Disco Medley
Published: Fri, 01/27/23
Possessing neither a mullet nor a Les Paul, and being both temperamently and physically incapable of singing in a way that did Wilson Pickett any kind of justice whatsoever, I slunk off the phone to begin working on Plan B. In the long run, of course, not playing in a wedding band turned out to be All For The Best in any number of ways. As I got out into the music world one way and another, I became friends and colleagues with plenty of New York musicians who did play weddings, and they all loathed the work to a remarkable degree, except for my friend Arti, who looked forward to the disco medley on every gig because it was the bass player's most challenging moment in the entire evening.
I now see this debacle as an early step in discovering that you can't be good at everything, or at least, if you want to get good at certain things because they pay well, you have to make a conscious choice about it. I could certainly have pivoted and made an effort; my friend Ed had actually done exactly that a few years earlier, after his band had, in classic fashion, imploded on the eve of their record deal. Ed went and found someone to teach him how to play weddings; since Ed already had the Rock Thing down, he simply worked backwards, learning standards and jazz voicings and all the stuff that would let him blend into the earlier part of the evening without blowing his cover.
The whole time I was stumbling around in New York, trying to figure out what I was going to do and how I was going to do it, I played fingerstyle guitar for fun, and essentially for myself. It was a blowoff thing I did without really thinking it was worth much, because it wasn't rock or jazz, the two things people around me seemed to take seriously and treat as stratified practices with winners (touring bands with record deals, horn players with Michael Brecker-esque levels of technique) and losers (everyone else). I didn't even really know anyone else who cared about fingerstyle guitar, which should have told me two things: 1. Any fluency I might possess in this department was actually kind of rarefied, and therefor, under the right circumstances, perhaps more valuable than I suspected, and 2. Fingerstyle was appealing to me precisely because it was not what everyone else around me was interested in.
Of course, there were great fingerstyle guitarists all over the place at the time, I just didn't know any of them personally. And like anything else, once you get inside that world, your special, distinguishing thing is just that thing that everyone knows and cares about; your own knowledge and abilities lose some of the distinction they had back out there in the larger world. The tradeoff, of course, is you no longer feel like such a freak – people get your reference points, they see what you're trying to do, and you finally feel like you have a more accurate way to consider your own efforts and progress.
In his poetry manual The Ode Less Traveled, actor Stephen Fry argues that learning the nomenclature – what words like "spondee," "anapest" and "pentameter" actually refer to and mean – is every bit as essential to the would-be poet as it is for a mechanic to be able to identify the dipstick and the drive train by name, or for a soccer (sorry, football) player to understand the offsides rule. Every field has its inside cant, and even more, within the subdivisions of a given field the uses for the same material may differ.
Case in point: consider the difference between the ways a rocker, a jazz guitarist and a fingerpicker think about a chord like E7. You can't get more essential than E7 when it comes to guitar, and yet the way you voice that chord, and the way you use it, changes radically just among those three styles. In today's Youtube lesson, I show four different ways to play E7 and how using them in call-and-response phrases can improve your playing immediately, making even familiar licks sound better right away. You can find the lesson at the link below:
The Four Chords You Need To Sound Better Right Away
Obviously, this whole story would have been different in the internet age. When I'm telling people about my online master class, the Fingerstyle Five, I rarely lead with the fact that we have a community forum, but I think for the members who participate in it, it's one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. When I was first learning repertoire classics like "Anji" or the pieces in Richard Saslow's The Art of Ragtime Guitar, I had almost no one to compare notes with, discuss the tricky parts with, or receive encouragement from. Working on technique, repertoire and improvisation is a lot easier when the answer to your questions is just a forum post or a live stream away. If you think a little more camaraderie and a little less isolation could help your playing too, I encourage you to check out the Fingerstyle Five membership at the link below:
https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/
More soon,
David