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