Author Archives: Glenn Schoonmaker

Notation

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I’ve always wanted to write my musical ideas down in standard notation but each time I tried it took way too long and never seemed quite right. I bought this book back in 2004 hoping to fix that.

After trying to go through the material with my old approach (wanting to dedicate hours of study and only moving forward when I thought I had mastered each and every subject) inertia kicked in. This became yet another book that sat on a shelf for a long time with the “some day” label assigned to it in my mind.

“Some day” came and I started going through this book as part of the “little bit every day” experiment that I’ve been doing the past few months and I’m about half way through it. I have to say that it is one of the denser music books that I’ve gone through but I’m glad that I’ve stuck with it. Between this book and ear training I’ve started being able to write simple melodies from memory.

Things like nursery rhymes, holiday melodies and early Beatles songs, etc.  I know it’s not the level of Quincy Jones taking a complete symphonic score and distilling it down to it’s core elements and then re-orchestrating it in all twelve keys without an instrument, just using his mind, pen & paper. But I’m happy to be moving in that direction.

Study

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I have been really fortunate to have had some truly fantastic guitarists/musicians as teachers/mentors. Each had their own area of expertise (James Robinson: Flamenco and improvisation, Hristo Vitchev: Jazz and Music Theory, Doug Doppler: Metal/Rock and Modes). A common thread they all share (aside from them all being great guitarists) is their commitment to excellence as musicians. Each of them are truly masterful and I’m very grateful to have been able to have the opportunity to study with them.

Perhaps the one lesson that has become the most useful and profound is one that James Robinson shared with me. I was having difficultly making time to practice and he said “just do a little bit every day, even 5 minutes a day and you will get better over time”.

After repeatedly trying (and failing) to make myself stick to difficult and extensive regimens, I decided to try his suggestion and do a little bit every day. The past few months I’ve been doing just that and I’m starting to see a difference. I created a daily routine that covers a wide variety of subjects that I’m interested in and limit the amount of time that I spend on each of them to 5-10 minutes a day. I do some ear training, guitar studies (fretboard knowledge, chords, sight reading, bends, scales, improvisation), theory, notation, bass, keyboards (scales and chords), songwriting/chord progressions and vocal exercises. Again, each area only getting 5-10 minutes a day, period.

Is it perfect? No, but I can see that I’m making progress and am happy to have something that is manageable and easy to stick to. Also, I have plenty of time left over to do other things like writing and recording songs, which is why I want to be a better musician in the first place.

Thanks for the excellent advice, James!

Lyrical

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I used to really struggle with writing lyrics. It felt so important, with a such need to be significant that I usually stopped before I began.

Along with “starting with the end in mind” I’ve been using a cool technique that I learned in a songwriting workshop that Richard Adoradio and Kenny Schick put together back in 2006.

The process is simple. Get a timer and free-write without stopping for 2-3 minutes. When I say free, I mean completely free. Write whatever comes into your mind and don’t stop until the timer goes off. What you write for these 2-3 minutes does not matter. The point is to get into the creative mode and to get past the inner critic. Don’t filter, don’t analyze, don’t evaluate. Just write.

Once the timer goes off, work on the actual song lyrics can begin. The “stage has been set” for focusing on a theme and what feelings are to be conveyed. Rarely do I use anything that I came up with during the free-write. It was just a means to getting ready for the real stuff.

Now days I can usually finish a song’s lyrics in one sitting, as long as I stay open to the idea of it being done.

Thanks to Kenny and Richard for the great tip!

Start with the End

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“Start with the End in Mind” was a phrase that I heard from time to time over the years. I thought it sounded good but I had no idea just how useful it could be when applied. It wasn’t until I started working on the Music Sketches project at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017 that I found out first hand what it could mean.

Up until then, writing songs had been a difficult and arduous experience. I was lucky if I got one whole song together in a given year. Then I tried applying this idea of starting with the end in mind, as if the song was already done and that the process was easy and (dare I say) fun. I just focused on the idea and feeling of what it would be like if I had already finished the song. Before I knew it I would have a new idea which would lead to another new idea to another and so on. Within a few months I had over 50 song ideas recorded. These were full song ideas with chord progressions, melodies, grooves, hooks and sometimes lyrics and vocal parts all recorded and posted on YouTube.

It was a huge realization for me, that all those years I had been the starting with an end of difficulty, confusion and futility. Good to know.

The Bottom

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I love great bass lines and have been fortunate to have played with some truly fantastic bassists over the years (Akil Wemusa, Doug Pohorski and Edo Castro). I bought this book years ago in the hopes of becoming somewhat competent and conversant on the subject, but never got that far with it.

Recently I decided to take another go at it and finished the book this week. Am I at the same level as one of the amazing bass players I mentioned above? Not even… but I’m feeling more comfortable in reading and writing bass lines and that’s more than I had before.

Inspiration

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I love the feeling of being inspired. That feeling of possibility is so fun, free and full of hope, hope for something new. It can happen in an instant, in any number of ways and can become the basis of a whole new direction in one’s life.

In the past I thought inspiration was something that just happened to us if we were lucky and that we needed to really treasure those moments. But now I feel it’s a choice. I can invite inspiration by being ready for it and welcoming it through seeing it as a choice.

I get to choose how I feel in any given situation. That is the one thing in life that I can control. In the past I mostly felt things in a reactionary way, responses learned from previous life experiences and assumptions. Lately, I’ve been trying to ask myself on a regular basis “how do I want to feel right now?”.

Right now, I chose inspiration.

The Fretboard

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For many years I played guitar mainly by ear. I knew most of the notes in first position and those up around the 12th fret. Everything in between was very “gray” in my mind. I would just force my fingers to learn the shapes of the sounds that I wanted to make. At times It was frustrating process. I wanted to know what I was doing but it seemed so difficult to figure out.

Then I learned about Single String Scales while studying with Doug Doppler years ago. Essentially you take any scale and play it up and down the fretboard, slowly, one string at a time. This made a huge difference for me in all aspects of playing guitar. Scales, chords, arpeggios, melodies, all were clearer and easier for me to grasp. It was still a slow process, but I could finally understand and see the notes on the fretboard in my mind.

I still do Single String Scales as part of my practice regimen using exercises from a great book that Matt Warnock put together called Fretboard Mastery. It goes into depth on demystifying the fretboard, with clear and easy examples.

Molekular

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I love creating ambience/textures in a song. Whether it’s to help shape the mood or make a sonic statement, I love creating “ambient environments”.  Lately I’ve been working on a new song idea and wanted to take the main theme and tweak it into something new. I played the melody using a Mellotron patch in Logic, converted it from MIDI to audio and then ran it through Native Instruments “Molekular”. I dig what it turned into.

Here’s a clip showing before processing, after processing and in the mix.

Creativity

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I love making new songs. I love the feeling of getting a new idea and imagining where it can go. Often I’ll get next inspired through studying a scale or chord voicing. It can be one or two notes that triggers something in my mind that that will later blossom into a fully formed song. The biggest factor in this process is in me being open to “hearing” the idea in the first place. It’s almost like having a net out in the water to catch fish, but this net is in my mind, open to catch ideas.