Learn how to zone in and play, no matter your skill level
Longer ago than I care to admit, I attended a
seminar with one of my all-time favorite pickers,
Howard Roberts. It was a two-day deal,
and for the most part I was too inexperienced
to have a clue about much of what he talked
about. But one thing that stuck in my head
(and I am sure he wasn’t the first to say this)
was to study your instrument—but, when you
go out to play the gig, forget everything you
know and just play. At the time, this seemed
completely unfathomable to me. How could
you forget what you know—and why in the
world would you want to? I guess the reason
it stuck was that it was so far off my does-not-compute
scale that I just had to file it till later.
It’s Later Than You Think…
Meanwhile, I was playing in bar cover bands
and waiting for my genius to be discovered
(I’m still waiting, by the way). One night
at the OK Lounge in Marion, Iowa, we
launched into our version of “I’m a Man” (a
la Chicago). During my solo I had what I can
only describe—and, believe me, I hate to say
this—as an out-of-body experience. I had no
sense that it was me playing and somehow, at
least in my head, I entered “the zone.” Before
I continue, I will splash some cold water on
this and say that I have no idea if anyone else
noticed—or even if what I played was actually
good. But the important thing is that it was
just the music sailing under its own power. I
had no sense that it was me doing anything. I
saw my hands doing things I didn’t think they
could do and I was amazed.
Years went by with a few repeats of that
moment. Like many, I was on a quest to find
my spiritual path in life. This finally led me to
some study of Buddhism. After a fair, though
not vast, amount of reading, lectures, and
retreat attendance, a couple of things dawned
on me. First off, Buddhism really should just
be a philosophy and not a religion—it seems
that was what the Buddha intended anyway.
So whatever your religion, Buddhism is worth
a look. Just skip past all the supernatural
stuff and look at the basic nuts and bolts of
what the guy said. One of my favorites: “Do
not dwell in the past, do not dream of the
future, concentrate the mind on the present
moment.” I can’t say it any better than that,
and it seems to me now that that was just
what Howard Roberts meant.
Another book I found along the way was pianist
Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery: Liberating
the Master Musician Within. This book has
caused quite a debate in online music newsgroups,
because Werner talks about telling
yourself that you are a master. Many people get
hacked off at this, saying they know they aren’t
masters and that so-and-so is a real master and
how dare anyone compare themselves to that
person and blah blah blah. They are missing
the point entirely. What Werner is saying is that,
whatever level you are at in your playing, own
it, be it, be in the moment. If you walk onstage
worried about how you don’t measure up to
whomever you regard as a master, it will be
impossible for you to play at the top of your
game, because you are wasting energy and
mind space with stuff that has nothing to do
with the present. He doesn’t mean you have to
think you are God’s gift to the guitar. When you
are practicing, you can compare yourself to Joe
Pass or Buckethead and decide that perhaps
they play better than you. Big deal. Just sit
down and start practicing.
Here’s a fact: No matter what guitar you own
or how much you practice, you will always just
be you—no more, no less. So we just need
to find peace with that and give ourselves
permission to be who we are. Someone (I
forget who) said that your style is made by
your limitations. It might have been Miles
Davis that said that, but it was certainly true
of him. Miles, for me, was one of the all-time
greatest musicians—but he wasn’t the fastest
trumpeter, nor did he have the highest range.
What he did have was great tone and a musical
sense that seemed to never fail.
Wile E. Coyote Syndrome
Watch out for your inner critic, because he
won’t help you. I’m talking about that voice in
your head that will list, at great length, all the
reasons why you can’t be a master—or even
play well…and what were you even thinking
being onstage…and these guys are better than
you so what are you doing here…and…HELP!
Remember the old Road Runner cartoons?
There was always a moment when Wile E.
Coyote would go off a cliff and run through
the air. Then he inevitably looked down and
had that moment of “Oh no!” and down he
fell. The zone can be the same way. When
you have that out-of-body feeling and you’re
soaring, the critic inside you can shoot you
right down. Practice playing and just having
the critic shut up. At first you may only be
able to make it go away for a second, but try
to remember how it feels so you can try to
expand the feeling. Don’t think about expectations.
No worries about playing faster or being
cool/hip/rad or whatever. Remember, we are
just talking about feelings here, so pay attention
and find your way through. (I so want to
say “Use The Force,” but I won’t).
Being in the zone means you are there for
whatever happens. You are locked into the
present moment.
Relax.
Breathe.
And just be…there.
Pat Smith founded the Penguin Jazz Quartet and played Brazilian music with Nossa Bossa. He studied guitar construction with Richard Schneider, Tom Ribbecke, and Bob Benedetto, and pickin’ with Lenny Breau, Ted Greene, Guy Van Duser, and others. Pat currently lives in Iowa and plays in a duo with bassist Rich Wagor.
Paying homage to the guys who did it first.
A seemingly endless discussion on guitar
news groups concerns the idea of who is
(or isn’t) an innovator. In the sense that to
innovate is to introduce something new,
there are lots of them in the history of
guitar. But let’s think about what kind of
innovator we’re talking about. There are
two basic ways a musician can innovate: by
composing or by playing. For the moment,
let’s stick with players. Most will agree that
an innovator must influence others to follow
in their footsteps. Then there is the small
matter of whether the musician influences
players of their same instrument, players of
all instruments, or whole genres of music.
Let’s be brutally honest here. Most of us,
myself included, are basically imitators.
Before you go medieval on me, I don’t
mean to say we never have an original
thought—just that we take all we’ve heard
and bend it to our own uses. Some will just
be mimics. Others will make a personal
style out of it. Very few will take what they
have heard and forge it into something
new and amazing that will change how the
instrument or music in general is played.
The Biggies
Time to name some names! And, (disclaimer
here) all of this is debatable. I think the
most important musician in the last 100
years to influence everything was Louis
Armstrong. The way he played changed
the way every non-classical player played
their instrument. In my humble opinion—
and rest assured that no opinion could be
more humble—number two would be Miles
Davis. He was the catalyst of at least four
jazz movements, from bebop to fusion, and
the who’s who of great players that went
through his band is unprecedented. Miles’
trumpet playing was influential, but in his
case it was Miles the bandleader and visionary
who affected music as a whole. Charlie
Parker was also an innovator, stylistically.
But without Armstrong, the others wouldn’t
have happened the way they did.
From Innovators to Influencers
Sadly, there are no guitar players who
even come close to Louis and Miles as
innovators. There are players who innovate
or influence other players of the guitar
who are important at least to the rest of
us guitar pluckers. Numero uno is Andres
Segovia. He moved the guitar into the
realm of being a legitimate instrument,
and he was also the reason many composers
wrote for the guitar. The next two are
Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian.
Django has followers who’ve made his style
into almost a religion. It’s surprising how
many people try to just play exactly like
him. Few seem to take his style and build
on it. I will credit Bireli Lagrene as a great
player who takes Django and knocks it up
a notch. Other Django-influenced players
include Les Paul and Danny Gatton. Charlie
Christian, on the other hand, inspired a
generation of players such as Jim Hall, Joe
Pass, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, and Tal
Farlow, who in turn influenced the players
that came after them.
Hoppin’ Around
That brings us to the ’50s and some genre
jumping. Another guitar church founder is
the great Chet Atkins. Chet’s picking influenced
players in many genres, and I will go
as far as to say he pretty much influenced
all guitar players to some extent. Chet is
also interesting because his playing not only
spawned a mass of imitators, it also influenced
many players to play fingerstyle and
do it with their own flavors: Lenny Breau,
Tommy Emmanuel, Tommy Jones, George
Harrison, Leo Kottke, Scotty Anderson, and
on and on—Chet was and is huge.
Rock’s daddy has to be Chuck Berry. I also
think many people took up guitar because
of Buddy Holly. Was Buddy an amazing
player? Nope, but he made some great
rock music and looked cool with his Strat.
The Ventures were gigantic in their day,
and I know a bunch of guys who started
playing guitar because of them. Mike
Bloomfield’s frantic blues playing got people
running to play Les Pauls. Obviously,
The Beatles also got people to buy guitars,
though like Buddy Holly I think it had
more to do with things other than their
guitar playing. The two biggies of the ’60s
are Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. The
influence these two guys had is almost
beyond description. Though both of them
were very much based in the blues, their
use of distortion, effects boxes, volume,
and of course epic solos touched every bit
of rock guitar that came after.
So you get the upshot here? There are
innovators who change all of music, but it’s
a small number, and there are players who
innovate and influence the way the instrument
is played, and there are many of
them! Bottom line? Take all the things that
you love and play from your heart. You
may or may not change the world. I don’t
think you can actually set out to change
the world—but you can play as you play,
and it will go where it goes. Listen to your
heart when you play.
Pat Smith founded the Penguin Jazz Quartet and played Brazilian music with Nossa Bossa. He studied guitar construction with Richard Schneider, Tom Ribbecke and Bob Benedetto, and pickin’ with Lenny Breau, Ted Greene, Guy Van Duser and others. Pat currently lives in Iowa and plays in a duo with bassist Rich Wagor.
Want to change up your tone without spending a ton of money or effort? Try these small changes.
The most overused saying on guitar forums is, “The tone is in your hands.” This is what people say when someone seems too gear oriented. But the fact is that good tone, while in the ear of the beholder, involves a lot of stuff. For example, say you have a Strat and a Les Paul. While both guitars are solidbodies, they are made from different types of wood. The wood has a profound effect on tone. The wacky thing is that even if you have ten Les Pauls, they will all have differences in sound and feel. You already know there’s an army of replacement hardware and pickups out there. Then there’s the whole amp choice bit. It’s pretty overwhelming!
So let’s start with a couple of basic things you may not think much about. My goal here is to get you to actually think about the choices you make with your tone rather than just rolling on autopilot. After all, it is your tone.
Experiment with Fingers and Picks
I think the single most underrated tone ingredient is what you pluck the string with. Fingers (with nails or skin), flat pick, fingerpicks—try it all as you pursue your tone. Many players never give this a thought. With just your fingers you can get a wide variety of tones. Try letting your nails grow out a bit and use them. You can change your tone just by adjusting the angle of attack (this is also true with flat picks). Try brushing the string with your thumb à la Wes Montgomery. If you take the meaty part of your thumb, press the string, and let it snap, you get a very distinctive sound à la Mark Knopfler. Be sure to try picking in different spots along the string, closer to the bridge then farther away to go from bright to dark. Try pinch harmonics, like at the end of ZZ Top’s “La Grange,” or listen to Roy Buchanan do it. Pick the string, and as the pick crosses the string, let the meat on your thumb lightly hit the string too. To get this sound takes a bit of practice, so be sure to grip the pick fairly hard to make the flesh of your thumb protrude.
Try Different Plectra Picks!
There must be a zillion kinds of picks available. The two big things to consider are the thickness and the material it’s made from. I’ve used Clayton acetal polymer small teardrop picks for decades now. I like the 1.90 thickness and I’m very used to it, but I am always trying out new picks to see what they do. There are companies making picks out of bone, horn, seashell, assorted woods, nylon, plastic, and on and on. Picks made of hard stuff tend to sound bright and soft stuff tends to sound dark. For a long time, the gold standard of picks was tortoiseshell. These days, tortoises are protected and black market tortoise picks can run upwards of $50—you shouldn’t be using them anyway. Several makers have created synthetic tortoise picks, some of which are very close. Also, there’s a whole market in super-thick “Django” gypsy jazz picks, but that’s a whole story and technique of its own.
Many teachers start beginners with a thin or medium pick because they are a bit more forgiving of bad technique. As you advance, you may notice that thin picks flex. As you play a scale, you have to take into account both the flex of the pick and the flex of the string. Thin or thick, like all of this, is a personal choice. Take some time and try different things to see what works best for you, both in terms of your picking technique and your tone.
Fingerpicks, while not available in quite the variety that flat picks are, are available in more forms than ever before, but mainly in plastic or metal. The metal ones have the biggest variety of thicknesses, and can be open or closed on the fingertip. The thumb pick is the exception; there’s a huge variety of these out there and materials and thicknesses vary widely. There are also some hybrid picks, like the Fred Kelly Bumble Bee, which is sort of a flat pick tacked to a thumb pick.
Check out Different Strings
Strings are another key aspect of sound. You must consider what they’re made of: stainless steel, nickel, bronze, copper, nylon, and more. Also consider the way the string is made. Is it flatwound, half-round, polished, groundround, roundwound? So many choices. My point again is not to tell you what to do, but to get you think about what choices you make.
Do you want a bright sound? More sustain? Less sustain? With electric players, it tends to go like this: jazz players like flatwounds for their dark, staccato sound (flats are also less prone to feedback). The shred players seem to like the clarity and sustain of stainless steel round wounds. For my Tele, I like 100 percent nickel strings because they are darker sounding and have a nice, soft-yet-scratchy feel that I enjoy.
But Don’t Stop There
Every aspect of playing electric guitar is part of a vast interconnected system, and each ingredient makes a difference. Even non-amplified acoustic players have many choices to make. Take courage, fellow pickerheads! Pay attention to your tone and make decisions about what sounds good to you. Do some research into the players you love and see what they use, but keep in mind that chances are good you’ll sound a lot more like you than like them. You may even consider going to the insane edge of buying a guitar just because of the way it sounds rather than by what peghead shape it has. Yeah, okay… that might be going a bit far. See ya next time!
Pat Smith founded the Penguin Jazz Quartet and played Brazilian music with Nossa Bossa. He studied guitar construction with Richard Schneider, Tom Ribbecke and Bob Benedetto, and pickin’ with Lenny Breau, Ted Greene, Guy Van Duser and others. Pat currently lives in Iowa and plays in a duo with bassist Rich Wagor.
