As I’ve mentioned many times before on sknoblog, I’ve been more or less learning the guitar for the past few years. When I say more or less, I mean that I haven’t been doing it systematically and super-seriously, but I have actually been learning the instrument, and learning how to play old or new songs on it.
But let me backtrack a little. During all my musical life, I’ve always followed the same pattern. Write some music, i.e., hear a cool melody in my mind’s ear. Barely learn how to play the new piece, and cheat as much as possible by using Midi and or audio cutting and pasting. And once the new piece has been recorded, never play it again… I used to do this 20 years ago with my 4-track cassette deck and crummy saxophones (see Vintage Vince).
Then, when Midi came along, it was even easier. Buy a computer (a Mac Plus), a midi sequencing program (OneStep) and a midi equipped keyboard (a Kurzweil K1000). Enter notes one at a time, or slow down the tempo and enter a melodic line, then another, or a left hand piano part, then a right hand, and then quantize the music to the tempo, manually fix wrong notes etc. Check out « Women on the subway » on Vintage Vince to get an idea of what I’m talking about, keeping in mind that I could barely play keyboards (and I’m not much better at it today)…
When I started recording audio on the computer (G3 processor-power permitting), mainly voice, I followed the same quick and dirty pattern. Sing, stop recording when I feel I’m off key or I make a mistake, keep the good notes and punch in a new recording where things started going wrong…
Fast forward to 2001 when I buy a very-used electric guitar for 2 (that’s two) dollars on a flea market. You can hear it on songs like « Maubert » or « Le plastoc » or « Dark Indigo » (all available on Radio Vince). On all of these songs, I recorded pretty much one or two chords at a time, i.e. 1 bar of rhythmic guitar in E, loop it over 4 bars, then record 1 bar of rhythm guitar in A, then loop it, etc… Even worse for solo guitar. On le Plastoc, the main solo (acoustic) guitar is fake. In the second half of the song, there is a real solo electric guitar, but it was recorded the old fashioned way: a few notes at a time.
Old habits and ways of thinking die hard, but at one point, a couple of things dawned on me:
First, that the guitar, at least at a basic level, was an instrument that wasn’t beyond my technical reach. Strangely enough, even though I have bee writing (somewhat sophisticated) music for 25 years, I have always wished…I could play an instrument! I have poor left-hand right-hand independence which makes keyboard playing hard. On the guitar, your two hands are (mostly) in sync.
Second, that maybe I could actually learn how to play my own music!
From that point on, I embarked on a personal musical revolution, that has had ramifications beyond the narrow realm of guitar playing, that is still ongoing, and that I will tell you about in future installments of this palpitating new series of posts.