I mentioned the other day that writing is harder than practicing, and that time is a great enemy. Let me be honest and tell you that my enemy has a collaborator, a traitor in my camp, someone who delights in taking away time from practice and forcing me into other things that seem rewarding. And that traitor, that vile Ephialtes , is me. You know what that I do? I wind up forgetting that I am a guitarist, and thinking that I am a music theorist.
Read on and I’ll tell you what I mean.
So, I am working on learning some songs, as we’ve discussed before. To make this completely separate from anything else we’ve done before, let’s talk about a great song, “Stella By Starlight. ”
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I’m not great at Substack or I’d find something better to do than give you this link to a PDF. Here’s a link to the file on MuseScore .
Dirk Laukens offers a fantastic lesson on this song, you should check it out .
Stellaby
136KB ∙ PDF file
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Anyway, there’s a lot of ways to think about how to play this. And the most consequential decision that you’re going to make it is about the chords. Remember, the guitar is both a melodic and harmonic instrument. If you’re playing in a band, maybe you’ll take a solo, but you will for sure be accompanying the melody, or comping . This means that deciding which chords to play and when to play them is going to be choice for your responsibility for the majority of time that you’re playing.
Never mind anything else, this is going to define your approach as a player. Dirk has a great lesson and method available on playing chord melody style. You should buy it . (Ed. note, you’d think that this Substack is an ad for Dirk’s site. It’s not. I’ve never met him, we’ve never spoken, he’s never even answered an email. I just think that he’s really valuable.) Anyway, you’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about chords. Jazz players spend forever on this. Look at what a lead sheet is, it’s melody with the harmony notated above it so that you can play chords.
I’m working on an exercise right now to change the way that I think about chords, which is to use the CAGED System to generate chord shapes. It’s a good system for understanding where chords are, what’s easily available, and how to build shapes.
So, guess what I did. Did I pick up the guitar and start figuring it out? You’d think so. Nope. I printed out the lead sheets and started doing analysis.
Examine key signature for stated key
Examine melody and chord changes for key changes (current keys)
Analyse key changes to relationships to stated key
Analyse each note for relationship to chord, stated key and current keys
Guess what that gave me? A whole lot of paper and pencil, not a lot of guitar time. Some of this is smart to do but some of it is way too much preparation. I would have been way better served by playing and trying to figure it out with a guitar in place of a pencil.
This was not a bad instinct, but it was the wrong choice. If I were a music student, playing and practicing for hours a day, this would not be a bad thing to do. But I am not a music student, I’m a dad with a job. Here’s the evidence of that . My time is dear. That means that I should be maximizing time with hands on neck, rather than hands on pencil. As my friend Trevor pointed out, I am not a music theorist, but a guitarist. And without a substantial amount of ear training, I wouldn’t be able to hear what I am doing on paper, anyway. The guitar would be a much more effective way to do what I am hoping to do.
So, don’t overcomplicate the task and consider it warning sign if the task involves you having something in your hands rather than a guitar. Get lost on the neck, spend more time there, rather than in your head. It’s better to have no tangible artifacts of playing, no paper, than tangible artifacts of thinking, lots of paper, if your goal is to play the guitar.