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If you want to be a great guitarist you should try to develop and nurture passion for other art or music that has nothing to do with guitar and adapt or assimilate those things in your playing.

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Story Time

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Let me share with a you a story.  This is a true story, but the names have been removed to protect the guilty.

Once upon a time, there was a doe-eyed child trapped in a 17 year old body who left his small town of 2,000 people and went to a big city to study guitar.  The institution of learning he went to study guitar at was a very big place with several thousand musicians.  At the absolute minimum it was completely overwhelming for him as an experience.  He went to the school knowing his ass was going to get kicked – but not knowing that saying his ass would get kicked would be more like telling the parachuter mid jump when his/her chute wouldn’t open he/she might break a bone from the fall when they “bounced” (yes “bounced” is the technical term for this occurrence and yes, it happens often enough that a term needed to be developed).

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It kind of broke him.  In addition to the culture shock of being in a city, rather than a place he described as “Deliverence with snow”, he found the school had a real focus on Jazz (insert Jazz hands motion here).  Anything non-jazz was looked upon with complete derision.  He was bombarded with fellow students and faculty telling him the music he liked, the music that was a part of his soul was trash and he was wasting his time.  So he did what anyone from a small working class town would do, he became a walking middle finger to anything jazz because he thought that it was the only way he could defend his identity.  And the point that door was shut was the moment his undergrad experience was doomed.

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Now to be fair, the blame for this was 50-50 with the school.   In his lesson – a weekly 1/2 hour slot – he and his teacher went over a series of proficiency requirements that were necessary to pass the final exam.  The student asked questions about why he needed this material, how he could utilize the material – but there was no educational buy in.  He was just told these were tools he needed to play jazz.  And given what we’ve said about jazz – you can imagine how well this process was received.

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He found another teacher his second semester.  Someone who was more understanding and someone who shared a lot of his interests.  The two of them started delving into Japanese modes and other concepts and he actually got excited about what he was doing.   He asked his new teacher if they could just keep going in this direction instead of focusing on rote memorizations of reharmonized chord-solo renditions of tunes that didn’t need solo renditions.  The teacher said to talk with the chair of the department and get his approval.

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The chair of the department was newly appointed and had a lot of work to do.  He was not happy with the prospect of meeting with the student.  The student explained he had a very specific direction that he wanted to go in his playing, that this direction didn’t coincide with the narrow parameters of the proficiencies and then asked if there was any way that he could be accommodated.  The chair informed him that wasn’t what they did at the school.  The purpose of the school was to have the students master that school’s style and then when they got out they would have the rest of their carer to develop their own style.

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The student said he realized he was only a student but that the logic of the situation evaded him.  Actually, in the interest of honest reporting and to exclude any pretense of articulation what he said was,

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“look I know I don’t know anything – but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.  There’s only 12 notes – that’s the substance.  Everything else is style.  What is the point of having 800 people all walking out of here and all sounding exactly the same?  Isn’t my style the only thing that’s going to make me different from every other guitarist out there?”

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He was then told that was the way it was and he could take it or leave it.  The student thanked him for his time, walked over to another office and submitted a change of major form.

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Music is a language.  If you learn it as a language, immersing yourself in it, learning vocabulary, speaking it to others as often as possible – you will gain fluidity in it.

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For a moment I want to discus vocabulary and then bring it around to the issue of style.  One way to think of licks is as vocabulary.  You learn a bunch of licks so you can communicate with other musicians.  You might not speak a foreign language – but you should at least learn how to say a few words or phrases to try to get you by.

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If you only learn licks from one source – it will be difficult to not sound like that source.

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If I go to a show and see a guitar player I can tell you usually in a song or two who he’s listened to.  If it’s only guitar players I probably won’t make it to song #3.  Drummers can often tell you the same thing about other drummers.  Going back to the language analogy, if you grow up in New Jersey and everyone you know and speak with is from New Jersey – you’re going to have to work hard to get a Texas accent sounding authentic, much less an Irish or Spanish one.  Do you have to learn other accents?  No – no one is forcing you to – but it’s important to realize that

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all of your experiences influence how you communicate with other people.

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Hence the Wittgenstein quote in the article.  For those of you who remember Orwell’s “1984″ – there was the idea of newspeak,  the language that kept getting smaller each year for the purposes of eradicating thoughtcrime.  The less you experience in the world, the less you are able to express.  This is why 13 year old children writing love songs do not have the lyrical content to truly plumb the depths of the soul, even though they are often supremely confident that they do.

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If your experiences influence how you speak with other people then it stands to reason they can effect how you play with other people.  If, for example, four guys in a room have only listed to, played and learned “Smoke on the water” – they’re not going to come up with “Giant Steps” any time soon.  They’re going to play “Smoke on the water” and if they write something new it will probably have a lot of similarities to “Smoke on the water”.  Traveler’s advisory – do not party with these guys.

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Adaptation and the hidden agenda

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This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t learn other people’s licks.  It’s vital that you do – because you have to develop vocabulary, but I highly recommend you vary your sources.  If you play guitar try learning music played on other stringed instruments like violin, or from non-string performances like vocal lines.  My rhythm playing is rhythmically informed by things like drum rudiments, flamenco foot work and rhythmic phonetics.  My single line playing is rooted in rock, but there’s various Hindustani, Balkan, Arabic and Koto references specific to things I do.

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Almost every gig I’ve ever played I got because I put energy into learning things that weren’t guitaristic and adapting them.  You’ll never confuse my guitar with a Kayagum – but if I play a note with a sharp bend and crazy vibrato it doesn’t sound like a guitar lick either.  It crosses a boundary and becomes something new.  And here is the hidden agenda.

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When it becomes new, it becomes yours and things that are yours have extra value.

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In addition to this, try cultivating artistic influences from things that are not guitar related.  Francis Bacon the painter probably influenced me at least as much as Hendrix and is a model for me in expressing motion and fluidity through art.  I’m passionate about books and films and I try to adapt anything worthwhile in those experiences into my playing.

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The important thing is to find things that you are passionate about and explore, adapt and/or assimilate them to the fullest level you can.

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The limits of your musical language are the limits of your style .

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