Moshkito



 I could not even imagine, a couple of those folks even enjoying some intentionally missed note in the middle of a chord, as is the case with XTC, and how it does not hurt the piece. And the same for quite a few other experimentation folks.
 
 

An "intentionally missed note in the middle of a chord" is a complete misnomer. Shirley if it's intentional, it's just a 'different' chord.

SteveStrummerUK

Moshkito



 I could not even imagine, a couple of those folks even enjoying some intentionally missed note in the middle of a chord, as is the case with XTC, and how it does not hurt the piece. And the same for quite a few other experimentation folks.
 
 

 
An "intentionally missed note in the middle of a chord" is a complete misnomer. Shirley if it's intentional, it's just a 'different' chord.

Not according to Andy Partridge. The sound itself of the combination of notes, or the dis-combination of notes, seems to open up his imagination and off he goes into the movie, and that tends to dictate his next set of notes, or lyrics. He does not clarify if the sound of the combination of notes is what creates songs for him or a few words together or separated ... he says that both of them, since he has bits and pieces all over that sometimes end up somewhere else.
 
But I can relate to "seeing" things in music ... and it is how I define it. Sadly, there are things that I do not "see" in a lot of music ... I was listening to pieces of "Boris Godunov", and those voices did nothing for me, and the music was marginal for my mind. But put on Verdi or Puccini, and I am gone in a second or two.
 
XTC is one of those odd ball things for me, and some of it clicks and some doesn't ... but you're like a big box of paints and such ... are lyrics that are really nice and right to a nifty comment and idea.
 
I'm thinking about body painting now! Go figure!

gotta know how to make 'guitar face'

 

 

 

I'm an okay guitarist. My friend Barry is an okay guitarist. We were noodling around on acoustics one night last year when my friend Nate of the band Noctomb came over. They're one of those death-metal, low-tuned guitars, grunting/croaking vocals bands that seem to be popular among the kids these days.
He asked to play my guitar and the things he did on it flummoxed both me and Barry. I can't describe it, because I don't know what he did even though I was just 5 feet away.
A bonus was the first time he ever played a 12-string acoustic. He looked like a child the first time he tasted candy. It was cool.

Guitarists can think in any number of ways about the fretboard.  At any given time,  there are at least 3 places to play the same note!  Some guitarists don't even think in terms of theory and simply have an ear tied to different places on the guitar and see sounds in terms of different motions (e.g. move horizontally  then go down two strings).  It's always tough with young students because, using the latter approach one can get up and running (and sounding decent) without much effort.  But to really get that edge, guitarists ultimately have to learn theory, and that can mean unlearning all the kinesthetic stuff that they had just spent the majority of their life doing!  Aaron Sherer has/had a pretty good system to get young students interested in classical guitar.  The problem being that it takes alot longer to get sounding decent.  Without the parents pushing them in that direction, students can lose interest real quick.
 
The fact remains, one can sound pretty decent on the guitar without much effort.  It's an easy instrument to sound *ok* on.  To truly master it takes a lifetime.  It's one of the most difficult in that respect.

I get where you're coming from. But I've always approached it differently. Where your perception has four legs, mine only has two. For me it has alway broken down into knowledge of your instrument and music theory and that's all.
 
How your instrument is built and how its tuned and how you get various sounds out of it? Instrument stuff.
 
How chords are built and how songs are built and how to listen to a song once and know the chord progression instantly even if you don't know the key? That's all music theory to me. Perhaps that because all of that and more was covered in detail in my high school music theory class.
 
Granted I probably had a pretty other-worldly high school music theory class, but all of that was taught in detail as music theory. Chord structure? Music theory. Song structure? Music theory. Arranging techniques? Music theory. Ear training? Music theory. Writing for 5-part harmony i.e. string arranging? Music theory.
 
It was all music theory and it was all intertwined and connected for me. Its all the same machine for me and in order to understand one of them, you had to understand all the others.
 
But enough about that. You're coming back to guitar and approaching it as though you were never there. Talk about that. How will that work exactly? How are you planning to pull it off? What do you expect the result will be?

JohanSebatianGremlin
... 
Granted I probably had a pretty other-worldly high school music theory class, but all of that was taught in detail as music theory. Chord structure? Music theory. Song structure? Music theory. Arranging techniques? Music theory. Ear training? Music theory. Writing for 5-part harmony i.e. string arranging? Music theory.
...
 

In many ways, this all helps. I do not doubt that. However, when one studies the experimental and the improvised music, specially on guitar, there are many that do not exactly go by a chord structure, any more than they do music theory, or song structure.
 
As was the case in most of the German music out of the late 60's and 70's, and very much also done in France and even Italy (of all places the most classically influenced!), there were many folks whose experimentation's defied description, and to this day, many of the German folks, from the so (badly!) called "krautrock" were intentionally not using anything that was Anglo-American, or Westernized music, specially what was called schlager or what we consider pop music ... 
 
I can even think of Jon McLaughlin, and I am positive that he knows his music, but he has a very good ear, and he bounces out of it really fast and can easily join Hindu musicians and improvise with them. 
 
At this point, I am not sure that it is about anything that we think about. And it makes me think that too much of this "theory" thing is stuff that we learn ... when we don't know anything, and hope that the theory transitions into your own music ... and it CAN'T! ... it's all stuff that has been done before and heard before, and you are merely replicating it. 
 
To "create", it has to be new. It has to come from a place that ... we were not there before, let's say ... and in many ways, my only concern is that we're limiting what an instrument can do ... which is ... just play the notes n the score!
 
Guess what rock music and almost all the music in the 20th century was about? Pretty much what you could NOT place in the score ... that made so much of rock, jazz and many other things so important and valuable, and we still listen to it. Heck ... even opera could use a Roger Daltrey for a scream or two, no? At least the point would be "true" for you and I, instead of sounding so ... weak for our ears!

Anytime one produces more than one pitch simultaneously (or even not so much simultaneously), one is using some sort of chord structure whether one knows about it or not. Having knowledge of theory does not in and of itself prevent one from experimenting. Just because you understand theory and chord structure etc, there is nothing that prevents you from getting the sounds you like out of your instrument just by playing it without paying the least amount of attention to what chords you're actually playing or what tonality you're playing in. In other words, you can still play using just your fingers and your ears if you want. I experiment all the time without giving any thought to what I'm actually playing. 
 
In short, just because you know the rules, doesn't mean you have to follow them. 

Moshkito

JohanSebatianGremlin
... 
Granted I probably had a pretty other-worldly high school music theory class, but all of that was taught in detail as music theory. Chord structure? Music theory. Song structure? Music theory. Arranging techniques? Music theory. Ear training? Music theory. Writing for 5-part harmony i.e. string arranging? Music theory.
...
 

In many ways, this all helps. I do not doubt that. However, when one studies the experimental and the improvised music, specially on guitar, there are many that do not exactly go by a chord structure, any more than they do music theory, or song structure.
 
As was the case in most of the German music out of the late 60's and 70's, and very much also done in France and even Italy (of all places the most classically influenced!), there were many folks whose experimentation's defied description, and to this day, many of the German folks, from the so (badly!) called "krautrock" were intentionally not using anything that was Anglo-American, or Westernized music, specially what was called schlager or what we consider pop music ... 
 
I can even think of Jon McLaughlin, and I am positive that he knows his music, but he has a very good ear, and he bounces out of it really fast and can easily join Hindu musicians and improvise with them. 
 
At this point, I am not sure that it is about anything that we think about. And it makes me think that too much of this "theory" thing is stuff that we learn ... when we don't know anything, and hope that the theory transitions into your own music ... and it CAN'T! ... it's all stuff that has been done before and heard before, and you are merely replicating it. 
 
To "create", it has to be new. It has to come from a place that ... we were not there before, let's say ... and in many ways, my only concern is that we're limiting what an instrument can do ... which is ... just play the notes n the score!
 
Guess what rock music and almost all the music in the 20th century was about? Pretty much what you could NOT place in the score ... that made so much of rock, jazz and many other things so important and valuable, and we still listen to it. Heck ... even opera could use a Roger Daltrey for a scream or two, no? At least the point would be "true" for you and I, instead of sounding so ... weak for our ears!

 
I think you're just taking this position to be obnoxious.  Of course, those who know music theory can get alot further on any instrument.  Just because someone get's a spot in guitar player mag doesn't mean they're good.  And frankly, learning music history makes one aware when he or she or it is COPYING someone,and can give the *originator* credit.  Variations are like using the predecessor's thoughts  like a cantus firmus.  Sadly, there hasn't been much new in the guitar world (improvised or not;  most new pieces are a type of improvisation) in an other worldly long time.  There's nothing gnu under the sun, it's all variations like Siddharta said;  different manifestations of the same thing or essence.