Performance

Many pop songs out there are fond of of the number four. A great example of this is The Flaming Lips's song "Turn it On." The chord progression for the verses is D - A - G - D. Four chords, repeated four times. That is a phrase, which can be analagous to a sentence of words. It's one of those "Ummm duh" kind of things, but the verse phrase is repeated until the chorus in many pop songs. There is repetition, which is why I love using this song to teach people guitar. The question is, "How do I know when the chorus will come?" The answer I believe is in the melody. The melody, in this song as well as many great pop songs (The Beatles were masters at this) will give away when the chorus will come.

Of course, you can count the amount of times a phrase is repeated and then switch when the chorus comes around. This is far from fail-safe because what if you forget? If you are on stage and forget the number of times a verse is repeated, and you are staring at some girl in the front row (true story. It happened to me. Embarassing!), then oops. But if you listen to the melody and hear it set up the chorus, then done. Switch, and then you are awesome.

The cool thing also is that there are even more musical cues, beyond the melody, that help give away all the choruses as well. In "Turn it On," the drums do a great job of setting up the chorus. It's fun to listen to drummers when they are playing in a big band (like Duke Ellington or Count Basie) sort of set up the next section. You can hear these cues too. If the intention of the musicians is to set up the parts, you can hear them. It's one of those nice little things that makes listening to music so enjoyable.

I remember reading a quote about six years ago from a major label executive:

"Did you know that vanilla is the most popular ice cream flavor? It sells more than any other variety. What I do as a major label rep is find the very best vanilla."

I hope you don't feel the same way. I consider vanilla to be pretty boring.

What's the alternative? Well, maybe first admitting that being different is scary. Maybe also admitting that being different may also bring the most rewards eventually. Nobody can say so for sure, but nobody will say that being different is boring.

The moment a person says, "I hate the status quo. I just want to be myself," is the moment I start paying attention to them. It's also the moment that they become far more interesting.

Promise me you won't be like vanilla. Vanilla is pretty boring.

I have been teaching the Beatles' song, "I Should Have Known Better" for about two years now. It wasn't until last week that I made a bit of a misjudgment on the one chord that is the pivot chord between the bridge and chorus/verse sections.

Before last week, I was teaching people that the chord in question is a B Major barre chord. This chord is monstrously difficult to finger [I will be writing more about this chord and it's many finger permutations in a future post]. It turns out that I wasn't listening hard enough. Instead, the Beatles are playing a B7 chord. This is much easier! Whoops. Sorry to everyone I've taught this song to and messed up on. Heh!

There was this one Milonga I went to where I saw people dancing to the Scorpions. I never thought I'd be the one to say it, but there is something a bit weird about dancing to "Hurricane." This doesn't mean that we ought to stay away from seeing how tango fits or translates to other music.

That said, my jaw dropped last Saturday night when dance partners Carlos Cañedo and Anais Haven danced to a waltzy Black Heart Procession song. Wow! Really? Seriously? I couldn't believe that Tango dancers even knew about that band!

Carlos and Anais danced the hell out of that song. In addition, it's really refreshing to me when Tango dancers are nice, down-to-earth, and approachable. I feel like I would make a fool out of myself if I went up and talked to dancers as good as they are (maybe because I enjoy dancing and am not terribly good at it). However, I gathered up my nerve, and went up to them later on to pester them about their song choices. They were quite awesome about it. I'm going to take a private tango lesson with them the next time they come to Austin.

Here is a YouTube video of them dancing to a freaking Fugazi song. That's right: FUGAZI. Carlos and Anais, I have a request: Can you dance to Radiohead's "Morning Bell," the version off of Amnesiac? I'll take whatever I can get though. Carlos Cañedo's tango website address is at the bottom of this post.

http://www.thetangocompany.com

These thoughts came to me recently:

#1

Could it be that the amount of progress a student makes is directly in proportion to how they handle their pissed-off-ed-ness if they can't play it?

#2

Could it be that the best way to inspire the best attitude towards this frustration is to play a song with the student, and ignore them?

The following are three recent examples of this:

Mark Elf is a jazz guitarist in NYC. When I was an undergrad, I cornered him and fired a bunch of questions at him about the music business. The following was one of his memorable quotes:

"Imagine this room to represent the entire amount of money in the music industry. You see those three bread crumbs on the floor in the corner? Those represent Jazz."

Ouch. Was it any better for classical guitar I wondered? Eh, no matter. I got accepted into a really good school, I should be fine, right?

I believe it was either (or both) Seth Godin or Hugh Macleod who said that youth tends to underestimate the competition, and speaking of which there is quite a lot of it in classical guitar. There are lots and lots of people doing the same thing, beating down the same doors. It's pretty hilarious. "Gotta get into Juilliard, gotta practice 50 hours a day. Sacrafice seeing the sun! COFFEE!"

The only way that I personally found to make money playing classical guitar that I could handle was to get a doctorate and get a job teaching at a university, and play shows on the side. Sounds pretty sweet right? I could be a professor, I could have my own library, tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, smoke pipe tobacco and say things like, "I disagree." It's not all roses, especially when considering the student debt. Eastman wasn't a cheap place to go to. Worth it, but not cheap.

But what about touring? The Ying String Quartet started by playing very small community centers, building their base of fans slowly. Eventually, they became a very highly regarded string quartet. They even ended up as the quartet in residence at the Eastman School of Music. Not bad. I like their story, because they really put themselves out there, which brings me to my final point: How many classical guitarists are really putting themselves out there? Are they too afraid of making a mistake?

The ones who are putting themselves out there recognize the trouble they are asking for, and they accept it. They accept the fact that they will not make an assured amount of money until later, when they have notoriety. They will make many mistakes. They will be burned quite a few times. They realize that they have a lot of work to do in their careers that equals or exceeds the amount of work it took them to have gotten where they wanted to be musically. But they do it anyways because they love it. Dan Lippel is one of these guitarists.

Dan and I were in a bar in NYC when we were talking about motivation. Dan said this:

"If during your darkest period of life, where everything is going to total s**t, you still feel as if you can't live without your guitar, then it's obvious what you must do.

I agree.

If you are a classical guitarist, and you want to be up there with the best classical guitarists at least as far as notoriety is concerned, do it. Don't mess around, just do it. Get out there, tour, and expect that people will call you crazy. It will not make sense, it will seem like you are hitting your head against a wall. But if you fight for it, it will come.

Yesterday I brought up the point that melody can come from just playing a chord. When a person creates a melody from an already existing chord, they are able to use whatever part of the scale they would like over it, as long as it sounds good with their ears of course. I think there is yet another way that is just becoming clearer to me, and that is to come up with the melody first.

If you are like everyone, there has been times when you just can't get a melody out of your head. It could be "Like a Virgin" by Madonna. It could be "Wonderwall" by Oasis [this is a great song to sing if you have a different song in your head!]. The point is that the melody is so memorable that you could sing it in the car at the drop-of-a-hat. I have a huge gut feeling that these very singable melodies came first, before there were any chords created for the song.

Try this out:

Take the phrase, "I want to be a lover, I want to be discovered," and hum it in your mind. Randomly put pitches to them. Randomly give one word emphasis over another. After you are singing the same thing over and over, then see if you can put some chords to it.

If you do this, comment back and tell me about your experience!!!

There is something that haunts me about melody. I've pondered how it is that some melodies tend to grab me while others didn't even seem to put a dent in me for years. I liked the melodies and lyrics with weird and interesting words (Jason Molina of Songs; Ohia is great at this), but have stayed away from melodies that wouldn't push me to hum them later. There is something to that which I can't figure out.

How does a person even create a melody? After 18 years of playing guitar and studying music, I still don't know! Melody is just one of the most mysterious things about music to me. It's also the most identifiable variable to the Library of Congress. The copyright office considers melody and lyrics to be the two identifiers as to an assignment of an original composition's copyright. Not chords!

It's how people come up with melody in the first place that boggles me. Is there some magic formula?

Nothing like public displays of creative frustration.

I remember being teased for having a guitar made by Hondo. No, not Honda, but Hondo. They made cheap and weird guitars. By the looks of the photos my Mom sent me, I can guess why I got made fun of. I think it was the braces, or the goofy smile.

Since it was the very first guitar I got, I laughed when a client brought in a Hondo recently. I thought it was awesome. My client's guitar looked like this:

[...]

In a recent lesson, I was hipped to the Rolling Stones song "Dead Flowers." It's a cool song. I usually don't listen to the Stones' music. I guess there were too many years of me being a dish-dog at a Chili's, being forced to listen to horrible classic rock, to even want to put the effort into checking out artists played on those stations. "Dead Flowers" is a cool song.

The chorus of the song is strangely sculptured, which like a Mississippi John Hurt song, tends to bring the listener into the mix again. The chorus as a whole is 24 bars long. There is A to D (a four bar phrase repeated twice), then G to D (again, a four bar phrase each), and one final D - A - G - D at the very last of the chorus (one bar per chord). This is the cap of the song. The effect, at least to me, is like this:

1. The A to D sets up the intensity of the next part
2. The G to D really sets the pace of the chorus, and makes it very very remarkable. The goofy thing was that every time I played this part in the lesson, I felt like there only should be two repetitions instead of three.
3. The D-A-G-D caps the chorus, and sets up the verse sections of the song very nicely.

Again, a nice example of how the song just messes with the listener in a nice way. Sometimes just an odd little thing inserted into a song makes all the difference.