Tonefiend Forum

I posted this on the homepage article, but figured I'd reproduce it here, too.

I consider myself a “Noodler” when it comes to original guitar pieces. I basically use the pentatonic scale patterns most of the time. However, I have also really enjoyed moving chord-shapes up the neck. I never really thought about this until now, but I rely on the D/Dm and E/Em chord shapes on the top 3 strings.

The D/Dm chord-shape on these strings consists of : 5th, Root, 3rd(major or minor). The E/Em chord-shape on these strings consists of: 3rd(major or minor), 5th, Root.

So, in a way, this is similar to Joe’s use of triads.

Wow – I gotta think about music theory more while I play. It seems that if I could get my fingers to do what I want, I’d have more energy for my brain to think. Back to practicing!

Well, I was going to sit this one out and content myself with reading the other excellent posts, but since so many have contributed, I’ll try to express my concept, and some of the frustrations it has caused me.

I came to guitar late after playing several other instruments and studying a fair share of theory. I picked it up when I moved overseas because I didn’t have much space and wanted to develop my ‘tune writing’ skills. The only real studying I did was to learn about a dozen Django Reinhart, Brazillian, and standard jazz tunes just to learn some chord shapes. So if I have a default chord ‘concept’, it would probably be to fall back on dominant 7 and 6/9 shapes when needed. When I’m writing, I almost always use some form of finger style and I try to keep my voicings minimal, but always moving – if that makes any sense. I want the full chord to be felt, but not necessarily heard at once. I don’t really think about the theory at all and while I probably use at least 300 ‘chords’ in regular rotation, it would take me a couple minutes to figure out exactly what most of them are. I guess my resulting ‘style’ falls somewhere in the middle of jazz, blues, and folk. Initially it was rather easy to write fairly original tunes and progressions because I had never learned the 'greatest hits' chord shapes/voicings/progressions. But after a few years of writing, I’ve ‘uncovered’ many of the common voicings/progressions and they are indeed difficult to break out of.

Perhaps the bigger frustration is that I want the music to propel the lyrics and I believe that the more common the progression is, there is a greater likelihood of listeners falling into the groove and tuning out the lyrics. Perhaps I’m alone here, but I have been 'actively' listening to different forms of music my whole life and I almost always paid attention to the music, arrangement, instrumentation, and production and almost never critically listened to the lyrics. I don’t mention this to play on Joe’s association, but my discovery of Tom Waits was a huge influence on me. His lyrics are worth listening to and I think it is due to both the genius of the lyrics themselves and also because the music is unique and perfectly suited to the imagery. His voicings, progressions, rhythm, etc. take you somewhere familiar but new and you pay attention to it. The music sets the dissonance and anticipation and the lyrics provide the payoff.

Ok, clearly that’s an oversimplified and probably inaccurate analysis, but Waits did make me want to write music and simultaneously freed me from feeling the need to write in any specific genre. Insofar as Waits has become his own genre, it’s difficult (for me at least) to specify it in formal theory terms, but rather I feel that a big part of both his early and later work is the organic relationship of the music and lyrics. He finds the right ‘sound’ appropriate to the imagery or vice versa. Ryan Adams is another songwriter that has a similar effect on me.

So I don’t sit down and try to write a Waits or an Adams tune, but I do try to emulate their musical balance. I sit down with a concept or a phrase and I try to build something new from that. But as I said earlier, it is getting increasingly difficult for me as my musical vocabulary expands. I fall into progression traps (my own and others’) and generally feel that I’m growing less creative over time. I averaged about a tune a week for a few years, but the combination of my musical boredom, time constraints, stress, etc. has seen my output drop significantly. Now I might sit down every month or two and hammer something out, but I’m not very satisfied with them. Occasionally I’ll bust out the scratch recordings of my earliest stuff. They're basic, rough, untrained, with horrible singing and playing, embarrassing lyrics, etc. and yet they are authentic and creative and I love them The few people I actually share them with also seem to connect more with them than my more recent stuff that is much more polished. So that’s my concept. It worked great for awhile, but I definitely feel like I’ve hit a wall with it.

Quote from bear on August 24, 2012, 05:37
The Pentatonic forms are also most of the major and minor diatonic scales. It's pretty easy to connect the pentatonic scales gradually into the diatonics, but most method books are lousy at it -- they present it like it's a whole different thing. It isn't. It's two more notes. And arguably it's better to teach the notes as add-ons because it clarifies the interesting thing about them, that they're the half-steps that fall in the scale. Getting these sort of things helped me get modes where they had flown over my head the first time around.

To take this line of thinking a little further, pentatonic forms are just extensions of triads! I think a lot of players fail to grasp that triads, and more complex chords are scales and/or modes, and thusly are all part of the same ball of wax. This tendency to teach these concepts as though they are separate just doesn't work for me. The guitar's topography makes it very easy to concentrate on certain 'grips' and move 'em around without necessarily working out what's really going on there, so I attempt to resist thinking in those terms. I try to be conscious of the intervalic value of every note in every chord shape I use and every note I play, which is a compromise really, but it allows me to improvise inside the changes with relative ease, even when I barely know a tune.