aloeroot, Author at Paul Lucas Music

Learning the Whole Guitar Neck

The guitar is a strange and wonderful instrument. It comes in all shapes, sizes and configurations, and is played with a variety of techniques in many different styles. More often than not, guitarists learn the instrument with the requirements of one of these styles as their guide. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most guitar players have gathered their entire understanding of music, and how the guitar is organized, through the lens of the style they play.

This often causes problems when we attempt to annex another style or get to the next level in our playing. It’s at this point that most guitarists realize that they don’t know the guitar neck well enough.

Swing Chording

I didn’t really ‘learn’ to play swing, I more or less ‘grokked’ it. For most of my early youth, my father was a working stride piano player. He played every swing standard known to man and he swung his butt off. Our house (and my head) was filled with the sound of that piano every day of my life. Needless to say, I had an advantage when I got calls to do traditional swing or dixieland gigs, as I felt I already knew a lot of the tunes, whether I had played them before or not. All I had to do was ‘remember’ the changes.

The Blues

Calling Blues a “style” is like calling yeast an “ingredient” in bread. It is so seminal to modern music that, without it, much of the music we listen to simply wouldn’t exist. It is the “local” musical result of the influence of the slave trade on the New World.

Afro-Samba and the Music of Baden Powell

There are a couple of guitarists who I would have dearly loved to meet. Unfortunately, they are both long gone, Wes in 1968 and Baden Powell in 2000. Both of these guys stopped me in my tracks and had me muttering “I’ve GOT to figure out what this guy is doing”.