Special Project 11

Discovery

For quite some time, what time I had available for practice in the traditional tuning was limited to preparation for students, learning material for Undercover Blues Band, and this very specific work with scales.

Student prep largely involved learning songs about 5 minutes before I had to teach them. Maybe the night before. Maybe in the middle of the lesson.

Undercover Blues Band work was really just a whole lot of fun, involving a great deal of “research” (ie listening to every version of every song I have ever loved) in order to determine if it was something that worked for me, my style and my voice, and then bringing it into rehearsal to present to the band. We would then work it until either we found our groove and that unique UBB arrangement, or we recognized that it wasn’t working and moved on to something else. I work with two of the most generous musicians on the planet. Learning lyrics was probably the closest thing to “labor” for me in this process. To this day I struggle with “Wang Dang Doodle”.

Here is a little benefit of my research, free to anyone for whom this sort of thing is interesting: Howlin Wolf never sang the words “wang dang doodle”. He always said “wang wang doodle.”

One aspect of the Guitar Craft approach involves working as comprehensively as we are able. For instance, the 24 variations of the “First Primary” are designed to explore every possible combination of the four fingers of the left hand. As with any well conceived exercise, it both reveals areas of weakness and provides the means and method for addressing them.

As far as applying this particular aspect of my Guitar Craft experience to rediscovering the fretboard of the traditional tuning, the work with pentatonic major and minor scales was more fruitful than I had anticipated. It began, as I mentioned, with a very straightforward exercise regimen to shore up the weaker forms until I was equally comfortable within each, and could move from one to the other with ease. I did the initial work in C, but once competent with that I moved to a “key of the day” format, giving me a way to continually readdress the difficulties in a slightly new light. It was a lovely balanced exercise. It was uncomplicated enough that it could function as a callisthenic exercise, which was good for my hands regardless of tuning. And because the organization of the exercise required only minimal attention, that left me free to observe; how are the forms related and connected?, what chord forms are contained within the scale form?, how are my hands behaving? Really useful stuff. And because it was not particularly time consuming or effort-heavy, it was easy to incorporate into my daily practice routine, allowing the continuity of daily practice without causing disruption to the other, more demanding, practice that Tuning the Air required of me.

Things got interesting when I applied the exercise of modulation through the Circle of Fifths to these forms. This, again, was an application of a practice I put my Guitar Craft students through. But when I applied it to pentatonic scales, I found a couple of things I had not anticipated; things that I had truly never noticed before in any tuning.

[NB. Non-musicians: prepare for mind numbing and eye glazing.]

First, the ground: Cycling major scales through the Circle of Fifths.

Beginning with a major scale, if you lower the seventh degree one half step, you modulate into the key one fifth below the original key. Thus, beginning with C Major, if you replace the B with a Bb, you have modulated to F Major. Lower the seventh degree of the resulting scale one half step, and the cycle continues. If you are doing this on the guitar, you will find your hand moving methodically down the neck toward the nut until you run out of fretboard.

Reversing this, if you raise the fourth degree of a major scale one half step, you modulate into the key one fifth above the original key. So, beginning with C Major, if you replace the F with an F#, you have modulated to G Major. Raise the fourth of the resulting scale one half step and the cycle continues. And on the guitar your hand will move up the neck until it falls into the sound hole or bangs into a pickup.

All of this is simply true, Harmony 101, regardless of the instrument or tuning. On a guitar in the Guitar Craft tuning, using the tetrachords that a tuning in fifths suggests, it is an incredibly graphic and enlightening look at the elegance of musical organization. On a guitar in the traditional tuning, it’s not quite so obvious, but nevertheless it is all there to be discovered, and once seen equally remarkable.

So far, no new news for me.

But I was using pentatonic major scales.

Newsflash: pentatonic major scales have neither a seventh nor a fourth. So if I want to modulate to the key a fifth below or above, with no seventh or fourth to alter, what actually happens?

What happens is that in order to modulate to the key a fifth below, the third of the original scale is replaced by the note one half step above it; this is the fourth of the original key, but the root of the new one. Thus, beginning with C Major Pentatonic – C-D-E-G-A – when I replace the E with an F, I will have modulated to the key of F Major Pentatonic – C-D-F-G-A. [Okay, I’m going to stop spelling out “pentatonic” now]. To continue to the key of Bb, replace the A with a Bb. And so on.

Surprise! I’m modulating down in fifths, but my hand is moving UP the neck.

In order to modulate up in fifths, replace the root of the original scale with the note one half step below it; this is the seventh of the original key, but the third of the new one. Moving from C Maj – C-D-E-G-A – to G Maj, replace the C with a B and voila – B-D-E-G-A. And so on.

The hand is migrating down the neck as the modulations move up in fifths.

That, by itself, was good for several weeks of delight in my daily practice. I would begin on the lowest possible scale on the neck – G major in open position – and cycle “down” through the Circle of Fifths as my hands migrated up the neck until I ran out of fretboard. Then I’d reverse the process – “up” through the Circle as hands move down the neck. The biggest problem was getting myself to stop, and move on to other things that needed practicing, like ALL of the Tuning the Air repertoire which suffered any time I skipped a day.