Special Project 02

Prologue 2

If I’m not careful, there could be more prologue than logue. Will strive for brevity, although it goes against my nature.

Guitar Craft had just walked in.

Reading Robert’s most recent, and likely final, draft of “The Guitar Circle”, I can rest assured that the comprehensive picture of Guitar Craft will be addressed, for those who care, in due course. Not my concern here. For now it is sufficient to say that Guitar Craft addresses the whole musician, from our greatest creative potential to the most elemental matters of technique and mechanics.

What IS specifically relevant to this special project is the latter. Three things that Guitar Craft addressed for me right from the beginning were exactly the things that I had intuited my need for: the rudimental mechanics of technique, an approach to understanding harmony on the fretboard, and how to practice. Whatever lofty creative aspirations I did and do harbor, this was what I needed in March 1985. And what I have established for myself since that time is a practice that has continued to evolve with my understanding, and served me for more than 28 years.

After testing the waters and discharging some obligations, which took about a year, I took the decision to work only with the Guitar Craft tuning. When making a commitment of this sort, it is probably better to be definite about the period of time, but I was not so clear headed. I vacillated between “forever and ever” and “for now”, whatever that means. What I settled into was “for the foreseeable future, but as if it were forever.” Basically, it was clear to me that I would never develop any real proficiency in this new tuning if I always had an “out”; a psychological and emotional, and practical, safety net. So for 12 years, if I wanted to play something, I had to find a way to play it on an instrument tuned in fifths. No exceptions.

In 1997, things were changing fast. I was preparing to leave NYC behind, and heading to parts unknown, which eventually became “Seattle”. Part of the plan was to let go of the corporate jobs I had been doing to keep myself afloat in Manhattan, and to earn my way strictly through music, primarily teaching. Before I left NY I literally threw all of my suits and ties away (actually, dropped them in the donation box of a church thrift store in Chincoteague, Virginia).

As much as I love working with Guitar Craft students, the reality was that this plan would necessarily involve taking on students who were not inclined to jump into a new tuning. At about that moment my friend Roy told me he was heading out to a music store in suburban New Jersey to look at Fender guitars they had on sale. I joined him, and while I was there a sunburst Lone Star Stratocaster jumped into my lap and wouldn’t leave. I kept the guitar around as something to noodle on from time to time for fun, and to have for those students who preferred the traditional tuning. All of my creative musical work was still in Guitar Circles, using the Guitar Craft tuning.

But teaching in O(ld) S(tandard) T(uning) required me to do some homework in OST. Matters of basic mechanics are indifferent to tuning, but it was my responsibility to get myself back up to speed on the OST fretboard. The most striking thing I noticed through this process was that despite more than a decade of never putting my hand on an instrument tuned in this way, I could instantly see the organization on the fretboard. I wasn’t “remembering” the NST fretboard. At no time prior to walking away from it had I seen it in this way, or with this detail, or understood it with this depth of clarity. My realization was that while I thought I was learning a new tuning during those years, what I was actually doing was learning how to see and hear; to be able to recognize musical patterns and relationships independent of the tuning.

So I worked with the “old” tuning as much as my teaching obligations required, and then a bit more, for fun, for me. And since the blues is my bedrock, it was going to come out. Pretty much everything I play, regardless of the tuning, has the blues in it, but here it was again in a very simple and pure form.

With the completion of Tuning the Air in December 2011, I began to work seriously in this tuning again, because there was some music I really wanted to play.