# Guitar/Playing What You Hear

The ultimate goal for many guitarists is to be able to create with the
guitar -- that is, to be able to conceive of a
melody or a chord sequence, \"hear\" it in one\'s
head, and then translate it onto the
fretboard. Ideally, guitarists should be able
to do so with the minimum possible latency and with as few errors as
possible, and they should fail gracefully -- that is, when they play an
unintended note, they should be able to recover from the mistake. The
best improvising guitarists, from blues players
like Eric Clapton and Freddie
King to jazz players like Wes
Montgomery and Allan
Holdsworth, have mastered this skill.

## Selected Exercises

-   **Practicing In The Dark**

Staring at the fretboard while playing is considered the mark of an
amateur. In most performance situations, it isn\'t possible to look at
the fretboard while still communicating visually with other musicians
and with the audience. In addition, looking at the fretboard introduces
additional delay between thinking the note and playing the note, because
the guitarist has to visually verify that his or her fingers are in the
right place.

A good way to break yourself of this flaw is to practice with your eyes
closed, or even better, to practice in the dark. You will probably find
yourself playing mostly clichés that lay out well under your fingers.
Resist the urge to do this. Practice until you can play new or difficult
phrases without looking at the neck.

-   **Visualization**

Pianist and teacher Barry Harris stated in an interview for the 2008
Stanford Jazz Series that he believes that piano players would be better
off if they played the \"piano in their head\" more often. According to
Carroll Smith\'s book \"Drive To Win,\" Formula One drivers can sit down
in a chair, close their eyes, and move their hands and legs as though
they were driving a lap, and surprisingly enough, they often get within
several seconds of their actual lap times.

As a guitar player, you should do the same.

Practice running through a solo in your head, humming or singing the
melody line and fingering in the air like you would on an actual guitar.
Without the feedback you get from hearing the notes coming from the
instrument, your weaknesses are exposed. Any chord or melodic fragment
that you\'re not confident playing in the air will likely be played with
hesitation on the actual guitar. The other advantage to visualization is
that you can do it anywhere, since it doesn\'t require a guitar. People
may give you strange looks as you walk down the street playing air
guitar, but you can be self-assured in the
fact that you\'re actually playing the right notes on your air guitar
rather than strumming aimlessly.

-   **The Random-Note Game**

As an improvising guitarist, if you\'re truly creating on the fly, you
will make mistakes. The best improvisers, including guitarists like
John Scofield, can use unintended notes as
starting points for new motifs or ideas. As an improvising guitarist,
you need to know how to recover from a mistake. Recovery requires that
you first know what note you actually played relative to the chord
change, and then find a way to proceed from that note in a logical way,
usually resolving the dissonance into something consonant.

A good way to improve your fault tolerance is to play the random note
game. Put on a backing track with chord changes, such as the ones by
Jamey Aebersold. Close your eyes, move your left hand up and down the
guitar neck, and pick a random string and a random fret. Play the note.
First, listen to the note, and try to hear where it fits into the
current harmony relative to the root note of the chord and to the other
chord tones. For example, maybe you just played the seventh instead of
the sixth, or the flat third instead of the natural third. Next, try to
create a melodic line that starts on the note and resolves logically
into the tune\'s harmonic structure. There are a few devices you can try
here:

-   Is the note a member of the current or next chord or scale? If so,
    you can play something diatonic (in the key).
-   Is the note a member of a chord or scale that can resolve into the
    current chord or the next chord? If so, play something over that
    chord, and then resolve it into the harmony.
-   Is the note a member of a chord or scale that is a half-step off
    from the current chord? If so, you can sidestep back into the
    correct key.
-   Is the note a member of a chord or scale that can be substituted for
    the current harmony? If so, play a line over the substitution, but
    keep a point in mind where you can enter back into the harmony of
    the tune.

This process will be difficult and time-consuming at first, but as you
play more and more and experience the common scenarios and mistakes that
you can make, recovery will move from a conscious (and slightly
terrifying) process to an instinctual (and not so scary) one.

-   **The Science of the Unitar**

\"The Science of the Unitar\" is an exercise popularized by Mick
Goodrick, professor at Boston\'s Berklee College of Music and teacher to
guitarists including Pat Metheny. Basically, you practice playing
major-scale lines using only a single string on the guitar. Most
guitarists spend the majority of their time playing in one of several
positions or \"boxes\" where the major scale or the blues scale are laid
out easily. This exercise helps guitarists to break this tendency and
become comfortable playing up and down the neck.

See the book \"The Advancing Guitarist\" for a more thorough description
of this exercise.

-   **Exploring The Neck**

Most guitarists start out by learning how to play chords and single
notes in first position up to the fifth fret. Next, they learn to play
the blues scale in a few different positions, and if they\'re really
diligent, they learn to play the major and minor scales in each of the
five most common positions. They end up very good at the common case of
playing within a position, but transitioning between positions or
playing licks that don\'t fall nicely within a position remains
difficult.

Here are a few exercises you can try that will improve your familiarity
with the neck:

-   Take two pieces of tape and affix them to your guitar neck, five
    frets apart. For example, put one before the 5th fret and one before
    the 10th fret. You\'ve just created a \"box\" that contains each
    note in the chromatic scale exactly once (with one exception in
    standard tuning). Next, put on a jam track and practice playing the
    melody and improvising using only the notes in the box. When you
    start to get comfortable in one position, move each piece of tape up
    a fret and do the same thing again with the same jam track in the
    same key. You will probably need to start at a slow tempo and work
    your way up. Don\'t be disappointed if you\'re less fluid than
    usual, or even if you sound downright bad -- you\'ve found a
    weakness and you\'re addressing it.

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-   Learn to play scales with four notes per string. Start off with your
    first finger on the 3rd fret G on the bottom string of the guitar.
    Play the G major scale up and down with four notes per string and
    one note per finger (no sliding). As you ascend and descend the
    scale, your hand will have to move up and down the neck while also
    moving across the strings. When you\'ve mastered that pattern, play
    the dorian mode of the G major scale in the same fashion, starting
    with your first finger on the 5th fret A on the bottom string.
    Repeat the exercise, starting on each of the notes in the G major
    scale. Then try it with major scales in different keys, and finally
    with the melodic minor, harmonic minor, and diminished scales in
    different keys. As you\'re playing, think about the patterns in the
    scales. Do this every day until you can play the scales fluently.

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-   Repeat the exercise above using three notes per string, and then
    with two notes per string.

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-   **Using All Your Fingers**

Are you using all of your fingers? If not, why not? Think of how much
more quickly and efficiently you could navigate the neck if you had full
use of all of your fingers.

Note that \"proper\" technique is not an absolute requirement for making
great music with the guitar. Guitarist Django
Reinhardt is renowned for his
contribution to jazz guitar, and what he did is even more amazing
considering that he only had full use of two of the fingers on his left
hand. If you watch video of Wes Montgomery, you\'ll notice that when he
played single note lines, he uses his first three fingers almost
exclusively, using his little finger only for octaves and chords.
Nevertheless, using all your fingers effectively will open up a world of
musical possibilities. Allan Holdsworth is one example of a guitarist
who has mastered this skill, and Kurt Rosenwinkel uses the same
techniques to achieve a horn-like, legato sound on a \"clean\" guitar.

There are a few exercises you can do to improve the dexterity and
strength of your little finger. The \"Exploring The Neck\" exercises
detailed above, especially playing scales with four notes per string,
are extremely useful for this purpose. In addition, placing artificial
limitations on your playing while you practice can help to target
specific scenarios. For example, try playing scales and songs, or even
improvising, using only your middle, ring, and little fingers. You\'ll
probably have to start at a slow tempo and work your way up. For a good
practice aid, try using Jamey Aebersold jam tracks in combination with a
software program that can change the speed of a recording without
changing the pitch.

-   **Tuning In Fourths**

For many jazz and jazz-rock players, after they begin to improvise over
music of a high level of harmonic complexity, the asymmetry inherent in
standard tuning will become a limiting factor in their playing. Songs
which contain rapid transitions between key centers, such as Giant
Steps and other compositions based on
Coltrane changes, may be especially
difficult to master in standard tuning.

Tuning the guitar in fourths (EADGCF) eliminates many of these issues.

Stanley Jordan is the best-known
guitarist to use this tuning. Allan Holdsworth states that \"if I was
starting guitar again, I\'d tune in Perfect Fourths.\" (see
link)

Advantages of tuning in fourths include:

-   Every shape on the fretboard translates directly into a musical
    interval. In standard tuning, the same shape on different groups of
    strings may produce several different intervals.
-   All chord shapes are usable across all groups of strings. For
    example, a voicing on four adjacent strings is usable on three
    different combinations of strings with no change in fingering,
    whereas the same voicing in standard tuning would require three
    different fingerings for the three combinations of strings.
-   All scales reveal their symmetry across the neck. For example, given
    a pattern to play a one-octave major scale across three strings
    starting on the root note, you could apply this pattern at any
    location on the neck and get the same major scale.

The major disadvantages of tuning in fourths are:

-   Obviously, re-learning of chords, scales, and licks is required.
-   Many pop and rock songs that rely upon open chords are no longer
    playable in their original form.

## Selected Resources

