Yesterday preparing for a lesson with a very talented high school-aged student, working on how an electric guitarist might approach accompanying a vocalist with something more interesting and just strumma-strumma-strumma. This involved an excursion into Tracy Nelson’s Down So Low. Incredible and soulful song, a blues sung as a spiritual. The original is piano-based, but it is great fun to play to the guitar as well. I remember hearing it when the first Mother Earth album came out in 1968. It wasn’t really “my style” as a player, so I never made any effort to figure out the chords, but it had a powerful impact and I listened to it often. My ear for harmony was pretty rudimentary, and what I missed at the time and only came to realize much later in life was that there is a turnaround at the end of every verse that modulates the song up a minor third. So the first verse is in A, the second in C, and the last verse is in Eb. I could tell that the emotional intensity of the song, and that unbelievable voice, was increasing with each verse, but it never occurred to me that this was in part accomplished through a simple musical/harmonic device.
Changing keys every verse poses a certain kind of challenge, but for a guitarist there is a kind of easy “out”. So when working with students on this piece, I take a cue from one of my Berklee teachers, and take that option away. I’m sorry I can’t remember that teacher’s name, because it was one of those small and almost off-hand insights that changed everything, and I wish I could acknowledge him. He gave us the assignment to learn Satin Doll in all 12 keys. No problem… until he said, “And guitar players, that means all 12 keys in one position. No moving the same fingerings up and down the fretboard.” Well, that kind of changed everything.
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As I was sitting quietly first thing this morning, which is how I begin every day, I found that my mind had moved to the subject of “natural” talent. It is very clear to me that for some people music seems to come much more easily than others, and it would not be a difficult logical leap to conclude that there is such a thing as innate aptitude. But I’m really not sure, and although I immerse myself in work with a wide range of people, my insights are anecdotal and certainly not scientific. It is remarkable to me, though. The things that seem simple but turn out to be difficult, and vice versa. How many times have I begun a lesson with something that I think is simply foundational in order to get somewhere else, only to spend the entire hour on this preliminary exercise, and then send them away with work to do on their own so that some day we can actually get to where I thought we were going today. On the flipside, on any number of occasions I have shown something quite complex as a demonstration of where I hope to go, only to have the student pick it up right away, and suddenly I’m scrambling for what to do next; can we take it further, or do we move on to something else?
Rhythm is, I think, the first and most rudimentary indicator. Some people can pick up the rhythms I present right away, while for others playing in time while tapping their feet is a major, major difficulty. And it completely transcends age. My perception is that whatever the percentage breakdown is between people for whom this comes easily and those for whom it is a terrible effort, it is about the same among adults as it is for kids. Everyone is different.
Natural or learned? I really don’t know. And since everyone I see comes with their own, invisible to me, history, whether that is 8 years or 50, I really have no verifiable way to know how they got to where they are.
What I do have is my own experience, and that is a lot of information. And on that score, one thing that is very clear to me (now, at any rate, although I think I have known it all my life and it is the sort of thing that gets pounded into the subconscious for safe keeping) is that if there is such a thing as natural talent, and if I ever had any, I pretty much used it up by the time I was 10 years old.
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Very good “connect the dots” lesson with one of my new students. For 4 weeks he has been dutifully practicing the scales and exercises I’ve given him. Today, just short of the “Why am I doing this? What is it all for?” moment, we put it into practical context, and I got to watch light bulbs go on all over the place. Plus (bonus!) it had just exactly the right measure of “And, if you had just a little extra mastery of this set of scales we’ve been working on, imagine what would be possible!”
Ironically, my own personal practice is pretty damned long on rote and short on inspiration at the moment. Fortunately I’ve been around this track enough times that I don’t need to feel like it is going anywhere to know that it is going where it needs it to go.
Now a fourth grader (one of the ones who can replicate any rhythm I throw at her) who is now working on the irritating and thoroughly boring, but in my estimation necessary, skill of reading guitar music is walking up the path. Here comes 30 minutes of Ode To Joy. Her older brother (fifth grade), who is a former student and has similar “natural talent” (see discussion above) has, it is reported, moved from guitar to trombone in order to take part in the music program at his school. I shudder to think what kind of honks and blats are being heard in the house at practice time.
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