The Sweet Spots.

Greetings from Tamborine Mountain, fellow twangers. Apologies for the ever widening gaps in my articles. My only excuse is that time keeps getting away from me.

I was watching some tennis the other day on TV, admiring the expertise the players had, thinking about all the practice they must have to put in to keep the ball in play. As a guy who plays once a decade for five puffing minutes, I know how hard it is. But what a nice feeling when you do manage to hit the ball from the sweet spot. That's the small circular area of your racket head where all the energy is perfectly absorbed and transferred back to the ball. All of a sudden, you're in control.

I like the idea of the sweet spot. I hear that golf clubs have the same quality; hammer heads have one too. I know that fretboards have them, or rather, music itself imprints sweet spots on your fretboard.

The analogy is not as far fetched as it first seems. The sweetspots mentioned above all relate to resonance, either of the tennis racket strings or the metal of the hammer head and golf club. Fretboard sweetspots are also about resonance, about waves blending, in this case sound waves. But really, I use the analogy more as a metaphor. The sweet spots I refer to are more home bases, safe havens, switching points.

The trouble with fretboards is that until the music starts up, they are just a grid of frets and strings. There is no centre, no pattern , no logic, certainly no sweetspot. It is pure potential - it's just a bunch of note and repeat-note positions laid out in an asymmetrical fashion. The kink in tuning, where the 2nd string is tuned to the 4th fret of the 3rd string (as opposed to the 5th fret rule the other adjacent strings follow) destroys any consistent pattern building. Couple that with the many inconsistencies built into the structure of music itself - the "tone - tone - Semitone, tone - tone - tone- semitone" order of intervals in the major scale for starters - and you've got yourself one complicated contraption. No wonder so many give up trying to figure it out.

I've written many articles over the years about music and the guitar, and they all wind up being about the same thing: how to find your way through the maze of notes chords and positions while making music. There is no other topic really. All the rest is just detail, personal preference. To play with picks or not? To use heavy or light strings? To use fuzz or overdrive? That's up to the player. But there is only one Music. The way it all fits together is governed by the physics of sound waves, not personal taste, and the only way to gain control over it is to understand its structure and mentally impose it onto the fretboard.

This where the sweetspots come in. I realized decades ago, watching and listening to my favorite players and knowing that most of them were musically illiterate that they were following some kind of center of activity around the fretboard. They always knew where they were in the context of the music. They never got lost. As a young intuitive player who was being hired for sessions, I made it my business to find out what the trick was. When, during a jingle session, the producer asks "play a little intro riff that ends on the six please Kirk", I want to know exactly what he means.

What I found, lurking in amongst all those notes, chords, positions, sharps, flats, sixths, sevenths, harmonies, etc, is a foolproof landmark, one that points to everything else, one that connects all the bits and pieces and more importantly, one that smoothes out all the irregularities of the fretboard and music. I found the sweetspots.

I wrote a whole book on the subject, called PlaneTalk, and I sell them all over the World from http://www.lorange.kirk.net, so I can't give the whole thing away here and now, but I'll drop a great big hint: know your triads. Triads are the smallest chord possible, using only Ones, Threes and Fives, and can therefore be seen as the most concentrated, compact and condensed view of that moment's music. Learn them, inside and out, and work your way out from there.

If you'd rather save yourself the time and energy, PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book is a comic strip conversation that takes place on a plane between an old pro and a guy who gave up trying to figure it all out. The reader gets to listen in as the "trick" is revealed. It comes with The Guitar Slide Rule, a folded-sleeve-with-insert-affair and I have also now finished the hour long companion video, which demonstrates the simple technique.

Check it out if you're looking for that elusive landmark. You can also learn the lesson online now at the PlaneTalk Online members-only site. For the price of a couple of lessons, you'll know the trick forever more. Sign up at http://www.lorange.kirk.net

All the best,

Kirk