Hello, everyone! I am about to do one of the most embarrassing things I have done in my life (this will be a little long, so I apologize in advance).
A confession: I am a HORRIBLE electric guitar player. No… Let me take that back. I’m not even a guitar player to begin with. Funny thing is, this doesn’t mean that I’m a zero when it comes to music. Quite the opposite. I graduated from a music school and have worked in music professionally for almost 15 years. But not on guitar. I am a ZERO on guitar.
MANY years ago, some friends in my block wanted to put a band together, but they didn’t have anyone to play the bass. Not wanting to miss on the opportunity, I volunteered to be the bass player, even though I didn’t know what a bass was. I also didn’t know that my dad happened to play some bass, so by my request he gave me my first lesson, after which I was immediately hooked. I practiced day and night, sometimes until the break of dawn, and after a while I became pretty good at it. (Alas, the band never happened because I was the only one who dedicated himself to learning and practicing.)
Then, one day a friend of mine stopped by with and handed me 2 cassette tapes, swearing that this was like nothing I had heard of. One tape had a slip with what looked like the Silver Surfer from Marvel comics, and said “Surfing with The Alien”. The other didn’t have a cover. It was a TDK tape with something handwritten on the label: “Yngwie – Rising Force”. I had never heard of either. Then I hit play… and it was all over for me.
Indeed, it was like nothing I had heard of and couldn’t get enough of it. All day I would listen to nothing else. By what seemed like a glorious coincidence, at that same time, my grandmother showed up at home with a cheap electric guitar that didn’t have strings. It was fine, because I didn’t know how to play a guitar anyway, so I would just sit down with the guitar on my lap, play the tapes, and pretend I was flying through the fretboard.
I was so fascinated by these guitar players that as soon as I got some money to buy strings I took off on a journey to try to be able to play like them. Mind you, I had never played guitar before except during daydreaming sessions on the neck with no strings. Considering I didn’t even have the basics of guitar down, you can imagine just how far that journey took me. For some odd, delusional reason, I was under the impression that if I focused on trying to learn difficult stuff, the easy stuff would take care of itself. And since I had become good at playing the bass, what else could happen than getting good at playing any other stringed instrument?
I don’t have to go into details. The faulty logic behind my effort lead to consistent monumental failures. My playing was embarrassing at best. Jamming opportunities provided everyone (except for myself) with enough laughs due to my pathetic struggle to produce a decent sounding line. Of course, eventually the guitar ended up buried like junk inside the closet and I moved on absolutely convinced that I didn’t have the talent required to play the guitar and that Yngwie and Satriani were indeed aliens that regular beings like myself were not capable of surfing with.
In time, I was ok with it because after all, I still had my first love with me: the bass. This makes it sound like a confirmation of the old-clichéd saying that goes, “bassists are just frustrated guitar players”. While I will be the first to admit that the joke is pretty funny, the truth is that after being with the bass for so long, I had learned to understand and appreciate it as a unique instrument that needed its own approach and philosophy. Its thundering, deep timbre and punch gave it the feeling of a portable, pluggable Mjolnir, and I still intended to hammer the world with it.
I went to music school and focused on becoming the best I could be, studying everything from jazz, funk, Brazilian and Latin music, to blues, rock and fusion. I was not a flashy player like Billy Sheehan or Victor Wooten, but I was finally a professional bassist, and drummers and singers were more than happy with the way I grooved. I put out an album, got radio airplay, sang and played in front of thousands… heck, even my favorite drummer in the whole wide world, Vinnie Colaiuta, recorded 2 of my songs!
Recently, 2 things happened… First, I came to realize what my problem with the guitar many years ago was. If I was to put it in math terms, I was trying to solve rational polynomial functions when I didn’t even know how to add 2 + 2. What I mean is, I didn’t tend to the essentials of learning to play guitar and, yet, I wanted to play things that take years of focused and dedicated practice. I hadn’t earned my wings, yet I wanted to fly with the best.
Second… I found Cracking the Code… and saw that you didn’t need to be an alien to surf with the best IF you have a strategic way to work around the mechanical problems that this music presents you with.
So, here’s the experiment, or rather the question I will work on through Cracking the Code: “CAN A 40+ YEAR OLD GUY WHO ABSOLUTELY SUCKS ON GUITAR WORK HIS WAY UP TO PLAY MUSIC LIKE THAT OF YNGWIE?”
I know I have discipline on my side. Through sheer dedication I have taught myself 2 things that I thought were impossible for me: advanced mathematics and Japanese language. I have excelled in both at a very high level simply by putting in the time. (That’s another story.) The only other thing that remains in the “impossible” realm is guitar.
Now, due to time limitations, starting last week I get up very early in the morning and dedicate at the very least one hour each day, religiously. I organized a practice routine that includes the following, distributed through all 7 days:
- Scales (purely scale (mode) knowledge and familiarity with the fretboard, possibilities of a single scale across the entire neck)
- Chords (chord shapes, inversions, and progressions, mostly outside of open position, often from a song)
- Exercises (anything pertaining to technique, such as picking, fretting, tapping, etc. Cracking the Code exercises fall here.)
- Licks (music passages and ideas within a musical, non-academic context)
- Reading (reading of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material, such as the Real Book, Berklee reading methods or artist songbooks)
- Ear Training (identifying and playing intervals and chord progressions, and picking up songs by ear)
- Improv (application of everything over a chord progression (jam tracks) with a strong emphasis on blues.)
- Songs (learning 100 songs I chose in order of difficulty that eventually take me to the experiment goal)
- Pandora box (practicing new material from random sources on any category)
My plan is to approach learning the guitar the same way I approached learning and mastering mathematics: by learning the basics slowly but well, without being “too proud” to learn something that looks “too easy”. Just as math books contain hundreds of exercises for you to work on, there are many techniques, scales, chords and patterns that need to be worked on to lay a solid foundation. And just as exercises include many word problems for you to see the theory in real life, rock guitar history has thousands of songs that I can learn to “see” the theory in action.
My goal is not to become an all-around guitar professional. I just want to become a good rock guitar player. I am more than happy to keep working professionally with the bass. And although I’ve lived long enough to be aware that in the long run plans change a lot, my final objective, the definitive milestone, will be to be able to play the songs that I fantasized about on the stringless guitar. Specifically, I have chosen 4 songs: “Surfing With the Alien” and “Crushing Day” by Joe Satriani, and “Trilogy Suite Op. 5” and “Far Beyond the Sun” by Yngwie Malmsteen. I know that for some of you accomplished players these songs do not present with much of a challenge, but for somebody at my level of utter inexperience, they are the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest on a pogo stick.
As I’ve said, I don’t want to depend on the techniques I have learned on the bass itself. I will approach the guitar as if I was a complete beginner, and even though there are things that I am capable of doing, like fretting or strumming, I will go through the complete process of practicing the technique fundamentals as if I didn’t know these things yet. What I WILL take advantage of, however, is the good sense of time and feel, and the knowledge of melody and harmony that I have developed through my years as a performing musician and composer.
I’m sure my embarrassing videos will soon find their way here for your priceless input. Any advice, any encouragement, any piece of wisdom, experience or ideas will be appreciated more than I could say.
If you made it this far, I’m sorry for the super long post… and THANK YOU!
