Two of the all time music greats gone in just a few days... Here's my favourite from the harmony and melody meister... And my favourite tribute to him... R.I.P. Brian...
In other news, I can thoroughly recommend Emma-Jean Thackray's latest album, Weirdo. Even Ian might like it.
It is true that as you get older, your progress is slower than it was however, it is absolutely possible. I have been teaching a retiree who sadly lost his wife and when he retired he decided to pursue a lifelong dream to play guitar. A year on and he is doing fantastically! Admitedly, being retired he has more time to practice but if you stick to the practice, you will make progress. I would recommend having a teacher (maybe biased here!) because this will give you extra motivation. Bottom line; go for it, it's great fun and apart from anything else you will feel a great sense of acheivement The ruler though, I can't help with
He always used to play the "right" wrong note for maximum comedic effect and that takes some doing - anyone can just **** up!
The thing with Les was that he was actually a very competent pianist, but he used to just throw in subtle key changes which sounded completely dissonant. As you say, you have to be very good to play badly very well!
I started playing guitar almost 25 years ago with no musical knowledge, just an interest in learning the songs I liked. Guitar was most accessible at the time because you don’t need to read music as tabs were available online. I wasn’t really creative enough to write my own stuff, so I didn’t feel the need for scales and music theory. Fast forward to a year ago and I decided I wanted to take up keyboard / piano and bought a moderately priced beginner Casio but set myself the challenge of actually learning music, but there are so many YouTube videos now to show you how to play songs as there are programs that light up as it plays. Again, I’ve stuck at it because I want to learn certain songs and pieces of classical (mainly Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata). It’s been a tough journey, but I’ve persisted and feel I’m doing okay with it, so much so I’ve already outgrown the keyboard and need to start looking at a decent digital piano! I think of it like puzzles - you either have the patience to sit and work them out or you don’t, but if you do, it’s great fun. Find songs you like and think you could manage and work towards them.
I believe that learning an instrument is helped by the attutide of teachers. I feel it is best to start with the music a pupil likes and focus on what element appeals. Once you have their attention you can develop this to look at other styles of music. My piano teacher at school put me off music and only got back into it in the early 1990s. I had a really good teacher although he went through scales and argeggios to get my technique up. The intention was to play jazz but i spent the first year sugh reading stuff like the Bach 48 preludes and fugues. I find sight reading really difficult but stuff like Bach , Scarlatti and Haydn useful because you find the rudiments of everything else in their music. I did alot of ear training too when i was shown how to reharmonise sings. I still find this really hard but i agree with Jo that it is rewarding. These compsers are good because your ears help you anticipate notes when reading wheras stuff like Bartok is too unpredictable. (The Microcosmos stuff is a good starting point ) I would add a word of caution insofar that the sheet music in popular music do not necessarily have the correct chords. I get that it is possible to reharmonise anything. However, some books have errors. The things i find difficult are playing with cross hands (often due to music being written for 2 keyboards) and stretching over a ninth. I love playing Thelonious Monk but also am addicted to sight reading. I buy music frequently ,.alot of it is too difficult for me although i like to find out how music works. I have loads of stuff from Baroque onwards but prefer 20th century like Scriabin , Syzmanowski, Villa Lobos but tend to prefer music with interesting chords. I find Debussy too difficult....can just about manage the 2 Arabesques. It is the sounds people create that appeal to me. I can suss out what is happening with 18th and early 19th century composers but don't quite understand more modern stuff which is what i prefer . Some composers baffle me such as Villa Lobos. His music includes childrens pieces but also stuff that that is impossible. Fair play for learning thr Beethoven...i have not got the patience to study his music.
I love vintage country blues and will read anything i can lay my hands on. The fact that their lives are so unknown or made up of myths does add to the authenticity. I have quite a few discs in my collection as i went through a phase of exploring this. It is interesting because the recording quality is often so bad that it adds to the atmosphere and makes the music almost seem prehistoric. I totally get the point about living the blues but many of them like Blind Lemon Jefferson actually became quite affluent. Blind Willie McTell had a good education in a school for the blind . The records inspire your imagination and i think that listeners do bring something to the music. For example, it is really hard to hear Charlie Patton's guitar or understand what he is singing about on those old Paramount Records.i do wonder how much the records reflect the experience of his audience. The accounts i have read are suggestive that they were even better live. Some of them led tragic lives and died in their twenties and thirties. Often they started off with a local following before making the 'Big time.' Even then , they left little trace of the lives they led. I am fascinated by this music and it makes you appreciate how hard life was 100 year ago. .
I use an app called Chord AI, which analyses a song which you feed in from your files or from YouTube etc., and displays the chords, complete with finger positions for guitar, mandolin, or ukulele. It can even analyse lyrics as well, although some of the interpretations are hilariously wrong! The chord analysis is pretty spot on though. You can feed in different capo positions and even use different tunings like open C or DADGAD. It’s so much more accurate than sites like Ultimate Guitar, which are often oversimplified or just plain wrong. And it’s free!
Agree about ultimate guitar. The contributions for any given song are just the interpretations by lots of different people and that’s why you get so many mistakes. To be fair though, it does not allow you to specify chord voicings and just uses the chords in its database when you enter a chord name, mostly leaning toward open chords to appeal to complete beginners. I usually teach my students a combination of chord theory and ear training.
Sad to read of the death of 'Honest' John Plain of The Boys. They were aligned with the punk movement but were always more pop-punk really. He wrote this one which is as catchy as hell imo. RIP John.
Ah, that's sad. They were great and big mates with Jonesy, Billy Idol and Tony James. He also wrote this ode to curing acne with the line "Johnny, Joey, Tommy, Dee Dee" in it. lovely stuff! R.I.P. Honest John...
I find this interesting as there are wrong chords but loads of possibilities for 'right' chords .' I am ok with things like flattened and raised 9th , etc but i struggle when you used a non related root with another chord.
The ‘mistakes’ I refer to are more fundamental. Very often I find for example something basic like Dm written when the correct one is Am! You make a good point about altered chords and that’s why I trust my ears more than something like Ultimate Guitar. Not sure how Chord AI would interpret these types of chord, I might give it a try.
Chord AI obviously can’t distinguish between different instruments playing different inversions of the chords, so the chord diagrams in a multi-instrumental track are often a bit exotic, as every note is displayed. It’s absolutely brilliant for simple guitar tracks though, and variations like added sixths or ninths and so on are displayed pretty accurately. Give it a go and see what you think, it’s helped me out with quite a few songs now.
NN When i had lessons , almost every chord i was told to use was altered and my teacher had an almost obsession with raised 9ths. The issue for me is using different roots. When i first started playing jazz i was fascinated by this but even more by non standard changes. I get bored by the minor-dominant - major stuff. It is the use of substitutions that i need more help with. I have a book abiut intervallic improvisation somewhere and this deals with adding different triads to chords so that you are building new chords based on the scales derived from the original chord. Some scales hint at different triads which infer a change in key from the initial key. From this point it gets very complicated. The whole point of much modern harmony is to imply ambiguity which if effectively what makes music interesting. I have to write this out in pen and paper but should really be internalising this !
Ahh - raised 9ths! I must admit I share your teacher’s love of these! Very popular chord in Jazz and Blues of course. I don’t know how much you have studied modes? I’m not necessarily talking about the standard modes of the major keys but more advanced stuff. An example of this would be looking at the modes of harmonic minor or jazz minor. The former throws up the wonderfully named Ukrainian Dorian (4th mode, aka Romanian Dorian or Altered Dorian). Both of these modes include some interesting intervals and therefore chords. This can in turn provide some interesting inversions! You are playing (in my opinion) the very best instrument to learn any kind of music theory. Even as a guitarist, I always teach harmony theory on a piano and then ‘translate’ this for my guitar students. Chromatic mediants are another area to look at. For example the chromatic mediants of C major are Amin, Amaj, Emin, Emaj plus Abmin and Maj and Ebmin and major. This can lead you off into some really interesting directions.
