Special Project 10

Application

So, from largely anecdotal experience, it seemed pretty clear that whatever real growth and insights had come my way during 15 years of NST-only guitar work were not tuning-specific. Only the details. The inner connection to music is obviously neutral. The inner work and the connection with myself is certainly neutral.

I set out to discover how to apply what I had learned about how to practice, what insights I had gained through the mechanics/technique side of Guitar Craft, and that methodical Guitar Craft approach in general, to work in the traditional tuning, and this required a certain capacity for discernment. I had a little experience with this when, around 1990, I had redirected much of my music focus to the electric guitar, for The Buttons and Desperate Measures. These were still instruments in the Guitar Craft tuning, but the move to electric required some reapplication of the principles to the outer realities of a slightly different instrument. The electric guitar doesn’t give you the same support for the right arm, for instance, so how to have that same ease in an arm that is free floating? Electric guitar, particularly at volume, requires a level of string muting in the left hand that is not so critical on the acoustic guitar.

So I knew that principles are universal while application is particular.

I also knew that every time I picked up a guitar in the traditional tuning, a whole barrage of familiar habits and automatisms was unleashed.

With Tuning the Air still my primary musical work, I didn’t have a lot of time to invest in this (oh for those glory days at Red Lion House, where practicing guitar for 8-12 hours a day was an actual possibility). The first thing I did was to apply some of that comprehensive Guitar Craft approach to what I had seen through the Joe Pass insight regarding the relationship between chords and scales.

Scales are a very efficient way to practice. Plus, they have the additional virtue of being something I actually enjoy practicing. They work the fingers in a meaningful way, and they outline the harmonic layout of the fretboard. It was clear that in this tuning I had some deeply engrained comfort zones, capable of surviving 15 years of neglect, punctuated by too many black holes. In good old Guitar Craft spirit, I began by making myself completely familiar with C Major, everywhere on the guitar neck. I used the 5 primary shapes of the pentatonic scale. It didn’t take long for me to notice which fingerings were old friends and which I had successfully avoided. I took my time to practice the weaker fingerings and reintegrate them into their sequence on the neck until I felt comfortable to move freely over the entire fretboard. As my hands developed their own internal understanding of the relationship of the forms, my head and ear worked to gain command of the identity of the intervals within the scales, and their relationship to the 5 primary chord shapes.

The use of the pentatonic scale as the skeleton for understanding harmony on the fretboard is really something that made itself clear for me working with the Guitar Craft tuning, but as I re-translated it back to the traditional tuning, “ah ha” moments came almost every day, as the gaps in my prior understanding began to disappear.

If one has a good grasp of the pentatonic scales, all of the diatonic modes are right there, save Locrian (which is a special case no matter what approach you take). Turning a major pentatonic scale into Ionian, Mixolydian or Lydian is simply a matter of filling in the minor 3rd gaps with the right note. You don’t lose the organization of the neck; you simply fill out the harmony. In the same way, the minor pentatonic scale can be filled in to create Aeolian, Dorian and Phrygian.

One great benefit of this approach, which I have learned through the teaching process, is that we can easily learn the particular qualities of each mode in its own right, and completely avoid the red herring (and, frankly, dead end) of learning modes with respect to their relative major.

Plus, there is something organic about the pentatonic scale that seems to transcend culture and geography. Everywhere you go, there it is.

Just ask Bobby McFerrin: