This is a shameless plug for an album I'm preparing to record. I've not been updating my blog much lately because I'm very busy practicing and preparing for the recording sessions. Later this year I'll be releasing an album of all 30 of Leo Brouwer's Etudes. There will be some... surprises! I'll leave it at that for now.
Practice hard, play the truth,
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
more, more, more, more, more!
New ideas are a great thing. Searching for new ideas is part of what keeps us most engaged with life and with music. When it comes to writing music, improvising, and practicing, however, more is not necessarily better. In fact, too many ideas can quickly become trite, confusing, distracted, flashy, and entirely without meaning. Repetition and variation, on the other hand, can often lend depth to the impact of our music and the effectiveness of practicing.
I'm going to take one very simple and very specific melodic idea and illustrate how many different ways we can look at this on the guitar. Two intervals. That's it. Up a diatonic second and then up another 4th. If we're in C and starting on C, that gives us C, D, G, which is an inversion of a Gsus4 triad. (There I go with the suspensions again...)
Here's a shorthand example of how I can practice this idea throughout the key of C and all over the fingerboard. (Click the image to enlarge.)
The first example is showing how the idea can ascend and descend through a C major scale in V position. This should be played ascending to the highest note in a given position, then descending to the lowest note, then back to the root. I use 7 positions for most scales.
I'm going to take one very simple and very specific melodic idea and illustrate how many different ways we can look at this on the guitar. Two intervals. That's it. Up a diatonic second and then up another 4th. If we're in C and starting on C, that gives us C, D, G, which is an inversion of a Gsus4 triad. (There I go with the suspensions again...)
Here's a shorthand example of how I can practice this idea throughout the key of C and all over the fingerboard. (Click the image to enlarge.)
The second example shows how to practice this same idea along a set of two strings. Again, the short hand can be extended all the way up and down the fingerboard, from open strings to the highest fret. There are 5 sets of adjacent strings on the guitar. Some patterns won't work on two adjacent strings, but this one does.
The third example shows how the idea can be moved up and down sets of three strings as chords. We've got 4 sets of strings to practice this on in this case.
Does that seem like a lot? It IS, but guess what. There's MORE you can do with this simple three note motive without even getting into rhythm or articulation. Consider that this only addresses a major scale and the associated modes. You can also apply this idea to harmonic minor, melodic minor, and other synthetic scales.
I don't know exactly how to calculate the number of different ways to play that one simple little idea on guitar, but I figure it's well into the hundreds...
Oh, and what if I switch the second and third notes so it goes up to G then down to D? Mind boggling!
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Oh, and what if I switch the second and third notes so it goes up to G then down to D? Mind boggling!
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
How music speaks to us
A friend recently shared this TED talk with me and I think it's definitely worth passing along. Benjamin Zander gives a very powerful demonstration of how music speaks.
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Music as truth
I had a few experiences this evening that got my brain going back over the relationship between music and truth. (Yes, this is going to be another more philosophical/spiritual post rather than a technical one.) This is something I've thought about a great deal throughout my life. The relationship between music and truth is also something I haven't payed much attention to for the past couple of years. More on this soon... The recent experiences that stirred up my thinking anew were these:
1 - Listening to three a cappella songs by Ravel that I'd sung in choir while I was in grad school and hadn't listened to for several years. One in particular, Three Birds Of Paradise (translated), moved me almost to tears while sitting on the bus. It did that to me 15 years ago even after countless rehearsals. There's a truth and a tenderness in that piece, regardless of who's singing it or where/when I'm listening to it, that transcends time in my own life.
2 - Having dinner and playing board games with two old friends, one of whom is experiencing the rather slow loss of his sister to cancer. His ideas about life and reality have often been found challenging by many who meet him. Tonight, they had the common element of "daring," but playfully and engagingly, even happily so.
3 - Reading a great article about "left" versus "right" in the political climate and what this editor believes journalism should be aiming for. The article, for me, reached beyond extremes and compromises. It spoke of reality in a dynamic and ultimately undefinable way that we rarely find in "news" reporting.
That's the stage. There's obviously far more to it than that, but there are the more immediate influences. Those are the things that I've been paying attention to tonight.
-----
My general thought is this - Music is a language. It's a way of communicating. We can communicate many things with one another - concepts, desires, images, feelings, realizations, formulas, regrets, beliefs... We use spoken language so regularly and for so many things that I wonder if many of us give pause to consider what we're trying to communicate at all when we speak. I wonder how often most of us pay attention to what's being said when we think we're listening.
Music is a language. It's a way of communicating. It's a LESS COMMON (I'm shouting...) way of communicating that speaking or writing. That doesn't make it less effective or more important. It DOES make it less familiar. That means we pay more attention. We tend to pay less attention to what is familiar and more attention to what is less familiar.
We tend to pay more attention to music whether "speaking" or listening. When we're paying closer attention to what we say and to what we're listening to, we're more likely to communicate something that is a deeper truth and we're more likely to hear that truth. If you're among those who create music, take a moment to consider the truth that you're speaking. If you're more a listener than a player, take a moment to think about what you're listening to. Are you really listening? What is the music telling you?
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
1 - Listening to three a cappella songs by Ravel that I'd sung in choir while I was in grad school and hadn't listened to for several years. One in particular, Three Birds Of Paradise (translated), moved me almost to tears while sitting on the bus. It did that to me 15 years ago even after countless rehearsals. There's a truth and a tenderness in that piece, regardless of who's singing it or where/when I'm listening to it, that transcends time in my own life.
2 - Having dinner and playing board games with two old friends, one of whom is experiencing the rather slow loss of his sister to cancer. His ideas about life and reality have often been found challenging by many who meet him. Tonight, they had the common element of "daring," but playfully and engagingly, even happily so.
3 - Reading a great article about "left" versus "right" in the political climate and what this editor believes journalism should be aiming for. The article, for me, reached beyond extremes and compromises. It spoke of reality in a dynamic and ultimately undefinable way that we rarely find in "news" reporting.
That's the stage. There's obviously far more to it than that, but there are the more immediate influences. Those are the things that I've been paying attention to tonight.
-----
My general thought is this - Music is a language. It's a way of communicating. We can communicate many things with one another - concepts, desires, images, feelings, realizations, formulas, regrets, beliefs... We use spoken language so regularly and for so many things that I wonder if many of us give pause to consider what we're trying to communicate at all when we speak. I wonder how often most of us pay attention to what's being said when we think we're listening.
Music is a language. It's a way of communicating. It's a LESS COMMON (I'm shouting...) way of communicating that speaking or writing. That doesn't make it less effective or more important. It DOES make it less familiar. That means we pay more attention. We tend to pay less attention to what is familiar and more attention to what is less familiar.
We tend to pay more attention to music whether "speaking" or listening. When we're paying closer attention to what we say and to what we're listening to, we're more likely to communicate something that is a deeper truth and we're more likely to hear that truth. If you're among those who create music, take a moment to consider the truth that you're speaking. If you're more a listener than a player, take a moment to think about what you're listening to. Are you really listening? What is the music telling you?
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
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