Putting It All Together

I am a largely self-taught musician...or at least it feels that way. What is true is that I taught myself to play my father's chord organ and my brother's acoustic guitar basically with no assistance. But it is also true that I studied cello for 7 years in public school, and that probably gave me more of a solid technical background than I can really imagine.

But the guitar that I learned on was a shitty acoustic and I taught myself from chord diagram sheet music...so I learned your basic open folk chords. The irony of guitar is that...power chords and barre chords are actually "easier" than open chords...because you learn one form (ok, a handful of forms) and just apply them over and over. With open chords...every chord is its own thing. But I don't think I'm alone in finding barre chords and power chords difficult...just because that's not how I learned.

Conversely, people who know power chords will treat you like an asshole if you can't play them...because they seem so dirt simple to them. And they are. But that's kind of like a French person saying a Spanish person is stupid for not being able to speak French (this too, more than likely, happens).

I've been working off and on over the last few years to learn to play barre chords and power chords. But I've been inconsistent (the bass and drums...instruments I actually NEED to play...always get in the way) and haven't made much progress.

Ancillary to all of this is the idea of using effects pedals...and special ways of playing like "palm muting." All of this...foreign to me.

One of my band's suggested we play a certain metal tune. This is funny because I think of us as a folky-rock group. I have no interest in metal...but I think BECAUSE it is so funny...I wanted to learn this suggested song. I realized pretty quickly that the guitar player in our band suffers from the same guitar issues that I do, though, and so I wondered about re-arranging the song with the lead guitar on bass.

I plugged in my shitty Hondo Pro guitar into my borrowed 1.5 Watt Vox effects amp and gave it a whirl just to figure out the parts. It turns out that the song in question is actually pretty simple, though I'm still nailing down the exact structure. The song is essentially all power chords with some lead lines that follow a basic scale structure. There's a touch of palm muting. The key is getting the sound to overdrive...which with that little amp is easy. When my friends have told me in the past "when in doubt just put a bunch of feedback on there" I never understood how that helped. Now I get it.

I don't know what happened, but suddenly all of these things made sense to me and fell together. I'm certain that with just a few more practices I'll have nailed the entire song. I can even play most of it on bass now (chords and all). I'm still not the world's greatest power chord player...but I think I see how it goes. As with everything...it just takes practice.

I don't know if this constitutes some kind of break-through that, from this point forward will mean a whole brave new world. But it feels like it might.