I've been trying to learn to speak Spanish on this tour. I have an 8 CD set by Michel Thomas which promises that you don't need to practise outside of listening to the CDs. You just listen, say the phrases when he asks you to translate, and that's it. So far it seems to be working ok - I feel like I'm beginning to get a grasp of it. Last night, after I'd set up my gear, I was sitting watching Muddy fool around on his guitar. Some incredible Stevie Ray Vaughn was playing in the background and Muddy was standing on stage intentionally playing really bad blues licks. I wondered what made something 'good' or 'bad' when it comes to playing the guitar. I started thinking about learning to play an instrument verses learning to speak a second language. Let's take learning to play the guitar and learning to speak Spanish. Both require some technique to get the right sounds. I'd say it's harder to learn the technique for guitar than for Spanish as we're already pretty competent with the techniques needed to produce sounds with our mouths. Perhaps learning Chinese is harder, but it's still using apparatus that we're pretty familiar with. Learning the guitar, on the other hand, requires you to do things with your fingers that may be completely alien. It takes a long while to feel comfortable with those movements. Let's say you're competent at pronouncing the Spanish vocabulary, and you're pretty good at getting around a guitar neck. That's the stage I'm at now. My Spanish vocabulary is limited, but I have no trouble actually saying the words, and I'm technically proficient on the guitar. Now, a difference becomes clear. I can make lots of noises on the guitar, but they're not necessarily 'good'. I can run up and down scales, do some two handed tapping, and play other people's solos, but I often pick up a guitar and feel like I can't come up with anything good to play. This, I believe, is where the difference in speaking and music becomes obvious. In speaking, the first question is always "What do you want to say?" If there's nothing you want to say, then you don't speak. Perhaps when I can't come up with anything good to play, I should just not play. If you don't have anything to say (the saying goes), don't say anything at all. With Spanish, even if I know what I want to say, the process of translating and voicing the correct words feels difficult. In a conversational situation, once I understand what has been said to me, I know exactly what I want to reply but it requires a lot of brain power to say it in Spanish. Playing the guitar (or the drums) is different. You may have nothing to say, but if you possess the technique and you know some scales so you can still make a noise and you probably will. I think this is where the difference between a 'good' noise and a 'bad' noise arises. Bad noises are generally those where you have nothing to say but you play anyway. Knowing your scales and having the facility to make sounds with a guitar does not make you a 'guitarist', just as possessing vocabulary and knowing the rules of grammar does not make you a poet. It's possible to write sentences which are grammatically sound with no misspellings and yet are complete nonsense. What's the solution to this problem of making 'bad' noises? Practice thinking about what you want to hear before you make a noise. Sure, it'll feel slow and awkward to begin with, just as trying to speak a foreign language requires extra brain power to begin with. You may not be able to get your ideas out in the proper time frame. This is all just part of the learning process. Just make sure you don't say anything at all UNLESS it's something you wanted to say. With practice, the time taken to get from idea to execution will reduce to the point where you don't even notice the process. In language terms this is referred to as being 'fluent.' This exercise may not be appropriate in a live situation. If you seem to get by in gigs just making noises for fills and solos then don't replace that with silence or you'll probably get fired. But when you're in the practice room, really work on this idea of knowing what you want to hear before you move your arms. Maybe set up a vamp to solo over and only play when you have a complete phrase in your head. With practice you'll become fluent at saying what you want to say on your instrument.
No comments:
Post a Comment