I’ve been thinking about the guitar a lot. This may not seem odd because I play the guitar for a living so it should be expected. A ballerina is bound to think about dancing and a doctor should think about doctor things. But I’ve been thinking about guitar A LOT lately. I think learning guitar has been the single greatest thing I’ve ever done for myself up to this point and it’s taken me 16 years to realize that. Now I have a strong desire to show my appreciation for the silly chunk of wood with 6 pieces of wire buzzing all about and I want to advocate for future guitarists to stick with the thing even when they get a strong urge to throw it in a dumpster. Before I give my unsolicited advice I think it’s important to go back and process the whole progression.
I usually credit my sister, Danielle, for the reason I play and have a career with guitar. I wrote a college admittance essay about how in middle school she told me I was “talentless”. According to Danielle, she was good at art and I was good at nothing. I wouldn’t describe Danielle as mean, even in middle school, so I’m sure I instigated the confrontation, but she said it and could never take it back. She is still good at art to this day and I was more or less talentless in middle school, which is fine in hindsight because I now see middle school as a time to address puberty instead of form a “craft”. The essay wasn’t completely true though; it was a bit hyperbolic. Sure, I’m petty enough to never forget Danielle’s discouraging remarks, but really Guitar Hero 2 is the reason why I play guitar.
Just uncase you need clarification, the Guitar Hero franchise was the best playstation 2 games to ever exist. It involved the players holding Les Paul and Stratocaster styled plastic devices with 5 different colored buttons on the guitar neck and a toggle-like thing for right hand strumming. The goal was to press a colored button with the left hand and pluck the toggle with the right as a conveyor belt of colored dots came towards you on the screen. What a magical game! Guitar Hero 3 was really my jam, but Guitar Hero 2 was the formative version.
I still remember the day I fell in love. I don’t recall if I was in 6th or 7th grade but definitely middle school after Danielle told me I was talentless. My family was visiting cousins in Plymouth, MA. They had a finished basement which was the hangout spot for the kids. I walked down the creaky steps and was met by a boob tube TV blaring music I had never heard before. I was encapsulated by distorted guitars, thumping drums, groovy bass, and grown men singing in registers meant for little boys. I had never really heard that type of music before. My youth up to that point was filled with pop stars like Brittney spears and country bros like Garth Brooks torturing my impressionable ears in car rides with my family. Then down in my cousin’s basement my soul was awoken by the seductive adrenaline of rock n’ roll.
I officially started playing guitar right around when I turned 14 years old. My hair was long and I refused to wear major corporation branding on my t-shirts so I felt I qualified with all the prerequisites. About 6 months into noodling around on my own, I started taking bi-weekly hour long lessons and started my 8 year voyage of studying under an instructor. High school consisted of soccer and guitar. Sophomore year I joined the high school concert band and strummed barre chords behind the saxophones, flutes, and clarinets, then went home, placed a top hat on my head, and played along with Sweet Child O’ Mine. Music became the answer to my future. I don’t know if I was obsessed with music but I was definitely obsessed with the feeling of being a “music kid”. Like I was in this elite club of creative souls yearning to find the right essence that would tell me the underlying secrets of the world. I liked that people were like “oh you play guitar? Cool”. It was cool! I was hot shit. I was the best guitarist in my school of 500 kids, which meant I was the best in the world for all I knew. I could play the major scale AND the minor scale! I was making full concert band arrangements for 10+ different instruments and I was just 17 years old. I must’ve been a prodigy. I knew everything.
I became convinced Berklee School of Music was my answer to success, so I auditioned and didn’t come close to getting in. Berklee used to have a method of auditioning then a post-audition interview. My audition was so bad that the woman interviewing me was like, “You know, Berklee isn’t right for everyone.” My little 18 year old ego was shattered like a glass vase falling to the floor. Up to that point it was Berklee or bust. But, thanks to my college essay accusing my sister of bullying me into committing to guitar and declaring a major of Music Education instead of performance, I squeaked into the University of New Hampshire (UNH) jazz guitar program. I didn’t have to be good at guitar to teach elementary kids how to clap the rhythm, Ta Ta Ti Ti Ta (1 2 3 + 4). At UNH, I quickly learned that I wasn’t hot shit and I knew absolutely nothing.
As a freshman I was clearly the worst guitarist in the program. I didn’t know a thing about jazz besides barre 7th chords. I could barely read music, my ears were shit, my technique was sloppy. My guitar teacher said to me one day, “You don’t know your fretboard,” which was true, “You play everything by memorized patterns,” which was also true, “Imagine if a saxophone didn’t know the notes on his instrument. He wouldn’t be able to play.” I didn’t know my instrument. That was soul crushing but incredibly sobering. I became determined to learn and it started with the fretboard.
At UNH I also met my best bud and guitar confidant, Dave Adams. We spent our days writing songs, panic-practicing the night before lessons, drinking, fawning over the same girls, watching the patriots, and recording songs together. Dave could sing, Dave could play, Dave could think music with the best of them. He could do anything besides sight read (no guitarists can sight read). One minute we could be playing Allman brothers licks together, then the next he would switch to Master of Puppets and play it perfectly with our band’s drummer. Sometimes I got so intimidated around Dave that I would ask him to tune my guitar. For some reason, it sounded better when he did it. Still to this day, Dave is my guitar confidant. I now feel that no question is too dumb for me to ask him. Recently, I said to him “I don’t get the blues, how do I solo over it?” and I’d been playing the blues for 14 years at that point. He said “Minor pent,” which is always the answer for guitar.
All 4 years of college felt like catching up and simultaneously trying to keep up. Everyone started playing instruments at 8-10 years old and I only started at 14. They knew the technique, timbre, etiquette, history, and secrets I thought I was years away from. Every time I touched the guitar I was trying to prove something. Jazz was the pinnacle of what I saw as ‘real deal’ guitar. I sucked at jazz. I didn’t like playing it because I couldn’t solo for crap and my reading ability was so slow. To be fully honest, I spent more time trying to write the next big indie rock songs to make my college rock band with Dave famous instead of studying bebop licks. I shouldn’t have been surprised that my jazz was weak.
Even with 4 years of flailing and running around like a chicken trying to avoid slaughter, I did learn a lot. I learned about comping while someone else soloed, I learned how to add in walking bass underneath the chords I was strumming, I learned chord alterations and secondary dominants. I learned when to toss dorian into a solo. I learned that jazz is basically a collection of ii7 V7. I learned about the great guitarists of the past like Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass. Most importantly, I learned the fretboard; I could tell you all 12 different locations to play an E note on a 22 fret guitar neck. I wasn’t hot shit anymore, but I definitely left college feeling like I learned some shit.
I consider ages 22-26 as the dark ages of my relationship with music and electric guitar. I started teaching at a k-8 public school in Colorado. I hated the job so much that it made me hate music. I lived with my UNH friend Joey while he was in grad school at the University of Northern Colorado for jazz saxophone. His school friends would come over and talk about altered scales to throw over “All the Things You Are” and I would leave the room in disgust. They were dissecting music so deeply that they were searching for crevasses with just a twinkle of light to explore. I wasn’t even able to teach the fundamentals of music because I was too busy telling the kindergarteners to stop putting their shoe laces in their mouths. If I did get to play any guitar, it was my acoustic to sing songs like Going to the Farm. My electric was sitting in its hard case collecting cobwebs.
I left that job after a year and then Dave moved to Colorado to live with me and Joey in Fort Collins, CO. For 2 years, we lived in a house together while I went to grad school for music therapy. I was searching for meaning and trying to rebuild my relationship with music. Music and I were like a married couple avoiding the “D” word but desperately hoping couples therapy would fix everything. Looking back, I’m sad to admit that Dave, Joey, and I didn’t play as much music as we should have together. The roof should have been blowing off nonstop, but Dave was working on his mental health, Joey was gone most of the time while finishing his grad school then working, and I was too busy procrastinating from my studies by watching Game of Thrones in the middle of the day. My electric guitar sat in its case collecting more cobwebs. I taught a few private students for pocket cash but nothing substantial. Guitar was in the backseat while I was on my self-indulgent pilgrimage of self discovery. Strapped in tight but still in the back seat while I considered “maybe rock climbing or sports sciences are meant for me…”
Getting a degree in music therapy did make me gain a deeper relationship with the acoustic guitar, even though it wasn’t in the forefront of my mind. If I was playing at all during this time, it was acoustic. I learned how to bring musicality into a room with just my fingers and my voice. The fancy chords were gone; no more vii7b5 or V7add13. I learned to make an open C chord matter (the secrets are dynamic changes and arpeggiations). I gained a big appreciation for the folk legends like Bob Dylan and James Taylor around this time.
Then that brings us to the past 4 years. I’ve been teaching privately and I’m a board-certified music therapist. I’m back in love! Some switch went off in my head and I find the guitar to be a well of never ending fascination. I play A LOT of guitar for my music therapy sessions, more than my supervisors think I should, but I can’t help it. My fingers just want to move. With teaching I’ve really hit my stride in the past 2 years. I can genuinely say I love teaching guitar now. In the past I found unmotivated kids draining and good students intimidating. Now though, I can confidently say I’m good at it and I strive to get better. Maybe I just see the greater purpose better. For me, teaching isn’t about making the next Michael Jordan of guitar, it’s about being the presence in someone’s life that is like, “Isn’t this interesting!?!?”
I thought my senior year of college would be the peak of my guitar ability but I’ve been hungry to get better. And I definitely am. My brain works so much more efficiently now. I’m not a dumb kid anymore, I’m a dumb adult. There’s a difference. So much of the guitar makes sense to me now in a new, energizing way because so much time has passed with it in my hand. I can visualize and conceptualize more than ever. I can listen to advice without it hurting my ego. I can suck on one song and not think I suck all together. I haven’t put my 10,000 hrs in yet, but I believe in the theory because I’m noticing the effects of approaching 7,500.
This is the 16 year journey I had to go on to be proud of myself as a guitarist. For the first time ever in my life, the scale between playing to prove something and playing for the joy of the instrument has finally tipped in the right direction. Since I was 14 I wanted to be a capital “M” Musician, but over time, I think the interpretation of that sentiment is less grandiose. Maybe I’m a lowercase musician but I’m still a musician. 16 years to figure that out. 16 years! That’s older than most of my students and I feel like I just started to understand the guitar yesterday. I have so much more to learn before I can be satiated.
I believe everyone has their own odyssey to take, but with that said, here are a few tips I would recommend to steer the ship in a productive direction:
There are secrets (somewhat) so go find them
There are tips and tricks to the craft. No ultimate trick to make you good tomorrow, but resources that will point you in the right direction. You just have to go find resources that will help you. Maybe your full potential will be unlocked when you slightly adjust how to hold a pick or maybe you need a color coded PDF to memorize all 5 different forms of the pentatonic scale. Not everything is going to work for you. For example, I suck at sweep picking even though I understand the concept and I don’t like to wrap my thumb over the guitar neck for funk chords because my chunky necks make it uncomfortable. But others will work if you keep looking. Like I acknowledged earlier, I talked to Dave because I couldn’t understand why my blues soloing sounded lame. That brought me down a rabbit hole on youtube and I learned how to mix in chromatic notes to hit minor and major 3rds with the chord changes. It completely unlocked my blues soloing.
Keep playing, it will lead you somewhere.
When I was leaving college, one of the last things my guitar teacher said to me was, “if you open a private studio it will work out because you’re good enough at guitar and people like you,” and my immediate thought was, “This dude still thinks I suck at guitar”. I kept playing. I’ve had jobs over the years as an elementary teacher, a barista, a music therapist, a camp counselor, a bike mechanic, a wrench manufacturer, and a cashier, but I kept playing. 9 years later, I opened my own private studio and finally understood what my guitar teacher was saying. I’ve never been a prodigy at guitar; I’m still pretty sloppy, my ears still kind of suck, I get anxious when performing, I’m not very fast, and I don’t understand the gear side of guitar, but I’ve always had a knack for interpersonal relationships. People do seem to like me and that is potentially more important when keeping students than guitar skills.
Record yourself
Even if it’s bad, do it. For one reason, if you write music, and have an idea that tickles your fancy, it might turn into something down the road. The other day, I found a voice memo I made 8 years ago. It sounded like garbage–my singing voice was atrocious 7 years ago–but the chord progression was cool and I still liked most of the vocal melody. After rediscovering the riff, I wrote a whole song with it. If I didn’t press record 8 years ago to the random idea, I wouldn’t have the song I have now. For another reason, record yourself if you want to hear how you actually sound. It’s easy to think you’re the best guitarist to ever walk this earth when you’re alone in your room, but a missed note, CLUNK, on a recording is much less forgiving. You can’t get better unless you know where you’re starting from.
The journey to find identity is more important than actually finding it
My journey with guitar was a journey to find identity. Was I a blues guitarist because my sloppy nature worked well in blues? Was I a jazz guitarist because I liked 7th chords and walking bass? Was I an indie guitarist because I liked open note suspensions on high fretted chords and I found it easy to write sad boy lyrics with them? I still haven’t figured out my guitar identity but along the way I’ve gotten a taste of everything. I’ve dabbled in funk, reggae, rock, pop, jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, folk, jam band, metal, and indie music. I learned I care about understanding a song more than playing a song. I want to understand the ii7 V7 of jazz, the secondary dominants thrown in country, chromatic runs in bluegrass leads, why the bends in rock solos can be so satisfying (bending into chord tones), and the odd nature of Radiohead songs (a band deserving of their own genre).
Play with people better than you
When I was in my college band with Dave, I was clearly the worst musician of the 4 piece band. It forced me to be better if I wanted to hang with them. My only regret is that I didn’t ask more questions; I didn’t want them to think I was an amateur or annoying. With all my heart, I beg of you, play with musicians that are better than you and when they do something cool, ask, “how did you do that?” They will be excited to show you.
Guitar is Fun
Don’t forget to have fun! Practice your phrygian and figure out a way to toss it into a Scofield song or a prog metal lick, but find time to remind yourself that the guitar is great! Jam with friends, do dumb things to make them laugh, play Smoke on the Water for 20 minutes straight even though it’s probably the first song you ever learned on guitar. The better you get on guitar, the more opportunities you have for fun.
I think back on my life and it could have gone in many different directions. I could have made it into Berklee and crumbled under the pressure of trying to become famous. I could have never met Dave and never had a guitar confidant. I could have quit music and actually opened a coffee/bike mechanic shop that was once a consideration. I could have veered left instead of right or zigged instead of zagged. I’m happy with my path. I went the way I needed to go to get where I am. I’m by no means an important guitarist. In the large scope of guitar skills, I would say I’m pretty good. I will leave this world, hopefully as an old man, and have no page in the guitar history book. But that doesn’t burden me because WOW, the guitar is great! I’m so lucky to have it in my life. If you play, I hope you keep playing. If not, I hope you find something that makes you say, “WOW _____ is great!”