Lifes Too Short to Play Crap Music

“Life’s Too Short to Play Crap Music” - Tony Hogan 2009

Tony Hogan and Karen Brown

Yesterday I was giving a guitar lesson to a friend of mine;  she has only come to the guitar as a creative tool in the last couple of years.  We had spoken in the past about the need for a decent guitar to help her define her own musical voice, and I don’t mean singing, I mean a way of saying what needs to be said emotionally when words are too short or not powerful enough.  So, because she happens to like herself, she bought herself a nice small bodied acoustic Takamine for Christmas.  The small bodied guitars seem to fit women better, and also I often find they have a sound which will cut through better than the standard Martin dreadnought size. 

During the lesson we were talking about the need to ‘Make Things Musical’, this does not mean more notes.  It’s about working out what really needs to be played.  And this can be in any style at all, an open mind about accepting the diversity of styles is a healthy thing . 

Over the last week I had ripped apart an old Beatles tune called In my Life and totally reworked it so it is more of a fingerstyle guitar tune with a slightly blues folk edge to it.  By digging into what is underlying a composition, it’s possible to extract and highlight things which were not obvious when the tunes were first written.  You will often find that good musicians, once they have written a song will reinterpret the song numerous ways over a period of years.  Often the only people playing it the original way are those that have copied it.   Songs are living, not static and they are things for us to experiment with.  Example Jimi Hendrix “All along the Watchtower”… would Bob Dylan have ever thought that anyone would do that, or Cream doing Spoonful… or even the numerous versions of Bach, Air on a G String.. ( Many jokes come to mind)

When I play I don’t necessarily play just the straight chords.  I consider what I think  should be happening in the bass notes of the chords and try and create a nice musical pathway from one to the next.  This always creates an interest for the listener, even if they don’t know what they are listening to.   When you are interpreting a song on a guitar, which was recorded by a whole band, there’s a lot of work to do to replace the other half a dozen or so band members and the multi million dollar production.  You’ve got to think smart and move things around a little otherwise the tune can sound empty.

What is important is to find tunes that mean something to us.  So many players just try and copy the originals.  The originals are fine BUT, you’ve got to make them your own.  Some ways of doing this are by  putting the songs into another key and capoing up.  What I will often do  is transpose a song from G to E and then whack a capo on the third fret.  This means that I have to really listen to the movement of the chords and chose only the notes I want.  Sometimes I’ll just play two or three notes instead of a whole chord;  this is the beauty of playing fingerstyle guitar, other times I’ll add a couple of chords and on other occassions leave things out completely to ‘understate’ things.  The idea is to make it my own.  

When I first heard my friend sing a few years back, she was playing piano, but I realised that the texture of her voice would sit beautifully against the sound of an acoustic guitar with a  slightly country blues feel to it.  So yesterday we worked on blues.   When people say blues often there is an immediate conclusion of what that means.  The underlying structure of a blues is very simple, in fact it’s possible to play a blues with one chord or simple riff, but the hidden potential of a blues is endless. 

It is important to make your own music, to learn from what has been and to process it all and turn it into something which is truly a reflection of our inner most feelings, something that is uniquely and unmistakebly our own.  And as my friend and I came up with, “Life Is Too Short to Play Crap Music”

Tony Hogan … now on Facebook