Revelations Whilst Learning

IKnowALittle

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Apr 27, 2014
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Gigged tonite as usual. Some woman liked me and kept buying me beer. Normally I don't indulge, just felt like it tonite. No "lucky", home alone, a little bit drunk.

Seems to be a lot of different skill levels on the forum. This may be totally pointless, but I thought it might be useful for the "vets" to recount instances in their learning curve that were transcendental, might help other guys.

This is going to be a bit of a story so bear with me (or not). I started playing guitar at 13. I have very few memories that are etched in my mind, but this is one. The first time I held a guitar, it just felt so right. IDK, it's never dissipated.I knew then that I was going to play and be the best that I could be. I also took piano lessons from age 8 to 16 to appease my mom. Never really liked it, but did ok. The first band I played in at 15, I mostly played keyboards and some guitar. I've been playin' for 30 years, thousands of hours and thousands of gigs. Even after all these years, every time I pick up the guitar I get that little rush, kinda "tingly."

Anyway, on to the revelation. Until I was 17 or so I played stuff. Was ok, but it was by rote, had no idea of the theory or the reason it worked. I knew barre chords and power chords but never really understood . My dad, who was a very accomplished guitarist tried to explain, but I just never clued in. Then one day in November 1987, close to my birthday, I suddenly "got it", a "lightbulb moment" and it became crystal clear. The revelation is very rudimentary but it changed everything for me.

I realized that barre chords were just moving up the neck and using your first finger as the nut. Suddenly, the fretboard made perfect sense and I understood the movement of chords, scales and the "blues box." Not to say there isn't anything else to learn ... always learning.

Very valuable.
 
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I can't think of a specific time like that while learning really. I do remember taking a lesson with an "ace" guitarist in our area where he showed me the pentatonic minor scale in A and showed me improv soloing over "Keep You Hands To Yourself". We'd switch off back and forth playing rhythm and lead. He extended "the box" on the next lesson. Over the course of a few lessons, he showed me how everything connected up and down the fretboard first in pentatonic form, later into full modes. I should go back and exercise some of the theory knowledge of all that stuff that I've forgotten. Not using it constantly makes the details all foggy. I use it everyday, just not verbalizing it.
 
Hmm...three things come to mind.
First: I started on a guitar that was terribly unstable from a tuning point of view, so I got quite good at playing a melody on one string.
Second: I don't pick especially fast so compensated by playing notes without picking - hammers and pulloffs let me play twice as fast as I could pick.
Third: this was much later coming, but with a bit of help from a punishing book by Ted Greene I developed a decent understanding of chromatic chords. It makes it much easier for someone who couldn't be bothered learning a bunch of chords to come up with a melodic transition.
 
The best thing I remember stumbling across was when I was learning scales and modes. I found that if I memorized the patterns (across all six strings) for E Phrygian, A Aeolian, and D Dorian, I effectively learned all of the notes of the other scales and modes. So I spent time practicing those and memorized their shapes, and then when it came time to learn the others all I had to do was to connect the dots (so to speak) in-between them.

Once I had that down, anything like pentatonic, augmented/diminished, and harmonic minor was just a matter of removing, adding, or shifting a note within those patterns. It made it easier to "see" them in my mind.

And when learning new material or jamming out, once I find my "center" of where natural minor (aeolian) is, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump, from knowing where I'm at in a song.

It was like cheating on musical theory... considering I was a lazy student and all I cared about was learning to play guitar solos... it's worked for me.
 
Hmm...three things come to mind.
First: I started on a guitar that was terribly unstable from a tuning point of view, so I got quite good at playing a melody on one string.
Second: I don't pick especially fast so compensated by playing notes without picking - hammers and pulloffs let me play twice as fast as I could pick.
Third: this was much later coming, but with a bit of help from a punishing book by Ted Greene I developed a decent understanding of chromatic chords. It makes it much easier for someone who couldn't be bothered learning a bunch of chords to come up with a melodic transition.

I remember that Ted Greene book. Incredibly detailed and knowledgeable. I did a little, but mostly way to much for me.
If you worked thru that and assimilated any into your playing ... high five ... that's dedication.
And he was Canadian ... hey, I like my country also.
 
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My first real memory is learning bar chords. That opened up a whole new world for me. I could make my guitar sound similar to a lot of the rock and metal songs I grew up with in the 70's. "I Love Rock and Roll" had just came out and I started playing along with it, along with all these other songs I hadn't been able to figure out the chords for.
 
When i realized that the 5th fret on the E string and the open A string were the same notes i lost my ****.
 
When I was growing up there was a lot of punk and fast downstroke power chord rock going on. Most of my friends played this way too and never really developed any nuance in their picking hand. I recall my uncle telling me that the right hand is just as or more important than the left hand. Mastering the right hand technique has been my starting point whenever learning something new and it's the reason I've been able to sound like myself no matter what guitar or amp I'm playing through.
 
When I was growing up there was a lot of punk and fast downstroke power chord rock going on. Most of my friends played this way too and never really developed any nuance in their picking hand. I recall my uncle telling me that the right hand is just as or more important than the left hand. Mastering the right hand technique has been my starting point whenever learning something new and it's the reason I've been able to sound like myself no matter what guitar or amp I'm playing through.
Agreed.

My right hand is what makes things interesting...though maybe just to me.
 
When I was growing up there was a lot of punk and fast downstroke power chord rock going on. Most of my friends played this way too and never really developed any nuance in their picking hand. I recall my uncle telling me that the right hand is just as or more important than the left hand. Mastering the right hand technique has been my starting point whenever learning something new and it's the reason I've been able to sound like myself no matter what guitar or amp I'm playing through.

When I was younger someone told me that Eddie Van Halen would create overdrive by hitting the strings really hard... so, I smashed the motherf****** s*** out of those G** d*** stings. My goal was to machine-gun downstrokes like Hetfield.

About two years ago I started to pick lighter, turned up the gain, and moved to a lighter gauge pick. My playing has become a lot more melodic IMO.... although I still like being about to blast out downstrokes at about a million BPM.
 
Second: I don't pick especially fast so compensated by playing notes without picking - hammers and pulloffs let me play twice as fast as I could pick.

I was like this for a while. Then I discovered alternate picking. From that point on, my right hand has openly mocked my left hand, chiding it to keep up.
 
For me, it wasn't one moment necessarily, but the culmination of several. I started off on the easy stuff, like a lot of people. Kiss, AC/DC... learned those songs so easily that I thought I was "good" when I first started playing. LOL But then I started playing Ted Nugent and Led Zeppelin and the bar, especially for solos got higher. But in just a few weeks, I could play all my Nugent and Zeppelin albums. Then Hendrix and Trower. Very different trying to play the last two, and I had to learn "feel and emotion" more than technical stuff. The playing of both styles I think was my first big breakthrough.

Then VH1 came out. I was blown away. I could play every song off the album one week in, (except one). Two weeks in, I had all the solos down. The one of course that completely stumped me, was Eruption. I tried and tried and just could not figure out how he played those notes. It was literally 2 months later and I was still trying to play it, when I saw him on TV and saw him tapping. It took me a couple days, but once I saw what he was doing, my life was changed. Within a few days, I could play it and I thought I was a total bad a$$. :) Of course, I was 18, so, you know... LOL.

Then I got into DiMeola. Well that was totally different. All this hammer-on, pull-off stuff allowed me to play really fast without really having a great right hand. DiMeola not only picked ever note, he even did it on ACOUSTIC! :eek: I loved it. But WOW was it hard. Then you truly have to develope precision between both hands. To play machine gun fast and picking every note, jumping strings, running scales... again, DiMeola just blew me away. Trying to learn it on acoustic actually helped, even though I had a guitar made for it. I got an 84 Ovation Collectors Series acoustic and aside form the heavy strings, it played like an electric. Rounder fretboard radius and lower action. Made to rip. I learned to play that style, learned a bunch of his songs, and that was the next big step.

I think a lot of this has to do with what kind of player you want to be. To me, I always wanted to be able to play anything I heard and liked. Not just one style, necessarily. I always felt I did ok with the "play anything you hear" goal. Until Holdsworth! Forget that! No human can do that!!!

Edit to say: Not trying to brag or whatever. I'm just trying to describe the biggest breakthroughs in my playing, per the thread topic. Hope it didn't come off that way. (I'm not 18 anymore! :))
 
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The greatest guitaristic decision I made, get rid of that acoustic after 3 days and buy an electric. Never regreted it since, never posessed an acoustic either ;)
 
When I was growing up there was a lot of punk and fast downstroke power chord rock going on. Most of my friends played this way too and never really developed any nuance in their picking hand. I recall my uncle telling me that the right hand is just as or more important than the left hand. Mastering the right hand technique has been my starting point whenever learning something new and it's the reason I've been able to sound like myself no matter what guitar or amp I'm playing through.
As they say, "The left hand is the mechanic & the right hand makes the music"!
 
Two breakthrough moments for me
1. Learning how to use fingers instead of a pick
2. Being able to see chord forms all over the neck when soloing (in addition to scales)
 
The best thing I remember stumbling across was when I was learning scales and modes. I found that if I memorized the patterns (across all six strings) for E Phrygian, A Aeolian, and D Dorian, I effectively learned all of the notes of the other scales and modes. So I spent time practicing those and memorized their shapes, and then when it came time to learn the others all I had to do was to connect the dots (so to speak) in-between them.

Once I had that down, anything like pentatonic, augmented/diminished, and harmonic minor was just a matter of removing, adding, or shifting a note within those patterns. It made it easier to "see" them in my mind.

And when learning new material or jamming out, once I find my "center" of where natural minor (aeolian) is, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump, from knowing where I'm at in a song.

It was like cheating on musical theory... considering I was a lazy student and all I cared about was learning to play guitar solos... it's worked for me.
We think alike when it comes to cheating on musical theory!
 
Two breakthrough moments for me
1. Learning how to use fingers instead of a pick
2. Being able to see chord forms all over the neck when soloing (in addition to scales)

I still haven't learned how (really) to finger pick. I did it one time out of emergency (one week before we were to play a song live, the other guitarist had to leave the town on business. I was playing leads and melodies over his finger picking the main chords of the song. I had do drop my part and do his, or pull out on performing the song. I learned his parts, played it, and haven't really dont it since).
I wish I could! I see Doyle Dykes play and just think "man, that is a real musician! I wish I could do that!"

Another point: I still play almost all by ear. I can read chords but don't. Once I learn a song, watching music slows me down. So the funny thing about starting out as a classical pianist when I was young, is that I can't "really" even read music on guitar. When you start talking "theory" and so forth, my eyes glaze over. I can play stuff (don't laugh) and don't know "what" I"m playing, such as a Sus2 or whatever. Example, I'm a well known Rush freak and Lifeson always played a very different style of chords than most other players I was listing too and playing. I learned to play them, but didn't even know what they were called or the "theory" behind it. Just that they were one of my favorite bands, sounded awesome and I loved playing them.

To this day, I rarely ever look at tab or written out music, unless I can't figure something out, which is normally pretty rare or weird. Like The Rain Song. I LOVED that song from day one and could never figure out how to play it even though it didn't sound "hard." Only when I looked at the music that a friend had copied and saw the TOTALLY whacked out tuning it used... then I put my GS Mini in that tuning and left it for 6 months so I could play that song over and over to make up for all the years I couldn't! LOL.
 
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