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Things you would avoid/things you would do better? Whats the most optimal route you would choose?
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10-27-2024 10:50 PM
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I sort of regret not having had the patience to stick to classical-guitar training (only had a few lessons and then dropped out) to develop right hand (finger style) technique and good sight reading (and, of course, repertoire... J.S. Bach, John Dowland, etc.).
It would have enriched my jazz developement as well.
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My story exactly. Rudimentary skills after classical lessons in early teenage, for playing guitar and banjo in a high school dixieland outfit that never left the cellar; then marginal involvement in the folk movement followed by rhythm guitar in a rock band 1967-68. Full stop for 25 years until an early bandmate asked me to join his swing band. Lessons and gigs, but wide gaps in my technique - block chords and chord-melody for example. Also, hereditary problems with sightreading and absence of scale exercises have resulted in the strange combination of passable comping and decent single-string soloing, with next to no lead role in between. I'm only 77 (for one more month), so we'll see...
Originally Posted by frabarmus
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I guess I was seeking short term (if not immediate) satisfaction... i.e. learning by ear, off records (which was much easier) everything I wanted to be able to play... including Donna Lee (melody) before I understood/could play the changes to it, knew enough chord fingerings, could improvise over the changes, etc.
I was already 24 when I had my first jazz-guitar lesson with a pro guitarist/teacher and we spent the first couple of months "resetting" my everything on guitar, all the disfunctionalities I had picked up after 10 years of selfteaching. But it was definitely worth the effort. Soon after, my teacher (guitarist with Italian TV Big Band, among other things) unfortunately left my local, country town, (classical) music school as there were just three of us who had enroled in the Jazz-guitar program and it wasn't worth, for him, driving 30 Km to the school, from where he lived, for 3 students only. So, even my jazz guitar training lasted about 4 months only.Last edited by frabarmus; 10-28-2024 at 05:13 AM.
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I would have started learning to play different genres from almost the beginning (which is basically the old "find a jazz guitar teacher to take lessons from"). Trying to START learning jazz after 2-3 formative decades of playing only rock/blues/pop/country is no mean feat. Your brain just picks new concepts up so much easier when you are younger.
And I LISTENED to jazz back then, I just didn't play it.
OH- I would have gone to Berklee. I wanted to so bad, my parents could afford it (only $10,000 a year back then!), but my mom refused. Made me go to a state college which was cheaper. They had a music program of course, but it wasn't totally immersive like Berkelee. I made it 2 semesters then dropped out to move to the east coast with my rock band, and had the time of my life.
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I would have started playing jazz far sooner. I've always loved the genre, but I thought I had to understand it (fully) before I could play it, rather than as it turned out, that understanding came by playing it.
Wasted a good many years there
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Not wait 20 years before taking regular lessons with a good professional player. Then I wouldn't have wasted 20 years listening to and loving jazz but trying to guess the path to learning it.
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I would not have followed the conventional teenage rock guitar method: learning open chords at the far end of the neck, then trying to copy classic songs from tab charts in magazines. Instead, I would have studied the fretboard, learned movable chords, practised modes and discovered intervals. Songs could come later, if at all.
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I would've gone to see live music constantly and I would have gotten a GOOD teacher to advise me on what to listen for, what they were doing and what's important, which good ear training would have been a top priority.
I would have learned to see the entire fingerboard by relative tonic and mapped out all intervallic relationships right from the start.
I would have learned all voicings by ear and avoided playing by "grab" shapes as soon as they were solid, and developed my own chord vocabulary right from the start.
Then I would have found a singer, a duo partner and played as much as I could to explore what is possible in real time by ear.
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I don't think I'd change too much about the way I learned guitar - I think that's gone OK. But I would change the way I'd learned jazz. I'd be less pig headed about doing it myself and find a mentor and get more instruction early on. And done more transcription earlier, which I think a good teacher would have insisted on.
On the other hand that also would have required me to be a completely different person, so here we are.
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What, again?
No, I didn't start over again already, though I have been re-adjusting my goals quite a bit. I did start learning an instrument from scratch a couple years ago and while the dreamer in my would love to know to play other instruments too its more realistic sibling wonders whether we'd have the courage and motivation.
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I was stubborn and obsessed with scales, if there was one thing I could've changed it would be that. I'm grateful for the classical training I received at the beginning though
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I'd join the Count Basie band in 1935.
A musical apprenticeship.
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Could you imagine???? Or Duke Ellington? Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Or Benny Goodman's band, that would have been amazing too... altho Goodman could be a hard boss/taskmaster.
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Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Ohhhhh, it's "start from scratch again at the age you'd like"?
That raises interesting ideas! Like inspired by the hypothesis that Segovia's touring of the US meant the end of the budding use of archtops in classical music interpretation ... what if we could test that by preventing that tour from happening?
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I'd take music reading more seriously from the get-go.
When I started out, it wasn't necessary for what I wanted to do...by the time I got into music that required it, I had been playing quite a while and the vast amounts of practice time I had were drying up. For this reason, I think my reading is still embarrassingly bad.
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like others have said, focus on reading. id probably have started with classical if i were doing it again.
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Interesting!
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I'd be less concerned about innovation and more concerned about learning foundational theory and technique. Major scale across the neck, diatonic chords and their inversions, reading music. The basic musicianship that everyone else knows by middle school that we guitarist shrug off as useless "music theory" because Jimi Hendrix never explicitly said he could read music or practiced scales.
All these ear players have some kind of system, and it's usually pretty close to one of the popular ones. I can cite Jimmy Bruno's 5 fingerings being synonymous with the CAGED system, even if he doesn't know what CAGED is.
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I'd probably focus on almost entirely Barry Harris methods
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I'd Make a list of 20 songs that I want to learn. And I'd learn them, memorize them. Then I would perform them for family and friends as often as possible. And learn to sing the lyrics also. 20 songs regardless of genre.
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Exactly!! When you know better, you play better Originally Posted by joe2758
Also, I would tune to all fourths from the get go as I've seen the light!
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Change my goddamn picking to circular picking.
I've played guitar for 25 years, and 24 of those were spent using alternate picking with a bizarre Frankenstein combination of wrist, forearm, and elbow. I thought alternate picking was the way to go because of Guthrie Govan.
It was only this year that I watched and learnt from Pasquale Grasso how powerful circular picking is. Guthrie Govan warned players not to use circular picking because of some perceived inefficiency, but that's nonsense.
Circular picking should be the default picking for jazz guitar because it encourages clean, accurate, legato playing with little to no involvement of the wrist, forearm, or elbow. It is incredibly efficient and motion-saving. It also gives you so much control over how you accent the notes.
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Is circle picking the Benson, Chuck Wayne thing?
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Benson is not circle picking; Wayne is. They both have a similar great sound for jazz. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
Benson is playing more "palm up" with the picking hand so that the rotation presents the pick to the strings with an "inverse pick slant" - looking down at the pick it is the right edge that makes first contact with the string rather the left edge. This avoids hanging up the pick in the strings and allows for fast, clear, articulate playing with easy accents and slurs.
Circle picking is characterized by little or no motion of the forearm, motion of the hand only to shift position over the strings to be picked - the primary motion is moving the pick by flexing the thumb and index finger. Compared to other methods, it kind of looks like the right hand is not doing very much but it supports extremely fast, clear, articulate playing. It is usually associated with economy picking without rest strokes which allows individual instant variation of applied picking firmness to the individual notes of a phrase in a dynamic way that accents and slurs are very effective.
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