Special Project 04

Juggling Tunings

The Guitar Craft tuning appeared in a moment of inspiration, a point of seeing, a creative leap. When Robert describes how it “flew by”, he is describing a moment that is familiar to anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to find themselves in the creative now. In that moment, he was alert enough to notice. To be awake in those moments when the source of all creativity makes itself known to us, is from my perspective the primary aim. To have the skills to do something with it, well of course that is nice, too.

In the early days, I was more or less convinced that the rationale for the Guitar Craft Tuning was that it served to throw experienced guitarists off of their game. It worked. Boy oh boy did it work. The first courses were only open to “plectrum guitarists of at least three years experience, fluent in the English language and above 18 years of age.” So you had to already play guitar, and with a pick. Most of us were more experienced than that minimum, and the tuning came as quite a shock. For me, feeling stuck as I was, it was a great relief. It was a chance to start over, this time with intelligence and clarity replacing the haphazard and accidental nature of my first experience.

How many people get that opportunity in life? How many people get that opportunity twice?

Before long I came to see that the tuning is much more than the shock value it sometimes provides. As shocks go, it’s a good one. And players with OST experience still suffer. But people began arriving already knowing a bit about the tuning, perhaps having experimented with it. And even more than that, the “experience” prerequisite fell away, and people who had never played guitar became more and more common. So now, there is a large pool of guitarists out there who have never played anything BUT the Guitar Craft tuning. That’s pretty interesting.

When I moved to Seattle, I was toting among other things the Stratocaster I had purchased on a whim a year or so earlier, but I was really still not doing anything with the traditional tuning. I would pick up the guitar and let my hands run through blues licks that were so much a part of my pre-GC playing, just for fun. The occasional OST student. I had a notion to start a blues band, as a kind of diversion, but it never quite came together. In Seattle in 1998 there was a huge amount of Guitar Craft energy and activity, and I had my hands very full.

It was really another 6 years before I began to address the old tuning in any kind of serious way. Guitar Craft students, alone, were not getting it done in terms of paying my rent (and my escalating health insurance bills. Don’t get me started; I was never sick, I was just aging), and so I began to actively seek non-GC students. For the most part, for these lessons I relied on:

• Muscle memory. Never underestimate the power; for good or ill.
• The new clarity with respect to seeing the fretboard, regardless of tuning, that I referred to in Prologue 2. I also noticed that my ability to read music in the old tuning, which was never much to begin with, was much improved, even though in Guitar Craft there is virtually no reading. Fascinating.
• The understanding of technique that I had acquired through my work in Guitar Craft, easily transferrable to any tuning.
• A generally good ear, noticeably sharpened through the work in Guitar Craft.

I still didn’t practice in the old tuning. The Guitar Circle work and Tuning the Air dominated my “serious” guitar playing, and demanded constant attention and a great deal of practice. Some OST lessons required a bit of prep in terms of learning tunes that students wanted me to teach them, but that was about it. That has never been difficult for me. The manager of a little studio I taught at for a couple of years, during the “job interview”, asked me if I knew all of the popular songs kids were listening to. Being fatally honest, I said “no”, but quickly assured him that with a recording I could figure anything out on the fly. He took me at my word, thankfully. Okay, if you want to learn a Meshugga tune, or some shredding sweep picking solo, I’m probably going to point you to a more appropriate teacher, but that is rare.