Vivaldi

NylonDave

Chris Martin wrote: »

Love the tone, I wish I could get that sound....................BUT!
(lack of talent aside) I live in a single storey house; with no stairs!
What to do?

Just listen real careful Chris and you'll find that any guitar in any space can make a beautiful sound. If anyone is around who makes uniformly loud and ugly sounds though that fact can be hard to understand. Especially if that person is you.

I've gotten some nice compliments for the wonderful sound of my Aldi guitar. It always amazes me how few people seem to understand the job of a musician.

I'd also say it is pretty important to stay away from people who make a point of not listening, not responding to dynamics, tuning up a new instrument in the middle of your solo, loudly playing in another key after you have began to reach for a melody etc. Basically any kind of delusional childish mean spiritedness will make it hard to make sense of the music as it comes to you.

Those environments are not good for music, they are closer to sport and gamesmanship is not a practice that interests me. Also everyone should be on the same team, it's not like I expect a midfielder from my own team to routinely run up behind me and trip me up when I am about to shoot, or that my own team captain has the habit of blowing the whistle when I have the ball and an open goal. But there are some places where I have come to expect it and mostly I avoid them and when I can't simply to accompany.

Staying present is the thing, your ego will call to you to not listen, to hear mere sounds and not music, to miss the point of music. Both the music you might make and the music being played around you. It will use envy and insecurity against you and lead to stasis.

You could end up trying to play every note louder than the last regardless of the sense of the music and then you will be chasing your tail for ever and getting worse and worse. You may be more effective in clumsy company but the cost is too great I think.

Musical Heirarchy is a good starting point. It is amongst the short list of terribly important things that amateurs never think about, because you need a real teacher in the room with you to explain it, it does not make good 'entercation'. It is not uncommon for amateurs not to have a strong sense of what hierarchy is and how it determines time signature, or even that time signature is a real palpable element of music and not just an arbitrary decision made when writing it down. And consideration of this kind of Heirarchy is a natural cure for the other kind which, if it interests you, you can enjoy when you join a golf club or rotary club or cult.

Think how the volume of each note interacts with it's placement in the bar, which will be different for every style. Also think about how all of that is inflected by harmonic movement and pitch direction and also what is possible on your instrument and with your technique.

Maybe sing a phrase and listen really really carefully to what it's dynamic content is, which notes are you naturally ghosting ? where are the sforzandi ? which pitches jump out and what is the dynamic direction of the phrase surrounding them ? why do those pitches jump out ? are they really the loudest ? Try and think of as many ways as possible of being present by changing your focus and listening to the music that naturally leaves you, That's you !! Be glad of it, study it, enjoy it.


Then as a melody comes to you let yourself play it, don't worry about mistakes as another will come along in a moment anyway.

Unless you think music is hidden in a plectrum or the guitar itself or a resonant space. Unless you don't even think about hierarchy and time signature ( which is to say FEEL) maybe you work on tab alone and think music is a trick and that any day now you will be able to cheat like you hope your heroes are. Maybe you trust one person to do all your thinking for you and that that makes you part of something because you are surrounded by like mindless others and it makes your ears and wit atrophy to the point where you take genuine pride in your inability to understand what your own ears are trying to tell you.

And if you must chase sound and not music then be very careful who you believe. Marketing is not education and even if you are happy to be hoodwinked it can all mount up.

Like my pupil who I recommended should record himself. In the eighties, when I started teaching, he would have recorded on a cheap tape recorder listened back and heard that my criticism was just and this would have shaped his practice and helped him to avoid delusional resentments and accelerated his learning. It was for ear training not turd polishing.

Now he is older and has 'learned' from marketing, this commercially manipulated marketing has stripped away much of his common sense and has left him trusting technology more than his ears. So he spent a grand on a home studio and believes he should be solely in the business of turd polishing. He plays less frequently and more clumsily and believes that he should fix it in the mix. So he is going backwards and rapidly. He makes a Karaoke tracks and photoshops himself into them. It appals me but I don't watch TV where that is the new paradigm for 'composers'.

It is sad. I asked him not to come round any more. He will find a way of wasting his money online sure enough though. Someone will sell him a way of looking at the guitar that will make the work he needs to do seem finite. He will think them his friend, he will not need to think for himself and that will be a comfort.

But the work isn't finite at all and for me that is the real joy of music. And if you ever do manage to truly to switch on your ears do try and be kind to those who insist on missing the point. It will be a challenge but there are none so deaf as those who wont listen and their fear and confusion is palpable. And they need to spend money for comfort.

Saying that, it might be worth Maggies while to put up the flat for sale in the classified section here.

D.

NylonDave

Oh, and thanks to the ten percent of clickers who listened and especially to those who shared a sincere or kind word.

D.

ChrisMartin

Well my comment re the stairs was only a light-hearted reference to your tone, sorry if it read otherwise, but the giveaway was my other statement "(lack of talent aside)".
I mean I DO have a bathroom..........

But there are two points there that suggest NylonDave has been tapping my phone or reading my mail (metaphorically speaking) since the '80s.
I too fell victim to labels and wasting money on the 'right' gear as I thought it necessary to achieve a certain sound, and this should be a lesson to all, but I wonder how many readers on this forum are still guilty. I mean when I went through my BB King phase in the '70s I had to have a 335 (as near to a 355 as I could find at the time), but then I branched out into other styles, and it had to be a Telecaster if I wanted to be like my heroes Albert and James. Of course there were some who took that further and paid even more because the weapon of choice had to be of a specific vintage, pre-CBS, pre-Norlin etc, etc - funny though how all those '70s Fenders that were comprehensively rubbished at the time to justify the so-called 'vintage' phenomenon are now marketed as 'vintage' in their own right. Doesn't that example alone tell us how the mugs are being manipulated by the market. I am sure if I had a six-figure sum to blow on a late-50s Les Paul, I would also be able to somehow convince myself that I could really hear a difference and it was worth every cent; that is until the novelty wears off after a year or two, and the Ferrari needs new camshafts so I sell it on to the next mug. All of which has nothing to do with music (except of course when the Ferrari is back on song).

I was fortunate to at least get some guidance from a teacher back then who just happened to be one of the top session players in London in the '70s and '80s. Most of what he taught me (along with just a little theory) was how to hear harmony, which helped my ear, and also some nifty right-hand picking techniques, which still today I probably need to unlearn if I am ever to master the required GJ picking style.
He also taught me the name on the headstock makes little difference.
He had a few instruments for different jobs, but they were all working guitars, not the high-end names us public always thought the pros must be using. An Epiphone jumbo, a Fender Mustang bass, a few others may have come and gone, but his main guitar for most jobs was an ugly looking home-made contraption that sonically could do it all, but was maybe lacking something in the finishing details. Probably a fair description would be to imagine if Brian May was sight-impaired.

I meant what I said about lack of talent, and I still regard myself as a beginner, but I at least have learned that which instrument suits which individual is something the marketing gurus will never be able to tell you.

So if NylonDave can sound like that on a cheap Aldi guitar, and indeed my Brad Paisley impersonations on my $40 Aldi Tele' show I have no need of a Fender, it does indeed come back to the individual, their touch and the ability to get the most from what you have is far more convincing than the constant self-deluding chase for nirvana which may for many on here come in the name of Busato. Sorry Michael, I am not putting down the virtues of such great instruments, but wondering aloud how many, for whom the price is affordable, actually have the talent to bring out the best in them?

Second point; I have to also admit to having gone through, well I lost count how many, books with tabs learning by numbers instead of by ear. As Dave says if someone is showing you where and when to put your fingers are you really learning anything? Are you even listening? The sense of achievement from when I finally get it by ear, and hopefully some understanding of the construction, harmony, yes, even feel, is to me, a real lesson, yet we still see many requests on this forum for "does anyone have a tab for (insert name of tune here)". These requests are often politely answered with something like "it is better to learn it by ear yourself..." but that does not seem to stop the requests coming. Certainly over the last, what?, twenty or thirty years? the tab mentality has become the norm for the younger players, such that we seem to be spiralling down into mass market of recycled noise, which in turn may not be all a bad thing as it does enable a genuine new talent to immediately stand out, but one has to wonder how many times we will see someone like Antoine Boyer take, at a young age too, all of those influences and truly make them his own. He or she won't be found on Pop Idol of that I am sure.

I don't mean to be p*ssing on anyone's fireworks here, but I am sure most of us guitar learners would deep down, admit, we have all been though the same things, but hopefully most do eventually either grow through it..................or....eventually, give up.

Lango-Django

Wonderful, Dave.

If you should ever chance to meet and play with fellow gypsy/classic guitarist MIKKO KARHULA, I'm sure as a duo you guys would rip a hole in the space-time fabric.

(I've been trying to find and copy a URL from one of his classical improvisations which he has posted here at this site, but for some reason I couldn't find one...)

NylonDave

Thanks Lango, I've been following and enjoying Mikko's posts and noted the similarity of our tastes.

I have been playing a little with steel strings recently and finding it can blend quite well. I even got a cheesy name for our duet.

'Steel 'n Nylons'.

Lango-Django

I too fell victim to labels and wasting money on the 'right' gear as I thought it necessary to achieve a certain sound, and this should be a lesson to all, but I wonder how many readers on this forum are still guilty.

Good point... can I plead "guilty with an explanation"...?

The past ten years or so have seen a revolution in the amplification of acoustic guitars which is still a source of amazement to me when I go play a gig and can actually achieve good volume AND good acoustic tone without constant feedback problems... true, this kind of gear is expensive, but to me it is well worth the price!

******

But as to your main point, no, I don't NEED to play my expensive custom made guitar and of course i can play equally well, or poorly, with my Asian Selmer copy.

But here's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it...

"Life is too short for drinking cheap wine, eating mediocre food, or kissing ugly girls!"


Will

Mitch

Nice playing!