Guitar EDjumacation Thread

[jhale667]

I taught myself by listening to records and playing for hours a day and jamming with friends...

Now i'm trying to catch up by learning stuff like jhale has posted...

Glad you like. I was fortunate enough to get to study for two years (15-17) with a guy named Chuck Biel, one of the best teachers in my home state...he's actually Dean of Guitar Studies at the State University now. Monster player, you couldn't help but learn when around the guy. Great on guitar, but truly frightening on bass.

And he was pals with some heavy-duty jazz players, even managed to bring Frank Gambale of Chick Corea's band in our po-dunk town for a clinic and private lesson deal a few years after and invited me and some of his other cool former students to, in '89 I think. That was pretty intense, as that dude is like the Yngwie of Jazz as far as sweep-picking goes.

Anyway, his (Chuck's) method was you showed up with one of those Ernie Ball neck chart books (think they're still only like $2.99 today) with the blank 1-octave fretboards, and your own copy of Ted Greene's Chord Chemistry. he taught you chords and scales concurrently (had it figured out how many pages to skip to start each chapter in the blank books - WAY impressive to a pre-internet 14 yr old...lol), and if you did your homework, he'd teach you "Eruption" or "Battleaxe" or "The End of the World"...stuff like that. So you basically filled up a couple of those neck chart books if you stayed with it for a year or two. Took theory courses with him on top of that, cool shit.

We've kept in touch over the years, great guy... and I credit him for my total dedication level to the instrument and music in general as much as I credit EVH with my insane dedication to tinkering with them...

He hugely pushes ear training, and I completely agree. When I was a kid taking lessons from him, I didn't learn a song...I learned the entire album (or tried to) if I liked it!!

Fortunately, I've always been an information packrat, and I held on to my materials...had to re-copy them by hand once (aforementioned dead-sea scroll action) and that sucked. But now that it's digitized, and I can break it down into 3-scale jpgs even Ace can read why not share with the group?

MusEdit makes it easy to check for mistakes too, will play the scale you've entered back to you as a MIDI-file (stock piano tone, but still)...pretty sure you can import completed compositions into sequencers too, but never tried it...

[jhale667]

MODES (And I don't mean of the "Depeche" variety.)

OK, moving right along, the for the uninitiated, starting a scale on any degree other than the first (while maintaining the specific scale's note formula) is to play a mode generated by that scale.

For this example, we'll use the C major scale...try to spot the relative minor scale for bonus points...

[jhale667]

[ace diamond]

OK, moving right along, the for the uninitiated, starting a scale on any degree other than the first (while maintaining the specific scale's note formula) is to play a mode generated by that scale.

For this example, we'll use the C major scale...try to spot the relative minor scale for bonus points...

the dorian

[jhale667]

Here's where it gets interesting: Modes generated by an ascending Melodic Minor...

[jhale667]

[GAR]

I couldn't afford lessons. I used to walk to school with the guitar case for 2 miles most of it along the train tracks because it was the straightest walk to school. But not the safest trip for a $5 Harmony classical strung with Ernie Ball 9's in a chipboard case.

My guitar teacher taught beginning classical, I had that for a year.

Then I had 3 friends who took lessons from Tommy Girven from Smile, one of those also took lessons later from Wolf Marshall who drove a Rolls Royce off his Starlicks royalties.. he taught at Waltrips' Music in Arcadia, it's still around but he's long gone.

After that, I took some lessons from Chet Thompson at Dr. Music, and Joey Taffola who took lessons from Vinnie Moore and the Kurt James.

All that being said, I am sure I know 5 chords and 2 scales in two octaves!

[ace diamond]

oh boy.......hey hale, do you have the 100 pages as a .pdf file?
that way i could download the whole thing and work my way through it
rather slowly so as to make sure i am catching on and learning this stuff right,
and so i can put it on a flash drive so i can take it to kinko's and print it out.
so i can really study it closely.
and then of course study by application with my guitar in my hands.

[jhale667]

Haven't converted it to pdf, no. Hadn't really thought about it, to be honest. That page count is if I print it directly out of MusEdit, I had to break it down to 3 (.med) files in that...
And chord chemistry is something that should be everyone's go-to reference manual. There's an entire section on chord-substitution that's brilliant...the musical equivalent of "Don't wanna use the standard Cmin7 form? Use this weirdo inversion!" Would've thought it would have been made it downloadable by now, but a quick Google search only finds Amazon.com book listings and whatnot...

And a Wikipedia bio that says he passed away in 2005. Did not know that. R.I.P., Ted!

[ace diamond]

damn. that sucks,man.

[ELVIS]

I learned the entire album, many of them...

Great post jh...

[Nitro Express]

In my experience, the people who were very proficient at music theory typically played like a robot. No feel. They were excellent in the technical application and had the technical ability to piece together complicated pieces of music but nothing good seemed to come from it.

[jhale667]

Not always...

My teacher's attitude (which I later adopted) was basically, learn enough of it so that it becomes second nature - meaning you don't even have to think about the relative major to the minor key you're playing in or whatever, that way you have a wealth of info to draw on for improvising, and interpreting chord progressions - but then throw it out the window and just play.

I mean, it's never like I'm soloing in A minor and think "Hey, now would be a cool time to throw in that lick based on E phrygian..." Those types, the ones that worry about that shit in advance, are the ones that sound robotic.

Kind of like that old Billy Sheehan GIT/BIT ad "You have to learn the rules before you can break them."

[kwame k]

Quick question on these scales and nodes......
























































How in the fuck do you play 'em with sticks

[jhale667]

On a Xylophone?