I’ve commented elsewhere, but realized I should post an intro here too.
I’ve been playing for 35 years or so. I’m a generalist, not a specialist, and have dabbled in everything from trad folk to experimental jazz, but my real roots are in what I think of as Americana. I split about 50/50 acoustic and electric, and play in rather a lot of bands. I’ve been a singer and a songwriter as well as a guitarist, especially for the past decade or so. And therein lies a story.
About two years ago, I noticed a sharp drop in my singing voice. My tone was rough, and I couldn’t hit pitches I wanted. (I’d actually noticed losing about a minor third in my upper range over the couple of previous years, which I wrote off to age.) I figured I’d just injured my vocal cords, and took a month’s voice rest. A little over a month after the rest started, I recorded a song, and… my voice was substantially worse than a recording just six weeks or so earlier. So off to the doctor I go. At the voice clinic, the doctor checked mostly to make sure I didn’t have cancer (I didn’t), told me about vocal polyps and nodules, put me on a week of prednisone, and scheduled some time with a speech therapist, and a follow-up with his colleague in three months. Over that time, my voice quality decayed rapidly. I had little volume and struggled to sound out complete words. At my August follow-up, the doctor took one look, and told me I had warts growing on my vocal cords! I was screwed… the only treatment was surgery in the short term, and ongoing laser surgery treatment for the rest of my life after. It’s an extremely rare condition, but very debilitating and potentially fatal if not treated. The warts will eventually grow over the air passage, suffocating the victim.
Since then, I’ve had the operating room surgery, followed by laser surgery every three months or so. My voice is permanently damaged and unpredictable, severely limiting my singing.
It’s been heartbreaking, and caused a deep depression. It got to the core of my identity as a musician. Imagine losing your ability to play guitar. (Scarily enough, I can easily imagine that now.)
Recovering emotionally from this has led me to focus much more strongly on my guitar playing. I’ve been lax and lazy about developing new technique for ages. I’m changing that now, and it’s forcing me to confront things that are weak and unsatisfying in my technique, limitations I can address with conscious effort and practice.
For ages, I’ve relied on a CAGED view of the neck for the left hand, and a combination of backbeat strumming, legato, and hybrid picking for the right - very much in the vein of Neil Young or (I wish) Richard Thompson. But when I went to regular “lead guitar” single note playing, it all falls apart. It’s slow, sloppy, and full of poor, amateurish note choices. I can’t play stuff like bop or metal to save my life. (On a positive note, I have excellent tone.)
Exploration on YouTube led me to Troy’s Cracking the Code, which led me here. Pickslanting explained so much! My single-note picking was “correct” per the shortcomings of guitar pedagogy, and so my pick was always trapped. But the groovy ease of my strumming/legato was, clearly, downward pickslanting. A very limited form, but it is what it is. So now I’m working on this, in conjunction with Fretboard Anatomy’s Metronome Boot Camp, to get things under control.
Just last week, while watching Troy’s brief analysis of John McLaughlin in the Strunz & Farah interview, I had an epiphany. McLaughlin’s four note per string approach is really 2+2, and he’s often playing two string arpeggios. And I was like “Oh, that’s how you play bop on guitar!” My jazz playing has always sucked. I couldn’t play arpeggios with my CAGED concept with any sort of efficiency, so I’d fall back to scales - diatonic “modal” patterns, or worse, major/minor pentatonics that I could play sort of at tempo, but sounded ruthlessly unhip. I sounded like a crappy rock and roll player trying to fake jazz, which is exactly what I was. But what John McLaughlin does? Oh. He can play two note per string/two string seventh chord arpeggios, alternate them with thoughtful and sophisticated scale choices, and do them at those crazy 200bpm bebop tempos!
I want to be able to do that. I won’t ever be John McLaughlin, but maybe I can at least learn to play jazz that actually sounds like jazz and not posing.
After a few weeks of this stuff, what I’ve realized is that I need a way to conceptualize the guitar neck that is in harmony with a way of conceptualizing picking efficiency. The two concepts, together, will allow me to play single note lines with the notes I want, with the rhythms and tempos I want to hear.
It’ll be an interesting journey.