Friday, March 16, 2012

The Beginner´s Best Musical Tool



No, it´s not your guitar. It´s not your guitar mags.  It´s not scales or modes, great as they are. It´s not even music theory. What is this magical tool then, you´ll be asking?  And how am I supposed to be able to afford it?


The guitarist´s best tool!
Here´s the good news.
It´s cheap.
It´s widely available.
It´s the simple cotton bud.



Come again?



The cotton bud! 
Because the first thing a musician has to do is clean out his or her ears!


Your ears are essential for the simplest of reasons (the amazing Evelyn Glennie excepted).
If you can´t hear it, you can´t play it. 


But by "hearing" I mean every, single note.



I so got what it takes to rock!


Think of the many songs you can sing along to with ease.  Most people can do this.  But can you hear each individual note exactly as it was sung on the recording? Most people can´t.  If you can, keep it up, because it's the most important thing you´ll ever do in your musical life.



Let me explain.


Our ears are very limited when it comes to hearing multiple musical strands all at once. Our ears like to focus on the main thing, like the melody or the guitar solo. Everything else in the given piece of music becomes the background. 

Yet the background is every bit as important as the melody, sometimes even more so.



Imagine you´re sitting in a noisy pub having a conversation with a friend. People are shouting in the background, the jukebox is playing and maybe somebody´s practicing some impromptu cosmetic surgery with a broken bottle without the luxury of anaesthetic.

But you're focused on what you're friend is saying and the noise in the background just adds to the atmosphere.  If the pub was empty, you´d probably go somewhere else.  And if someone shouted your name (or “duck"!) you´d turn around to see who it was. Or duck.


No, I said you were a DUCKING duck,
clean your ears out, will you?


Now let's “put this to music” and see what's happening. The melody - your friend´s conversation - is the most prominent part of the music and the backing is the atmosphere.

Simply put, without the atmosphere, melody doesn't say very much. And if something in the music jumps out at you from the speakers (like “somebody phone the polis!") your ears decide that this is the most important thing.

Why? 

Because it's louder and takes precedence over anything else in the music at that moment. That´s how your ears work and this is very unhelpful if you want to be a musician.



What d´ya mean, my arse is perfectly clean!



My advice is not to spend hours practicing scale shapes all over the fingerboard if you can't make music with the ones that you already know.

And guitar magazines, however helpful, usually condense a year´s study onto one page and give the impression you should learn it all in a week.  They also force feed the idea that the best technique is the fastest.  This is rubbish. Tone, vibrato, string bending and note choice are the most important factors in playing great guitar.


To be a musician, you have to hear everything. 




Hear,  I said!  Get yourself a packet of cotton buds, for chrissake´s!

You have to HEAR ALL THE SOUND.  So do the following:

  • Listen to as many great players as possible and absorb ALL their sounds
  • Hum guitar parts - licks, melodies, solos and fills, etc., as accurately as possible till you recognise ALL the kinds of sounds players make
  • Listen to how guitarists play notes then bend them, or make them wobble (vibrato)
  • Train your ears by listening until you can mimic ALL the sounds you hear

Do this and you´ll definitely be... a budding guitarist! 













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