Hope to see you next Wednesday at Mount Tabor Theater, 48th & Hawthorne in Portland, from 8:00PM - 10:00PM!
Building a custom guitar!
I'm going to be building a guitar from this swirl-painted "Ibanez JEM" style guitar body. It is currently being clear-coated, but I'll have it in my possession in about a month. Also getting a JEM-style guitar neck with these gorgeous inlayed pyramids from a luthier in Chicago. Then it will just be a matter of purchasing all the hardware and assembling the instrument. I've wanted to build my own custom guitar for quite a while, and finally it is becoming reality. ;-)
Alien Guitar Secrets, June 19
I'm taking a trip to Orlando Florida to attend both Jemfest X and Steve Vai's "Alien Guitar Secrets" master class on June 19th! It'll be painful wasting almost two whole days traveling across the country and back, but it will be worth it. Just getting to meet Steve Vai will be a real treat, but being instructed by him in his master class is absolutely an opportunity of a lifetime!
If you're a guitarist and are interested in this event, check out his Alien Guitar Secrets info page for general info. You can also buy tickets online.
If you're a guitarist and are interested in this event, check out his Alien Guitar Secrets info page for general info. You can also buy tickets online.
Thoughts on music theory
I heard a fellow guitarist once say this: "What I've found is, sometimes the more that you learn, you can feel a little bit bound by 'this mode only goes with this mode', and 'this thing is supposed to go with that', etc.", and "I was so much more creative before I knew any music theory."
Excuse me?
If you're feeling boxed-in, it is because you're letting yourself feel boxed-in. You're not allowing your knowledge to feed your creativity; instead, you're probably just practicing a scale or two. Before, you were just experimenting and creating crazy stuff which occasionally sounded cool. Now, you're trying to make use your new fretboard knowledge and, unfortunately, you haven't yet learned *enough* of the technical stuff to be really useful musically. Instead, you're now keeping yourself within the boundaries of the few scales you just learned and it is sounding a bit boring. You've taken yourself away from the "playing by ear" method for a little while and it is starting to frustrate you. Where did your creativity go? It is still there, my friends. You just need to continue to broaden your understanding of the ways you can express yourself.
Learning music theory is like learning a new language. The greater your knowledge of vocabulary, the more you can express yourself. I firmly believe that with a strong foundation of fretboard knowledge and music theory in general, you're giving yourself a new freedom of expression; you're opening doors that were closed before. Learn all forms of each scale up and down the entire neck. Learn all positions of all major scale modes. Learn why certain modes agree with major and minor chord tonalities. Spend time learning various techniques on the fretboard that you've not learned before. Listen to and play various styles of music. Pretty soon, you've created in your head an amalgamation of music that you will draw from when you're trying to express yourself musically.
And then, you can look back at any of the "cool" things you had ever played before your had this knowledge and recognize exactly what you were doing and why it sounded cool. It is the process of understanding what you are playing, versus just playing. When you do have an understanding of what you're playing, you then can transpose that into another key, across different strings, and in a completely different neck position, and still know exactly what you're doing.
You don't just learn fingering patterns in a box.. You actually start to form the mental pictures of the way modes are inside the major scale at different starting points. Instead of just learning C# Phrygian at a certain spot on the neck, you actually hear that you're playing the A-major scale, but starting at the third scale degree. The old trick of playing by "ear" before is actually now starting to help you hear these relationships between modes and their parent scale.
The spark of creativity is showing up as you're now inventing your own new riffs inside of the various scales and modes that you've learned, and pretty soon, you're not feeling bound by music theory and your new knowledge, you're instead feeling completely liberated! You're learning more vocabulary, just like in a language.
Boxed-in because you've learned more about music theory? Nonsense. Boxed-in, for me, would be learning pentatonic-minor and only ever applying it to a 12-bar I-IV-V progression. If you can find your way out of that rut, and you'll find there's a whole musical world out there awaiting you.
Excuse me?
If you're feeling boxed-in, it is because you're letting yourself feel boxed-in. You're not allowing your knowledge to feed your creativity; instead, you're probably just practicing a scale or two. Before, you were just experimenting and creating crazy stuff which occasionally sounded cool. Now, you're trying to make use your new fretboard knowledge and, unfortunately, you haven't yet learned *enough* of the technical stuff to be really useful musically. Instead, you're now keeping yourself within the boundaries of the few scales you just learned and it is sounding a bit boring. You've taken yourself away from the "playing by ear" method for a little while and it is starting to frustrate you. Where did your creativity go? It is still there, my friends. You just need to continue to broaden your understanding of the ways you can express yourself.
Learning music theory is like learning a new language. The greater your knowledge of vocabulary, the more you can express yourself. I firmly believe that with a strong foundation of fretboard knowledge and music theory in general, you're giving yourself a new freedom of expression; you're opening doors that were closed before. Learn all forms of each scale up and down the entire neck. Learn all positions of all major scale modes. Learn why certain modes agree with major and minor chord tonalities. Spend time learning various techniques on the fretboard that you've not learned before. Listen to and play various styles of music. Pretty soon, you've created in your head an amalgamation of music that you will draw from when you're trying to express yourself musically.
And then, you can look back at any of the "cool" things you had ever played before your had this knowledge and recognize exactly what you were doing and why it sounded cool. It is the process of understanding what you are playing, versus just playing. When you do have an understanding of what you're playing, you then can transpose that into another key, across different strings, and in a completely different neck position, and still know exactly what you're doing.
You don't just learn fingering patterns in a box.. You actually start to form the mental pictures of the way modes are inside the major scale at different starting points. Instead of just learning C# Phrygian at a certain spot on the neck, you actually hear that you're playing the A-major scale, but starting at the third scale degree. The old trick of playing by "ear" before is actually now starting to help you hear these relationships between modes and their parent scale.
The spark of creativity is showing up as you're now inventing your own new riffs inside of the various scales and modes that you've learned, and pretty soon, you're not feeling bound by music theory and your new knowledge, you're instead feeling completely liberated! You're learning more vocabulary, just like in a language.
Boxed-in because you've learned more about music theory? Nonsense. Boxed-in, for me, would be learning pentatonic-minor and only ever applying it to a 12-bar I-IV-V progression. If you can find your way out of that rut, and you'll find there's a whole musical world out there awaiting you.