on playing guitar in a broken home

 i've been thinking a lot about this recently, and I don't know that I even want to share this as I type it. I don't want to make an attention seeking spectacle of my pain, but I think it's interesting and I feel like letting this stuff stay hidden is bad, etc. I'm just gonna write it

 when I started playing guitar I started playing in my abusive childhood home. My dad was an asshole, super respected, high status, no one could see or cared to see how poorly he was treating me and often enabled him. All that sorta sad stuff, I'll spare u details beyond that, just my parents were dangerous so I listened for them

 and listening for a threat, in a sort of combat style scenario, a traumatic environment, dramatically alters your playing as you would expect. Even now I get quiet when i hear a thud, surveilling my safe environment for threats that aren't there anymore. It makes playing for people very strange but I'm not interested in talking about that.

 I just find that my style I think is rooted in this hyper-vigilant trauma escape mechanism where it let me soothe while still allowing me to feel safe. 

 some observations and theories: 

- I play fast, so fast I find myself having a hard time expressing the "real" thoughts I have while I'm playing in language, it's all so close to straight feeling, and the closer you get to that core pre-linguistic formation the better my playing is i find. being in the "zone" etc, but when I'm going slow I start to surveil my environment because I can hear it, neighbors shuffling, the fridge humming, my mind starts to wander back into hypervigilance which is exhausting and just not fun etc. I'm often jealous of american primitive players who are so skilled in slow melodic sections recently. But the gist of this is it is a meditative state that lets me escape negative thoughts, but this also makes it a trigger for those negative thoughts so I aggressively pursue that meditative state with speed

- I play fingerstyle, which allows for a lot of control over complex rhythms, this would let me break into irregular time signatures when i wanted to listen to a noise without alerting people that i was listening because the sound didn't stop

 - dynamic control was one of the things that came most naturally to me

- I focus on rhythm over melody, melody often made me feel unsafe e.g. playing a sad song let my parents know i was sad but a polyrhythm doesn't really communicate on that level. I think this also reflects that i was listening for thuds and murmurs more than the melody of my instrument while playing

 

ok,

I wanted to get that out there i guess, for myself a little bit, a record of it all, I'm doing much better re: the broken home now and I don't want you to be concerned or sad about something that's over

on rhtyhm !!

 i've been uninterested in melody recently or not uninterested but found myself less concerned with melody while playing. this is in part mastery, it becomes more subconscious as i move on i find. and i was kind of stoned sitting here like that feels weird. and what feels weird is the difference between how i process melody while playing and rhythm

 i feel like i have deprioritized melody to make room for more thinking about rhythm while i play. melody is a higher level thought than rhythm. You have 12 notes but every moment is an infinitely small point on a line to hit that note, as in our system of harmony is more of a path that you follow but rhythm are the individual steps you take. melody is usually a second order thought rhythm a first

 as in

 when i play there are some things that happen automatically, without language, but melody happens at the exact moment those things become legible, rhythm is almost always an impulse to me, i never count, but i do think what do i harmonize next. i nod my head to the rhythm in the pocket, never the melody.

 when people talk about music i think of it often as layers of dialectics almost

it starts with you. your internal self and body

then it manifests in the physicality of the instrument

then those manifest a series of higher order layers for you to merge thought yourself and the instrument

and in that layer you have melody, rhythm, dissonance, whatever, all these components

and they stack too

but the very first layer beyond the body and instrument is rhythm and without that the link to your self and feeling is gone, it doesn't matter how beautiful the harmonies you have are, the music becomes sterile

 not that melody can't be beautiful, it's just not the bedrock ykwim 

the guitar is the piano but you put your gross fingers on the strings

 i realized today that i think of the strings uniquely for a guitarist

for a long time they were these abstract things to me. sort of formations that seemed beyond my understanding especially because i was playing electric first. the pickups kind of obfuscate some of the simplicity of acoustic sound. And that's what I think i want to talk about. The physical dimensions of acoustic sound.

 At it's core, it's vibrating metal. The other day I heard a rattling sheet of metal in my vibrating vent that was reminiscent of a guitar. everything beyond the fret-board and the strings is accent on an acoustic guitar, an electric adds the pickups and the whole dimension of sound synthesis, almost two isntruments really.

But I'm not presently interested in the dimension of sound synthesis here. I want to talk about the literal sound of the strings, the guitar itself.

 I realized at one point in a way that's sort of in my lizard brain, the way you learn to ride a bike, that the sound of this instrument is my finger on the metal. i feel it literally in my body, i am also emitting that sound if you really want to get into it; I started getting really physical with the instrument, we often ignore this dimension i think. stuff like how it feels to play high up on the neck vs low down not just ergonomically but emotionally and so on, we focus on melody, the notes, western traditions/theory not the physicality of the instrument; finger on metal.

 I think a thought that got me started on this path was playing a little piano.

each guitar string is a piano. I started thinking to myself it's like i have six stacked keyboards and I'm in KISS.

 but then I started thinking about what a piano was, taught strings but no fingers. Pure machine almost, not really, but the physicality of that instrument feels much cleaner, there's more levers, more articulation and more options if you look at it through traditional schools of thought on all this.

 In fact I hear that all the time "if you can play piano you can play anything"

ok maybe not all the time but sometimes 

but what they mean is that you can play aesthetically pleasing music with western instruments not that you know all of instrumentation

 however the guitar is not purely a western instrument which is interesting in this discussion, but i am not qualified to speak deeply on that history, i do think it is worth keeping in mind as the sort of divergence point between the piano and guitar is the introduction of the banjo to europeans

 but what a piano player misses on guitar is this very physicality.

they play beautifully harmonious melodies but at a certain point they all sound the same, tim henson jacob collier, they do everything right, but they're not interesting. That's opinion, but that's like what I mean. They're talented, they're smart, they're creative, and they have developed their own voice, but they learned music the same way every other virtuoso does (I assume lol) through western music theory

 I can't name the notes in a d chord

I can't name the notes in a c minor scale

I could play a c minor scale

but I started thinking this early on, I don't want to avoid theory but I want to follow what excites me. I thought this would make my playing interesting, fun, something unique. I think all the time about kurt cobain talking about punk rock "it means freedom, playing what you want" and i feel that too!!!!!! uwu

 sorry

but yeah I think the scaffolding you approach learning with matters a great deal with the shape of your voice later on even if you don't super consciously choose it, and not that there's any greater or lesser value to uniqueness. Like i think tim henson is cool he seems swag, but like what i said is why i don't listen to his music, I do really like hearing him talk about guitar though.

ok sorry back on track yeah, so I realized that the guitar is a very physical manifestation of the piano essentially

a merging of a now deliberately erased history with our own

and honestly I think that's what the ache in the blues is

the weight of that violence, slavery and genocide

and that genre is studied intensely for it's "non-traditional" approaches to the acoustic guitar, a genre composed mainly of black musicians rejected from american society, and since that society won out and wrote the history that approach to the instrument is now something you learn after your scales after you put in your due diligence

 When i started playing again at 27 I found I enjoyed the physicality of the instrument a great deal, playing until my arms strained, chugging until i broke strings, testing out elaborate patterns for finger picking.

 my left hand is way behind my right and when i'm playing i primarily focus on the right since i can only focus on so much at a time while improvising. at first this was just because i found the feedback satisfying, hitting a string hard and hearing that booming sound feels nice, explosive, powerful, almost like a gun but not dangerous so kind of lame lol, quiet notes and all the other sorts of sounds on the guitar all have a unique physicality and that tactile nature is immensely satisfying to me

but yeah i followed that and then I found the music that did that and then i learned that tradition 

and this whole spiel came from the way i tune

way down, bgbbgb is my tuning presently, super loose

bgb on the low strings is so i can barre with my thumb and chug easily and for cool drones when i'm  playing melodies because i often don't have the thought or fingers to spare to play a full bassline and open strings on the melodies cause sympathetic resonance. and that's a physical thought. I did not want the notes or the harmony or the shapes. I wanted a way to use less fingers, and then i kind of tugged at how weird that felt and wrote this, interesting to me

  

life is like music if you get really stoned and think about it

i write to mirror stuff out and ask, do you see this too

and at first that felt so all consuming, that desire to know what i felt and saw was real

as I have put writing out and people have responded to what i say, that desire has become less about dialogue and mirroring and more about shaping pre-lingusitic sensation and feeling into some sort of legible form; the same core is still there though writing helps me make sense of larger feelings, makes them smaller

 writing always feels less in the moment for me than music though

less of a thing that comes out of me and more of a thing i construct

which i like, i like the two aspects of each medium

but i've been sitting here, probably too stoned

staring at the wall and having that big interconnected feeling about it all

 

there was a pretty girl earlier and we had a nice interaction, nothing serious

but i was thinking of all the cues subtle/overt/otherwise that make up a conversation

and it felt like thinking about how i play music

which is so corny i'm so sorry

but i'm sure you can see the parallel the way you maybe emphasize a note less because you're tired, the way your eyes don't quite meet someone else the same way when you're tired

we think of everything as so controlled

i choose what to say

what to think what to do

in a conversation especially

but there's so much beyond the overt, and language often flattens it. I think music draws our attention to this through pre-linguistic formations of sound.... notes and such, like they're like words but a little more abstract, able to communicate the larger scale of some of these glacial thoughts

if writing lets me see these thoughts and feelings, give them shape, music lets me inhabit them

playing guitar drives thought from my head the same way running does when i'm playing intensely

you pour yourself so wholly into everything you do whether you like to or not

there's no singular vessel for "you" etc

and this has been something i've been trying to remind myself of

like sure we experience things as ourselves

as a distinct unit

but the actions and things we do are part of a larger composition and that larger composition could be whatever you know a beautiful symphony, or a pit of wallowing souls, whatever you see it as, but we're pouring ourselves into it whether we like it or not

in conclusion, 

texture

 i think when we talk about some stuff with music

we often fail to capture intangibles well and usually handwave away the hard to explain

or just the harder to capture elements of what moves us in the medium

it's very hard to translate the sensation of music to words and there's a lot of writing about music and i think it pushes the medium in a sort of push/pull feedback loop where we start to focus on the concrete details we can capture in words, spoken or written

 and when i say texture i don't mean acoustically

i mean the way nebraska bruce springsteen was recorded on a 4 track in a motel

 the way bob dylan only had an acoustic guitar and his voice

teen suicide's lo-fi recording setups early on

 these are all aesthetic choices not entirely made with aesthetic considerations or even consciously sometimes. These are all driven by the prevailing conditions of the artist's life.

and when people talk about posers

i think this is what they mean

if you believe what you say

there are certain things you can't do

and like i think the yuppie archetype is a creative dead end

that's annoying discourse stuff though i don't care

 but yeah the material conditions and the overall shape of your life

are such large factors on your music

and I think being a writer as well as a musician has cultivated this feeling in me

because most writers know that if you want to write interesting things you have to lead an interesting life, you write what you know

the same goes for music probably

but don't beat yourself up and think you're not interesting here because i can feel that impulse in myself there's a lot of ways to be interesting etc

 and it's not just how you live

it starts with how you think

the sorts of ideological frameworks you put your feelings in

and i think there are some frameworks

fascism, bigotry, etc

that are just also creative dead ends

speaking of yuppies.....

lol fuck my life

but yeah like i don't want to litigate what a good texture is

i'll know it when i see it 

how it feels to improvise fingerstyle guitar

 i'm going to write about what it feels like to improvise fingerstyle guitar pieces. I've been thinking a lot about this. I hardly know any songs. any songs like at all, after playing guitar for a long time. What I get from the instrument is less the end product and more the sort of stimulation creation is. I still like making pretty stuff and impressing my friends, but the reason in an empty room i am usually prompted to pick up the guitar is it clears my head, the same way running did

 i'm old enough that my knees are too bad to run like i used to lol

 but yeah I realize i think about this a lot more than other people, just in conversation with other musicians, and I want to talk about it, because i feel like it's interesting. I am by no means the best or the only improviser and i'm sure there are a variety of approaches.

ok so i can launch into a sort of improvised song right away

but i usually resort to a very comfortable phrasing, something familiar

before that even actually i tune

and that tuning builds a sort of mood based ambiance for me, lets me sit in a moment, get in the right headspace

 that's one of the things about improvising that i really like. there's no room for illusion in there

the seconds between notes is really not a lot of time and i find myself shortening my thoughts into what almost feel like bursts of shorthand, like a twin language for your instrument and conscious thought. especially fingerstyle i wouldn't even have time to say the notes out loud

this actually reminds me of a machine learning model a little bit, a bridge between two states that's nebulous and huge and impossible to control directly, you have to manicure it

 it's interesting because you cultivate mindstates. If I'm bored i play boring things, if I'm on edge i play faster, more volatile jumps in intervals, stuff like that is obvious, but i'll mold myself to moments. like "oh I'm playing a lot of harmony i need dissonance" is the sort of top level thought i have

 and then that translates into a sort of state i can't tabulate or easily express before becoming physical impulse and noise

i feel like that state is something so human and affirming to feel in yourself, to know that by default this is how we are, ok that's a little woo woo but i mean it

at some points i lose conscious experience lol

like i'll come to like unable to remember if i liked what i just played

it never happens when i record though

that blinking red button puts me in weird headstates. I've always felt i play best for myself

which sucks lol

it's fun to be impressive

but it's lowkey tortured artist core so whatever

 but yeah like being aware of that mindstate, the one recording sets me in, is something i've been trying to overcome

and it leads me to think a lot about process because I can't control that feeling but i can control the environment etc

therapy core lol

I'm realizing i've departed from the original point, it's so hard to describe improvising

learn an instrument maybe idk, or find someone who wrote something else idk idk sorry

 

stop sending me hate mail over going electric!

 

marissa anderson is really cool

she does american primitive on guitar

if you are not in the know that's just like

instrumental bluesy-folksy-fingerpick-y sorta classical guitar stuff

it inspires a lot of my playing

actually you can see me play here, although i think most people who read this know

https://bsky.app/profile/guitar-hater.bsky.social

sorry to clout shark

but yeah

she does that, and it's traditonally acoustic guitar

but she does electric and acoustic, so do some other artists

but her in particular i like

because she has made me play electric guitar for a day

after not touching one for months, like 6 months i think

I really zeroed in on acoustic for a second

and also got a really beautiful brand new taylor 212ce

well i chipped it up a little already with metal fingerpicks but you know

it's my favorite guitar

that's not interesting though

what I want to talk about is marissa anderson's tone

it's so pure

it's almost like a synth, just raw sine wave

but with the acoustics of the finger on the string

and just that purity is interesting especially since

i've been trying to seperate the guitar and some vocals

so i can process my god awful singing

and I think there's something interesting in the idea

of like a shoegaze fingerstyle

anyways

the raw sine nature of her tone, it's so unvarnished

like so fucking raw it feels like the way you can hear the wood of those old acoustics in really old blues recordings where it's all high end

but it's a different sort of material so the rawness is very different, the low end is so interesting

and the sustain is wonderful, as well as the ability to apply compression

but just the way you don't have to strike as hard to play as loud

it lets my playing become looser, and i appreciate that

i guess this was half about switching to electric from acoustic, that's right folks I'm going electric, well switch is a very permanent word, i'm just interested in electric again

everyone is up in arms!!