IT'S ALL RIGHT, NOTHING IS WRONG...

I once had a stab at learning piano. There was a Fender Rhodes kicking around my place a few years ago and from time to time, I'd plunk myself down in front of it and do a bit of exploring. After thirty odd years of playing guitar, I was pretty fluent with how music works, how it all connects up, and yet I found myself wondering "Is this right? Am I doing this wrong?" Silly, because these are questions I never ask myself when playing the guitar. On the instrument I taught myself to play over the decades, I know that really there is no wrong or right -- only sounds that either cut it or don't. Everything can be labelled, whether consonant or dissonant.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that no matter what combination of notes you come up with in music, they can always be labelled as some kind of chord. Even the most vile sounding, throbbingly out of tune sounding chord can be named. It might turn out to be a "sus4Maj7flat nine" (one I just randomly played then -- awful sounding combination), but it's always possible to name any cluster of notes. It's the human ear which decides which sound good, and are therefore worth remembering and classifying, and those that sound so bad that you'll probably never have occasion to use them. (I remember one of the most difficult sessions I ever did was a TV commercial where the actor was meant to be a terrible guitar player. The producer asked me to play really badly. Easier said than done when you've been practicing how to play well for decades).

The context of any group of notes is what gives it its quality, and context is the most important thing to get a grasp of. I guess the strongest, most important context to fix in our musicians brains, is the I - III - V of any major chord. Such a solid sound. I have always viewed other chords as distortions of that context. In other words, minor chords are majors with a flat III; Major 7ths are majors with a flat I; sus 4s are majors with a IV replacing the III; augmented's are majors with a sharp V ... etc. I simplified my thinking no end when I decided to compare everything to a major. If you carry this thought process along a more linear path, all scales can be viewed as distortions of the major scale. Again, this reference back to the pure 'mother scale' can simplify your thinking. If you can picture the major scale/chord there at all times, then any deviation can be more easily tracked.

As music evolves, more and more deviations from the 'pure' are being used. I find music today is often much more dissonant than it used to be, more deviations from the 'pure' are allowed. I sometimes wonder how (or why) some of the music played on the radio today got there. Some of it is so ugly, so 'wrong' by certain standards, that it really is difficult to listen to, especially when you've dedicated a lifetime to ferreting out all the nice sounds that music has to offer, the 'right' sounds. And yet, there it is, blaring away in full, slickly produced, stereo.

It all comes down to personal taste I guess, but I do like the idea of sticking to the rules at least most of the time. There is something almost mystical about the way that sound waves combine to give us music. I've spent all my life delving into it, sifting through all the combinations, classifying. My ear has always been the judge, and my ear has always enjoyed the music rather than the noise. As the decades roll on, it seems that dissonance is being more widely accepted as music, that ugly sound combinations (by my old fart standards) are OK in the pop music of today, that breaking the rules is not only cool, but admired. Too bad, in my opinion, but there you go.

Fact is, it's much more difficult to make music than to make noise. To move some kind of pattern up and down the neck and come up with a bland melody which doesn't fit (it can't possibly) is much easier to do. In the old days, record companies and producers would veto any such attempts at making music, and even if they didn't, radio stations would refrain from playing any such records. Today, all that has changed. So long as the production is clean and the act has a look or an attitude that is admired, anything can wind up coming through the speakers of your radio.

So that's why I say "Nothing is wrong, anything is right". It's just the degree and usage which is questionable.

In other news, http://www.guitarforbeginners.com is thriving. 600 + visitors on a good day. The poll overwhelmingly votes that 'getting your hands to work' is the most difficult aspect to playing guitar. Check it out for yourself on the home page.

PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book continues to sell all over the World, and the video is a hit also. There are a few thousand players out there who now know 'the trick' to keeping track of all things musical on the fretboard. They're all making music -- not noise -- you can count on that.

I've loaded up some new instrumentals at http://mp3.com/kirklorange. Have a listen to (and download for free) 'Southern Cross', 'The night is Young' and 'Time is a river'. They should be up and running by now. All done in dropped d tuning.

All the best and until next time, keep on twangin'

Kirk
http://kirklorange.com
http://lorange.kirk.net
http://guitarforbeginners.com
http://mp3.com/kirklorange