What Sound Are You Going For? Who's Sound Do You Want?

In a previous email we discussed playing the comparison game between yourself and other players and how detrimental it can be to your learning process.  Today we are going to learn how to properly learn from other players. In order to do that, understand this: Every one of your guitar heroes has their own guitar heroes and influences, yet, they don't play exactly like them. Instead, they have formed their own style based around their guitar heroes and influences which is the style that you have come to know and love about them.  So now, the question is:  How do YOU do that?

The answer is actually very simple. It's in the comparison game lesson. Don't try to BE them. You don't have to learn every song they have ever played on or every lick they have ever played.

So what do you learn?  Learn their articulation. 

Their articulation is the way they play something. The sound, speed, syncopation, note choice, and note volume all correspond with their inner rhythm and inner creativity. All those elements can be learned by listening. They can immediately be applied to the things you are capable of playing currently. They can enhance what is already there as well as form new ways of playing. You do not have to learn any of their licks or songs to learn their articulation. The articulation isn't the lick or song itself.  The articulation is the Sound.  It is the Expression they play with.  

They use all the same techniques and notes that are available to you.  They strum an E chord like you do. 

Here's great exercise to learn this concept: Write down the names of your top five guitar heroes. Then write one or two words that describe what you love about their playing.  Once you do that, go listen to a few recordings of theirs.  Listen to a chorus or a solo or an intro to a song and listen for those elements that you wrote down. Then take your guitar and play something that you know how to play but try to play it using their articulation or, in other words, play the things you know but try to sound like them.  Listen to the way they strum a chord, or the simplicity of a rhythm part they play, or the note volume in verse fills, etc. and then apply that to your own playing. 

Like I said before,  this can be acquired by listening, which means you can practice anywhere at any time.  You will come to find that a lot of your ability comes through osmosis. That is a fancy way of saying you surround yourself with great players and great music and you absorb it into your mind.  You may find yourself playing something and not even know where it came from. You might play some ideas that you know for sure you never spent time on learning yet you are able to play them.  The way that happens is that you have listened to so much music or you have listened to the same song so many times that you have it stuck in your head and it pops up one day in your playing.  You may not have learned the whole song but you did learn a part that stood out to you and now you can apply the same idea to other concepts.

One thing you definitely should not do is to get so enamored with their playing that you get the thought in your head that you will never be able to play at the level. That is simply just not true! You may not be able to play exactly like them but that does not mean you can't play at the same level that they do.  Look at it this way, all them are your guitar heroes yet none of them play alike.  You will be surprised how fast new ideas start to come out in your playing once you start applying articulation.

Here are my top 10:  (There are a lot more than this)

Jason Jordan - Fearless, Fluid

Brent Mason - Clean, Creative

James Mitchell - Outside, Tone

J.T. Corenflos - Edgy, Passionate

Bryan Sutton - Creative, Fluid

Joel Key - Wise, Intuitive

Scotty Sanders - Leader, Flexible

Jake Workman - Technical, Clean

Tim Galloway - Consistent, Flexible

Jamie Michaels - Memory, Sculptor

The main point of this article is for you to understand that it is absolutely pointless to compare yourself to other players and that the way you make true growth is by developing your own technique. Learning articulation from listening to other players is a major part of technique because it helps develop your musical intuition.  That intuition is how you approach music at any given moment and the articulation is how you come up with and piece together musical sentences to form a complete story.  

  Especially as a beginner, learning the guitar mostly revolves around physical technique and is mostly just memorizing some basic information, but pure, physical technique can only take you so far.  To go beyond, into the more advanced areas of music, requires that you develop your mental technique, which comes from being a good listener of music.  By that, I mean two things:  One is being a student of music and listening to great players and lots of music, the other is to be able to listen critically when you are in a live band situation, or even more so, a recording situation and to contribute to the musical story that is being told around you.

Mental technique is the way you train your awareness of music and of the instrument.  It is how you develop endurance and consistency in your playing to be able to play for long periods of time.  A good example of what I’m talking about is when you hear a bluegrass guitar player flatpick a fiddle tune or a solo jazz guitar player play a jazz piece and keep a consistent tempo.  Even if he makes a mistake, you won’t hear it or notice it because his inner sense of rhythm and melody is so strong that it sounds like he meant to play what he actually played.

So what is a good way to start to train part of this mental technique?  Sure you can learn a song and learn the ins and outs of the piece but there is more to music than that.  A good way to train mental technique is to create based on everything you already know, but to limit yourself to just a few concepts.  Let’s take it in steps:

1. Turn on a metronome and set anywhere from 80-120 BPM.
2. Pick a key and two or three chords.  Ex.  Key: E  Chords E and A or E, A, and B.
3. Start playing rhythm along with the metronome and then start to create a melody around those chord changes.  Form musical sentences without losing the groove and see how long you can hold to the groove.  When you feel like you have run out of ideas, start playing rhythm again without losing the groove until you come up with a few new ideas.

That exercise is a lot like training yourself to run long distances.  The more you do it, the more endurance you will build.  Remember what we have also said!!!  Train like an Athlete!