Chords

[Steve]

There are a lot of bullshit myths surrounding the notion of talent.

Yes there are. talent is in the hands of those that work hardest. I hate the phrase '(S)He has natural talent' I say BOLLOX! (S)He just works a lot harder than anybody else! And a classic example is Zander! Nicks son. When Nick first posted up some of Zanders playing, it was pretty raw and basic. The recent post by Nick with Zander playing is a testament to his hard work and fortitude.

[Jules]

Wow - this topic really blew up. I can't even remember what the original question was!

I had a kind of revelation yesterday - I don't know if it's happened to anyone else, but I was playing on my bass, and I just kinda realised that the bass is the only instrument I wanna play. I already knew it was my primary instrument, but it just really hit me yesterday.

Did something similiar ever happen to anyone else?

[thelevellers]

Yeah, I've had similar moments, but not quite as simple as that... I wont go into them, as we're far enough off topic as it is

Plus, this is a public forum that my friends know I'm on

[Nick]

Yes there are. talent is in the hands of those that work hardest. I hate the phrase '(S)He has natural talent' I say BOLLOX! (S)He just works a lot harder than anybody else! And a classic example is Zander! Nicks son. When Nick first posted up some of Zanders playing, it was pretty raw and basic. The recent post by Nick with Zander playing is a testament to his hard work and fortitude.

That's a lovely thing to say Steve.

I'll tell him of your post - and it's very true. He applies himself and does work hard at it and takes it very seriously. He took up the piano fairly recently and practices away at that and his teacher is confident that he will be at Grade 6 standard next year. He has a compositional side though that is a fascinating talent and is something special.

I have friends now who are decent professional and semi professional players who accept him happily as an equal and that's really nice.

He has a great ear but his understanding of theory only adds rather than subtracts and he is starting to pull the various strands together where his ideas and technique are coming together so that he can jam and play with structure and a free flow of ideas. We were chatting tonight about chords and he has at least as good a knowledge as I do of chord progressions, chord substitutions, tritones substitutions, where to use secondary dominants and all that stuff and how to apply them in his playing - but it doesn't get in the way of just getting and down and rocking.

This is a bit more of his playing - he still has a long way to go but I don't know lots of people who can wander onto a stage and jam like this with no clue as to where it was going and play a decent 7-8 minute guitar solo on a borrowed acoustic that they have never played on before. I'm probably biased but it ain't bad - Jam and Fragile (Sting) - sorry the quality is rather distorted

Edited May 30, 2008 by Nick

[Lazz]

Jules made a comment about thinking that learning guitar was learning a few chords, picking up scraps of information from tabs and going from there.

And I didn’t believe him for a second. He seems far too smart. I took it as another throwaway comment from a playful adolescent weegie.

Sadly, this is an experience I've never had (…. a music school)

Me neither.

My understandings of what they do and how they teach comes from more sideways involvements.

But enough to know about visualisation not being overlooked in the curriculum.

To suggest that all children are born the same and somehow it is a socializing or normative element that prevents a child from being a genius strikes me as being incredibly naive.

Oooh.

Cheeky.

Fighting talk.

Clearly, not all children are born the same. There are defective versions. We’ve all met bona-fide loonies whom we can easily identify even without benefit being medically qualified to do so. Others are born already broken and it’s tough to imagine a kid without limbs growing up to be a champion tap-dancer.

But I wasn’t talking about the extremes – I was talking the large general lumpen mass who inherit the same basic equipment with all the unknown potential it provides.

Have you ever read Rosenthal and Jacobson’s “Pygmalion in the Classroom” ?

What happened was that they tested all of a school’s elementary students at the beginning of the school year, then selected 20% of ‘em completely at random, without reference to the results, and reported to their teachers that they had identified these little guys as having "unusual potential for intellectual growth" and who could be expected to "bloom" in academic performance by the end of the year.

At the end of that school year, they came back and re-tested.

Can you guess the results ?

The kids of whom more was expected did significantly better than the others.

And believe me, without worrying about the actual numbers, the stress is very heavy on ‘significantly’.

There have been lots of other comparable studies subsequently, in different areas of activity, and all with the same substantive result.

(I’m sure there must be echoes of this in your own experience.)

Last time I did any serious teaching for my sins it was remedial literacy and numeracy to mixed ages in a part of South London that was even dodgier than the neighbourhood where I myself grew up – and that was pretty murderous. Anyway, the first challenge to be confronted was their awful self-perception of the limits to their own abilities – they’d all internalised the fact that they were useless failures – and part of my strategy was based on methods of learning/acquiring language. And quite frankly, Steve (or should that be stevely, Frank ?) I think you’d be foolish to underestimate what a staggeringly impressive piece of work it is for kids still pooping in diapers to figure out an entire theory of language.

Have you ever learned something other than your mother tongue ?

Can you imagine what a huge triumph that is for babies ?

To me – that’s clear evidence of genius.

And the evidence about child-rearing, or socialisation, and how it bears upon measurable abilities is pretty overwhelming too.

You can call my position naïve if you insist, but it is actually based on a well-developed complex and coherent developmental model built out of grounded theory and oodles of research.

How many Alan Holdsworths are there? How many Miles Davis's?

That’s a trick question, isn’t it ?

There is only one of each of us.

Alan is lately often given to wondering where his gigs are and why he couldn’t have managed a career based on beer.

Miles is dead – as you know – and, though few get to approach the unique level of profile he achieved, there is still an awful pile of trumpet players who are unique and special in their own way. (I can knock up a fascinating list if you want.)

unless you've been around street-level rock musicians, this is probably a different territory and I suspect we'll never meet eye-to-eye on it

Looks like we have each been making some interesting assumptions about the other

I have spent a lot of time and effort escaping where I come from, but can’t deny my past. And, for what it’s worth, those days for me then were pretty much as ‘street’ as your average south central L.A. rap-star today. We were so poor we couldn’t even afford to pay attention.

My music education happened on-the-job.

If I was to divide all the guitar players I have known on the street into two categories, I would be tempted to identify one group who were quite happy with what they could bash out at the level they’d achieved and perfectly content to have fun doing whatever they had time for, and another group who were interested in doing more and better and were willing to put some time into finding out how.

I never heard about tablature until I came into north America.

And here I want to say that I think tabs are very good. They can illustrate exercises, techniques, and passages that can't be taught any other way.

I didn’t know that – and find it hard to credit.

I mean, if they are a help to people – and they obviously are – then they are good per se. I just find it a bit of a stretch to think there is guitaroid stuff that can’t be taught any other way. In fact I just mentioned this to my mate (who Pat Martino calls the best guitar-teacher in the world) and he laughed nd spluttered at the suggestion. But what do I know ? I’m not a guitar player any longer – not that I ever was a real one before. No – what concerns me about tab from a purely practical functional educationalist point of view is that I can’t see how it offers the user any real illumination of any of that other important stuff we’ve been talking about. How does it inform someone’s harmonic understanding ? Does it have any real cumulatively heuristic developmnental value ? That’s what I think is detrimental – but perhaps I’m wrong. Please advise me.

[Lazz]

I'm talking about talent in the sense of "arriving in the fullness of" having reached or tapped into a potential that has gone beyond potential and into the actual. Talent is a vision, its a "being-pulled-into-something" at the moment you are yearning for it.

Come along, my lovely.

How come you have a visualisation of what it is while claiming you have no direct experience of it ?

You're a regular talented guy with the spirit of genius still somewhere inside like the rest of us.

And perhaps more than your fair share of self-doubt and ill confidence.

Sounds like a text-book case to me, your honour.

And could be argued in support of my precious thesis.

I will never have that kind of talent.

I will never be a virtuoso on any instrument.

I'm not quite convinced by any of this as an indication or measure of worth.

I admire, and often envy, the craft skills involved in commercial music production for jingles and film and such.

But they do get away with some questionable trash for little good purpose and they aren't marked as pinnacles of achievement in my book.

And too many times have I witnessed virtuoso performances which have bored me to tears.

What I want are people who have something to say.

And who can convince me in the saying.

[FinnArild]

In my experience (if you don't mind me butting in) there is talent AND there is dedication. For greatness you need a combination of both. Dedication is usually more important than talent.

[Steve]

In my experience (if you don't mind me butting in) there is talent AND there is dedication. For greatness you need a combination of both. Dedication is usually more important than talent.

I agree. And those with the most dedication work the hardest! And with hard work comes revelation! If we look at other forms of art, painting for example! Tracey Emin, John Constable. One of these two was a great artist. The other was Tracey Emin. One worked hard at his craft, the other was Tracey Emin. One had talent, the other was Tracey Emin. Constables talent came about from hard work (and dedication), Tracey Emin decided to be an artist. From my own experiences as a painter, I know it takes hard work (and lots of practice) to turn out a painting of any worth. I'm sure if I were dedicated enough, and worked hard enough, I would become pretty good! Whether I could attain any special place in the artists hall of fame? I doubt it! Simply put, I don't have enough 'talent', in other words, I don't feel I want to spend that much time applying myself to art! But there are a few people who feel I do have some 'talent' (My mum, my wife). Only because they have no idea which end of a brush to stick in the paint!

[Mazrocon]

I'd say it's alright, it's not like every song has to be completely different from each other

~TIMOTHY~

[Lazz]

Wow - this topic really blew up. I can't even remember what the original question was!

I think it was something about your relationship with a minor.

Anyway - you started it.

You should be proud.

I had a kind of revelation yesterday - I don't know if it's happened to anyone else, but I was playing on my bass, and I just kinda realised that the bass is the only instrument I wanna play. I already knew it was my primary instrument, but it just really hit me yesterday.

Did something similiar ever happen to anyone else?

Exciting stuff.

Follow that road J !

Unfortunately, we're all far to busy arguing to pay attention.

But yes .... I recall that kind of feeling.

Lucky boy.

I'd say it's alright, it's not like every song has to be completely different from each other

Uh-oh.

Now we've got Timothey trying to drag it back on track.

Don't worry - I'll fix that.

A note on tab. There are lots of kinds of tabs, from full song transcriptions to lead tabs. And they come in a variety of flavors. There's the generic ASCII tab that uses numbers and keystrokes to indicate fret-position, there are tabs that combine notes on a staff and tab below. And then there are tabs produced in freeware or professional software applications.

etcetera...

That all sounds good and great for what it is and what it does.

But, as a language, isn't it still somehow 'isolationist' in its sytem ?

Does it, can it, work as a tool to enhance and aid someone's harmonic understanding ?

It's the heuristic value I'm interested in.

[Steve]

Steve, I wish I had half your humor.

I'll send you some in the post.

I didn't know that you painted. I would love to see some of your work! I only knew about the architectural models.

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