How To Play Guitar

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Jandek – Come Through With A Smile

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This essay on “How to play the guitar” by David Fair of Half Japanese expresses exactly how I feel about music.

I taught myself to play guitar. It's incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string farther out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast, move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That's all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that's pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you'd still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But the thing to remember is it's your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn't have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that's absurd. How could it be wrong? It's your guitar and you're the one playing it. It's completely up to you to decide how it should sound. In fact I don't tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they're all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don't depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn't matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn't matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I've never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you'd feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn't to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.

Okay, maybe it’s not completely true that I feel the same way Fair does about music. If it was true, there would be a lot more Popsheep posts about Jandek, Half Japanese, John Cage, improvised music, and the Shaggs. The unfortunate reality is that I can only take so many of these kinds of songs before my patience runs out, no matter how much I appreciate the music on an intellectual level.

As a theory of music production, though, there’s no doubt that Fair’s theory is beautiful and, in many ways, inherently democratic. It’s about removing ego and posturing from music, about stressing participation in its creation rather than focusing only on its consumption. But the type of authenticity that Fair wants to promote (which is, from the start, kind of a dubious goal) is only part of what makes a piece of music enjoyable. The case in point might be my career as a guitarist. For whatever reason, I decided ten years ago that I would only teach myself to play, never really reading any books on the subject or taking any lessons. I think the idea was that I would maintain my own style, uncorrupted by formal education, with the stress always on improvisation and exploration. But, ten years later, the reality is that I still kind of suck at guitar, despite pretty regular practicing for that entire time, and still play in a roughly similar style to everyone else I know. While my hours of improvisation and fiddling about can often be extremely rewarding in the immediate sense, it has never really produced any songs worth putting to tape or posting on an mp3 blog.

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Destroyer – Nothing Against You (Bored Spectre)
Langley Schools Music Project – Space Oddity

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But then something comes along whose amateurness and lack of technical skill gives it a kind of immediacy that reminds me of why something like the essay above appeals so much to my musical sensibility. Early destroyer recordings like this one from Ideas For Songs, filled with flubbed notes and missed chords, are still some of my favourite despite, and perhaps because of, all their flaws. And it’s hard to deny the appeal of the amateurish enthusiasm of the Langley Schools Music project, particularly that guitar squall that comes after the countdown in this outstanding cover of Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.

Usually though, it’s the simplicity of the playing or the approach, rather than any profound or new way of conceptualizing guitar playing that gives these kinds of songs their lasting appeal. They’re not breaking any musical boundaries but are managing to invite a relationship with the listener that doesn’t seem possible in something like a Steely Dan or Shellac song. There’s plenty of less “outsider” genre examples of this. Think of the horrible yet great guitar solo on Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” or the opening guitar wankery on Redd Kross’s “Linda Blair”, or pretty much any part of Link Wray’s “Rumble”. These are moments of genius that manage to transcend their apparent simplicity and, from a technical standpoint at least, crappiness.

So, what I’m saying is that, while Fair’s variation on the “anyone can play guitar” theory can occasionally make for both aesthetically and intellectually satisfying snippets of genius (like the quite beautiful Jandek song posted above), it can more often than not make for a more difficult listening experience than is necessary. I’m personally of the opinion that making “difficult” music requires far more skill than making accessible music, and I’m pretty sure that both David Fair and Jandek are actually pretty good guitar players. I think a more honest theory might be that “anyone can make pop music”. Using a few chords and some good ideas, it doesn’t take much to make interesting, and often challenging, songs.

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I found the David Fair essay in this ILM thread. You can buy Jandek albums at this address. You can buy Destroyer products here, and the Langley Schools Music Project here.