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 

 1.      Turn up on time 

The sundial has been updated and many years ago the Swiss developed some great technology called the clock

 2.      Check all your equipment is accounted for before you leave for the gig

 Leaving your amp at home really sucks

3.      Learn how to communicate with other musicians

Screaming at band members was outmoded around about Neanderthal Man

4.      Never get intoxicated before you play

 Pretending you are Jimi Hendrix is fine, believing it is scary for the rest of the band.

 5.      Don’t teat the audience with disrespect if they don’t like your music

 The chances are, if you haven’t tuned up and the drummer is playing a different song, the audience has every right to be critical.

 6.      Create good relationships with venue owners

 Using the PA to describe negative attributes of the guy paying your wages is a no, no, even if has short changed you two dollars, there are other ways to sort issues.

 7.      Speak up for yourself when need be

 Telling your girlfriend about band problems instead of telling the band, is a great way to prove to your girlfriend that you don’t have any skills at dealing with issues, but don’t worry there’s a great market for songs about your lover leaving you

 8.      Don’t throw tantrums in public places.

 Unless you’re using is a promotional tool, showing the anger management skills of a four year old is not great for your career

 9.      Pack an extra extension power lead and guitar lead

 Standing next to a refrigerator at the other side of the room at the only available power point waving at the rest of the band, would be a little embarrassing.

 10.  Check all your equipment is accounted for before you go home

 “Now where did I leave my ’69 Les Paul, I had it last night?”

 11.  Don’t believe the saying “You’re only as good as your last gig”

 That’s bullcrap, there’s good and bad nights, learn from your experiences