Blog: The Perpetual Beginner

Core Concepts 3: what’s your musical direction?

January 21, 2019 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

When I was first learning to play, I didn’t have a specific musical direction. I played the rock music I loved, studied classical guitar seriously, and played in jazz band, at school. I wanted to know everything about everything, and read the monthly issues of Guitar Player and Guitar World magazines cover to cover. Everything I read reinforced the feeling that a real pro ought to be able to play just about anything.

This was a good attitude for a hungry teenager. Having a wide musical interest was great musical preparation for a career as a player. When you don’t know what your next gig is going to call for, it helps to have the ability to handle anything that might get thrown at you.

The average casual player has different needs.

I don’t mean to say that it’s not good to be a well-rounded player, because I don’t believe more knowledge ever hurts. But one thing I hear from students over and over is that they feel they’re dabbling without any focus. Some get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information out there. One student told me, “I have hard drives full of gigabytes of guitar lessons, but I still can’t play the way I want to”. This can lead to “option anxiety” and ultimately paralysis. No wonder people get overwhelmed!

If we look at the players that inspired us to pick up a guitar in the first place, though, it seems to me that most of them were stylists. They staked out a musical territory and created a personal sound out of that sonic landscape: a kind of musical home.

This week’s core concept is built on that idea: that while versatility is essential to the pro and has value of its own, it doesn’t have to be your goal from the outset.

The stylists we all admire got to know their musical territory well, and the best mastered the style and sound in a way that set a new standard. But few could play everything with the same level of skill and conviction, and ultimately that’s not what most fans want from an artist anyway. We can fall in love with individual songs, but being a fan means connecting with the musical personality. Developing that personality demands a deeper familiarity of the music you play, a command of nuance and suble detail.
This is hard to develop when you’re skittering across the surface trying to pull information from everywhere. Building real skill takes focus, not just in the sense of concentration on a task but concentration on a style and sound. When you get to know the music in greater detail, you’re going to play it with more conviction and confidence.

So just because your favorite YouTube channel has three hundred lessons on playing in seven different styles, you don’t need to explore them all right away.

Pick a direction first. Find your musical home and get to know it well. This might remain your focus for a lifetime, or it might just be a starting point. If you find you’re losing interest, pick a new direction. But recognize the value in really getting to know the music you play, and stick to it for as long as it feels good. It will make you a better and more confident player in the long run.

Core Concepts 2: talent is an advantage, not a requirement

January 14, 2019 By Dave Isaacs 2 Comments

When I was teaching kids, parents would sometimes ask me if their child had any talent. If a child showed a natural affinity for music I would happily tell them so, but it always struck me that they were really asking a different question. What these parents really wanted to know was whether music lessons were a worthwhile investment. They wanted to know if their kid “had it”, or whether they didn’t show enough latent potential to justify the expense of the lessons. But the mindset behind that question is one of the great obstacles to the average person learning to play music.

What we call “talent” is simply a level of innate understanding and natural ability.

It’s a beautiful thing and certainly something to be celebrated. But talent isn’t a predictor of success in any area, nor is it a requirement. The gifted will progress much more quickly, and some will achieve heights the average person can’t touch. But when it comes to music, the ability to build a sound foundation as a player has very little to do with talent. It’s a question of ease more than potential: some will get to that baseline level without any struggle at all, while others fight for every small improvement.

The inherent problem is that if you believe you don’t have talent, those struggles are that much harder to push through. It’s difficult to persist at anything when some part of you is questioning whether you’re even capable of doing it well. Ultimately, a focus on talent is elitist: a belief that only the best should play music at all. It also misses a fundamental point in that even the most gifted people still need to do the work. Of course, the most gifted people ARE more likely to do the work, because they get to a point of gratification more easily. It’s more fun more quickly, and so they do it more and more intensely. Their talent is to make it easier to persist and do the work that building real skill requires.

For the average person that wonders whether they have any talent, the question is pointless at best and damaging at worst.

Playing music is gratifying and fun at the simplest, most basic level. The real question you should be asking is, what can I do to increase the fun factor in playing music? The better it feels to play, the more you’ll want to do it.
This Core Concepts series will help you find answers to this question. Make friends and get comfortable. Find other people to play with and learn to be a good listener. Embrace simplicity as you build your skills. The bottom line is, everyone should be able to make music in some way, that that starts with the belief that you can.

Core Concepts 1: make friends with your guitar

January 10, 2019 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

Core concepts are the key ideas that make players into musicians. If you struggle with the guitar or just need some new ideas, this new series will help show you how to become the player you want to be. To start things off, we’re looking at fundamental number one: make friends with your guitar.

People will sometimes ask how long it takes to develop basic confidence playing the guitar.

Some people are immediately comfortable, while others still feel awkward after months or even years! Most will fall somewhere between those two extremes, and even the most naturally gifted are going to struggle sometime. It’s very common for the average person to get discouraged and question whether they “have it” at all.

But playing music is not only for the gifted, and every aspect of playing an instrument can be quantified and taught. Best of all, playing music can be equally satisfying no matter how simple or complicated the song might be. So your immediate goal should always be to be able to play something well, not necessarily something challenging or difficult. That comes later. The satisfaction comes from the experience of playing confidently, and that means making friends with the instrument first.

What does it mean to make friends with your instrument?

It starts with getting physically comfortable. This can actually be one of the biggest challenges for some people, especially for singers that are already comfortable onstage without a guitar. Having an ungainly box hanging around your neck takes some getting used to! But understanding a few simple principles can really help.

First of all, recognize that playing CAN feel natural. Watch any skilled player – actually, anyone skilled at practically anything – and they make it look easy and fluid. That’s not just because of their skills: in fact, it’s the other way around. The skill is possible because the approach is natural. In other words, they play the instrument in a way that lets the body move the way it’s meant to. For example, a relaxed, “default” or “neutral” hand position on guitar doesn’t look any different from a relaxed hand away from the guitar. Yes, sometimes we need to bend the wrist or extend the fingers, but the hands should always return to neutral. When they don’t, it looks and feels awkward, and that awkwardness makes playing more difficult.

If you think this is an issue for you, pay closer attention to how the instrument feels.

Try just sitting or standing with it, without playing, then gradually introduce small gestures. Forget everything you might have been told and just ask yourself whether it feels comfortable to execute the movement slowly. It’s amazing how often I’ve seen someone who has struggled for months or years radically change their comfort level in playing by just paying attention to what feels and sounds good.

Sometimes this means ignoring something you might have been told, and sometimes it means taking the advice to heart. Well-meaning advice can still be misleading if it’s taken out of context, and the person offering it may not have the right perspective. The fact is, there are few absolutes regarding technique other than that both your body and your instrument follow basic principles of mechanics. “Making friends” means that the two work together as naturally as your skills will allow. This doesn’t actually require a lot of experience to notice: there’s a difference between unfamiliar and awkward, and a more relaxed and efficient approach will almost always feel and sound better. But the only way to really know is to explore.

Once you establish a comfortable friendship with the instrument and the music you play, your commitment will win out over any particular frustration or challenge.

And isn’t that the case for any healthy relationship?

Putting the pieces together

December 17, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

All the lessons in the world won’t teach you to play if you don’t learn how to put the pieces together yourself.

The explosion of educational content on the internet is a wonderful thing. I wish YouTube, Ultimate Guitar, JamPlay, and the thousands of other online resources existed when I was first learning to play. But despite all these tools, I constantly hear from students that are becoming frustrated. One told me recently, “I have hard drives full of terabytes of guitar lessons, and I still can’t play”.

The problem is not with YouTube, the nature of learning online, or the strength or weakness of anyone’s teaching technique.

The problem is that really learning to play requires a specific skill that you can’t get from watching a video: the ability to manipulate musical ideas in real time.

I’m not talking about the difference between playing prepared parts and improvising. Even if you’ve practiced every detail of a piece of music, a good performance still requires a strong delivery. That means playing the music with your mind as well as your hands: not simply repeating a sequence of learned movements but speaking to the audience as clearly as if you were using words. Shaping a line with the right emphasis just in the way you might deliver the turn of phrase that brings the message home. This is what “performance” is really about, and the only way to learn how is to do it.

It’s possible to learn a part and execute it consistently based on muscle memory alone. It’s also possible to play on autopilot. Even more often, it’s possible – and even common – to play without really hearing yourself, or listening to what’s going on around you. I’ve been onstage with musicians myself that were playing at the same time I was, but we weren’t playing together. Without real-time interaction and sensitivity to each other, musicians can play simultaneously but not as a real ensemble.

This gets back to the recurring question of whether you should be thinking while you play.

I think that being completely in the moment and “in the zone” is the highest form of music-making.

It’s a goal to shoot for every time. And there will be moments in that state when the music just happens. But just as often, there is thought in the form of observation and reaction, and in conscious choices. Think of it like driving: you don’t think about moving your foot from the gas to the brake, but you do pay attention to the traffic around you. In other words, though directs action but not the mechanical movement. It’s the same with playing: your choices direct the musical gesture, but the physical movement comes from muscle memory.

Even something as seemingly fundamental as strumming a song from beginning to end requires conscious attention. The chord sequences and form of the song should absolutely be memorized, as well as the lyrics of course. But no matter how thoroughly you’ve practiced, there are aspects of the performance that need real-time attention. You may have rehearsed when to build a crescendo, for example, but you still need to feel it as it happens. Dynamics are really enhanced by conscious performance, because we feel the music that much more strongly and respond to the emotional energy in the song. After all, when we talk about a “dynamic” performance we’re not really talking about soft and loud. A dynamic performance is engaging because it draws the listener into the flow the performer is experiencing. You can accomplish a lot practicing with a metronome or backing track, but it’s still not the same as playing with or for someone else. The simple presence of another set of ears in the room will make you self-conscious enough to hear differently. It’s also sufficient distraction to disrupt the performance if you haven’t learned the music thoroughly.

Real musicianship is developed and tested in performance.

I’m not suggesting that playing in a group or on a stage is the only way to get better. This is actually an area where social media can he helpful, in that you can learn to perform for the camera and then post videos. Aside from starting a YouTube channel, there are also numerous Facebook groups and other forums where a beginner can post videos and document their progress. But sometimes you might just corral a friend or loved one and ask them to sit down and listen to you play.

When it comes to improvising, conscious choices matter as well. There’s a fine line between going with the flow and going on autopilot. I find that the simple thought “now do something else” can be enough to keep me out of stock clichés and mindless licks. A good improvisation should tell a story, so it’s best to choose your words and not just babble.

A good teacher can absolutely help you develop these skills. I work with my students on developing listening skills and reactivity both in private lessons and in my weekly group classes. But 30 minutes or an hour a week of supervised practice are a check-in, a tuneup. The real work has to be done on your own.

Get rhythm: timing and feel.

December 10, 2018 By Dave Isaacs 1 Comment

If you believe you have no natural rhythm, you’re wrong.

Rhythm is actually as natural as breathing, or a heartbeat. We use the term “pulse” in music for a reason! Your pulse might be faster or slower depending on the situation you’re in, but if it’s irregular you know there’s a problem. We walk in time too, mostly. (Try walking OUT of time, you’re likely to look like this).

The fact is, rhythm is everywhere in nature, including your body. So learning to apply it in music might come more naturally to some than to others, but everyone does in fact have “natural rhythm”.

When we talk about keeping time in music, we’re really talking about coordination.

There can be a difference between perceiving steady time and being able to articulate it. To really develop a musical command of rhythm, you also need to be able to play with it: to count, group, and subdivide time in a variety of ways.

When I was in my first year of music school, all the students were required to take a class called “musicianship”. The textbook was called Elementary Training for Musicians, but it seemed to be far above elementary:

(In fairness, this is from page 100, but still….)

However, looking back at it now the way the book is organized is brilliantly simple, and provides a solid approach to building musical coordination. Each chapter is divided into three sections: action in time (rhythm), action in space (melody), and coordinated action (both together). The “action in time” section begins with a simple instruction to tap a steady pulse. Over the course of subsequent exercises, that pulse is organized into recurring counts to create meter.

Meter is just counting!

Meter, as the name suggests, is simply organizing your steady pulse (beat) into measured groups. If a song is said to be “in 4” then the groups are four counts long, but there’s no separation or pause between them. The beat is continuous, and the count is a cycle:

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 etc…

Meter and time signature

The term “time signature” also refers to meter, but goes one step further and articulates what to call the rhythmic value being counted. In most cases these will be quarter notes, but can also be eighths or (less commonly) half or sixteenth notes. This doesn’t change the steady beat, or even tell you definitively how fast to go (tempo, measured in beats per minute or bpm). The difference between 3/4 and 6/8 time, for example, is more a matter of style, feel, and accent than fast or slow. The distinction matters, but it’s important for you to learn to pick up these kinds of details by listening rather than by counting and thinking. For our purposes, all that matters right now is that you can keep a steady beat while counting to two, three, four, or six over and over.

Add a slight accent to each “one” as you count. There’s a good chance you might do this naturally, since our bodies like cycles. The first count of the cycle is called the downbeat, and you might feel a definite sense of landing or arrival each time it comes around.

Let’s differentiate further. This time, count to two repeatedly and put the accent on the second beat. This is called the backbeat. Now experiment with changing the accent back and forth from downbeat to backbeat. You’ll notice that this changes the feeling of the beat:

Downbeat accent: 1 2 1 2

Backbeat accent: 1 2 1 2

Most songs will accent one more than the other, and the “feel” of a downbeat-heavy song will be very different from a backbeat-heavy song. You will always hear and feel both beats, but the sense of momentum and forward motion is determined by where that accent falls.

Subdivisions and strumming

Of course, most songs do more than bounce back and forth between two beats. The pulse can be divided up into twos, threes, fours, or even further, and notes can be played on any of the subdivisions. Any rhythm you might ever play or sing will line up with a set of pulses and subdivisions that can be “measured” in time as if you were using a ruler.

Applying this idea to the guitar, we can use pick strokes as our unit of “measurement”. Repeated down-up strums might be counted as “1 and 2 and” or as “1 e & a 2 e & a”, articulating eighth notes and sixteenth notes respectively:

From here, you can work out most rhythms by simply alternating between down and up strokes and either striking the strings or not. For example, notice this pattern of down and up strums:

The quarter note pulse is played with downstrokes, while the subdivided eighth notes are filled in with upstrokes in between. If it helps, you can count every subdivision but only strum on the ones where a note appears:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

Each italicized “and” is a swing of the arm without striking the strings. If you find this tricky to coordinate, try swinging the arm back and forth and counting out loud: “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”. Notice how the down swing reinforces the sense of arrival on the downbeats, while the up swing on “and” creates a sense of lift. Viewed this way, it makes sense why these are called upbeats.

Ideas to apply

If you’d like some more practice with applying this idea, download this exercise and apply the strum formulas. It’s important that you think in terms of rhythm and feel, though, not just timing. Try using this sequence:

1. Play a steady beat with repeated downstrokes.

2. Count to four repeatedly to establish the meter.

3. Pay attention to the upstrokes and count the “ands”.

4. Using the steady down-up-down-up as your “ruler”, find how the rhythm lines up with the counts of four. Remember that a single quarter note is played with a downstroke, while pairs of eighth notes are played down-up.

5. Experiment with the feel by emphasizing downbeats (1 and 3) or backbeats (2 and 4). You can also try emphasizing other beats for even more options.

These are relatively simple rhythms and there’s a lot more to explore. But if you can begin to connect the related ideas of steady pulse, meter, and subdivision to the feeling of moving the arm back and forth, your coordination, timing, and confidence in strumming will absolutely get stronger.

For more on strumming accents and rhythm, check out this video lesson from the archives:

How to make a guitar sing.

December 3, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

Some people can play a lot of notes, but the best players make the guitar sing.

Why do some musicians command attention with a single note? Chops are impressive, and speed and flashy technique have their place. But the notes are just the beginning. Expression on the guitar comes from the player’s touch, and the way that subtle variations in pressure and movement can shape a melody.

Many players seem to get distracted in their explorations of lead guitar. This often starts with learning scales, which is important for a variety of reasons. But memorizing patterns on the fretboard is just the first step in a longer process, and can even be misleading. Why else would so many students express that they’ve learned the forms up and down the neck but still can’t seem to make music with it? If you’ve learned about bricks but not mortar, you can’t build a house.

Good lead guitar starts with attention to phrasing.

This is much too large a topic to explore with any depth in a single blog post. But for now, we can hugely simplify and just say that the problem most people have is that they try to use the scales as a foundation for improvising. But music is built on gestures: smaller melodic phrases with integrity of their own. Even a long, continuous line can be broken down into smaller segments that together form a larger gesture. The scales give you one possible set of notes to choose from, and this often works very well. But it’s the choices that make your playing musical, not the set you choose from.

Once you’ve begun to trim your ideas down into smaller pieces, you can start to look more closely at the way you articulate the notes instead of just the notes themselves. Playing melody is like speaking, and no one wants to listen to someone droning on in a monotone. Phrasing, dynamics, timing, and articulation are essential elements of communication. An experienced actor can make the same words convey different meanings by the way they deliver the line. To be an expressive player, you need to have the same kind of flexibility with notes.

1. Repetition and variation

Again, the simple idea is just to do less. Make statements: play a few notes, pause, then play an answer. This is called “call and response” and is an easy way to make your ideas more organized. Pay attention to how many notes you play in each statement, as well as how long you wait between them. Trying varying the amount of time between phrases. Use repeated rhythmic patterns to tie things together, then mix them up to create interest. Nearly all music balances the opposing techniques of repetition and variation to create a coherent whole that holds the listener’s attention.

2. Articulation

How many different ways can you approach a note? You can land squarely on it, or slide in from above or below. Remember that slides can be timed, in which both the starting and ending notes have a specific duration, or untimed, in which the first note is a “grace note” with no time value of its own. You can slide in from an adjacent fret, further away, or an indeterminate pitch.

We can also use slurs: “hammer-ons”, when coming from below, “pull-offs” when coming from above, or simply tapping the neck (another type of hammer-on where the note is sounded by the finger landing on the string). This also leads us to what in classical music is called ornamentation: trills (moving very quickly back and forth between two notes, from above or below), and turns (approaching a note from directly above or below, moving past it, and then returning to land on the target note). These can be played strictly with fretted notes or might also incorporate open strings.

Then there’s the question of picking hand attack. Are you using a pick or a bare finger? How hard do you strike the note? What about the force of the attack? Does the string ring out cleanly or is there a percussive “snap”? Are you simply passing through the string or “popping” it away from the neck? (This doesn’t have to be a dramatic movement, although it can be). Changing the angle of attack can radically change the tone, as does striking the string in different places. Tremolo picking – quick repeated back-and-forth strokes on the same note – is another powerful and memorable effect.

3. Vibrato

Vibrato involves moving the finger back and forth on the same fret, pushing and pulling the pitch slightly. This has the effect of essential sounding the note repeatedly, creating more sustain and a more vocal, singing sound.

There are two basic types of vibrato. One comes from the wrist and forearm, in which the arm is rotated slightly back and forth. This works best with the index finger. The movement can also be from side to side, which is effective with any finger. This is the kind of vibrato you see used on bowed instruments like the violin and cello, as well as the classical guitar.

The second is more dramatic and comes generally more from the arm. Balance on the fingertips and lightly move the arm up and down. This tends to work best with multiple fingers resting on the same string. Try varying the speed to create a different effect. This is the type of vibrato you probably associate more with the electric guitar, especially in blues and rock settings.

Some players create this motion more from the fingers than the arm. This generally involves more of a dropped wrist, and requires more muscular effort. This approach has its place, but to my ear the vibrato isn’t quite as controlled and tends to be more obvious and dramatic. We tend to see mostly hard rock and metal players using this approach. As a general rule I always prefer to have the muscles of the hand working less, relying on the larger muscles of the arm to carry more of the movement.

4. Dynamics

Dynamics are essential to expressive playing: again, think of a speaker with a droning monotone. Varying the volume and intensity of your phrases. Get louder (crescendo) and softer (diminuendo). This variation comes primarily from the intensity of the picking hand attack, but can come from the fretting hand as well.

The music itself will tell you when to change and which way to go. A solo might have an overall dynamic “shape”, perhaps starting more quietly and building in intensity as it unfolds. It can be very effective to suddenly get quieter, especially when it’s unexpected. And when you’re playing with a band, the feeling of a rhythm section responding to your dynamic lead is a powerful thing the audience will always feel.

These are all topics that could be explored in much greater depth, but the first step is just to get you thinking about them.

Pay attention to the ways you hear great players shaping the sound with variations in touch, timing, and melody. Some of these techniques are more challenging than others, but they all can be mastered through experimentation and practice. Taken together, these are all factors that contribute to a player’s sound. All of my guitar heroes had their own approaches and ways of using these techniques, some very distinctive and recognizable. The great Latin rock guitarist Carlos Santana once said, “your tone is your face, why would you want to look like someone else?” His sound is instantly recognizable: melodic, expressive, and yes, singing. Yours can be too.