Learning mechanics "VS" creativity and musicality

General Music Discussion
#20

I’m just sifting through all this, and I think there are basically two points being made:

  1. We run a web site where the specific goal is teaching instrument technique

  2. Our general attitude displays concern only for “playing fast” and in some way evidences disregard for making music, being creative, etc.

Am I correct that this is what is being said here, in summary? Because I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth.

Obviously, 1 is true. It’s what we do. 2 however is not. Given all the things I’ve said in lessons over the years about the amazing creativity of players like Eric, Yngwie, and Eddie, I actually can’t really imagine how someone who has actually watched any our stuff would even think that. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that lots of the Cracking the Code “old timers” actually don’t think this about us.

I could give you a hundred examples in our lessons of how our general attidue is one of mechanics in service of musical goals. Since there are so many, I guess I’ll just quote myself. Here’s the end of this lesson, which has been viewed over 300K times:

“The power of this is really limitless. One of my favorite ways of being creative in lead playing is to take interesting mechanical concepts and marry them to interesting tonalities. And we’re thrilled that so many of you feel the same way. This kind of picking knowledge would have been science fiction when I was a kid. If you showed up to a guitar contest with this kind of firepower, that would be like rolling up to the club in a time-traveling DeLorean that you found in a barn. But if this kind of knowledge, and the creativity that it can inspire, is now becoming accessible enough that we can get over 100 correct responses in a matter of an hour, that is everything that Cracking the Code is about.”

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#21

You say this as if there is a Submit button at the top of the page.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for my daily quarantine walk in downtown Manhattan. I will be walking into the nearest specialty Italian restaurant to complain that they don’t offer me tikki masala.

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#22

I’m admittedly a CtC fanboy. One of my biggest regrets of my playing career is how much time I wasted shoe horning my inefficient technique by practice practice practice. I had no choice because I was in a band and I had to be able to perform my solos (we did all original stuff). I made out fine live, BUT holy crap did I have to practice hard to nail those 16ths @ ~170bpm!! It took away a lot of the time I would have loved to spend on creativity/musicality. It’s pretty exciting that now things like that are ironed out and for the most part, I’m able to get through stuff with comfort that felt challenging before.

I guess the irony is…I am done, retired, whatever you want to call it :slight_smile: I feel like within the next year or so, the mechanical tweaks CtC helped me with will be totally rote. . I’ve said this about a million times before but I really wish this platform existed when I was like 15 years old. At least now I have the option though! I really do feel like I’m on the path so that all the stuff I want to play will feel totally relaxed in about another year’s time. Will I use this in making new music? I dunno. Time will tell I guess.

For now, I’ll remain a cranky old curmudgeon of a web developer who annoys my wife with fast-ish licks that don’t make my hands feel tired :slight_smile:

#23

That’s the exact point made! and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

but you have to be honest with yourself that this is the primary focus here.

Fwiw, nobody was complaining about the site, or it’s primary function, simply stating this indeed was its primary focus which is perfectly fine. It seems the ones who have more vested interest in it seemed to get a little defensive.

#24

Thanks Joe. That’s pretty much it. When I was a teenager I had a notebook full of stuff I wrote but couldn’t actually play. We animated the “purple notebook” in the original Cracking the Code series a recurring theme because it was emblembatic of imagination outpacing your physical ability to actually execute. Obviating the notebook is the quest.

One thing I’d also add for anyone else reading this thread. If you only hang out on the forum, you’re going to see a lot of threads about people trying to solve stringhopping problems and other technical issues. These are inherently clinical topics and it’s only natural that those conversations will stick to those topics. Obviously our lessons, like the Pentatonic Puzzle lesson above, and the seminars, include a lot more thoughts about applying mechanical ideas to generate cool ideas.

Two, another thing you can check out is our Instagram page, where you’ll find all sorts of things related riffs and creativity. Here’s an awesome clip from our recent sit-down with James Seliga. In both posts on James, I mentioned his facility with melody writing because it’s how I found him. He does instrument demos for the Mandolin Store, and all his tunes are so awesome, I was finally like, we have to get this guy in here. This is one of his cool little compositions:

Here’s another of his that I love. We played this in the interview as well, and it was a good discussion point for how he uses his world-class roll pattern technique to fill in the gaps of these pop-style melodies that he comes up with:

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#25

Learning technique is the primary focus, yes. So you can play stuff. What kind of stuff? Well, the seminars are three-plus-hours each of me going on and on about how cool it is that players like Yngwie and Eric Johnson were able to craft highly distinctive vocabularies from relatively simple ingredients, and how learning these same techniques can enable your own explorations. There are whole monologues in there about Yngwie’s live Alcatrazz performances and the amazing stuff he was able to come up with on the fly. I got a little carried away. But it’s geniune.

There is no way to completely separate the musical and mechanical. Any lesson I’ve ever done where I talk about how to actually play a particular musical phrase, you will hear me talk about how cool it is that we have ways of enabling phrases that were previously out of reach for many of us, and the creative possibility that can arise from that.

Here’s the conclusion of the Volcano Seminar. It’s a short two-minute video. This was not scripted, it was just something I turned on the camera and did. This is what I say in that video, word for word. It could pretty much be a mission statement for Cracking the Code.

The musical value of learning technique is the focus of all these lessons because that’s what got us started down this road. If you feel we’re not doing a good job of communicating this, or if the message isn’t getting across, and especially if you’ve got ideas for how we can improve that messaging, we’ll take that feedback for sure.

Script:

"Man Yngwie Malmsteen, what can we say? We haven’t edited this footage yet, but we’ve probably spent, I’m going to guess, well over three hours talking about Yngwie and the incredible mechanical gifts he bestowed upon us.

Why do we spend so much time talking about Yngwie? Is it because we want to play Yngwie? Well, maybe. It’s great music, you should play it! But it’s also because we want to play… everything else.

Even given what we know now about two-way pickslanting and the sophistication of techniques required to play three not-per-string scales, and all this complexity that exists in the world that maybe we didn’t know about before — even knowing that, if all we ever knew was the Yngwie strategy, if that was the only guitar playing technique we had, you would never go hungry.

There is just an incredible amount of creative possibility in this system. And yes, it’s a “system”, there are rules. You can’t just play a thing because you want to, you have to figure out how to do it. But within those rules, even the restrictions are exciting! It can lead to song ideas and creative inspiration you wouldn’t have hit upon any other way. So dust off those old dragon album covers and take another look at these five simple rules, because within those rules may very well be the freedom that you’re looking for."

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#26

It’s an important point: how the mechanical exercises impact creative ideas. In pentatonic puzzles, the volcano pattern is being used in a range of different situations to create different ideas; taking what I’d call a digital pattern and using it to springboard into different ideas. Because it’s a pattern, it can easily be employed on the fly too

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#27

I have always felt that CTC was educating on the mechanics and leaving musicality to the player and for the record, I like that - “teach a man to fish”. That being said, the materials are littered with that sentiment of using the mechanics to explore what is possible musically and there are many forumites here that openly go there and its refreshing.

It is an interesting thread for me as I’m at a perculiar point where I really don’t know where I am going with guitar and sometimes seriously consider hanging up the guitar for good. Reason being? Because I can’t play what I want to… technically. Thats why I’m here! Lol.
I’m not a creative genius by any stretch, but when I compose a solo I would be happy to hear it and play it - IF I could play it. Its often that what I want to hear is writing cheques that my abilities can’t cash!

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#28

Correct. This was indeed implied.

Incorrect. This wasn’t stated. The original quote was merely just this:

Blockquote
I know this place is really designed for a very specific purpose mostly, but I do wish more topics like these would pop up here.

From this I feel some people got a little defensive, feeling there was an unfair critique that simply wasn’t there. From what I’ve seen here, the focus is primarily on the technical aspects of the instrument. There’s nothing wrong with that, and nobody implied there was, just a desire to see other aspects pop up more frequently.

#29

I think the solution is writing from within your physical vocabulary, or altering things to fit your physical vocabulary, and not getting too worked up about that. If we’ve learned anything, we’ve seen how super clear it is when you start transcribing a lot of these great players that the lines did not arise in a vacuum but with their specific techniques in mind.

EJ is the classic example of “these are my picking patterns, so I wrote songs with them”. Because of this, to some extent he always sounds like him. But nobody does “him” better. And plenty of his stuff, like his chord soloing, and his whole rig with all the tones and effects, is just glorious and very much his own. Those things aren’t really dependent on technique so much as just having fumbled around until he came up with those insights.

There’s plenty out there. Having the specific technique to play ABC line in some arbitrarily decided “correct” way — I wouldn’t let that get in the way at all.

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#30

Thanks for the feedback @Troy and I agree and have put that into my time with the guitar. However, its quite difficult to put your ideas ‘on hold’ and play a ‘lesser idea’ - total buzzkill! Hahaha.

I’m trying not to come across as the grumpy windbag that I’m pretty sure I have become… honest! :rofl:

#31

This is what I’m saying, it’s not a “lesser” idea. Just because you came up with a certain way doesn’t mean it’s better. There have been numerous times when I had some line that I came up with which I needed to tool around with to make it more playable, and the result was more interesting because it was more unusual.

Also, I think people have this idea that great composers of yore just pulled lines out their mind. But when you go through things like the Bach violin sonatas / partitas, there are lots of things in there that lay out as symmetrical shapes on a violin or mandolin neck, and are a nightmare to play on a guitar tuned in 4ths. He was an expert violinist and definitely wrote for what was doable on a violin.

When I speak English, I don’t concern myself with what words are available in German. And lord knows they have a lot. I just work with what I got!

#32

Well it is lesser if you like it less than your original!

Recently, I have been trying to balance the technical and the musical by attempting to create original musical pieces and ​alternative solos to cover songs that I could play confidently, but still had appropriate stylistic elements to fit the song.

I thought that this would lift the burden of trying to match the records, but I’m not sure it has. I’m probably not being creative enough and I’m latching onto the limited creative ideas which seems to be what you are saying here.

Its hard to move away from an idea that you like - how do you know when enough is enough and let the damn thing go? I have even considered tabbing out my ideas and asking if others would like to play it so that I can hear it as it should be played in terms of quality and tempo…

#33

How are you coming up with stuff that you can’t actually play? Are you humming things? Working on a keyboard or other instrument? Thinking up mathy or harmonic sequences or patterns in your mind?

In general when I do that kind of thing the lines are usually more literal or linear in nature. The kind of thing you would be able to think up on your own. Whereas, after “guitarifying”, usually they are not things I would necessarily have thought of.

Obviously you’re not going to like every line on a guitar. Even if you could play them all, you might not even like them. But there’s always a way to get something you like. There’s some commando application of flat picking, finger / hybrid picking, legato, tapping, harmonics, trem bar, effect pedal, etc. We can keep going. There is some commando way to do something cool to flesh out an idea.

Whereas if I could “alternate pick everything” I bet I’d write the most boring stuff… because I would never be forced to try something weird.

#34

5 posts were split to a new topic: How to achieve consistency in musical performance?

#35

I’m with you on that one :slight_smile:

In particular, I would love to see more of what music people come up with by applying the knowledge acquired here.

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#36

Well post your backing track, see what people will come up with. Encourage beginning members to try it immediately, not just the more seasoned ones that already know they can play well. Make it a fun learning experience that people want to partake in even if they aren’t confident yet in their playing skills. At the end of the day, all this is useless and for nothing if you can’t apply it.

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#37

This would be a cool thing, a few community backing tracks for test drives. Could be a thing.

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#38

Somethings can be very effective learning experiences when done in groups, be it in person or virtually. When you have others around to bounce things off of, you can walk away with aspects of playing, melodic sensibilities etc. that you may not have even considered. Peer feedback also, so long as it is constructive, can be an incredible tool as well.

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#39

Sorry for the detour, I can’t believe you are doing a feature on “the mandolin store guy”!!! That demo of the Eastman Mandola was actually the first I saw from him. He’s freaking amazing!