I can’t summarize every Subversive Guitarist column here. But I’ll recap some key concepts, with one goal in mind: creating an ongoing series of mental, technical, and musical challenges to keep your playing moving forward. That’s what I mean by “perpetual subversion.”
Breaking Boxes
As stated upfront in the
first column, this series was inspired by the most common complaint I hear from intermediate and advanced
players: “I feel like I play the same things every time I pick up a guitar.”
I believe that’s because most of us learn using the same licks, formulas, and box patterns. Those tools help make guitar a relatively easy instrument to learn. The downside is, that stuff can get baked in as muscle memory. Your hands automatically fall into their familiar patterns.
Every exercise in this series aimed to subvert this cycle. But the point isn’t the individual exercises so much as the processes behind them. You can apply these endlessly, perpetually challenging yourself and uncovering new ideas.
Comfortable Techniques in Uncomfortable Places
One useful procedure is to apply a technique systematically to every note or chord in a musical passage. Take
position shifts, for example: We tend execute them favoring certain fingers, positions, and strings, especially when
improvising using box patterns and scales. But picking out melodies by ear using only a single string (suggested in
the July
2018 installment) undermines those habits. With practice, you can get comfortable shifting positions by any
interval using any finger, all while honing your ability to play melodies by ear. We used “Happy
Birthday” as an example (Ex. 1). Why not just attempt a single-string version of some random
melody as part of each practice session?
Going to Extremes
It can be revealing and inspiring to apply techniques in a more extreme fashion than we might during regular
playing. We did that when we focused on sliding between notes in the Dec.
2018 column. Ordinarily, we tend to favor particular fingers, positions, and beats when using this
technique. But if you apply the technique systematically to every note in a melody, you can break out of your usual
habits, cultivating freer and more flexible phrasing. The examples used the cowboy ballad “The Streets of
Laredo.” We started by learning the basic melody in Ex. 2.
Click here for Ex. 2
Next, we replayed the melody, sliding into every downbeat note (Ex. 3). Then sliding into the second beat of each measure (Ex. 4), and then the third beat of each measure (Ex. 5).
And then we did it all again but sliding down into each note. Try this with the first tune that pops into your head.
Another exercise in extremes was when we exploited the guitar’s maximum dynamic range in the June 2019 installment. We tried to play using 10 distinct volume levels ranging from barely audible to the loudest possible attack (Ex. 6).
Click here for Ex. 6
We all have a general sense of when to play louder and softer. But practice using the instrument’s maximum range and exploiting subtle dynamic changes can bring greater mindfulness, control, and expression to your playing.
Melodic Disruption
We’ve all got favorite phrases we like to play. It’s part of what defines our personal style! But
sometimes our lines are nothing more than muscle memory on display. Exercises that force you out of your familiar
fingerings are an excellent remedy.
For example, many of us practice scales—a good thing! But you can benefit far more from the exercise if you venture beyond simply running them up and down using only adjacent notes. We did that in the April 2019 lesson, where we tried practicing scales using short melodic “cells,” repeated on successively higher or lower scale steps, as in Ex. 7.
Click here for Ex. 7
That way, you eventually practice every possible intervallic leap, not just the familiar ones. The benefits are finding new melodies, getting better at playing tunes by ear, and general mindfulness. If you select a different short melody to play sequentially each time you practice scales, you’ll benefit far more from the exercise.
We tried another “scale disrupter” in the July 2019 column: octave leaps. Moving fluidly between octaves can create generate more interesting melodies while honing fretting-hand speed and accuracy. We practiced skipping octaves at shorter and shorter intervals, culminating in Ex. 8. It’s “The Streets of Laredo” again, but with an octave shift occurring between every single note.
Click here for Ex. 8
Composite Rhythms
We looked at various ways to expand you your rhythmic confidence and creativity, but it all boiled down to two
techniques: composite rhythm and rhythmic displacement.
Composite rhythm pertains to hearing the multiple rhythms in a piece of music not as isolated entities, but as parts in a single organized tapestry. That can be as simple as confidently tapping a foot while playing rhythms whose rhythms don’t coincide with the taps, as in Ex. 9.
Click here for Ex. 9
Then we got trickier, tapping rhythms other than the downbeat while playing syncopated rhythms, as in Ex. 10.
Click here for Ex. 10
This can be a humbling exercise, especially when you remember that drummers do more difficult things every time they play.
Rhythmic Displacement
We also talked a lot about cultivating the ability to shift rhythms in time—a technique that’s far
easier to describe than execute. One way to tackle it is by studying famous guitar intros that deceive you into
perceiving the downbeat as somewhere other than it is, only to surprise you when the full band kicks in. Ex.
11 is one of the examples from the
August 2019 column.
Click here for Ex. 11
We revisited the notion in February 2020 column, where we started with a common folk fingerpicking pattern, only to shift it around to eight possible starting points within the measure, as seen in the video below.
The ability to shift parts in time on the fly can resolve countless arrangement problems and help you craft groovier, more interesting parts. It’s all about making the familiar unfamiliar. Hey, that’s worth saying twice!
Making the Familiar Unfamiliar
Want to generate new ideas and cultivate new skills every time you practice? Then always be sure to practice a few
strange and uncomfortable things. It can be as simple as playing a familiar scale using new melodic sequences. Or
always substituting new chords each time you practice a fingerpicking pattern. Or shifting a part in time by a 16th
note. Or flipping an exercise backward and playing it start to finish. The possibilities are almost practically
endless.
With an attitude like this, you’ll never cross the finish line—and that’s great! Guitar becomes a lifelong challenge, always fresh, always fascinating. And you’ll never again have to say, “I feel like I play the same things every time I pick up a guitar.”
Is it good to able to read music fluently? Yup! (End of article.)
But it’s not quite that simple, is it? Learning to read well usually requires years of practice, and not everyone has that kind of spare time. If life obligations only let you play for a few minutes per day or a few hours per week, it’s probably not wise to over-invest in a reading regimen. Other factors include your preferred styles of music, whether you aspire to a musical career, and how much you value exposing yourself to a constant stream of new musical ideas.
This article’s goal is to help you arrive at your best decision. It’s a complicated calculus, with no hard-and-fast rules. Some might say reading is essential for professionals, but not for amateurs. Others might say it’s important for classical and jazz players, but not rock players. I find such views far too simplistic, so let’s attempt a more nuanced discussion. We’ll cover most of the usual considerations and some less commonly considered factors.
Readers and Non-Readers
I should disclose my background and biases. I learned to read as a little kid, and I kept reading through college and grad school. I can generally look at a piece of notation and “hear” what it sounds like, or hear music and visualize how it would look in notation. Sometimes I think I read music better than I read English. This reflects no innate talent on my part—it’s simply a matter of training.
But for all that, I’ve never insisted that all my students learn to read, and I don’t believe it’s a crucial skill for many guitarists. Most of my favorite players are non-readers, or semi-skilled readers who don’t use notation as a day-to-day tool. In some cases, a lack of theory and reading knowledge contributes to a player’s unique and exciting style.
Career Considerations
So who needs to read? If you’re going to pursue a degree in music, you need to read well. (You’ll probably need to learn piano too, so get cracking if you haven’t already.) This is probably true even if your specialization is rock, jazz, or pop.
Once upon a time, you had to be an ace reader to be a studio/session guitarist. That’s rarely true these days. The last time I had to do serious reading at a session was for a film score several years ago. If I’d been forced to decline every prospective gig that required reading, I’d have lost … maybe two percent of my work?
Composing for film or television was once unthinkable without notation skills. Even today few musicians would dare step into a big, expensive soundtrack recording session without strong reading skills. But increasingly, the music for film and TV (not to mention jingles) is produced independently in small studios, often by musicians without traditional training.
What if you dream of a career as a session player? Some of the leading Los Angeles players are superb readers, but a handful of players get most of the jobs. There are fine readers in Nashville, but guitarists are far likelier to use “Nashville number system” charts than standard notation. (The number system is a specialized type of chord chart.) In fact, you can make a case that “session guitarist” no longer exists as a career option. Most non-rock stars who make a living in music are multitasking: playing, performing, composing, recording, producing, mixing, teaching, and investing many hours in self-promo and social media. Sure, reading ability is an advantage, but it’s probably less of a factor than at any point in the past.
You don’t even need to read music to be a guitar magazine editor. I’ve edited for two major guitar mags, and in both cases, only a few of the editors were capable readers. (But obviously, you need those skills for, say, transcribing guitar solos or editing music for publication.)
Isn’t it possible to play MIDI notes into a DAW or notation program and have the program capture your performance in notation? Not quite. No matter how precise your performance or how clever your software, you must almost always make many manual edits before the notated music becomes suitable for sharing.
Tab: Fab or Drab?
These days far more guitarists rely on tab than on standard notation. Tab (short for tablature) isn’t some recent invention for guitarists too “lazy” to learn notation—fretted-instrument players have used tab for well over 400 years. Tab has helped millions of guitarists successfully learn millions of songs.
But tab has shortcomings. First, only guitarists can read it, so you can’t use it to share ideas with musicians who play other instruments. Also, tab conveys limited information about the music it depicts. As an example, consider the two measures shown in Ex. 1.
If you’re not a notation reader, try picking out the tab notes. Wow, a descending C major scale—big deal. Without the rhythms indicated in the notation, you might not realize that it’s the first phrase from “Joy to the World.” (The Christmas carol, not the Hoyt Axton song about Jeremiah the Bullfrog.) Tab doesn’t tell you how long to sustain notes, or whether to play them legato, staccato, or some other way. It communicates nothing about dynamics. It’s not clear when notes should bleed into each other and when they shouldn’t. And while tab can indicate note-to-note articulations such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, and bends, it has no way to depict longer musical phrases.
Tab usually works great if you’re already familiar with the music you’re trying to learn. And that brings us to one of the strongest arguments in favor of music reading.
Learning What You Don’t Already Know
For me, the biggest benefit of reading well is the ability to learn from music you don’t already know. It’s a cliché to say that guitarists should study music by non-guitarists, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Tab can be great for learning a Van Halen solo, but it won’t help you learn a Miles Davis solo or a Bach prelude.
As an example, I often steal ideas from classical music for everything from rock solos to pop hooks. Racking my brain for an example, I thought of Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, a piece for orchestra and chorus that I’ve loved since I was a teen but have never approached as a guitarist. I downloaded a free public-domain score and got to work.
For reference, here’s a fine performance of the score as the composer intended.
It opens with a chord so unique and renowned that classical musicians refer to it as (wait for it … ) “the Symphony of Psalms chord.” It’s a bizarre voicing of an E minor triad played by most of the orchestra. According to traditional music theory, the 3 of a triad is the note you’re least likely to double at the octave. But Stravinsky quadruples it, voicing the G in four different octaves.
With eight notes spread across more than three-and-a-half octaves, it’s unplayable on guitar. It’s literally impossible to play the three lowest notes on a single standard-tuned guitar. The chord is difficult on keyboard as well, though players with a good reach can handle it (see Image 1).
But if a single guitar can’t play the chord, can two guitars? To find out, I had to write down the chord, and then figure out how to divide the notes between two instruments (Ex. 2). Yes—it works! What a bizarre and fascinating voicing! But I’d never have known that if I couldn’t read music.
Click here for Ex. 2
Then I started thinking about other parts of the piece. In the opening section, the famous chord alternates with spiky, chromatic melodies employing half-diminished scales centered around Bb. Those are played by a bassoon and an oboe, doubling the melody at a distance of two octaves—a relatively rare voicing for guitarists. With its dissonant intervals and the tritone clash between the E minor chord and the Bb scales, this passage could inspire a hundred evil-sounding metal riffs. The odd-meter rhythms would suit any musical style with the word “progressive” in its name. And whoa—that two-octave doubling sounds an awful lot like impossibly fast artificial harmonics. I’m definitely going to be stealing that trick.
Those scales are a bitch to play at the indicated tempo of 92 bpm. I had to write everything down and learn the parts slowly from the page. This too would have been nearly impossible without reading skills. Ex. 3 shows the piece’s opening section, transcribed for two guitars.
Click here for Ex. 3
The goal isn’t to perform a symphony on two guitars (not that that’s a bad idea). It’s about stretching my hands into new formations and stretching my ears to incorporate these new discoveries. This cuts to the heart of the entire Subversive Guitarist series: breaking dead-end muscle-memory habits and finding new inspiration.
Another example: My previous column, on mutant folk fingerpicking, employed a simple concept: Take a pattern whose accent usually falls on the downbeat, and then shift the placement so that the accent falls anywhere but the downbeat. But there’s no way I could have gone straight from concept to performance. Again, I had to write it all down, and then practice from the page. It can be a laborious process, but if you’re lucky, it generates fresh, exciting ideas.
Obviously, That’s a Circle
For the sake of balance, here’s a final argument against relying too much on theory and notation. If you know theory well and have read lots of music from notation, you grow accustomed to the most common melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic formulas. That can be a valuable skill! But it can also make you leap to assumptions, ruling out less predictable, less theoretically “correct” options. It’s not a matter of guitarists with theory chops being sticklers for “the rules.” It’s simply that we sometimes assume prematurely where something is going, when the best destination might be someplace less predictable.
Here’s a visual metaphor: A player schooled in theory might look at the partial circle in Image 2, think, “Obviously, that’s going to be a circle,” and complete the idea as shown in the second drawing. But someone who doesn’t know the usual formulas might devise something more creative, like the third drawing.
Given the choice, I’d definitely choose “strong theory and reading skills” over “no theory and reading skills.” Yet I must admit that non-schooled players often devise the coolest, freshest ideas. Too often I make the expected choice because I know what musicians usually do. That’s the opposite of creativity! Maybe that’s why most of my favorite guitarists don’t have traditional theory and reading skills.
The Verdict
Hey, don’t ask me—the jury is you! I just hope I’ve presented a balanced perspective on an important and difficult decision for many ambitious guitarists.
