On the Application of Knowledge

For I learned that the absolute best way to find out what you don't understand is to try to express something in your own words.
— Donald Knuth, Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Here, he's talking about translating the Bible, despite not knowing Greek or Hebrew. I think it works when you're talking about most subject, especially music. You can listen to music, you can read about music theory, but it's when you come to play, you have to be you, and you have to communicate with others. I think it's easy to recast that statement as one of this blog's statements of belief:

The best way to learn to play music is to play music, preferably with other people and in front of other people

On the importance of committment

dabbling in jazz is like dabbling in satanism, you really don't get the benefits unless you go all in.
-- jazztele, on TDPRI

On Developing Your Personal Voice

Stop playing a Blues in E major every day. You all already know how to do this. Try new and innovative things, things that inspire you. Make goals. It’s important and cool to master different scales and all kinds of arpeggios, but don’t forget to use all this stuff for your own music. It’s useless to learn all this if you don’t use it in your own musical context.
— Telecaster Master Jim Campilongo

On Talent Requirements of Contemporary Music Styles

Music Business 2.0

To think that a pop-punk guy would get a "Man That's Deep" nod....

A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations

Victor Wooten at Sweetwater

On Monday, I took my two biggest sons to Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne to see a clinic with Victor Wooten and J.D. Blair.

OK, just in case you don't know, Wooten plays bass for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. He plays Fodera basses and Hartke amps. He has been featured before on this blog, in the inaugural post of the 'man that's deep' label. There's also some points to add to the 'how to not suck' label. But we'll get to that.

On improvisation vs. repertoire:"The fewer songs you recognize, the better night we're having."

Of course, he's a massive player. He, a looper pedal, and a great drummer can make all the music you'd want.

Gearhead Paragraph: He had two bassists, one a 4-string yin/yang bass tuned EADG with a Hipshot D-tuner and another bass tuned ADGC: a 'tenor bass' in his terminology. Both have 24-fret necks. He uses nickel strings, a Boss RC50 loop pedal, a Peterson tuner pedal and had a Hartke stack with a 4x10 cab for high notes and a 1x15 for the low. He uses a hair tie to mute the open strings — I call it the Greg Howe trick because that's where I saw it first — He has basses with Kahler tremolos, fretless basses, five-string basses with MIDI pickups, but he didn't have them there that night. But that is what he uses. If you try what he likes and don't like it, he doesn't want the blame, and if you try what he likes and like it too, he doesn't want the credit.

On endorsements "Don't buy something because someone uses it. Try it out because they use it, but only buy it if you like it."

On the transitive nature of instruments "Bass is more a role than an instrument."

The coolest thing, the thing I want most to try, is his groove/rhythm exercise. Set up a long drum pattern on your drum machine. Set your drum machine so it plays that measure four times. Find your groove in that. Get into it.

Then replace the fourth measure to silence.

This will tell you your tendencies, if you tend to rush the beat or lag. And, if you know, you can start to work against it.

This is when you swap out the third measure.

Then the second.

Then just have one beat, one note floating in a sea of silence.

I have yet to try that exercise. But it sounds like a perfect get-the-groove don't-suck kind of exercise, doesn't it?

On warming up "I'm 45 years old. I've been playing for 43. I should be warmed up by now."

If you get a chance to see him playing with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, do it. If you get a chance to see him playing in duo format with J.D. Blair, do that. But especially, if you get the chance to do a workshop with him, jump on that.

The final point: it is far more pleasant to be in the electric guitar room at Sweetwater after a Victor Wooten clinic than after a John 5 clinic. Bassists who play with each other are much more pleasant to be in a room with than guitarists who don't.

On the ability to count to 3

On the Tele Discussion Page Reissue (TDPRI), there's a tread called "Post your three no-brainer tips you've learned here". This is my contribution:

1. You can do it. Learn a technique. Mod your guitar. Build the thing from timber and finish it. Wind the pickups. I haven't done much -- I've modded every superficial thing on my #1, leaving only the fundamentals like electronics, nut and fretwork left for me -- but for any given thing I want to try, I know that a) I can do it and b) someone on TDPRI will tell me how.
2. For hot country guitar, you need a compressor, a clean amp and rubber-band strings. And, of course, a Tele. Unless you want to do it some other way.
3. The most expensive guitar/amp/pedal/cable isn't necessarily the best sounding guitar/amp/pedal/cable. Specifically, the SX guitars from Rondo are perfectly good guitars that make great mod platforms and are even pretty good guitars out of the box.
4. The Parsons White isn't the only way to have a B-Bender. And you don't necessarily need to bend the B.

OK. Clearly, I have lost the ability to count to four. But that's my take. What 3 (or more, or less even) no-brainer tips do you have?

Let's Go Trippin'

In Indianapolis, the best places I know to go guitar shopping are around the Castleton area, where you have Guitar Center, Sam Ash and IRC Music. If there is a better acoustic room in Indy than Guitar Center, I need to know now.

However, if they have ever had a musician come in and give a seminar at the Castleton Guitar Center, I've never heard about it.

Evidently, they have such things at the Hollywood Guitar Center. This is Dick Dale.



Part 1 of 12. See the whole set.

On Telecaster Culture

But as far as a specific guitar culture goes, it’s hard to find anything more hard core than Telecaster culture. Those Tele cats have a jihad thing goin’ on. You don’t even wanna mess with a Tele geek. They assemble at the TDPRI Compound for gorilla strategies and hard drinkin’. Nice bunch of folks, but don’t ever cross ‘em!
— Stratoblogster

Deep Thoughts with Greg Koch

On playing 319 shows a year, and on synergy

You have to want it; you have to have a band that wants it with you.

— Jason Ricci

On the state of the music industry, 2009

I really feel that, at this stage in life and where music is, live performances are again very vital. And that’s the one thing they can’t steal from you. They can’t replicate it, or download it for free, or anything else. So, live music is a crucial way for me to reach my audience. And the other thing is the internet, which has become an invaluable tool. Of course, you have to do it all yourself, so that puts the impetus on the artist. But I don’t mind that, I never felt the record companies knew what the heck to do either, so I might as well figure it out myself.
— Adrian Belew

On Retaining Knowledge

In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.
-- Uli Latus

On repertoire

"He always had a song for any kind of culture or any event, whether it was cowboys, Indians, prisoners, Christians, atheists. You name it, he had a song for it. Being prepared with a song and a story about it was a great lesson."
-- Marty Stuart, lessons learned from playing with Johnny Cash

On playing Guitar Hero vs. being a Guitar Hero

"It's a tough instrument — it's not easy. It took me a long time, and it was frustrating at first. And you just have to stick with it, and it's cool for people who don't have time to learn the chords or ain't interested in it, but to play music is one of the greatest things."
— Prince

A talk with Steve Cropper

On the importance of string gauges

"Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But the thing to remember is it's your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it."
David Fair of Half Japanese

The Twenty Tones You Meet In Heaven

There's a post on O'Reilly about keyboard tones. It started with 20 Sounds That Must Die, a list of way-overused keyboard sounds in 1995. He then reversed it, going to 20 Sounds That Must Live , a group of keyboard sounds that sound good and can generally be used in most situations.

That's interesting. But that's keyboard talk. I have a guitar.

No. That's not right.

I have several guitars.

I have a big dreadnought acoustic.

I have a tiny classical acoustic.

I have a Tele with dinky strings.

I have a Tele with heavy strings.

I have two lap steels.

Not to mention my pedals and the amp with clean and gain channels. And that multieffects box with bank after bank of emulation.

This is a big part of GAS. You need more instruments so you can get more sounds. A keyboard guy has bank upon bank of synth sounds, but to get a fundamentally different sound, you need to spend money on a fundamentally different instrument. You can break it down into acoustic, clean, crunch and lead tones, which might be useful for explaining. What are the tones you need to play? How do you get them?

On Practice

You (we) live in a time of unprecedented access to information. You can buy perfect transcriptions of just about any major soloist, instructions methods on any topic imaginable, free information on youtube, trufire, etc. Seek and you shall find. There are no shortcuts. You, guitar, metronome, time. — Smoke, from TDPRI