A Holiday Thought That May Help The Whole Year

A routine can be a powerful thing in productivity. It helps instil a sense of inertia and, as I’ve talked about in posts like this, or this one , keeping the ball rolling is usually a lot easier than initially getting it to roll. The counter-intuitive reality behind doing things is that:

Activity leads to other activity. It creates its own inertia.

Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.

The counter-intuitive part of this is when you’re sitting on a sofa and think, “I’m really tired. I just have to rest for a second and mentally gear myself up for this”. Inertia is working at keeping you sitting on the couch. If there’s a TV on or an internet connection – it’s working double time.

The reality is that just getting up and doing the thing actually takes less energy that expending the energy debating with yourself about whether or not you have the tools or the energy to do something.

The caveat is that this assumes we’re talking about moderate activity. If you’ve just run a marathon, I’m not advocating staying on your feet if you need to rest. I’m talking about procrastination versus physical exhaustion.

Procrastination is an energy suck

Completing projects is invigorating. It’s that energy that comes from getting something done and thinking, “All right – what’s next?” It takes way more mental energy to keep putting something off than to just deal with it.

Here are some tips that may be helpful:

Have goals. If you don’t know what you’re trying to do – you’re not likely to figure out the how.

If you have something you’re procrastinating – try to tackle small parts of if consistently. You’re going to get more mileage out of small daily improvements than trying to cram something into a marathon session.

Monitor progress. This goes along with goal setting but it’s important to check back and see how you’re progressing.

Be accountable but pragmatic. Either to yourself or other people, to get things done, it’s important to be held to your goals. Along with monitoring progress, being pragmatic (rather than judgemental) about your progress will help as well. If things aren’t progressing they way you’d like – beating yourself up isn’t going to help the process. By monitoring things you can see what works and what doesn’t work and adjust as necessary.

I Done This

Neither a typo or an obscure pop reference, I want to thank my friend Daren Burns for bringing this to my attention. I done this.com is a cool free online productivity tool that combines some of the tips that I’ve mentioned above, Here’s a quote from the web page:

“iDoneThis is an email-based productivity log. This evening, you’ll receive your first email from us asking, “What’d you get done today?” Just respond to our email and we record what you wrote into your calendar. Use your progress from yesterday to motivate you today.”

By helping to monitor progress and helping keep consistency and accountability, this could be something to help get the ball rolling for you. If you have something you’ve been putting off doing (like practicing) try it for a week and see what happens.

I hope this helps! Thanks for reading.

-SC

On “It is what it is”

Posted on July 18, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

I had a moment to catch up on some things this weekend, and returned a call from a friend of mine at CalArts. We had a very nice conversation catching up and discussing Higher Education funding, trends, pedagogy and the like and she was kind enough to tell me this:

“You know, in a conversation we had once – you gave me some advice and told me that, ‘it is what it is’. I thought about that a lot – and about how you’ve brought it up a number of times in our conversations – and it’s something I find myself coming back to as a mantra when I’m facing something difficult.”

She had asked me about where that mindset came from, and I’m sure it’s rooted in growing up in a working class small town in upstate New York. Compared to many people around me I had it relatively easy. My parents both worked hard – my dad taught middle school and my mom worked in a factory – and they owned the house we lived in. (A note: Despite a lot of nonsense talk generated in the media earlier in the year, as people living on an educator’s salary, we did not live high on the hog. We burned wood for fuel (that we cut stacked and dried on our own), did all our own repairs and (for a while) raised animals for food. The two-story house I grew up in with a garage and a 2 story workshop on a 1/2 acre of land sold for well under 40k if that tells you anything about the economics of the region.)

Other people I knew had it really hard. Farmers (and often their children) who worked from dawn to dusk with spouses working additional odd jobs just to make ends meet. We had “valley runners” – a term of no endearment reserved for families who would relocate multiple times a year to stay one step ahead of the law. I’d always see the kids in my classes; they’d show up for a couple of months and then be gone to the next county. When I’d see them months, or years later, they had always changed for the worse. They picked up a number of skills they needed to survive when you’re always on the run (typically manipulation, but sometimes cons or petty theft), that were depressing enough for an adult to have to rely on to get by – much less a child.

Mainly though, I knew a lot of good people who worked hard and were often presented with really difficult situations. And the response to those situations was to work through it. I can’t count the number of times that I heard variations of, “No use crying about it – let’s get to work.”

For those of you who resonate with this sentiment, and have never read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, it might be worth a moment of your time. One point Aurelius’ (and other Stoics like Epictetus) bring up repeatedly is the value of seeing things for what they are. That often means removing the emotional issues associated with the matters at hand and trying to deal with them objectively. (Albert Ellis made an entire career out of this method of inquiry with his REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy) approach).

Getting emotional about certain things (particularly difficult things) only adds to their difficultly.

In my world view, some things are simply facts andviewing those things as such makes it easier to see them for what they are.

For example:

2+2=4.

How do you feel about that? (or do you feel anything?)

It’s difficult to get emotionally invested in it because it’s merely a fact.

Now here’s the idea applied: where a student might hear, “You’re going to have to put a lot of time in to getting those sweep arpeggios down the way you want.” I hear “2+2=4”. There’s no emotional involvement and so there’s less to get tripped up on.

There are a million reasons to procrastinate, and generally only one or two to get something done. If you’re facing something really daunting there’s a several part process I can share to help make it manageable.

Getting it done

Know why you need to do what you’re doing. As Viktor Frankl once said, “He who has a why can bear almost any how”.
Deal with problems individually. Many problems are multi-tiered so break them down into individual components to make them easier to manage.
See the problem for what it is. Gain a scope of what it is you are trying to do and prioritize what has to happen to complete it. (For example: If you’re trying to get better at sight-reading – you’re going to have to work on it a lot over a longer period of time. If you’re trying to get two bars of a solo down – it will probably be a much shorter over-all time investment).
Have milestones and a deadline. Know what you’re going to complete by when.
Prioritize and address what you can. Don’t get hung up on big steps here, this stage is all about the specifics of each step (i.e. the grunt work).
Reassess and return. As milestones are reached verify your progress and start again.

I remember reading a David Lee Roth interview where he was talking about how having a drive was the only thing that was going to get you through endless vocal practicing in your bedroom.

There’s nothing glamorous in the work that goes into doing anything well, but it’s necessary to acquire the skills needed to do those things.

In other words, it is what it is.

Thanks for reading.

-SC

What’s wrong with playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” for a world speed record?

Posted on July 4, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

A lot actually, because if speed is the only tool at your disposal you’re not going to be a working craftsman (or craftswoman) for very long.

Guitar-squid, (a cool user-generated content guitar site I really like and recommend you check out), recently posted a link to a you-tube clip of of John Taylor trying to break a speed record by playing along with a sequence of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the bumblebee at 600 bpm ( 11:48/12:26 in the video – note: I think the math here is suspect – it may be 600 bpm if he’s counting it as 1/8th notes – but it sounds like 1/16ths at 250 bpm/300 bpm to me).

For sheer technical precision you can also see this attempt by Tiago Della Vega at the same song here at a much cleaner 320 bpm. (7:38 or so)

The Guitar-Squid post was asking the question of whether or not the performance was real or faked. The real question however should probably be, other than the players themselves, does anyone care?

Flight of The Bumblebee

I’m not going to bag on either of these players because I respect the work that went into both renditions, but I am going to use this approach as a springboard for:

Why I think trying to set Guinness World Records for speed is a musical dead-end.

It’s not emotionally moving. It’s hard for me to think of a worse piece of music to devote time developing than a solo guitar rendition of the main “melody” of Flight of the bumblebee. It’s not a particularly memorable melody and other than the initial exposure of – wow that’s fast – it doesn’t leave you with anything.

One reason these particular arrangements aren’t moving is because there’s nothing to contrast the velocity of notes against besides a number of earlier renditions of the same arrangement. Let me use another analogy. Say you take a commercial flight somewhere and have a window seat. Soon you get to cruising height and look out above the peaceful clouds and it feels very calm. You’re actually moving at over 500 mph but since there’s nothing to contrast it against, it just seems like a “normal speed”. If, however, you were to fly at that speed about 20 feet off the ground you’d probably die of fear – because when you saw how fast you were moving past other vehicles and identifiable landmarks, you would understand just how fast you’re going. When you play quickly, it’s only quick compared to the slowest note you’re playing. Otherwise, you’re just playing a lot of notes and it’s perceived as cruising speed by the audience.

It’s not musical. Perhaps you disagree, and this would be why Flight of the Bumblebee is the number 1 song on your Itunes playlist. 😉 Other than musicians, practically no one listens to renditions of this song because (particularly as a solo guitar arrangement) – it just isn’t a strong piece of music.

In contrast to this, Hendrix’s solo on All along the Watchtower is something I could sing start to finish right now. Paco De Lucia can play a million notes with every one of them will leaving you breathless – and I’m sure that he could care less about how fast he could play Flight of The Bumblebee. In these examples, both players left me with something even after I stopped listening to the recording, because there’s real expression behind it. It’s hard to be play a lot of notes with meaning, but it can be done and when it happens – it’s done by people who are playing a lot of notes to get somewhere very specific rather than just to impress you. I’d point to the best moments of Yngwie or Scotty Anderson as one starting point and Shawn Lane, Allan Holdsworth or Guthrie Gowan as three guys on the more extreme end of the spectrum of note density who have something to say.

I’m not going to put all the fault on Rimsky-Korsakov either because the fault lies more in this particular arrangement and the parts people are leaving out as much as it is what they’re playing. Below is a piano rendition by Maxim. While it’s nowhere near the velocity of either of the guitar versions above, playing the harmonic component at the same time makes for a more nuanced (i.e. to my ears – enjoyable ) rendition.

As a career, it’s not sustainable and it’s not going to get you a gig. This is a little misleading. You probably can get a gig from this. If you make a world record attempt at something like this and you have a news worthy hook (like being particularly young for the child prodigy angle, or physically impaired in some way for the overcoming obstacles angle (yes – this sounds particularly harsh – but believe me, the healthy middle class 22-year-old trying for the record will have great difficulty getting air time)), you might be contacted to do a version for your regional morning show. You’ll get to the studio at some inhumanly early hour and (in a best case scenario) get enough time to run the piece and answer some questions. You’ll be replaced the next day by the local pie baker with an award-winning recipe or the local author with a new parenting book out.

If you do get gigs from it, they’ll be clinic type gigs where you play this and (just like the end of the first video) you’ll just getting people demanding that you play it faster. Not “better” – just faster. Because all this arrangement has going for it is velocity, and just like your news story will get bumped by other local news, your speed playing will get bumped by a cool extreme sports video or another video of someone wiping out trying to do a stunt.

I’ve mentioned some elements of this here and here as well, but being known as a really good guitar player who has the ability to chop out when you need to will serve your career in a much greater capacity than being known as the player with just a lot of chops.

Please note:

I’m not bagging on having chops or trying to develop them (and to do so would be completely hypocritical in my case). As a musician, you have to have enough ability to express yourself on your instrument and that requires technique. But technique only exists to help serve the song and the musical moment. Technique for its own sake is a musical dead-end.

Bonus quiz:

Give yourself a B+ if you can name either of the names of the two guys playing the guitar videos above without looking them up. If you can name either one two days from now without looking it up give yourself an A+.

Be the person people hit the rewind button for.

..
Marty Friedman once talked about how a really great solo is the one that you’d stop the recording for and rewind to hear again.

We remember things that touch us. We remember things that move us in some way. We share those things with other people. People that get excited about the things you do, are more likely to see you perform or seek you out and if you can move them at a show, you’ll see them again. That’s how you build an audience – one rabid fan at a time. If you touch people as a musician, you’ll be able to sustain an audience (and a career) a lot longer than someone who merely impresses them.

Thanks for reading!

-SC

ps – if you like this you may also like:

VISUALIZING VIDEO GAME LICKS OR AN INTRO TO SYMMETRICAL 12 TONE GUITAR PATTERNS

MAS MODELING!! POD FARM, POD HD, SCUFFHAM AMPS AND A WHOLE TONE LICK

MELVILLE, MADNESS AND PRACTICING – OR FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON PART 2

FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON

INSPIRATION VS. INTIMIDATION

KEEPING YOUR EGO OUT OF THE SONG’S WAY

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SURVIVING THE GIG

A Lesson In Improvisation And Jargon From A Cooking Show

WARMING UP: FINGER EXERCISES, THE 3 T’S AND THE NECESSITY OF MISTAKES

BUILDING BLOCKS – OR MORE EXAMINATIONS OF A LAPTOP GUITAR SETUP

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A QUICK LICK – AND A RIG DU JOUR UPDATE FROM HO CHI MINH CITY

“THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE ARE THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD”

A BRIEF THOUGHT ABOUT MUSIC THEORY

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Books:

LESSONS

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Practicing:

MELVILLE, MADNESS AND PRACTICING – OR FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON PART 2

Some Useful Online Practice Tools

POSSESSION IS 9/10S OF THE LAW BUT PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING OR PRACTICING PART VII

TESTING YOUR VOCABULARY OR PRACTICING PART VI

PRACTICE WHAT YOU PLAY OR PRACTICING PART V

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DEFINITIONS AND DOCUMENTS OR PRACTICING PART IV

TENSION AND THE SODA CAN OR PRACTICING PART III

PROPER POSTURE IS REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE – PRACTICING PART II

PRACTICE MAKES BETTER AKA PRACTICING PART I

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Circumnavigating The Wall You Just Hit

Posted on June 16, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

It’s easy to get so caught up in the how, or the technical process of what you’re doing, that you forget the why.

Every once in a while someone will send me a You Tube clip of some wunderkind playing a million notes and I often think, “Wow it’s impressive to spend so much time getting that down. I wonder how they’re going to use that when they’re playing Brown Eyed Girl at the local bar?” The answer, of course, is that they’re not going to play that or maybe even any song. The point of the video generally isn’t to develop something interesting in a larger musical context (like a song) but instead to promote their efforts by performing something technically difficult to get people impressed.

I don’t fault players for this, they’re simply trying to make a connection and that’s the point of music in general. Sometimes that means playing a million notes and sometimes that happens in the silences of the music you’re playing. It’s an easy path to go down because making a connection is really hard. In addition to a lot of work, it requires experience, sincerity and no small amount of guts to leave yourself exposed. In contrast, sitting down with a metronome and getting a lick up to a quick tempo is substantially easier and the result is quantifiable. Even if people aren’t impressed, you’ll know that you got it up to speed and take some comfort in advancing your technical ability.

But the flash of something fast will fade quickly, and what’s left is the content of what’s being said and the sincerity behind it.
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I like video game licks in certain contexts, but they’re probably not going to work on a ballad very well (even if it is a fusion track 😉 ). If you’re saying a lot of words without much meaning it’s not going to have a lot of impact.

I’ve had gigs where everything involving making a connection turns off on the stage and while it’s not a defining moment in human history, for someone who’s being used to being connected to music it’s a pretty awful feeling. I’d even argue that this was the case for 90% of the gigs I’ve played in LA. There can be any number of reasons for this. There might be technical issues that completely pull you out of your mindset. The audience might not be there to make a connection. Things may not be jelling with the band. But most importantly, it may be your disconnect, and it’s the most important, because it’s the only performance factor that you really have control over.

Those of you familiar with the Aesop’s fable regarding the fox and the lion will probably remember the final adage, “Familiarity Breeds Contempt “. You can put so much time into the same thing on guitar that it loses all musical meaning. The bad news is it’s probably not going to gain additional meaning on the bandstand. In all likelihood you’re going to disconnect from it further.

The more you work with specific things the easier it is to auto pilot your way through them, and the less likely you’ll be able to connect with it. Taking that a step further, it’s going to be hard to connect to audiences if you’re disconnected from your own playing. It’s more common than you might think, and a lot of musicians go through small (or large) periods where they “weren’t feeling it”. They hit a wall.

By it’s nature, any wall is usually made of pretty hard material so meeting it head on and trying going through it is not the best approach. I can tell you from personal experience that taking the approach of saying, “suck it up” isn’t going to get your groove back. Playing through it is exactly what you probably shouldn’t be doing because it’s just going to distance you further from the actual music when you play. It’s like when a relationship is on the rocks and you’re convinced that spending more time together will make it better when the time you spend now is stinted and awkward. The better approach in both cases is to step back and get some perspective…to go over the wall if you will…

One man’s recommendation for dealing with the wall

If you’re facing this right now, here are some strategies that may help.

Acknowledge that you’ve hit a wall. You can’t fix something you don’t recognize as a problem.

Once you acknowledge that you’ve hit a wall, realize that while it might be big and imposing, it’s still only a wall.

If the wall you’ve hit is from playing in general, take a break from playing for a couple of days. Spend that time trying to connect with friends or family. What you do isn’t really as important as the fact that you’re engaged and connected while you do it.

Learn some new songs. Learn things that are very non guitaristic like vocal melodies or horn lines. Take those ideas and write something new with them.

Go back and listen to music that inspired you. Try to find out what it was that inspired you about the music. Don’t over think or over analyze it, just try to connect with it.

Get out of your comfort zone. Listen to music from other cultures. Read a book by an unfamiliar (but recommended author). Play with different musicians. Take a short trip somewhere you’ve never been with a friend and see some new surroundings. When I was in Phoenix, I checked out the Musical Instrument Museum and had my head turned around in a dozen different directions both by the instruments and the multimedia presentations of field recordings. I left that place with a lot of new musical ideas buzzing around my head.

Practice playing in front of other people. Learn a new song and play it at an open mic. Make notes of when you’re connecting and when other people are connecting and make mental notes of how they’re doing it.

When you come back to practicing, take a measured breath before you begin playing. Mark the fact that you’re about to start something to get into the zone.

Try being mindful of what you’re practicing. Set limits on time and only practice one thing as long as you can be engaged in practicing it.

When you play a solo – try only playing what you can sing.

There are a lot of other things you can try, but the real goal here is to get re-engaged and bring that to your playing. As corny as it may sound, playing is an expression of who you are and where you’ve been. If you don’t have anything to say in your playing, it may be time to live a little more so you’ll have a story to tell next time you sit down…For me, it was about realizing what was wrong, taking ownership of that and moving past it to get back to making music instead of just sound again.

Good luck to you and thanks for reading!

-SC

Some Useful Online Practice Tools

Posted on April 28, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

While some larger GuitArchitecture posts are in the pipeline, I wanted to post about a few online tools I use frequently when practicing that may be helpful to you as well.

In previous practice posts, I talked about keeping a practice log and using small increments of time (5-10 minutes) in multiple sessions to really focus on ideas. (You can download a sample log here or here). The tools I mentioned to assist in this are a metronome and a stop watch.

Seventh String

Not to be confused with the very cool sevenstring.org forum, Seventh string is the company that produces the excellent Transcribe! software. While Transcribe! isn’t free (nor should it be – it’s an excellent piece of software that will pay for itself many times over) they have a number of useful free apps on their utilities page that may be of interest to you. The apps all use Java so you’ll need to have that installed if they’re not working – but the great thing about each of these apps is that they can either be run online or downloaded to your computer to run if you’re somewhere without an internet connection.

Getting in tune is the first step to any practice session. The online tuner on seventh string is functional but I find the tuning fork to be a lot more useful. In addition to providing tones to tune to, the tuning fork also can act as a drone. Drones can be a great tool for developing melodic ideas in a harmonic context.

The real prize here though is the metronome. I love the old school graphic and the click sound isn’t annoying to me. It also has tap tempo and can move incrementally.

Stopwatch

Working hand in hand with the metronome for timed training is a stop watch. I’ve plenty of hardware versions that are fine. But I really like the numerous variations on the online-stopwatch site. The countdown version is perfect for setting 5-10 minute increments (or longer) and rings when it’s done. There’s a metronome on this site as well – but it doesn’t allow incremental movement.

When practicing mid day – I tend to just open up my log, tune up, set the countdown timer turn on the metronome and work on the first thing on the log list.

The simpler you make a routine – the easier it is to maintain.

Anyways, nothing Earth shattering here – but I hope it helps!

Thanks for reading!

-SC

If you like this post you may also like:

PRACTICE MAKES BETTER AKA PRACTICING PART I

PROPER POSTURE IS REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE – PRACTICING PART II

TENSION AND THE SODA CAN OR PRACTICING PART III

DEFINITIONS AND DOCUMENTS OR PRACTICING PART IV

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PRACTICE WHAT YOU PLAY OR PRACTICING PART V

TESTING YOUR VOCABULARY OR PRACTICING PART VI

POSSESSION IS 9/10S OF THE LAW BUT PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING OR PRACTICING PART VII

Some Useful Online Practice Tools

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FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON

MELVILLE, MADNESS AND PRACTICING – OR FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON PART 2

INSPIRATION VS. INTIMIDATION

What’s wrong with playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” for a world speed record?

I have linked two sample documents for logs below. You could use word or excel, or any basic word processing or spreadsheet application to generate one of these. I haven’t seen an online version of these I like – So I’ll stick with these for now.

PRACTICE LOG (PDF)

Weekly Practice Log (Word)

Two Steps Back Or Setbacks In Project Management

Posted on April 21, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

Recently, I had a substantial graphics setback in one of the GuitArchitecture books that will delay publication by at least 2 months. This is the latest in a series of obstacles that have come about from starting this project, and I thought it might be beneficial to talk about the books in a little more depth and also to talk a little about dealing with setbacks in project management.

When I was at CalArts, I was a TA for Miroslav Tadic. This meant that in addition to grad studies, I was teaching 10 hours a week (all in ½ hour lessons and about an hour of built in lesson prep time). At Berklee, lessons were a fairly straightforward affair – each term had proficiencies and you had to prepare the material you needed for each proficiency over the course of the term. At CalArts, there were no proficiencies per se. Lessons were centered on student interest and what I started seeing as a commonality among guitar majors was an interest in modes, scales, chords and their applications.

Understanding the fingerboard

When I first learned these things – I used CAGED shapes – which really didn’t make a lot of sense to me. What was instilled in me by my teachers during this time was the concept of – you don’t have to understand it – you just have to play it. This also did not make a lot of sense to me.

I realized later on that what my teachers were trying to instill (at least what I hope my teachers were trying to instill) was the concept that you don’t have to understand it – you just have to hear it and get it under your fingers so you can play it. Having said that, if the fingering you have to work with doesn’t make any sense – you’re not going to be able to assimilate or utilize it easily.

While CAGED allows people to connect chords and scale shapes it doesn’t adapt well outside of the major scale. My method breaks all scales into modular shapes that cover the fingerboard in an intuitive way. Instead of twenty-one positional fingerings to cover major, melodic minor and harmonic minor – GuitArchitecture uses seven core fingerings to cover all of these scales. This approach allows players to break out of performance ruts and substantially reduces the need for memorization required to play scales.

In other words, it gets the notes under your fingers faster and in a way that makes sense.

The people who studied with me seemed to get a lot out this approach. When I took a pedagogy class with Susie Allen at CalArts, it made sense to take the material I codified and make a presentation out of it. I pulled 120 pages together pretty quickly and then had the idea that maybe there was a book hidden in these lesson materials that I generated.

Forming the clay

The approach that I use is very straight forward, but where I saw students getting hung up was in the application of the scales (i.e. breaking out of the stock forms and making music). I realized a number of method books had been done – but the majority of these books presented a scale with a 2 sentence explanation and then had 40 licks using the scale. If these happen to be licks from your favorite player, this may work for you – but it’s going to be hard to get people to practice licks for the sake of learning them in the scale.

I decided to go in a different direction from a standard lick book, and create something that would be a combination of instruction and reference. I wanted to create a book that you could get ideas from really quickly to make music – but would have enough depth to be something that readers could go back to over and over again. The first area I decided to tackle in-depth would be the issue of sequences. Here’s lesson 1 in project management:

Build off of past experiences (or go with what you know)

I had never seen any book that took a systematic approach to generating melodic sequences so I decided to work out the permutations to generate all possible unique melodic sequences.

When I wrote my Symmetrical 12 tone book, I used this same process to generate all of the possible 12 tone rows that could be created using symmetrical divisions of the octave (whole tone scale (6 divisions), augmented chord (3 divisions), diminished chord (4 divisions), and tritone (2 divisions). This was extremely helpful in knowing in advance what would be required in terms of mental discipline to generate these ideas. It was also a little daunting as material in the 12 tone book couldn’t be measured in hours or days – it took almost 2 ½ years of constant work from concept to cover. This brings up another important point in project management:

Whenever possible start with the heavy lifting

The reason for this is, as a project drags on – your endurance to complete the project will wear down exponentially to the point where even the slightest bumps in the road will have you questioning whether or not you can finish the project. You need to get whatever really ugly stuff (in terms of work) out of the way while you have the energy to do so. So I decided to start the process of generating all of the patterns and notating them.

Beware of the rope swing

You know those cute graphics of kids grabbing a piece of rope hanging from a tree and swinging into a lake? The story I know about a kid who did this ended differently. In the story I know, the kid was unfamiliar with the lake, swung into the shallow trying to do a flip, landed the wrong way and broke his back. Unless something’s on fire or you’re chased by zombies you should always go into the water before just diving in so you know what you’re getting into. Even knowing that, it’s easy to get into a situation and then get overwhelmed by the enormity of it no matter how well prepared you think you are. This brings up another point.

Be realistic about what you can do

I could have sat down for a week or two straight and probably generated all of the graphics I needed, but there would have been thousands of errors – in something where the tolerance for errors is 0%. Knowing what kind of concentration was required I did no more than 2-3 hours of work in a single sitting. This meant it took a lot longer, but the review process was ultimately easier.

Break up overwhelming things into small chunks

How many of you have seen Bobcat Goldthwait’s Shakes The Clown? Truly worthy of the title of “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown films”, the opening sequence is a fade in to an apartment in squalor. While a record skips in the background, a dog is trying to choke down a full slice of pizza. Project management is like this. If you try to do all things on all frontiers at once, you’re just a dog choking on a slice of pizza in Florence Henderson’s apartment in Shakes The Clown. The key is to have a strong overall view of the project. In doing so, you can identify what else needs to be addressed and work small on multiple fronts as you need to. While working on the graphics, I also started expanding on the modal application idea and applied this same approach to modal arpeggios, modal pentatonics and modal chord voicings (and harmony). In Frankensteining these together I realized that I had a problem but

Contortion doesn’t hurt if you’re limber

When I assembled all of these components – I had about 2,000 pages of material. This was prohibitively expensive to produce and (in that form) something no one would read (much less purchase). If I was dead set on releasing only one volume, I’d be in a lot of trouble – but working with the material I had and creating something new gave me more options.

Projects have a tendency to run wild on their own – so plan on constantly monitoring their growth

The good news was that I did have an overall view of what I was trying to achieve. In reviewing the material, I realized I could severely edit the material and expand some of these areas into five full books on their own:

The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes

The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Melodic Patterns

The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Modal Arpeggios

The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Modal Pentatonics and

The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Chords and Major Modal Harmony.

In the meantime, there was a 6^th book that I was developing, The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration. This book had started as a technical book, but I realized mid way through that the technical issues I wanted to address would be much better served by looking at a video. So I refocused what I had to make it into something useful.

The main modes book would have to be one of the first ones released and I wanted to get the sequences book done at the same time but the Positional Exploration book was the closest one to being done. Working within those parameters, I decided to release these three books this year and then focus on releasing the remaining books at the rate of one a year until I get to the point that I no longer want to read another book much less write one.

Be prepared to go a lot of it on your own

People generally have an aversion to things without proven track records. When people see something new in terms of a project, they typically want to wait and see how it’s going to work out before they get on the bandwagon. Once it gets rolling and other people sing its praises, there’s no shortage of people who will want to lend a hand or be associated with it in some way, but in the beginning expect to spend a lot of money and/or a lot of time to get the skill sets you may be missing to complete your project. Along those lines:

Be ready to make a lot of mistakes

Do you know the story of Thomas Edison and the creation of the light bulb? Apparently Edison tried some 3,000 filaments in creating the light bulb. There was nothing glamorous about this work. It was just shoving a bunch of different things into a light bulb to see what worked the best.

If you’re working on any project there will be multiple points that you are literally in the dark and will have to triage a solution.

When I first came up with the book idea, I wasn’t sure what the layout was going to be and didn’t have the money for a graphic designer. I made some initial design decisions that, once I had enough material together to really get a sense of what the book was going to be, I realized really wouldn’t work. This required a lot of labor to fix so…

Be ready to improvise because you can’t plan for everything

Many solutions are wrong. Unless you’ve done the same project before – there will be countless things that go wrong. Solutions to problems will not always be obvious, easy or desirable. But if you’re flexible and have a strong conviction about what the project will be when it’s done – it will be easier to adapt solutions to the project (or vice versa).

In going though the review stages of the books I realized that there was an entire graphics section I missed. Even being as methodical and meticulous about it as possible, when working on something with this scope you’ll miss things. Fixing this will now set the book back at least 2 months and while it is immensely frustrating – it’s also manageable because I know the books are going to be done this year and along those lines:

Have a deadline or know when you’re done

Deadlines allow you to get things done. I’d write more about this but I’ve already written on it here.

You really can’t do it alone

I am really fortunate in that I had a number of people who were willing to take a look at what I had done and offer feedback. Some of that feedback resulted in me realizing just how much material had to be edited further and/or corrected.

Even with innumerable revisions and examinations – it’s really difficult to catch everything. Even if you can, it’s unlikely that you’ll be objective enough about the project at that point to see all of the angles that other people see when they examine what you’re doing. This might cause a lot of discomfort in realizing that something that you thought was mostly done actually had a ways to go, but in my case, having a stronger book makes it all worthwhile. And this leads to the final point:

The difference between 99% and 100% isn’t always 1% – sometimes it’s 100%

The paradox of most long term projects is that the closer you get to completing the project, the more every instinct in your body will tell you to bail out on it. By the time you get to getting the project to 99% it may take as much energy as you’ve put into the project up to that point to get that final 1%. In the end, the payoff is in the 1%.

I’m bummed about doing a lot of work I’ve already done all over again, but I’m really excited about these books. I don’t think there’s really anything like them and hopefully other people will feel the same way.

I hope this helps with your long term projects!

Thanks for reading.

-SC

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Books:

Keeping Your Ego Out Of The Song’s Way

Posted on March 9, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

Thanks for coming to this page but it’s moved!

You can find it now on Guitagrip.com.

Thanks for dropping by. I hope to see you at guit-a-grip!

Surviving The Gig

Posted on March 4, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had the opportunity to play a lot of different styles of music in a number of bands. In terms of gig referrals, this has pluses and minuses. In the plus category, when someone needs Frisell-ish textural guitar on one tune, post-tonal shred on another and fretless on a third – I’m on a short list of players that people call. On the minus side, for generic guitar needs (“We need a (rock, jazz, blues, etc) guy for this track”, other people who specialize in that type of vibe will often get the call.

If you have a stylized sound you’ll get calls for some gigs, but to keep working, you’ll also need a generic enough skill set that you can cover other things if you have to.

Each band I’ve played in has had different challenges to approaching material, but there are two general points of emphasis I’ve come across. The situations all call for quality, but depending on the quantity, quality may be a very relative term.

How To Learn 110 Songs In 6 Days

Years ago, I had a gig opportunity open up for me when I was living in Boston. A friend of mine on faculty at Berklee gave me a call to see if I wanted to take over what we in Boston called a GB (General Business) gig.

GB gigs are typically weddings, corporate gigs or something similar. The emphasis on these gigs isn’t to make a big spectacle. Your job is to provide some background entertainment and stay out of the way of the function as much as possible.

The gig pay wasn’t great but there was a challenge that I couldn’t pass up. I’d have to learn five one-hour sets of music (110 songs) in a week. The songs were mostly covers (60’s to top 40 in scope), and while I had heard most of them, I didn’t know any of them. There were also at least six originals that I needed to learn as well.

I’ve always liked challenges so I said, “Sure! Let’s see how it goes.” I got through the gig and ended up making money playing with the band for the better part of a year. So here’s what I learned.

Have a game plan. Since the gig was in 6 days time, in reality I needed to learn all of the songs in 5 days and would possibly be able to carve out some time to run trouble spots in the 6^thday. Since some of the songs were ones I had already heard a lot, I worked on the assumption that figuring them out would not take a lot of time.
I started with a plan of getting down 20-30 songs a day (depending on how long it took to learn them.) The gig itself was only 4 hours, but I wanted to at least have gone through all the tunes in case people called them out.

Start with the hardest and/or most unfamiliar tunes first. They’ll be the longest one’s to get into your head (or your fingers) and if you start them first you’ll be able to review them each day while you work on new material.

Top priorities: PRIMARY SONG elements (the key, main riffs, chord progression and song form). Day tripperwon’t fly if no one’s playing the opening riff. The focus here is essentials.Here’s the question to ask when determining essentials. If the tune was being played as a duo with you and a vocalist, would someone recognize the song?

Secondary priorities: Is there a signature solo? Are there specific rhythm parts that you need to copy or will generic voicings do? Are there specific timbral elements unique to the song? If you’re playing Purple Rain, you better have a chorus or a flange and the right rhythm (and voicings) or it ain’t going to fly.

Take notes. There’s no shame in a messy set list. I had crib notes everywhere for the gig. Usually this was just a reminder of what key the song was in and some short notes on progressions on song form
(i.e “song x” –

G (This indicated the key)

unison intro (just a reminder)

3^rd chorus solo.

The point was to just have enough notes to jog my memory about the tune. Unfamiliar tunes had some more detailed notes like chord progressions written in (like a verse or a chorus).

Smaller is better and stay flexible. Tone wise you should have 2-3 primary tones (clean, dirty and lead) that you can tweak to get close to the song. If you have patches for every single tune, it’s going to fall apart. I did this gig with a Pod 2.0, pedal switcher and a fender amp. I never used more than 5 settings. Part of this is to know your sounds and get close rather than perfect. Having said that, this rule changes if you’re in a tribute band. If you’re playing in an Ozzy Tribute band for example, then you better plan on having every tone identical, every lick and every solo note for note. In gigs like this, the goal is to get it close enough that it doesn’t draw attention to what it is, namely a cover band instead of the real thing.

Take lots of breaks. You’re going to need to stay focused for something like this so plan on taking frequent breaks to recharge and come back to it fresh.

Play with good musicians because they will save you. While the music we were playing wasn’t my favorite, the musicians were very good and had the tracks down cold. If everyone knew the tunes at the shallow level that I did, we wouldn’t have played the gig nearly as well as we did. Additionally, since the keyboardist/vocalist and other vocalist knew a ton of tunes, if a request came up and I didn’t know it they could generally do a stripped down version of it as a duo.

Be professional. This is really right next to musicality in importance if you want to gig consistently. People who show up late, drunk, unprepared, or not at all are people I’ve never seen on a stage more than once. Gigs are stressful enough that people don’t want to have to worry about you. Make sure that you’re not part of any problems that come up.

Finally, no one wants to work with a jerk. I don’t care how brilliant a musician you are, it doesn’t mean much if you’re a crappy human being. This doesn’t mean that you have to suppress your strong opinions and kowtow to everyone around you but it does mean that you’re not the only person at any gig and there’s no reason to act that way.

As general advice, what this really speaks to is the depth of which you know (or need to know) something. I saw the movie Rock Band again recently and there’s a funny scene early on in the film where Mark Wahlburg’s character stops a band rehearsal over a small discrepancy in a performance and I laughed because I’ve been in situations where rehearsals stopped because I threw a fret hand slide in somewhere or where days were lost because I was required to match tones exactly. I’ll save that story for another time…

In the meantime – thanks for reading.

-SC