loud and soft has as much to do with perception as it does with how much air is actually being pushed around. In other words, if your loudest isn’t very loud, make soft even softer. Dynamic range can expand in both directions, and the listener is going to respond to the perceived difference within the overall dynamics of the song and performance.

But there needs to be a difference. If there’s no change in dynamic throughout a performance, a listener is less likely to respond at all! You’re less likely to hold the audience’s attention if your playing is monotonous. But if your performance is full of dynamic contrasts, you’ll command attention.

In addition to the problem of playing without any dynamics at all, many perpetual beginners have one of two problems: playing consistently too hard or too lightly. The solution lies in the topic of some of my most recent posts: how you use your strumming hand.

Tuned guitar strings are at tension, stretched tight from headstock to bridge. This has a huge impact on dynamics, because the amount of force a string can absorb (and still resonate) depends on the string tension. If you strum harder than your string tension can handle, you’ll get an unpleasant, buzzy sound – or worse, you’ll actually start to muffle the strings as they snap back against the guitar instead of ringing out. (That percussive effect can be really cool and useful when it’s done right, but that’s a topic for another piece).

If you’re not getting much sound out of your guitar, you have the opposite problem: the movement of your hand isn’t generating enough energy to get the strings ringing. It’s simple physics: you want to produce sound by efficiently translating the force of your strum to the strings…”efficiently” in the sense that the energy of the arm or hand movement goes to the strings and not to extra movements that don’t contribute to the sound.

To break this down a little, just follow these basic principles:

1. Keep your hand light and relaxed. Movement creates the energy, not muscle. If it looks or feels awkward when you strum, it probably is. Relax and explore until you find a position that feels fluid and natural.

2. The further your arm swings, the more sound you’ll produce. Playing softly means relying more on the hand and a loose wrist, while playing louder will bring more arm into it.

3. You should have a sense what it takes to create three basic degrees of intensity: soft, medium, and loud. You should also be able to play a smooth crescendo: start as softly as you can, and gradually get louder. Check out this demonstration:

Notice the difference between the softer sound produced by the small hand movement, the loud sound produced by the swinging arm, and the gradations between as the movement gets larger. Notice also how the strum movement is relaxed and efficient…there’s very little muscle work involved, and the hand never moves further from the strings than needed to create the appropriate sound.

So to take this back to the opening of this post…if you play a song without dynamics, your performance will be much less interesting. Contrast is one of the most important elements in music, because variation draws attention and creates interest. Dynamic contrasts make music more compelling and dramatic, and can really help amplify the emotion in the lyric. Ultimately, performing is about communicating feelings. A dynamic performance will make your audience more engaged, interested, and able to feel what you want them to feel.

Strum series 3: wrist, hand, and arm

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Strum Secrets 3: wrist, hand, and arm

In this series I’ve been exploring some different approaches to strumming, and how to create a variety of sounds and rhythms by varying your technique.

Just like all other aspects of playing an instrument, there is an ideal of “perfect” technique balanced by the reality that there are many great players that do things differently. But a good place to start is to look at the anatomy of the hand and arm, and notice which movements are most natural and fluid.

Consider that there are basically three ways to move the hand to strum: moving the wrist from side to side, swinging the entire forearm, and rotating the hand. You can explore this away from the guitar and notice how each one feels….each one does feel distinctly different, and produces a different sound.

The wrist movement is the least natural, in my opinion. Not that we’re not meant to move that way, of course we are. And if you’re doing any muting with the picking hand it’s pretty much the only option. But you’ll notice as you move the hand that it’s the most muscle-intensive of the three approaches. In a lot of ways it’s also the most precise, because it’s easy to keep the movements small…so in music that requires a lot of fast picking like hard rock or bluegrass, it works well for lead playing.

Try using this approach to strum, though, and the limitations should be obvious. An acoustic guitar especially won’t “speak” the way it should if you’re playing a rhythm part that should be ringing and resonant. To make the guitar really project, you need to use a larger movement to create more force in the stroke. It’s basic physics, really: larger lever + more motion = greater power.

When we take this approach, we need to make a distinction between swinging the entire forearm parallel to the face of the guitar vs. turning the hand slightly outward and rotating the forearm in the process. The first works well for driving, powerful strumming, especially eighth-note backbeat rhythms. Swing the arm further for a nice accent on the backbeat to simulate a snare drum hit:

down-up-DOWN-up down-up-DOWN-up

To play more subtle or intricate rhythms, though, the entire forearm is awkward to move quickly. Faster strums tend to work better when the forearm is relaxed and the movement is led by a slight outward rotation of the hand. Lead the movement from the fingertips, not the wrist. (Think about it as you try to compare, you’ll feel the difference). You don’t need to rotate far…think of the point of the pick forming a narrow arc that swings through the strings. This works great for 16-note note rhythms and syncopated parts like these:

1. Speak this rhythm: Dum di-ga dum di-ga dum di-ga dum
2. Play the same rhythm: down down-up down down-up down down-up down

This one should be played at a faster tempo than the earlier example. You should notice a big difference in both feel and tone.

Again, there are no absolutes here. Whenever we talk about technique, look for “natural” rather than “correct”, and be clear on the difference between “unfamiliar” and “awkward” as you consider how natural the movement feels.

Check out this video from a YouTube series I posted a few years back, exploring this concept. Again, don’t worry so much about whether you’re doing it “right”: just notice what you feel and hear, and it’s likely you’ll find most natural approach just by paying attention to what feels and sounds best.

The Perpetual Beginner: confidence, competence, and self-limiting beliefs.

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I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year talking with people about how they see themselves as players and musicians. I work with students with widely different levels of skill and musical goals, so of course everyone has their own story. But one thing I hear from a lot of people is that they don’t feel like they really play. Some have played for years, but feel they haven’t improved in a long time. They know some chords and can play some songs, mostly, but it’s often a struggle and the music doesn’t flow.

Why do so many people get stuck? Is it just a matter of talent, that some people just have “it” and some don’t? What does it take to move from perpetual beginner to confident player?

There are some very simple answers to those questions, and they can set you on the path to where you want to be. That’s the main goal of this blog: many people struggle with the same challenges, so I firmly believe believe that the solutions that have helped so many others will help you too.

If there’s ONE single biggest problem many people share, it’s a lack of confidence. Not just confidence in their ability to play a particular thing: underneath is often a deeper unease, a sense that maybe you’re struggling because you just don’t have the talent. This is possibly the biggest and most damaging obstacle, because it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We celebrate excellence and achievement in all fields. In most areas, everyone recognizes the amount of hard work and dedication that it takes to achieve excellence…but when it comes to music, so many persist in the belief that if it doesn’t come easily it’s not meant for you. This belief gets reinforced because musical talent is common enough that most of us know someone that obviously has “it”. Young musicians that quickly master multiple instruments, or develop the ability to play songs easily by ear seemingly overnight. Even the ubiquitous videos of shredding seven-year-olds on YouTube and Facebook, though fun and impressive, can also add to this overall negative impression.

While we celebrate the gifted, we can discourage the merely interested. What this misses is that both the gifted and the struggling learn and improve the same way: through exploration, trial and error, and enough love for the process that obstacles are challenges instead of barriers.

The simple solution for the perpetual beginner is to realize that your immediate goal is not to be a great player. Your immediate goal should be to be able to play whatever it is you’re working on with confidence and authority. That means that your goals need to be modest in the beginning – but setting one modest and attainable goal after another is a sure path to progress. You may not have the skills to play what you want to play just yet, but you can learn to play something easier and play it well. And there’s a LOT of gratification in doing even a simple thing very well.

If you feel like you’ve been struggling, take a good look at what you’re trying to do. A good practice routine should absolutely include some challenging things…after all, it’s how we grow our abilities. But it should also include some much simpler things: a song with just a few easy chords, or a simple melody at a slow tempo. Along with practicing your ability to land the fingers in the right place at the right time, you should also be practicing your ability to just play…no matter how simple the song is. It should be familiar enough that you don’t have to think much about the mechanics, just the music. Can you play a song beginning to end in a way that’s satisfying to you? Not even without mistakes, but with enough flow that your mistakes are bumps along the way instead of roadblocks. That’s an important immediate goal, because it builds your confidence…and in music as in many other things in life, confidence is half the battle.

In subsequent blogs I’m going to explore this topic in much greater detail. For today, think about your mindset. Do you have self-limiting beliefs about your ability to learn to play? Are your practice goals reasonable and attainable? Do you practice different things with different levels of difficulty? And most of all, does playing make you want to play more?

There are no barriers to entry in playing music, and no arbitrary standard you have to live up to unless you choose one. So play what you love and love what you play. Do the work that it requires, but remember that even the simplest sounds can touch people. And the person that most needs to be moved by the music is the person who plays it. It really comes down to just one simple thing: find the love and don’t let go. The rest all follows from there.