Popping and Bopping

There are two things that make developing compound lines on the guitar easier than on other instruments. Especially sequenced compound lines. The first, is that while as guitarists we may generally not have the same control over the decay and sustain of our notes as other instruments (noted exception), we do have a tremendous amount of control over the articulation of our attack. A sensitive execution in terms of individual note volume can really bring a line to life.

If a lot of your experience involving the kinds of lines I'm referring to come mainly from bop heads and Bach inventions then you've probably felt that the guitar is not well suited for this kind of line formation or improvisation. While I've spent a lot of time writing about how to unlock the intervalic possibilities of the guitar, as has this brilliant man, and any decent and popular jazz guitarist today makes use of some sort of contrapuntal or angular and disjointed approach to melody, this notion of compound melody is one worth investigating more closely.

This brings me to the second things that make the guitar a well suited instrument for this kind of melodic exploration. Two many guitarists, myself and my work in these blogs included, tend to become very vertical when they start to explore more interesting intervals melodically. This definitely has its advantages and welcome outcomes and I don't want to seem dismissive about this approach. It's just not what this column is about. As jazz players, we could learn a lot from sitar players and the tapping of metal guitarists in terms of how to unlock the possibilities inherent in the layout of the guitar and take advantage of the obvious fact that the guitar has six strings.

I've sometimes talked about escape lines instead of escape tones, about how once you've learned to delay a resolution, you can postpone it indefinitely so long as you keep enough concentration to remember your intention. Take a look:

I've included video so I don't have to mark fingerings and positions, and here's what to look for.
The first system is a simple demonstration of the idea that you can delay your resolutions by much more than an eighth note without losing its coherence or effect. First there is a simple line and then the line again with a little melodic embellishment of the escape tone.

The second system shows a line a bit more complex, with a hanging dissonance at the top and the bottom of the line. Notice how each of the dissonances is created and resolved on the same string. Using this as a device can allow you to keep track of a complex idea much more easily. It's a way to keep things organized so you don't get lost in the infinite possibilities of sliding your hand around the neck.

The third system is just a neat line that uses a more interesting contrapuntal texture as a resolution.

The fourth system onward are simple exercises which can help you get into this mode of thinking. Hopefully you can fill in the blanks because I've implied more than I've explained in this article but I'm starting to enjoy that much more these days. I've spent a lot of time writing about how to take an exercise like that and extrapolate from it whatever you need to accomplish your goals at a given moment in time. Good luck!

All The Things Solo

This is an old one I meant to finish but maybe you could.

Raising Awareness/Twinkle Twinkle

If I had to boil down the job description of a teacher to one brief statement it would probably be: to raise awareness in others. I can think of two recent examples which will help to explain what I mean.

One student I have was learning the song Blackbird by the Beatles. It was a song he had already learnt long ago with another teacher well before he was ready to play it. He thought it would be a breeze to learn because he’d already learnt it before. He already knew where to place his fingers for the most part and the basic structure of the song. This was perfect because it allowed me to focus from the beginning on awareness, not having to deal with issues of notes and rhythm and memorization, and helped me isolate the concept with the student. He needed to become more aware of tempo, of the sound of his attack, the consistency of his right hand to pluck the notes and his left hand to apply the exact right amount of pressure. He needed to become more aware of all the things that made the recorded song sound so good and to hear the difference between what he was doing and what Paul McCartney was doing. Otherwise he could never fix it.

But what I really want to point out in terms of awareness is the following experience. I had taught this student a small portion of the song that he had forgotten where it modulated to G Dorian. Not that he knows what that means but that’s alright. The story of how to grow patience as a teacher for what must be told to a student you know you’re going to have for a long time is another story. Anyhow, before teaching the boy the section in question I asked him to sit at his computer and see if he could figure it out by ear. I gave him many clues. I told him only to listen to the lower note and that he could play it entirely on the A string. But he could not here the note. He could literally not distinguish the sound of the lowest note on the guitar from the rest of the sounds that were happening on the recording. He couldn’t isolate the low guitar note from the vocals. So I taught him the line and he played it a few times and then I made him listen again. And still he could not here the line even once he know what he was listening for. So this is what awareness is. One way to help someone make leaps in awareness is to let them return to something they thought they understood after a period where they had not thought about it for a long time and then show them what they had missed the first time, assuming that you as a teacher are aware of something that they were not. Once they see that they missed something, they are open to further suggestions. The shock of realizing that they had failed to understand something that they thought they were sure of beforehand is often a very useful tool to gain the trust of a student and help them evolve.

There is an eight year old girl I started teaching a few months ago. She is a very energetic and positive child and she was taking up guitar after giving up a few other instruments. So I sit down with this young lady who has not had good experiences with music teachers and who wants to be entertained and who has no preconceptions about what is cool or interesting or childish in regards to guitar playing. She can’t hold the guitar straight. It sits flat on her lap with the sound hole facing up. But she can sing a note back to me that I play and she is very enthusiastic.

I’d like to point out to anybody teaching a student how much about her I had sized up within the span of 2 minutes. The guitar kept slipping down, chords were out of the question, good attitude, no musical knowledge, relatively strong but completely untrained ear, no technical ease whatsoever. I walked in without a lesson plan, noticed these qualities, and then reacted instinctively. I think this is a strong way to approach any private lesson.

So we played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the high E string. It took two weeks to learn. I never wrote anything down, never told her the names of any notes, never asked her to hold her guitar upright. I only asked her to remember what I showed her. And I did show her using visual information. It was enough for her to be able to look at my hand and discern what fret I was playing and then to confirm what her eyes taught her with the confirmation of the sound of the note.

Next came Happy Birthday. Although we played in a different key, still on the E string but in A major instead of E major, there was only one note different and for the most part all the notes were the same as in the other song. I tried to explain this to her but she obviously didn’t understand so I let it drop. Where progress was being made was in the fact that this song contains larger leaps, forcing her to increase her spatial awareness of the fretboard and the fact that it was a longer song and therefore a greater test of memory. This song took almost a month to learn and still there were no note names, no chords, no scales, only the sounds and her gradual and mostly unconscious heightening of awareness and development of a methodology to figure out the sounds. I was allowing her to look at my hand less and forcing her to use her ear to find the sound and her own brain to discover where it was located on the guitar. It was slow and to many people perhaps she could have learned it better or faster. They might also say of many of my students that their comprehension of theory is surprisingly limited considering my own obsession. But I would say that to train a horse the best way you have to let it learn at its own pace and come to you when it feels ready. And so it also is with guitar players. And when they are ready they excel because they have been taught how to think for themselves, how to solve a problem, how to use their ear, how to be confident.

The third song was the Itsy Bitsy Spider. In some respects an easier song, but still tricky. For people starting to learn how to listen and recognize notes, repeated notes are very hard to recognize. They sing the song with the words in their head and hear and feel slight differences in intonation and imagine that the note has changed when in fact it didn’t or only did so very slightly but they were fooled by their perception. So this was a good exercise for the recognition of repeated notes. More importantly, since it was easier and shorter than Happy Birthday, it allowed for this young student to learn the notes almost entirely by ear and to memorize it with noticeably more ease. Still there was no concept of a scale, no names for notes, only a relationship developing with the sounds and their relative location on the neck of the guitar on a single string. But was that entirely true?

We are now about two months into lessons and it is time to learn Oh Canada. But first, this young student had to learn what a scale was. She learned very fast. All I had to do was play it for her once and she played it back to me perfectly. It was clear that our two months of building fundamentals, even if she still didn’t even hold the guitar properly, which I was about to finally address as well, had payed off. Then I had her sing the scale degrees while she played the scale. Then I had her go back and play the Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle while also singing the song in scale degrees at the same time. And then I sung to her our Canadian National Anthem in scale degrees and she played it back to me perfectly and had no trouble remembering it. And because I had waited for the right moment I was able to do all of this in a half hour. And this little girl was able to feel as if she discovered the scale and therefore understood it and appreciated it on a level which many adults I meet don’t necessarily possess, let alone 8 year old girls. Undoubtedly when I return she will be worse off then that during our one extremely lucid session. But we will build back up to that moment where she caught sight of all that she was unaware of and then surpass it many times over on the way to the next breaking of the dam of her awareness.

Feeling Good

Here's a list which I think is really important, especially for us jazz musicians who can tend to be a pretty negative and self critical bunch. It comes directly and exactly from the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns.


Definitions of Cognitive Distortions

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolours the entire beaker of water.

4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
            a. Mind Reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
            b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. LABELLING AND MISLABELLING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddamn louse." Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

A Certain Slash Chord on Stella

The chord Gaug/A makes a great A7 substitute, implying Lydian #5. The chord itself implies Gmaj7#5.

But wait, that mode, the third mode of melodic minor, can be transposed to numerous places to imply an A7 chord, because the 4th 5th and 7th modes of melodic minor are all dominant scales.

So Gmaj7#5, Fmaj7#5, Dbmaj7#5 (or Gaug/A, Faug/G, Dbaug/Eb) all very cool sounding chords, all imply some kind of A7 chord.

And as for the ii chord? Em7b5? We're going to use the sixth mode of melodic minor, but play the chord of the 3rd or 5th mode: Bbmaj7#5 or D9b13 (or related slash chords).


I'm going to start out for now by being very strict about chord tones because if I start using substitutions for the substitutions things get too far out too fast. Except of course for the aforementioned TBNII.

Here's a chorus on Stella

The Importance of Lists

At the moment, it is not possible to buy the Mr. Goodchord Voice Leading Almanacs. I would like to propose that, although I do find them useful (especially vol. iii), this can be viewed as an opportunity rather than a calamity.

What are the almanacs? They are lists. If you've read through the Advancing Guitarist or any of Mick Goodrick's magazine articles, then you know might be familiar with the following kind of proposition.

First take a look at pages 57-61 of the Advancing Guitarist. Nice list, right? The Goodchord Almanac Vol. I consists almost entirely of writing out all those chord voicings note by note and in every possible inversion and chord type (1st inversion, drop 3 etc). More nice lists.

Why would a person bother to do all that work? Well to help us out. But maybe we could make our own lists to help ourselves out. Maybe the most important lesson Mick Goodrick teaches us through all his books is not to use his lists, but the value in creating our own. There are an infinite amount of ways to present this kind of information.

Let's take a look at an excerpt from pages 41-42 of the Advancing Guitarist. Mick is suggesting we create random sequences of the 48 triads and then voice lead through them. But wait. Don't stop there.
***
Things To Do:
1. Now go back to the "triad row" and voice-lead through the entire progression.
2. Now play it backwards.
3. Start with a different inversion of the very first chord and go through the sequence again.
4. Play it backwards.
5. Start the sequence with a spread triad voicing.
6. Guess what now?
7. Can you see other things to do?
***

So, like you, upon reading that, I think alright let's rock and roll. Maybe I get through it once, maybe I start on number 5, maybe I will read them in columns instead of rows, or read every second or third triad etc.

There are lots of possibilities. Now here's a little experiment. Try doing it without the list or "triad row". WTF? is the proper reaction. It can't be done. There's no way you could retain all 48 triads and which one's you'd already played, let alone systematically juggle their order or anything like that.

Mentally writing and maintaining the triad row while you do the exercise is way too complicated. Without the list, it becomes impossible to do this kind of work thoroughly.

So let's make our own custom lists, tailored to our own needs, in addition to whatever other ones we might have in the Advancing Guitarist, Chord Chemistry, Voice Leading Almanacs, Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony etc. (All great books full of many lists worth considering).

In fact, I just made a list of books which I might open up when I start practicing.
Making a list of all the songs you know is also a great idea. Arranging them into a binder, your own custom fake book, is an even better idea.
Mick talks about the Chinese Menu approach to practising. When there are simply too many things to do, arrange them in a numbered list, and in categories: Warm-ups (appetizers), Theory (soup), Application in Songs (entrée). Every time you sit down to a meal... I mean to practice, order the dishes that you feel like eating. And try to order every dish at least once a week or every few days or whatever makes the most sense to you. 

Recently with a saxophonist, I made a list of everything he knew how to do while soloing, the point being that when you see how huge it is, and then consider how many tunes and keys and changes there are, there is never an excuse to run out of work.

More Things On All The Things

 What are the circles with the letters and arrows for? Here’s a second study on all the things you are which will attempt to demonstrate. Every 8 bars makes use of a different circle as well as a different type of voicing.


Bars 1-8: A=3, B=5, C=7
***
Bars 9-16: A=1,B=5,C=7
hmm... interesting how the arrow from A to B turns out to be a common tone.

***
17-24: A=1 B=2 C=3
***
24-28: A=1 B=3 C=7
surprisingly normal
***
29-32: A=1 B=3 C=7
why did I switch so soon besides trying to fit all the circles into one chorus?
why would the last circle be hard to finger with the chromatic movement of the bass line harmony?
***
33-36: A= 1 B=4 C=7
Does this break the pattern? Or is there voice crossing? Wouldn’t these voicings sound great sung by a choir?
What's the lesson about following directions (especially your own)?

All The Things (3 notes)

Makes use of various three note structures. Will make more sense with bass player or on piano with bass note. The whole point, at least for me at the moment, of exploring three note textures, is to assume that they are being played in a group or at least duet setting.

Some 3 Note Ideas

7 no 5

A simple enough rock riff... or is it?

An  Em7no5 chord spread huge with the 7th in the bass, planed through different chords of A minor. The flat and natural sixth are used. It's a 5 bar pattern. And the pedal tone of A gives it a certain eerie quality. I also always find it interesting when open strings are used and two notes which appear very far away on the guitar are actually quite close together on the music staff.

Or is it in D mixo/dorian?

Three's company

For the last few months I have been largely preoccupied with finding interesting four note voicings and arranging them in an order which allows for chords and melodies to be played. What I have noticed is that this lends itself much more effectively to playing alone or at the most in a duet situation, perhaps accompanying a singer. But in the context of a band or a jam session, many of these voicings have not fared as well.

For starters, part of the beauty of the open voicings is their openness. This is obscured in a band situation. Their space is overwhelmed by the sound of ride cymbals and saxophones. If there is a piano player there, they are obviously totally ineffective. Smaller shapes with a more sparse and percussive comping style should be used because more often than not it just always sounds like the guitar is stepping on the piano’s toes and not the other way around (speaking generally of course).

I have also recently started to play duets with a bass player. The bass player is there to lay down the harmonic foundation. The chord inversion is completely up to them. And then there’s just the fact that their instrument is so full sounding. Big four note open chords are great because their openness ironically makes them sound fuller as they create a sense of space. With a bass player, the options increase incredibly, because the pressure to create that sense of fulness is largely taken off of our shoulders.

Let’s take a look at the power of three notes. There are the triads, but also spread clusters, three part fourths, as well as 7th chords omitting the 5th or the 3rd (omitting other notes from any other kind of voicings results in a redundant voicing explainable in another way).

Now I need to plane modally, explore inversions and chord types and write arrangements or studies which help me find ways to put things in a traditional context as well as get practice transposing and recycling them. Most of all, the more hard work you do with them in as many different ways as possible, the better you’re going to remember them and be able to find them when you’re looking for them. It seems to be working.

Here’s a chart which clearly resembles the Mick Goodrick chart from the last article. It is interesting because it contains every possible combination of 3 notes without having any note repeated. That means that the chart for any key or mode would look the same, just with a different key signature. I didn’t bother spelling the triads.

Once again, the power of working out this chart as a practice aid before sitting down to experiment with the possibilities cannot be overestimated. You could play a row or a column. You could choose a single box every day and explore it uniquely through different inversions and who knows what else. You could play a standard deciding to go through the voicing type column, cycling through them as the changes go by. If you get confused, you can just breeze on over to the corresponding square to find out exactly what notes you need and apply the appropriate accidentals for the context of the song.

You could find a thousand different ways to use this piece of paper. And it will not be the same as if you practised without it.

What's amazing is that after three volumes of voice-leading almanacs, there's still new ways to present the same material which are not redundant. This is because with every new layout of the same information, due to the complicated nature of the material, I think we tend to see different possibilities based on what the layout suggests. That's probably why Mick bothered rewriting the same thing so many different ways. Every one really does make you think differently.

***

I chose to follow this train of thought before checking to see what existed in Vol. III on the subject of 3 note voicings. Now that I open it up I find that my chart is not there. What is there, is a detailed listing of every possible inversion and order these notes could be in as well as their relationship to four part chords. There is a huge amount of redundancy in those charts and in many ways this chart is more practical in its reductive quality. It does require a certain facility with inverting chords though to be practical.

The charts which appears later on (p. 55-61) are much more interesting in my opinion. They systematically list all the ways in an abstract and generalized form which the collections of 3 notes listed above can be led into each other! There's only six possibilities! Hopefully nobody minds if I put this chart up on this blog because I doubt anybody going out to buy Vol. III would choose not to because of this one chart. And it will answer a lot of questions. Choose any two voicings from the above list and the way in which they lead into each other can be described by the following chart:

From these two charts, every possible movement of 3 notes to another 3 notes without having a doubled note can be extrapolated in a systematic fashion. Rather than working like a computer to work out all the possibilities, how exciting does it seem to dive into the endless and completely unintuitive intellectually (but often easy enough to play) and extremely musical possibilities that these papers unlock?

In an age when jazz composition is rhythmically driven by odd time signatures and polyrhythms, and harmonic progressions are becoming simpler and more modal in nature with an emphasis on bass groove, how could these papers not excite a person to think of all the possibilities that still lie within a major scale?

This is an extremely relevant and new intellectual framework from which sounds can be discovered. In an age when so much has been done, we need to organize our thoughts scientifically or else we will never reach the extreme boundaries of what is mathematically possible while still more or less in the realm of the tonal system, or at the very least the kind of ancient modality dating back thousands of years.

 Or screw the whole damned thing and let's go microtonal. But I like this.

Exploring The Possibilities

What follows below are 3 sheets of paper, one compiled by Mick Goodrick and the other compiled by me for a piano player. They both address the issue of how to come up with new voicings to freshen up your playing. Perhaps the global lesson of all Mick Goodrick's Almanacs is that before even picking up your guitar it can help to lay out a theoretical road map of all the possibilities for whatever you're going to work on. The reason for this is that once you start working, you very quickly get bogged down with possibilities. If you're trying to learn them all you'll never get to the end of the list.

It's much less exhausting to think about the all the possibilities first and write them out then to have to play them all. Suppose that you're trying to learn drop 2&4 voicings. Suppose you decide to go through all the chord types, maj7, then min7 etc. It becomes overwhelming to have to think of all the possibilities and put yourself under the immense pressure to both remember and learn them all on your guitar. So probably you will never get to the vast majority of the mathematical and technically feasible possibilities. But if you make a list, you can hop around.

Take a look at Mick's list below. Mick is trying to come up with minor II V voicings, so he makes a chart. He wants to use the 6th mode of melodic minor for Em7b5 and the altered scale for A7. So he writes out every possible four note chord voicing from the five categories of chords which exist in the mode and he circles all the ones that don't have the note E in them. He's decided that he wants to use rootless voicings. He could have decided otherwise.

Now imagine if you were trying to think of all that while you were also trying to play them on guitar? It's confusing and hard to keep track of everything. Did I do that one yet? What was that last one? This way you can jump around from circle to circle without constantly having to recalculate that information and then see if you find anything you like on the guitar. Having a systematic (maybe even scientific) coding system before you start practising allows for a much less systematic and generally more inspiring and productive practice method.

Then we see all the four note possibilities for the A7. Again, because all the possibilities are mapped out, this frees up a great amount of our imagination and concentration while practising to look for musical and emotional possibilities rather than just systematically running through the list. We can never learn all the possibilities so why even try? But we can reduce them to one handwritten 8.5x11 page. And then just go wherever we are interested in going at that very moment.

I cannot stress enough: without writing out that page, it becomes necessary to memorize it without ever even seeing it, and probably you will be trying to play them at the same time as think of them. For those familiar with the juggling act, this is a few too many balls even within a practice context.

Take a look at the pages I wrote. They essentially recycling the information from the Almanacs. It is just another way of presenting the information on Mick Goodrick's page. Since it is geared for a specific talented piano player who transposes and planes shapes modally quite effortlessly, you'll notice that I spend more time explaining the way voicings are constructed (drop 2 vs drop 3 etc) as opposed to Mick's page which assumes you already have done a lot of work exploring inversions and is more interested in the aspect of modal planing.

Either way, it is a good idea to write down everything that comes to you. You don't want to have to repeat the mental process to get back to it. Thinking is the important first step. But once you've thought your way somewhere interesting it is time to mindlessly memorize it on a totally non-intellectual level.

You'll notice that if you treat the G# minor scale as a vertical scale (and don't mind the crunch of the 5th and 6th occasionally), that any chord from the mode in any inversion and in any substitution (TBN, clusters etc) becomes a possible chord (at least for a few beats if it is extremely tense and feels like it needs to be resolved). You'll also notice at the bottom of the last page there is an equation which shows that there are AT LEAST (and probably more) 1176 easily playing voicings on the piano for a G#m7 chord in a modal context.

Working through them would be pointless. What if one of your all time future favourite voicings is number 1032? What if it's really not obvious to you? I would hate to have to play 1031 to find out what it is. That's why a good road map is essential. Or maybe it's more like the yellow pages. You know what you're looking for but you're not sure who exactly is going to give it to you. You look up the general area you require and then you dial a few numbers to find exactly the right thing you needed. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is indeed like an Almanac.

The Slippery Slope

This tune is literally a page straight out of Mick Goodrick's Voice Leading Almanac Vol. III.

It is (i)grip-slipping through a (ii)six tonic system in (iii)cycle 7.

(i) The guitar voicings represent grip-slipping although I cheat a bit. Grip-slipping means voice-leading through inversions. I say that I cheat because the first voicing is drop 2&3 and the second chord is drop 3 instead of being another drop 2&3. The third chord is drop 2&4. In fact this creates a 3 voicing cyclical pattern so it's quite an interesting cheat. You might say it's grip slipping cubed. The A section interrupts itself at the tritone before finishing the cycle in the B section.

(ii) It utilizes a six tonic system, which is another way of saying that the roots of the chords are derived from the whole tone scale but the notes of each chord are not related. 

(iii) For those who haven't checked out the voice-leading almanacs or read earlier posts of this blog, cycle 7 means that the roots of the chords have a relationship of increasing by a seventh. Cycles are always ascending.

Cycle seven is cycle two backwards. Notice the contrary movement between the root and the voicings which is integral to grip-slipping.

The C section just sounds nice. The tighter voicings as well as the quicker harmonic rhythm provide a nice contrast.

Also intentional is the avoidance of accidentals in the A section melody, despite moving from no flats (or one sharp) to 5 (or 6) flats.

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Contrepoint 3.0

Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others - sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on - can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
    Excerpt from Drive by Daniel H. Pink

Many of the worlds greatest artists never went to university, dropped out, or were asked to leave. Without resorting to romanticized and poetic discourse about the artist’s fiery and unruly disposition, after three years of CEGEP and five months of university I can’t help but wonder why that is.

We hear repeatedly that the best way to learn about music is to play it, to listen to it, and not only to study scores but to copy them out. Yet most of us know that in this respect we are too negligent and lazy.

Rather than playing and copying out Bach’s manuscripts, gradually raising our own questions and coming to our own conclusions which we could then compare to those of an experienced professor, we are slowly fed an oversimplified and inaccurate formal system to explain his style.

But who else is there to blame except ourselves? As it turns out, scientific evidence suggests that being in school and having to complete assignments for marks decreases our motivation to do extra work independently and decreases our overall productivity in the subject in question.

Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive is about how to motivate ourselves and others in the 21st century. He distinguishes between two kinds of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivations include drawing a salary to do a job or getting good marks in school. Intrinsic motivation is when we want to do things ourselves purely for the enjoyment of the challenge and the satisfaction of achieving a goal.

Consider the following experiment, explained in Pink’s book. A group of school children were divided into three groups. Each group of children was asked to draw pictures. One group was offered a reward beforehand for their cooperation: a certificate with a ribbon and their name on it. The second group was not offered an incentive beforehand but received the same award at the end as a surprise. The third group was not offered a reward beforehand and did not receive one at the end.

The interesting result is that two weeks later when the researchers returned to watch the children during free play, the children from the first group who had received the incentive before drawing now showed much less interest in drawing than before the experiment when compared to children from the other groups.

Offering the children an incentive to participate decreased their future enjoyment and intrinsic motivation to take part in the future. Incentivizing the activity took something that had been enjoyable to the children and, since the activity now felt like work, made it less enjoyable.

Countless other experiments can be found in Pink’s book which show that this fact extends to adults and even monkeys. One study demonstrated that people who were given a financial incentive to solve creative and intellectual problems quickly (fastest time gets $20, for instance), the average time that group took to solve the puzzles actually increased considerably when compared to a control group.

This suggests to me that the studying of music theory in school is seriously flawed. We are constantly confronted with rules and conventions that don’t in reality exist, that are historically inaccurate, and that don’t connect to us emotionally. We are told to play along, to follow the rules, because if we don’t, we will lose marks, maybe fail the class, maybe even be forced to leave the school if too many classes are failed. Follow the rules and you will be rewarded. Don’t and face the consequences.

The unfortunate side effect of this approach for most of the population is that it creates a barrier between what they are learning in school, which is perceived as extrinsically motivated work, and their intrinsically motivated artistic expression, making it harder for the two to reflect each other. So two camps are set up, the self-glorifying academics on one side, all too conscious that their works have a basically non-existent audience, and the free but untrained ‘indie’ artist, all too conscious that their works are unsophisticated and often lack in cleverness, much like their adolescent crowd.

This may also be why the history of classical music seems so reactionary. It always seems to be a move away from the predecessor, always a disdain for the older style and those that continue to practice it, while at the same time glorifying the past as a time when people followed their instincts.

Maybe part of this trend can be explained because, having acquiring a knowledge of the old style through traditional scholastic means, it is only human nature to find something inherently unsatisfying about it. The incentive system in place while we were learning the style makes it much less interesting to us in the present.

What would happen if the presentation and integration of the traditional material was done in a less traditional way? A way which at least provided the possibility for intrinsic motivation to take hold rather than trying to squash it entirely, deliberately asking you to check your own propelling sense of self-motivation at the door? What would happen if the study of theory was an opinionated and creative experience? Maybe the polarization of emotional expression on one side and intellectual complexity on the other would be less of an issue in contemporary classical music? Maybe the products churned out by hard working academic composers would begin to find a larger audience? Maybe the whole educational process would be more enjoyable, more rewarding, and above all, more inspiring?

Heuristic Healing

A fun little modal tune exploring slash chords and spread voicings.

The Mountain Climber

Often when people start playing guitar they have serious misconceptions about what they’re going to be doing. They think it’s going to be easier or more fun than some other instrument like piano or violin that they hated playing as a kid. This is especially true of young people around the age of 12. Nowadays, many of them may have become inspired by Guitar Hero or Rock Band to go for the real thing. They don’t understand that as hard as it may be to play on expert mode, it’s a whole lot harder to play the real thing on beginner.

My first goal is to make them excited about music. They will never succeed if they are not self motivated. There can be no external awards, no marks or distinctions, only their own sense of satisfaction at attacking a problem. I want them to see that music is a beautiful and deep thing, that it is more than an iTunes playlist on shuffle, more than the next hit single which sounds like the last one and is deliberately ‘manufactured’ to generate profits. I want them to want to learn.

I give them no theory. They don’t read music. There’s no set game plan. We don’t have to finish what we start. Every consideration is secondary to keeping these young people interested. Months will go by where everybody involved, including myself and the parents, wonder if progress is really being made.

 Eventually, the day comes where I realize the child is much more mature than they were before. They are beginning to ask questions, beginning to wonder how and why things work the way they do, beginning to practice more without anybody bothering them because they want to know.

Often, however, their excitement about the questions is followed by a very underwhelming reaction to the answer. This is because the answer is so much huger than they can be made to see in an hour or even a year. If a child who can strum a few chords, barely remembers their name, can find notes by ear but can’t be bothered to know what they’re called, asks you how the G major chord got its name, or how to figure out a tune by ear, the explanation is quite massive. They must be made to understand the major scale, the concept of a triad, the names of the notes, intervals (which is not intuitively represented spatially on the guitar), as well as keys and tonality, to really understand the answer to these questions. And of course, they must understand it in the least abstract sense. They must connect all these concepts to sounds, to the physical act of playing their instruments, or else the whole exercise is completely meaningless.

So when the big questions start rolling in, I like to tell them a story about mountain climbing. They ask me what appears to be a very simple question, and they see me sigh and refuse to answer them. The next week they are learning the major scale, being forced to sing out pitches, and doing all these things that don’t seem to matter. Why am I making them do it?

I tell them that the answer to their question is on the other side of a giant mountain. There is no possible way for them to see the place to which they are heading, and the path there is long, winding, and difficult, and it is very easy to get lost or detoured. It is going to take a long time to climb the mountain to reach a point where they can see their destination. Furthermore, they must be guided by someone who knows the way. I am their guide and they must trust that I know the mountain path because I have travelled it before with someone who taught me how to navigate the treacherous route. If they truly want to reach their destination, they need to have faith in their mountain guide, their musical sherpa, to know how to get to the mountain’s peak. That’s good teaching.

Evening Blue