Nashville Guitar Guru | Guitar Lessons in Nashville, TN

Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

The Perpetual Beginner

Should you anchor your picking hand?

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There’s some debate among guitarists whether it’s ok to anchor the picking hand.

As with so many other aspects of technique, there’s no absolute right answer. Watch ten different players and you might see ten different things. But there’s a basic principle of technique at work, and then several variables to take into account. Some of these are mechanical factors, some musical, but the more skilled a player you become the more you’ll begin to realize that you can’t separate one from the other. Every technical choice you make has a musical impact.

The basic principles we want to follow are economy of movement and relaxed control. Resting one or more fingers on the face of the guitar just below the strings can help with both these things, minimizing motion and making your picking more precise. Many people do use the term “anchor” to describe this technique, but I think that’s misleading. An anchor keeps you fixed in one place, but we need to be able to move around in order to strike any of the strings with equal ease and a consistent sound.

Try resting one or more picking hand fingers on the soundboard below the strings, and strike each one in sequence. If you keep the fingers in the same spot, you’ll probably need to start twisting the wrist to reach the bass strings. Aside from being awkward to begin with, you might also notice that this changes the angle of attack. The way the pick or finger strikes the string is important for both mechanical and sonic reasons. Minimal, relaxed movement is most efficient, while a focused, direct attack produces a strong, resonant note.

Instead of anchoring, think of balancing on the face of the guitar.

Maintaining some kind of contact does provide a helpful spatial reference, just like the way a railing helps you walk down stairs. We don’t hang on to the railing to keep from falling, but touching it helps tell your brain where your body is in space. Touching the guitar has the same effect on your control of the picking hand. But your touch has to remain light, resting without applying pressure. When you move from string to string, let your arm come into play. The wrist will move slightly as well, but shouldn’t have to twist dramatically.

The proportion of your hands is a major variable here. Some people have long fingers that allow them to comfortably reach the face of the guitar without restricting the movement of the pick. You might find it feel best to rest with the pinky alone, or with all three free fingers. Either way, you want to maintain relaxed control of the pick without restricting your ability to reach all the strings. If your fingers aren’t as long, you might find that you need to let them rest on the treble strings when you strike the basses. Other players might rest the heel of the picking hand against the bridge, stabilizing from the bass side. This works well for bass runs, but can make it awkward to reach the treble strings.

Strumming is another variable. Depending on the sound you’re trying to produce, you may need a much wider range of motion.

Some players keep the base of the hand resting on the bridge of the guitar. This requires a lot of side-to-side movement of the wrist to be able to strum. To really make the strings ring, though, you need to be able to swing past the strings and follow through on the downstroke. This will take your wrist off the bridge, but the full strum shouldn’t need to be stabilized the way picking individual notes does. If you’re combining single notes and strums, you might find it best to move the hand on and off the face of the guitar as needed.

If you maintain a light touch it’s not difficult to just allow the fingers to trail behind the movement of the pick. As long as you’re not unintentionally muting any strings, this will allow you to maintain better control over the single-note picking while still allowing for a full range of motion when you strum.

The bottom line is that we need to balance between two primary goals:

  1. Accuracy

    We want to minimize effort and maximize control in every aspect of guitar technique. Stabilizing the hand helps your accuracy by minimizing motion, but you need to make sure that the stability is really coming from balance rather than from muscular effort in the forearm. It can be easy to mistake control for tension if you’ve gotten accustomed to using the muscles of the forearm to direct the pick.

    Explore the difference between leading the arm from the fingertips versus actually engaging the muscles of the forearm. See if you can create a consistent feeling of lightness that you can maintain as you move from slow, relaxed notes on a single string into larger and larger strums. If you feel like your control and accuracy suffer, find a point of contact that allows you to maintain that open feeling in your forearm and still direct the movement of the pick.

    2. Tone

    The sound of your guitar is a product of how you play it. A clean pick attack produces a strong ringing note with minimal “scrape” or percussiveness. The angle of the pick as it strikes the string makes a big difference here. Try approaching the string from directly above and lightly moving the thumb towards the floor. Some electric players use a more angled attack so that the edge of the pick glides across the string; this does allow for some additional speed at fast tempos but usually sacrifices some definition and fullness of sound. Find a relaxed hand position that allows you to let the mass of the hand and arm do the work. Explore how this impacts the sound of the guitar.

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.

Does your playing serve your writing?

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Does your playing serve your writing?

If you play to write songs, of course you use the instrument as a creative tool for writing. But do you use it in a way that both serves and stimulates your creativity?

One way of looking at this is fairly obvious. Session musicians and side players know that it’s essential to “serve the song”. In that setting, it means letting the song itself dictate the vocabulary you use to play it. A player with a lot of ability and range has many options, but has to choose one that fits. The part has to sound like it belongs both tonally and emotionally. It should stand out but not call so much attention to itself that it takes the listener out if the song. Usually, this involves limiting choices and restraining technique, although there are times when pulling out all the stops is the right move.

 

On the other hand, songwriters that play to write often fall into a trap.

Writing songs doesn’t require a large musical vocabulary. In fact, we’ve already established that musicians often have to edit themselves to find the right thing to play. Since a good song can be very simple, some songwriters only learn the most rudimentary things. This can work if the writer has a well-developed musical sense away from the instrument. But too often, the limited guitar skills end up in the driver’s seat and determine the rhythm and the melody as well. The ear and voice can be led by the guitar chords, and lead to repetitive and predictable melodies.

So “serving the song” can also mean having enough musical vocabulary and skill to write what you really hear, as opposed to what your skills allow you to approximate. If you want to be expressive as a songwriter, this is important. After all, don’t you have a responsibility to your muses to be as faithful as possible to their gifts?

As a creative person you have a responsibility to develop your own voice.

At least, you should recognize that the ability to be uniquely yourself can help your work stand out. Many songwriters sound alike for two reasons: one, they listen mostly to each other, following the same model. And two, they learn the same basic vocabulary and then stop there. But odds are, you do have your own musical perspective. Everything you ever do in music is filtered through everything you’ve ever heard. Whether you know it or not, you’ve developed a musical sensibility over your lifetime that’s uniquely yours.

So how does this relate to the guitar?

 

Your musical tastes and perspective define a vocabulary.

This is the musical language you use as a player and writer. You want to have both a technical and creative command of this language: a sense of the musical possibilities of a song or situation, and the skill to execute them on your instrument. So your study and practice should be pointed in that direction.

There’s a basic technical facility that every player ought to have to form chords and melodic patterns. It comes primarily from finger independence and control, so your practice ought to include some kind of exercises to develop that coordination. It doesn’t take much effort if you focus: in fact, five minutes of concentrated practice on virtually any controlled finger move can have more immediate impact than an hour of scales. Of course, the more you play, the better. But recognize that even a little work makes a big difference if you do it regularly.

 

The key is learning to use your vocabulary.

I make sure my students learn the primary major and minor chords in open position and as barre forms. Everyone also learns the major and minor scales in open position and as moveable shapes. These are basic building blocks in almost every popular style, and are a convenient way to map out the locations of notes and chords on the guitar neck. But the way you use them can be very different from one person to another. And what you learn beyond that basic vocabulary is absolutely determined by the musical direction you choose.

One great way to explore this is to use music you like as a model. The idea is not to copy anything directly, but to learn how that basic vocabulary of sounds in the music that speaks to you. Use this exploration as a creative tool: using the song as a blueprint, write something new that uses the same basic vocabulary. This way you can learn and classify the sounds and patterns. Break them down to their essentials and then put them back together in a different way. This is what all creative musicians do in one way or another. We filter our influences through our unique musical sensibility to create something new. The most gifted people do this effortlessly, but it’s also a process you can apply consciously. When this exploration drives what you practice on the guitar, it can lead you to your own way of writing AND playing, one that sounds like you and no one else.

A better way to learn scales

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Guitarists tend to learn scales by memorizing finger patterns.

To some extent, that’s because of the tactile nature of the instrument and the way we learn it. On piano, there’s an obvious linear logic to way a scale lays on the instrument. On guitar, most students find it challenging to see scales as anything other than a series of finger moves at first.

Many student players struggle to get beyond this initial, limited view. They memorize licks that can be strung together, or walk up and down the scale, but have a hard time using those memorized scale patterns to create melodies. After all, we want to be able to sing on the instrument, not just play licks. You know the difference when you hear it: one takes you somewhere, and one doesn’t.

 

The trick is to get beyond the fingerings into the sounds.

This means knowing the patterns to the point that you don’t have to think about them. When that happens, you can simply think of melodic gestures: a scalar climb, a melodic leap, a sequence. It doesn’t mean you’ll never play a lick again, but it does lead to more musical coherence and drama in your improvisations.

It’s also a big part of developing style. Eric Clapton once said in an interview that he might play a Buddy Guy lick followed by an Albert King lick, but that they would be connected by something that was his. No musician plays without influences, and the ones that put them together in original ways are often the players that define a sound. You can use this perspective to help create your own style, but first you need to internalize those scales.

 

Practice method

First of all, we need to feel the musical vibe of the scale. Play it slowly up and down, one octave at a time from root to root. Hear the difference between a bright major, a bluesy minor pentatonic, the exotic phrygian mode or harmonic minor. Notice the notes that the give the scale its definitive sound.

 

1. Play through the octave and count the notes, assigning a number to each one (root, second, third, and so on).

 

2. Make a mental note of the position of each root and their visual relationship on the fretboard.

 

3. Starting, from the root, play each interval: root to second, root to third, root to fourth, continuing up to a ninth (one step beyond the octave).

If you can sing along, that’s even better, and continue to do so throughout this process.For a pentatonic or whole-tone scale, find the relationship between the scale tones and the corresponding major and number accordingly. For example:

C major: C D E F G A B C

C minor pentatonic: C Eb F G Bb C

Matching up the letters with numbers, the minor pentatonic would be 1 b3 4 5 b7.

 

4. Repeat the process, filling in the scale steps in each interval:

1 – 2 – 1

1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 1

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1

and so forth.

 

5. Play an arpeggio from the scale, up and down:

1 – 3 – 5 – 3 – 1

1 – 3 – 5 – 7 – 5 – 3 – 1

1 – 3 – 5 – 7 – 9 – 7 – 5 – 3 – 1

 

6. Extend the scale by repeating the process in another octave. If the position doesn’t cover a full second octave, identify the notes you can reach and adapt the exercises accordingly.

 

7. Play through the entire position using a sequence like one of these:

1 3 – 2 4 – 3 5 etc
1 2 3 1 – 2 3 4 2 – 3 4 5 3 etc

This process is a variation on the sequence Jamey Abersold introduces in his excellent book How To Play Jazz and Improvise Vol. 1. This book also includes an extended set of patterns and sequences you can try. If you’re interested in the jazz vocabulary it’s a must, but it’s helpful to anyone.

So far, we’ve only covered one position at a time. Ultimately you will want to be able to connect positions in a linear way, and I’ll cover a practice method for this in a subsequent post.

What you know and why it matters

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You don’t need to know everything to play the music you want to play.

But when you know more it will help you play more things better, and thanks to the internet it’s easier then ever to find new information. There was no shortage of information before the digital age, of course, but now it’s a limitless source of inspiration and resources. But with the added aspect of social media, one of the confusing downsides is that for every piece of information you find, you might also find ten opinions about its value.

Sometimes added commentary can really be helpful, and offer another useful perspective. But that depends on the nature of the commentary. Just as often, the comments can range from dismissive (this isn’t important) to demeaning (this person doesn’t know what they’re talking about). Putting aside the general tone of online conversation these days, it’s worth looking at two major fallacies that lead people to make these comments in the first place.

 

I don’t need to know about that, so you don’t either.

The first part of that has some truth to it. You don’t need to read music to play in a band, or understand the Lydian chromatic concept to write a great song. However, if information doesn’t inform a specific task, it doesn’t make that information irrelevant to playing music well.

Speaking very broadly, we could say there are two types of musicians: those that play music to do a specific thing, and those that play music and then choose the thing they’re going to do. Both have value, in that the difference is really between what we might call vertical and horizontal knowledge: between depth and breadth. There are specialists and there are general practitioners. In music, as in medicine, we need both. No podiatrist is going to question the need for you to see an internist, or vice versa. So why should a musician that lacks specific expertise question why you might need it?

You could make the argument that many of the world’s most celebrated musicians were unschooled, and you’d be right. All of these people had (and have) unquestionably great gifts. But natural ability is a variable, while information isn’t. Some people just do what they do. Some can duplicate it and some can’t. But anyone can learn about how it was done, and that’s worth knowing.

If you don’t do it my way, you’re wrong.

Music is an art that can be quantified by science. In other words, there are absolute principles of acoustics (sound) and mechanics (how we produce it), but those principles can be applied in many different ways. Each player finds their own balance between the art and the science: between the sounds they make and the way they make them.

If you’re writing music to fit a certain style, there’s an established vocabulary the listener expects to hear. This is why music of a certain time and place tends to have a similarity to it: there’s a common language with variations in dialect and expression. Within that, there will be things than sound right and things that sound wrong- that stand out in a way that distracts from the whole. But that “wrong” sound might fit perfectly in a different setting. And every so often, someone comes along with a completely different way of “speaking” and changes the language for everyone else. This is the history of music in a nutshell.

In other words, there ARE wrong notes if you’re trying to meet an established standard.

This doesn’t necessarily mean “conforming”, although it could be seen that way. If you’re developing your own vocabulary, the only wrong notes are the ones that distract your ears and mind out of the flow of what’s happening.

Then there’s the question of technique. Basic principles of mechanics apply to playing an instrument, as they do to everything else in the universe. Fretting notes on a guitar or strumming a chord requires the application of force, and follows the laws of physics. You could make an argument that “good” technique should use these principles to produce the most sound through the most efficient use of movement. I think this makes a lot of sense, and it’s the basic idea behind the way I teach technique.

However, if you watch people play, you’ll see a LOT of variation in how players approach the instrument.

Some people are inarguably awkward, others less so. Some clearly don’t play well at all, while others are impossibly smooth in spite of what should be an impediment. The bottom line is, we can talk about ideal technique, but we can’t talk about “right and wrong” without making many qualifying exceptions to the rules.

Internet commenters are frequently missing the big picture.

This should come as no surprise to anyone: social media is generally not where we looked for nuanced perspective. But conflicting advice can be confusing, and some of these opinions just add to the noise. I have two pieces of advice:

One, recognize that different approaches or ways of “speaking” may have value or reasoning that you can’t see.

Two, take everything with a grain of salt, including this.