A Slightly Ridiculous Avocation
Published: Fri, 05/20/22
I'd been kind of stalled out for a few months, knowing that I needed to figure out how to practice but not being able to wrap my head around how exactly to do so. This was, of course, making me feel more than a little hypocritical, considering my tendency to dish out the practice advice in a more or less professional capacity. In particular, I spent the month of April providing my Fingerstyle Five membership with new exercises and ideas for learning the fretboard, and that's actually what finally broke things open for me as far as the 7-string goes.
This instrument, made by Hybrid Guitars in North Carolina, has the bottom three strings of a bass guitar (E A D) and the top four strings of a regular guitar (D G B E) so the premise is that you can play both bass lines and guitar parts (chords, solos or whatever) at the same time. This is not all that different from the premise behind playing fingerstyle blues, but once the bass parts – viz., whatever you play with your thumb – have their own register and distinct tonal identity, you can't quite get away with just a quarter-note steady bass or alternating bass anymore. You need a little syncopation, at the very least, and beyond that, there's this opportunity to play things that start to sound like real bass lines. All of which raises the ante not a little.
The fingerboard exercises I gave everyone last month involved playing various scales up and down just one string at a time. But not only playing the notes – also naming them first by note name, then by interval, as you play them, while using a metronome. The idea is to start mapping out the fretboard while building your mental reflexes, all so that you can find the notes you want, when you want them, while simultaneously seeing and hearing them in terms of how they relate to whatever key you're in. Getting all that into your head and under your fingers requires a degree of slow, careful effort, and it doesn't even have much immediate, obvious impact on your playing. But I find it incredibly effective in terms of wiring my brain and fingers together with the fretboard.
So I started applying this idea to the 7-string: could I take a scale up, say, the third string, while keeping the same bass line going under every note? How would I have to shift positions to do so, and when would I have to jump up an octave in the bass to keep reaching higher and higher notes on the one string? Just like on a regular guitar, the results were not immediate in any way. But I was experimenting with adapting some of my fingerstyle guitar arrangements to the 7-string at the same time, and over the first couple of weeks of doing the new exercises I noticed a distinct improvement in the way the instrument felt in my hands: less awkward, easier to control, even when I was doing things in open position that had no direct connection with my exercises up the neck.
So we'll see what happens when I take all this out the door and into the real world. Hopefully it will be fun; probably it will illuminate, with the light of a thousand suns, all the things I need to start thinking about next. Having obtained this guitar with the idea that it would be a slightly ridiculous avocation to pursue in my copious free time, not an actual going concern, I'm not quite sure just how it's morphed so quickly into a gigging proposition. But there's nothing like the prospect of interacting with other musicians, in at least the vicinity of additional humans as well, to clarify just what it means to be able to function on an instrument. If your inclination is to keep your picking to yourself, you have all my respect and admiration. But there's always the chance that getting your guitar, if not out of the house, then at least around a few more people, could help you see what to work on next, and that can only help you play better, even if it continues to be for your own amusement.
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Today's Youtube video is all about pentatonic scales, and guess what – getting started with blues improvisation does not require learning your scales all the way up the neck, in five different positions. In today's lesson, I suggest three steps you can take right away to start making pentatonic scales sound good, without getting a nosebleed (or a headache).
3 Rules For Making Pentatonic Scales Sound Good
More soon,3 Rules For Making Pentatonic Scales Sound Good
David
For organized, ongoing weekly lessons that help you learn tunes, turn them into complete songs, and start improvising, register for the Fingerstyle Five membership at www.fretboardconfidential.com