Should it sound like music?

I had another epiphany. Lately, things have been sounding a little more like music and I'd been taking that as a good sign.

Then I began thinking about my son and his violin. He's been playing for years and, over the years, it's sounded more and less like music. At the very beginning, it had lots of rough patches and, though I was proud of every note, sometimes, it was a stretch to find music in there. Later, it sounded like music a lot, and this lasted up until fairly recently. Of late, though, he seems to often work on bizarre scales and exercises that don't sound like music. I suppose the difference is that the bizarre scales aren't supposed to sound like music.

So the issue is this: if this is the typical continuum, where am I on it? I'm thinking I'm at that first break between initial non-musical and musical.

I guess the moral is that the more progress I make, the longer the path to where I want to be seems.

Rhythm

I'm back from my trip, a week away from the guitar and no noticeable backsliding.

I've been working through the Shipton book (described in an earlier post). I'm up to the third part and had been having trouble with some of the fancy syncopated strums. I had a little epiphany today though. I noticed that if I just hold one chord shape it's easier to figure out the strumming pattern, than if I'm trying to do the chord changes at the same time.

This is probably the most obvious thing in the world, but it's fairly typical of my epiphanies!

Hiatus

I'm off to an international conference for a week and, because of all the other carry-ons I'm taking, I'm leaving the travel guitar behind. This may be the first break from daily practice since the beginning of the year.

I'm going to miss it and I worry that I'll backslide.

There's research that shows that appropriate "visualization" can help more than actual practice in some kinds of learning. I don't think the learning involved is middle-aged guitar, but I'm hoping it'll generalize.

Collectors

I just got a new guitar. Actually, it was a very generous gift from my mom on the occasion of a momentous birthday: a Martin D-18. I put up a picture to the right.

It's just gorgeous and sounds like bliss. It's clearly worthy of someone who can play a lot better than I can at this stage, but i) it gives me a goal to shoot for; ii) it was a really nice gift; and iii) did I already mention that it's just plan goegeous?

I think that there is a collector syndrome. My impression is that it shows up most often with men who collect guns, of all things, but I think it shows up with guitars too. I've run across quite a few guys who "collect" guitars. I'm not sure how well they play, but they seem to have way more guitars than they have time to play them. (There are obviously women who collect things too; there just seems to be something very male about this kind of collecting.)

With this beautiful new guitar, I now have three, All Martins.

• LXM A baby Martin for traveling.
  
• DX1R My previous guitar. Quite serviceable and probably the one I'll use for trips where I have enough room to bring a full-size instrument.
  
• D-18 The new beauty. So far, I want to guard it with my life and keep it at home!
  

When I was shopping around for the D-18, I did see some really beautiful Larrivee instruments....

Consumed

I found a new little riff that I'm totally consumed by. It's from a song called "The Junkie Song" by a band called the Be Good Tanyas. I found the tab on the web and it looks like this:

  Am                      C           G
----------3-3-------------------------------
---1----1--------1----1----1----1--0-----0^1
-2----2--------2----2----0----0----0---0----
--------------------------------------------
0----0--------0----0----3----3--------------
----------------------------------3---3-----

Hauntingly pretty to my mind, but really really easy. I suppose I have this naive view that the most interesting music should be hardest, but maybe that isn't so. It would seem that there's music that's hard to play and then there's music that's hard to think up.

I guess the trick for me at my stage is to try to enjoy learning the latter, rather than the former!

Bar-chord ruminations

I'm refusing to use the spelling barre on general principle.

I have a general understanding of bar-chords and use them occasionally, but I've been working hard of late to make my transitions to bar-chords smoother and to get them to sound better. The ones I use the most seem to be the E-shape

|-1-|---|---|
|-1-|---|---|
|-1-|-2-|---|
|-1-|---|-4-|
|-1-|---|-3-|
|-1-|---|---|

and the A-minor shape.

|-1-|---|---|
|-1-|-2-|---|
|-1-|---|-4-|
|-1-|---|-3-|
|-1-|---|---|
|---|---|---|

The E-shape barred at the first fret is a full F, which I use all the time and the A-minor shape barred at the second fret is a B-minor, which I'm using a lot too.

I find that I'm really slow at moving into these positions and that my left hand is pretty sore. (The old soreness seems well under control though and I'm assuming the new soreness will fade as I get better at this.)

---

O.k. a switch of gears. I just noticed that a C-shape barred at the second fret should be a D and seems to be identical to a D if you just look at the first three strings.

|---|-1-|---|---|---|
|---|-1-|-2-|---|---|
|---|-1-|---|---|---|
|---|-1-|---|-3-|---|
|---|-1-|---|---|-4-|
|---|---|---|---|---|

Is this right??? If so, does this mean that what we think of as D is really a truncated barred C?

Doucement

For xmas, my wife got me a subscription to a guitar magazine: Acoustic Guitar, which I've really been enjoying. I was reading an article in it the other day about some guitar player named David Wilcox and they highlighted a really wonderful quote: "The dynamics on the guitar have so little to do with how loud you make it and a lot to do with how soft you make it."

I'm a linguist and the semantics are almost self-contradictory. Setting that aside though, I think the point is really apropos for me at this stage. Lately, I've been working on learning different strumming patterns and I have a huge temptation to wail away at the instrument. I find that if I hold back and concentrate on making strums that sound good, rather than feel good, that it starts to sound like music!