for preference, though you should try a Stratocaster, because a Tele neck is like a half-a-baseball-bat. If you have a bit more money, try a PRS Silver Sky SE,
which is PRS's only single-coil guitar. The overwhelming majority of guitar sounds you have heard are single coils through Fender amps. Single coils keep their tone through a much wider range of volume change than humbuckers do. Leave the Gibsons, Epiphones, any other PRS, and the others, because getting a good tone from humbuckers is a long journey with many false ends.
Learning scales and modes, and all the fancy picking techniques, takes time and practice, but it isn't hard. Learning the chords, if you do it by rote, is harder because you need to learn to move all four fingers at the same time, like some ballet dancer on all fours.
Making sense of chords is a task. It does not help that guitar chord books show you "chords called A-something". Which is not what anyone needs. Which is a book that shows us "chords in the key of A" (A major, B minor, C♯ minor, D major, E major, F♯ minor, G♯ diminished - for a start) which are scattered all over those books. (An A minor chord is not in the key of A. It is in the keys of C, F, and G major, and also A, D and E minor.)
Everybody talks about the major and pentatonic scale "shapes", but nobody talks about the chord shape-sequences that make up the chords in a scale. You may get a mention of Nashville numbers and cowboy chords (all the chords you can play in the first position with minimum use of barre chords). Oh yes, and barre chords. That will take way more time that anyone lets on, unless you're a natural.
This may all come easily to you. Maybe you got the same brain wiring Davy Graham did - some of the Tik-Tok players undoubtedly have. Maybe you have perfect pitch, or darn good relative pitch, and you have picked up without knowing it what sounds are where on the fretboard, so you can play back a phrase after hearing it once. A lot of people can do that, but even more cannot. Maybe you can just play stuff out of thin air - that's what it takes to improvise. A lot of people can, and far more cannot. Maybe you take to reading tab, or to reading proper notation. Like reading words aloud, some people are better at it than others, almost from the start. Maybe you can form muscle memories quickly, but maybe you're like most of us, and you need to play-it-or-lose-it.
And the guitar is only half the instrument, unless you are going to play jazz, when you only need half the guitar (because jazz only uses the neck pick-up).
Learning scales and modes, and all the fancy picking techniques, takes time and practice, but it isn't hard. Learning the chords, if you do it by rote, is harder because you need to learn to move all four fingers at the same time, like some ballet dancer on all fours.
Making sense of chords is a task. It does not help that guitar chord books show you "chords called A-something". Which is not what anyone needs. Which is a book that shows us "chords in the key of A" (A major, B minor, C♯ minor, D major, E major, F♯ minor, G♯ diminished - for a start) which are scattered all over those books. (An A minor chord is not in the key of A. It is in the keys of C, F, and G major, and also A, D and E minor.)
Everybody talks about the major and pentatonic scale "shapes", but nobody talks about the chord shape-sequences that make up the chords in a scale. You may get a mention of Nashville numbers and cowboy chords (all the chords you can play in the first position with minimum use of barre chords). Oh yes, and barre chords. That will take way more time that anyone lets on, unless you're a natural.
This may all come easily to you. Maybe you got the same brain wiring Davy Graham did - some of the Tik-Tok players undoubtedly have. Maybe you have perfect pitch, or darn good relative pitch, and you have picked up without knowing it what sounds are where on the fretboard, so you can play back a phrase after hearing it once. A lot of people can do that, but even more cannot. Maybe you can just play stuff out of thin air - that's what it takes to improvise. A lot of people can, and far more cannot. Maybe you take to reading tab, or to reading proper notation. Like reading words aloud, some people are better at it than others, almost from the start. Maybe you can form muscle memories quickly, but maybe you're like most of us, and you need to play-it-or-lose-it.
And the guitar is only half the instrument, unless you are going to play jazz, when you only need half the guitar (because jazz only uses the neck pick-up).
No comments:
Post a Comment