Category Archives: Music

The Bends

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A few months ago I stumbled onto this series of videos put out by Guitarist magazine featuring Guthrie Govan giving a master class on string bending. It’s really well done and he gives a bunch of exercises to improve your bends.

I’ve incorporated the idea of bending the notes of any given scale into my daily practice. Each day the scale is different but I’ll bend my way through it. While playing up the scale (ascending), I’ll bend up to the next note. On the way down I’ll pre-bend to match the preceding note.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Guthrie you can thank me later.

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.

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!

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.

Marvin Gaye

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My mom had a great record collection. While I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s she’d play a lot of the “crooners” (Frank Sinatra, Glenn Yarborough, Dean Martin, Neal Diamond, etc.), some jazz (Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Glenn Miller), a ton of R&B/Soul (Aretha Franklin, Earth Wind and Fire, Issac Hayes, The O’Jays, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Blood Sweat & Tears, etc) as well as a bit of rock and country (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Johnny Cash).

But it was Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” album that made me realize that music really is something special. Between Marvin’s beautiful voice and powerful lyrics, James Jamerson’s fantastic bass playing, the arrangement of the songs and their production, this album left an indelible mark on me. To this day it still moves me at the deepest level.

Thank you, mom, for bringing such amazing music into my life.