Reinventing civilization

I just read an email from the mom of one of my young harp students. This girl has re-invented the wheel, and I think I helped or at the very least failed to hinder.

We'd had a fun lesson on the basics -- the strings are named after the alphabet, they make the sound of a scale, you can easily find tunes you recognize (like Twinkle Twinkle) and you can also make up your own tunes. I showed her how people usually first learn to play with one finger on each hand, left right, left right; then two fingers; then three, and finally all four (except the pinkie). I showed how our eventual goal was to play with both hands. We improvised, we tuned, we had low-key harp fun. We did not open a book, even to chapter one.

Her mom's email says that while playing Brian Boru's March for a friend, the little harp beginner "figured out the two-hands thing". This is a bright, playful child. She has an auntie who is a harp player (thanks for the referral, Laurie!) so she's seen the harp played up close, many times. She has two hands and ten fingers and a harp from her aunt. All I had to do was make suggestions and she came up with the same solution arrived at by other harp players through the centuries.

I have two tracks in mind for her upcoming lessons. One track is to continue to tease her into discovering music through her own creativity and curiosity. The other is to help her see what has been discovered by harp players who have come before, so she doesn't have to do it all herself.

Here would be an interesting experiment: Leave a bunch of kids and a bunch of harps (or flutes, or harmonicas, or mandolins) alone together with no other means of diversion or entertainment. After a while, see what kind of music they've discovered. Don't judge the music according to our cultural standards -- simply listen to it and experience it. A campfire might help. Dancing is encouraged.

Gently Weeping, and I Do Know Why-y-y

Because I specialize in teaching acoustic roots musics, I rarely see a student with a red Stratocaster. Yet, here he is, home from college for the summer. And despite his demographic profile, he 's not interested only in rock. He's curious about how the guitar and music work. He sees it as much as a social tool as musical tool.

And so naturally I gave him a ukulele lesson and sent him home with my loaner uke. We watched the Jake Shimabukuro video that launched a thousand new uke players, and also watched a George Harrison version, just to assure him that this was, indeed, a cool song.

Do I want to convert him to uke? There are little strat-shaped ukes available in all the groovy rock n' roll hues, so it could be socially acceptable in his New York college world. No, it's more like I want to convert him into a musician. Things like barre chords and blues scales were getting a little tense and intimidating; so I'm sending him on a little musical vacation. The same skills used for strumming and chording and plucking uke will transfer over to guitar without him ever suspecting I've tricked him. Oh wait. I gave him this blog URL . . .

Scruggs, punk and theramin

How can teaching music be a lot like practicing veterinary medicine? When a student presents me with such impossibly fractured musical tastes that I have to switch from one instrument to another unrelated instrument in the course of an hour. And I'm not talking about going from dog to cat. Last week I think I did the musical equivalent of switching from bird to jellyfish -- maybe even from griffin to jellyfish! Just what bizarre things was I asked to teach?

Drum roll, please.
(d r r r r r r. . .)

I taught both punk-style five-string banjo and beginning theremin. All in one lesson!
(rim shot!)

Most of you reading this probably know that punk music and five-string banjo inhabit totally separate worlds, so you can imagine that punk music on banjo is a pretty odd stylistic hybrid. Most of you don't (yet) know what a theremin is, so I'll wait while you watch a classic video.

(tick tick tick tick DING.)

My student, a 20-something young guy, is passionate about raw forms of early rock, listens to Earl Scruggs and plays drums in punk bands. Combining punk with banjo is culturally natural for him, and I was up for the genre-bending challenge. We worked with a MySpace video which featured blistering 5-string banjo played by some punk who has obviously spent time woodshedding with bluegrass records. Since we have been working on the first break of Foggy Mountain Breakdown, I had only to adapt a few licks, tab them out and then jot out the chords for the crashy, punky strumming parts.

Our banjo mission accomplished, we went into overtime. By some bizarre coincidence I had just started dabbling with theremin when this same student said he was interested in it. So of course I had to bring it to my studio and help him discover it.

We've all heard the sound of the theremin in early sci-fi movies. I saw one, a peculiar pointy-headed desk with protruding antennae, at my recent commercial studio gig. (I get a studio gig about once per decade, so don't be too impressed.) Soon thereafter I recognized a theremin on the cover of a documentary film I found while scanning the shelves at Blockbuster. After pizza, beer and the video, husband Greg was googling theremins. The basic one costs only a few pizza equivalents (and in terms of ski vacation equivalents it was a screaming bargain!) so we decided to add it to our instrument collection.

A quick disclaimer here: I do not actually play theremin. I merely play with Greg's basic Moog model. Fortunately the cheap one is flat on top, enabling me to keep my wee dram glass within easy reach while trying to learn it.

I am humbled by this bizarre instrument. I cannot believe how hard it is to make musical sounds come out of it by waving your hands in the air near its antennae. All I could really do for my student was demonstrate my own limited playing, show him a Clara Rockmore video, help him play something like a scale, and encourage him to pursue it.

It's fun to experiment with this instrument that seems so odd it might as well be a species from some other planet. Theremin is reminding me how hard it can be for a new music learner, and that is making me a better teacher. And it makes punk banjo seem almost as normal as a cat or dog, come to think of it.

Pizza Equivalents and Dulcimers

That's my dulcimer, right above here.

Speaking of dulcimers, this question occurs to me: Why don't you have one? They cost relatively few pizza equivalents. The are charming and easy to play. You would love one and quickly learn to make beautiful music on it!

Wait. I hear you ask, "What's a pizza equivalent", and I see you in my mind's eye doing a double-take on that unfamiliar term.

Pizza equivalents are approximate monetary units. A small pizza might be $10, but a big one can be $20. The variance in amount is less important than the reality that few of us think very hard before peeling off a bill or two to pay for a pizza. Two tens, maybe a ten and a fiver, it doesn't much matter. We get a pizza, eat it, and go on with life. I'm happy after I eat a pizza, and I never miss the money.

You can get a pretty nice dulcimer for about 15 pizza equivalents. Minimally acceptable guitars start at around 25 or 30 PEs, so dulcimers are a relative bargain. Learning beginning tunes is only marginally harder than eating a pizza. So then we could have pizza IQ units, too. Passively watching TV takes fewer PIQs than does playing the banjo or reading Ulysses or washing the dishes. Getting started with dulcimer is much simpler than learning many other fretted instruments, so it's a mental bargain, too.

We Californians are dulcimarily disadvantaged because very few people here play the music of Appalachia on any instrument. Our unique surf guitar legacy is scant compensation. Perhaps if more of us loosed the dulcimer's sweet voice on our world it could help, in a matter vs. anti-matter way, to neutralize the horrible booming and thumping of megawatt car stereos and the roar of thousands of cars grinding along the freeways and the incessant, insistent beeping of every machine we share our lives with.

Put your pizza money in a jar a few times, and then buy a dulcimer with what you've managed to save. You don't have to think too hard about it. You will hardly miss the money or the calories.

Dulcimer DADGAD, eegads.

The Southern California Dulcimer Heritage festival is coming up this Fall, right here in Dana Point. It's a pocket-sized festival because there is very, very little dulcimer culture here in Southern California. But the festival organizers and participants are passionate and if you come, you'll grow in your dulcimerity.

I'm honored once again to be asked to teach. I'm tending toward a class on a dulcimer equivalent of the DADGAD guitar tuning. I am looking for a very different topic from my classes of previous years. I almost always play in three-string format, which is actually four strings treated as three, with one course a doubled pair. Since I am totally hip and with-it, all my dulcimers are set up with extra grooves in the nut for playing in four-equidistant spacing. I moved my strings into the equally spaced notches, and as I puzzled on what to teach, I thought fondly of DADGAD on guitar and how it can inspire wonderful free and improvisational playing.

At this point I'm only messing around with it. On dulcimer it's just DAGD. Or DGAD. Not nearly as pronounceable as DADGAD. It's pretty fun and makes beautiful sounds -- lots of suspended chords and ambiguity. The next step is convincing festival planners that this class will be a good thing for attendees; that they won't merely be paying me to sit and play spacey improvisations for an hour. (It will be me teaching other players to make spacey music, ha ha ha.) I'll have to convince myself first.

This C walks into a barre . . .

Imagine that. I wrote my previous post with suggestions for learning barre chords, and what do I find when I open my new issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine? Yup, a story on how to learn barre chords. If you read the magazine version, you'll get more information than I give in my little quickie. But as very often happens with me, I've turned the idea upside down or backwards.

Repetition, repetition, repetition is the way our hands learn chords. For example, most beginners try to learn a C major chord by placing first the index, then the middle, and finally the ring finger. After putting them down 1-2-3 for weeks, it's maddening when all three fingers still won't snap down all at once. And yet that's what the fingers have patiently been taught: To press down one at a time. I suggest to students that they reverse the order, and instead go from ring to middle to index. Shake up the neural pathways. Go through the permutations, one at a time, two at a time, the goal being to smack all three digits down at once. Try varied approaches. Learn to recognize what works.

My suggestion to try starting barre chords (see previous post, below) not with the index as a bar, but with the other fingers as a chord shape, approaches training the hand in a similarly inverted way. The left hand has to learn two independent zones: The index across all strings at a certain fret, and the three other fingers in front of it, usually in an E or A shape. Finger independence and finger inter-dependence.

Try this four-beat exercise:
1. Form and play a normal E major chord.
2. Finger the E chord using middle, ring and pinkie -- no index.
3. Keeping those fingers on the strings, relax your grip and scoot up to frets 4 and 5.
4. Drop your index finger down, forming the full barre form.

If you say "one and two and three and four and", the numbers can be the squeeze, the ands can be the release. Repeat the sequence a few times and rest. Then do it again.

The idea I want to stress is that you can learn to see your hands as I do, from my teaching chair. What is working? What is not? How else can you approach the problem? Try something different for the sake of getting a fresh perspective. There is more than one way to skin a C chord. Or a Bm, for that matter.

Another thought: If you're really struggling with barre chords, put on a set of really skinny strings for a while. They might sound too wimpy for you, or your action might buzz a little, but they will be very easy to press down while your left hand gains confidence. After a couple of weeks, go back to your normal strings (I'm a D'Addario EJ16 fan, myself), trusting that you'll adapt.

Barre exam and nagging

Please don't get the idea from my previous post that I always teach people to fret with only the left index finger. Some folks need permission to do that for a day or a week, or even forever. But I do indeed spend a lot of time helping "intermediate" level players improve their fretting and chording hand.

The recurring problems?

First by a mile is the habit of placing the finger way back from the fret. That means the string is not held firmly against the fret, and a razzing is what we hear. For most players I think this is a matter of awareness, like closing your mouth when you eat. (Where did I get that?) I can do little but nag in those cases, but after a while that seems to work! Naturally, some knuckle-busting chords make it hard to get each finger close to its respective fret. If this is your problem (whether or not I've been personally nagging you), decide you won't do it anymore. Refuse to accept that bad tone. Get a little mad. It's easier than sticking to that new diet!

Second has to be difficulty getting started with barre chords. I had a horrible time as a kid. I would do anything to keep from playing an F chord (maybe that's why I learned very early how to transpose keys). Everyone learns differently, but I have a hint I can share here that seems to help most students. Before mashing your index finger down at the first fret and then trying to assemble the rest of the F chord in front of it, all the while squeezing like crazy, try this:

Pretend you have a band-aid on your index finger (a blister from trying to strangle your guitar?) and can't use it. Play all your songs using E and A and D chords, and don't use the index at all. After a few days those "new" chord shapes will seem familiar to your hand. Then try making an E shape with your new, non-index fingering somewhere up near the 5th fret. Comfy? Good. Lay your idle index finger behind (forming a whole barre chord), and give a squeeze. Since you're several frets up from the nut, the strings will be easier to push down. Practice moving from the E shape in front of your barre, to the Am shape (it's the same finger shape moved sideways); do it at a bunch of different frets. Rest your hand and do it some more. Get a little dish of m&m's candies, and give yourself a treat when you do it right. Yum!