Not doing things by the book.
Teaching my students how to just play.
There are all kinds of levels of being an instrumentalist or being a working musician. What's the difference? That was the question we asked our band director in my high school jazz band. He told us that none of us were musicians...yet. We weren't considered musicians until we made our first dollar. So, we went out and did some paid gigs.
In all honesty, I don't think half the kids in that band ever gave much thought to ever becoming working musicians. There was a huge difference in the way some of the kids in the band committed themselves to their instrument, and how many of them never touched it until band rehearsal. We all knew who the weakest players were, but that was far from being the point of playing in the jazz band.
I lucked out and got (what I thought) was the easiest instrument to play in the band. The bass guitar just made sense to me. I had already been playing the guitar for a couple of years prior to picking up the bass guitar, so I already knew that being a guitar player was something I loved. Nobody ever had to tell me to practice. I heard and saw the results of the kids who didn't practice, every afternoon during band rehearsal. I never, ever wanted to be the weakest link in the chain.Â
Our band director was not someone who wanted to hear every note, exactly as it was written on the page. Doing that would be the antithesis of playing and interpreting jazz music. He wanted us to interpret the songs our way - and it worked great. He wanted the structure of the song to be evident, but he was more than happy to allow everyone in the band to present their parts, their way.
This kind of freedom was something I gravitated to immediately. As far back as I can remember, I have always believed that there are at least a billion different ways to do anything and everything - especially in music. Just because something is done the most popular way, does not means that it’s the only way. The very definition of creativity is to make something out of nothing. When it comes to music, when you play your guitar or your piano, you are creating colors and pictures, stories and emotions, out of thin air. That's the magic of music!
Yes, there are things you need to know in order to play correctly and do so with others, but you can make all the music you want and not know anything about what it is that you are actually playing. That is where the balance of not always going strictly by the book. A brand new guitar player might pick up the guitar and someone might show that person a few chords for them to practice. Maybe they go online and watch a few dozen videos to try to solve the mysteries for themselves. Some might even take formal lessons with a teacher. That was how I started. I took about two and a half years of guitar lessons when I was a teenager. We did the "book" thing, but I got bored with it within a few weeks. I was much more interested in playing the songs I liked from the radio or from my albums in my collection.
In the 1970's, we didn't have access to all of the music knowledge of mankind at our fingertips through the internet. Everything I learned came from listening and interpreting. I had to train my ears to listen for notes, chords, rhythms and patterns. I knew very little about music theory. At that age, theory was way over my head. I wasn't interested in knowing why. I just wanted to know how.
Back in those days, you played something the way you heard and could play it. I was lucky enough to grow up with one of my best friends who also played the guitar. This became a healthy competition between us. He and I would learn different things, then get together and compare notes. We didn't know or care if what we were playing was correct or not. We got it as close as we could and had fun doing it.Â
This sort of learning and practicing was actually harder to do than reading out of a book. I did however, keep a spiral notebook of songs. By then, I was learning a lot of songs, very quickly. I couldn't remember all of them, so I had to write them down. I took that notebook with me to small parties with friends who wanted me to play my guitar. It was just easier to page through and play one song after another without losing my audience. After a while, I stopped depending on that notebook. All of the songs were already in my head.
I do my best to teach my students how to play their guitars with the least amount of help possible. Once we have gathered a few dozen songs to play together, I tell them to create a set list of these songs, as if they were going to get paid to do a gig at a coffee house this coming Saturday night. How would they present the songs they know how to play on the guitar? Could they do it in front of an audience? This is learning what it is like to be a working musician. Not everyone is up for it. Some don't have any intent on playing for an audience bigger than the few friends and family members they can cram out of the back porch. That's fine too.
There are very few ways to prepare for things like this. The number one way is to always think like a working musician every time you pick up your guitar. Musicians don't become musicians without putting in the endless hours of practice and doing the same songs over and over and over, several hundred times until they've got them down so well that they don't even have to think about them. My favorite mantra is: "Don't practice until you get it right. Practice until you can't get it wrong."
Musicians who play gigs on the weekends or teach music during the week, have been professionals for many years. Becoming a working musician or teacher was a life choice they made long ago. Many of the pro musicians I know personally, can literally play hours of music and never repeat a song. None of us know how many songs we can play. Keeping count on that list, stopped after a few thousand songs.
When I was teaching lessons at a music store about eighteen years ago, one afternoon, one of the classically trained piano teachers and I had an hour to kill as we were both waiting for our next students. She was sitting at the piano in her room and I walked in with my guitar and said, "Let's jam something." She looked at me like I had a third eye popping out of my forehead. She replied, "What do you mean?" I answered, "Let's play a blues jam in E minor." She literally had no idea what I was talking about. At first, I thought she was kidding. Then she explained that the only way she can play music is to read it in front of her. Again, I thought she was kidding. How can you not play your instrument without needing sheet music in front of you at all times? This was the first time I had ever come across a working musician who had been trained by the book. Improvisation and interpretation were things she literally knew very little about. She could play anything put in front of her, but she had no idea how to play without the notes for her to read.
I never knew that world. I learned how to read some notation when I first started taking guitar lessons, but like I said, I grew bored with it almost immediately. It had become abundantly clear early on that playing what I heard, what I felt and what I knew was much more valuable to me than being limited to what someone else wrote down in notes on sheet music.Â
The guitar requires very little knowledge to play it. Any kid can sit at a piano and bang out some noise. This is why both instruments are arguably, the most popular for all age groups. If you can learn and memorize a few chords and learn how to strum those chords on the guitar, you can play music. You don't require much more than that to have fun. My job as a guitar teacher is to teach the basics to my beginner students, and keep them interested while I slowly incorporate ideas and things they need to know to improve on their guitar.
Most of my students have no intent on becoming studio musicians. They just want to play on the guitar, the songs they like the most. Everyone has their own motivation for why they choose to play an instrument. I want to make sure that they stick with it so that they will learn new ways of playing their instrument - ways they maybe never thought possible before.