So, of necessity, I was reacquainting myself with the traditional guitar tuning after a decade and a half of complete abstinence. I was not practicing it in any serious sense, other than small bits of research on songs that students want to learn. However, I was spending at least a couple of hours a day thinking on my feet in OST. Engaging in this process, I had noticed that muscle memory is powerful – my hands very quickly find old pathways and are happy to follow them, whether that is really where I want to go or not. I also noticed that even though I never had a great understanding of the OST fretboard in the first place – or so I recognize in retrospect; in it’s place I had memorized and well-practiced shapes and patterns – I was able to see this organization much more clearly now. And I had noticed that my ear was much improved.
It is during this period that I was also reminded of how much I love playing Blues. Not that I ever quite forgot. I have long maintained that everything I play is essentially Blues, regardless of the external genre. It has always been home for me. It’s not in the details, it’s in the groove. When I had a break in my schedule and wanted to fill it with something more profitable than going out for another cup of coffee, I didn’t practice scales or exercises, I remembered and relearned my old Blues repertoire.
Early on in my work with the Guitar Craft tuning I looked closely, as I think most of us did, at how to translate the stuff I played in the old tuning into the new. It is tough, for any number of reasons. A few people are remarkably adept playing OST “sounding” stuff in NST [that’s right Bert Lams and Tom McCarthy, I’m talking about YOU! And hey, Robert managed to perform a lot of old Crimson material in the Guitar Craft tuning, so we know it can be done] but for most of us the tuning tended to more readily lend itself to new music and new ways of arranging music for an ensemble of guitarists, that take advantage of the qualities of the tuning rather than circumvent them. I have a swampy blues thing that I do in NST, and Robert once suggested that I work that into a Guitar Craft piece, and I honestly tried. But try as I might, and I regard this as entirely my own failing, everything that came from it sounded to me like a parody or caricature, albeit a well-meaning one, of the Blues, and that was not something I was comfortable with. In the end, I think the bass lines to Intergalactic Boogie Express or Bicycling to Afghanistan have more authentic blues spirit in them than an NST transliteration of a Muddy-Waters-come-Johnny-Winter lick.
Another thing that happened during that period came completely out of left field. I had several boxes of analog tape stored in my spare room, including everything from 10-inch reels of multi-track projects I had done in my home studio between 1978 and 1985 and the source recordings for (scream) from 1994-96, to cassette tapes of demos I had made over the years and live bootleg recordings of bands I had played with going back to 1971. Magnetic tape has a shelf life, and most of these were well over their expiration date. So I pulled out the old machines and began a long project of transferring this material to a digital form.
Buried there among those tapes was something I had completely forgotten I had. Sometime around 1978-80 I had taken part in a Joe Pass seminar. And, I had brought my little cassette deck with me and recorded it. It was a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon in a room at a rec center; perhaps 2 dozen of us listening to Joe talk about and demonstrate his approach to the guitar. Great stuff that I had almost no capacity to understand or assimilate at the time, but it was fun. The line that I remembered him saying at one point was, “if you can’t sing it, you can’t play it,” which he then demonstrated to my amazement.
Transferring recordings is done in real-time. You don’t have to listen, other than to check in to make sure everything is running properly, but I did listen to a lot of the stuff, and I definitely listened to the Joe Pass seminar. And there, waiting for me, was a key that I had been missing. It had gone over my head in 197-whatever, but circa 2008 it made total sense, and explained for me what I was seeing on the OST fretboard.
It wasn’t something I could actually put to use in anything but a limited way, but it gave me something I could practice. Practicing in the old standard tuning… what a concept.
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In response to a couple observations from my friends Rob and Tom:
Rob and Tom:
To be clear, tuning is, or should be, transparent of course. No audience cares, unless you are playing to total guitar geeks, and even then you could argue that it's a pointless distraction. And it is also unequivocally true that any style and any genre can be authentically addressed in NST, without compromise. The trueness of the music is a measure of the player's relationship to it, not the details of the instrument.
But, different tunings have different qualities and different capacities, and that is something that the player needs to work with.
Pure rock and roll can certainly be played on an NST guitar (I hope my own output bears this out). But if you want to play Chuck Berry's Carol lick, it is going to require some pretty severe technical gymnastics. So if playing roots rock and roll is your thing, in NST your job is probably going to be to capture the authentic spirit of Chuck, rather than reproduce his guitar parts. (I might argue that that is your job no matter what tuning you choose, but we wander into philosophy)
Jazz lends itself particularly well to NST. But if you are partial to chords in close-voiced tone clusters, it's going to take 2 guitarists playing interleaved voicings to accomplish it. You can do completely authentic finger picking celtic tunes in any tuning you like, but Black Mountain Side in anything but DADGAG is going to be a tough row to hoe. On the other hand, if you are Igor Abuladze anything is possible.
So, there are choices to be made at every stage. At a certain point I came to the conclusion that, for myself, the new tuning was for new music. Rock 'n' Roll and the Blues is in me, and there is no chance in hell it's not going to come out in some way, no matter what I'm playing, but there are some wheels I didn't feel I wanted to put energy into reinventing.
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