Making Stuff Up
Published: Fri, 11/18/22
The most interesting conversations about music are really conversations about creativity; music just happens to be the craft my friends and I know best, the language we speak, the set of tools we've put in our hours with. I have musician friends equally obsessed with fixing cars, learning cabinetry, repairing amplifiers or getting good at coding, and I'm generally down for talking about those things too, because like music, fixing cars, learning cabinetry and the rest are also about learning something, understanding something and getting good at it, which is the part about music I find most interesting, too. I don't know beans about how to do anything remotely as cool as fixing transmissions or rewiring a reverb tank, though I've had my own flings with graphic design (highly practical), Italian (I can still say "thank you" and "fork") and, much to my family's dismay, vegan cooking, and will read books about writing for as long as the supply holds out.
Maybe it's that people who care enough about getting good at something like music are just people who like the feeling of getting good, period. So if they get interested in something else, that same gene kicks in – "so that's how they make self-drying Etruscan popsicle art – I wonder how hard it is to get good at that?" The reverse is clearly also possible – I have friends who are really great at something else, like writing nonfiction or running a retail empire, who have channeled that capacity for getting good into becoming serious musicians as well.
So, taking music seriously, I'm all for it, but I don't want to take it too seriously, because music is also really fun, and the point of getting better at it is to have more fun playing it. Nearly every month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, I present a new song to work on, along with solos, exercises and lessons to help you start improvising on that song. A lot of people stick with just the song itself, feeling like the soloing material is more than they're ready for, or that it seems too advanced. That's cool; learning songs is really important too. But the number one thing most people say they want to be able to do with the guitar is "just make stuff up." Which sounds like fun, right? So it bugs me that my improvising lessons might look intimidating to some folks, and lately I've been working on changing that.
The thing is, if you can't make stuff up yet, you have to learn how. And that might mean working on playing in time, so you can keep a groove together, or learning to count while you're playing, so you can play the licks you want to accurately, or getting to know the notes on the fretboard, because that's what it takes to start in the right place or land on the right note. Which maybe feels more like work, and less like fun. Unless...you can find a way to groove on the learning itself, and the satisfaction of seeing things gradually come into focus under your fingers, and the occasional moment when what you've learned so far comes together and you can see, in a flash, where it's all leading and what it's going to feel like when you get further down the path you're on.
I've always felt like the big thing missing from most fingerstyle guitar lessons was any kind of instruction on how to improvise, and I really want anyone who takes part in my membership or watches the videos on my Youtube channel to feel like there's a way they can get started on soloing now, that it's not this thing you have to graduate to, or have to wait to work on. So I've been doing more lessons on getting started with improvising on the channel, and this month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, we're spending all of November on the fundamentals of improvisation – how to groove, how to use the blues scale, how to start growing your own vocabulary of licks. My goal is to provide everyone in the membership access to a simple, learnable language for making stuff up.
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Last week's Youtube lesson was all about how to practice making stuff up. This week, it's all about how to maintain a groove – how to create and sustain a great environment for your licks and ideas to flourish in. You can find it at the link below:
Fix Your Groove Now!
More soon,
David
P.S. Registration for the Fingerstyle Five is always open; to learn more, sign up and get access to all of this month's membership-only improvisation lessons plus an entire repertoire's worth of songs, exclusive live streams, workshops and more, go to https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/.