Me and My Guitar Part III: Audiophonic Fermentation (?)

Decades (!) after my first encounter with the guitar I couldn't play a single recognizable song (I had long since forgotten Kumbaya and Wayfarin' Stranger).  However, I could produce some pleasing sounds by noodling around and practicing my chords -- something that has eventually become extremely important, as I'll try to make clear.

My wife and I retired in 2000 and move moved to Hawai'i a year later. The guitar she had given to me 30 years earlier successfully made the trip with us.  However, somewhere in the discombobulation I lost my pitch pipe and with it the ability to keep the guitar in tune.  For a while this didn't matter too much, because (a) I was busy with many projects around our new house and didn't play much, and (b) I could keep the guitar acceptably close to being in tune just by ear.  My intent was to eventually buy a new pitch pipe but something always seemed to get in the way.  As months and years went by the guitar got more and more out of tune and my tuning-by-ear approach didn't work.  I played less and less.

A few years ago while hiking with a new snowbird friend I found out that he was an accomplished guitar player.  When I briefed him on my own interest and my current tuning problem, he offered to tune my guitar for me and also suggested I go online and buy a cheap electronic gizmo that would allow me to easily and accurately tune it myself.  At the time I had never heard of such a thing, but it turns out there are several different brands of these nifty little things, most of them less than $20.  They clip onto the guitar and register the frequency of the string that is vibrating, transforming it into a visual display that shows how close it is to a particular note. By watching the display as you turn the tuning knobs you can dial precisely the correct tension for each string.  Damn!  Not only is this gadget helpful for those of us who don't have perfect pitch, it also has many of the characteristics of a Geezer Techno-Toy -- it's cheap, has colored lights, involves sounds, and runs on batteries.  Sold! A few days later mine arrived in the mail and it has changed everything.

My Friend

For the first time ever I began playing regularly.  At first this was mainly rediscovering the basics and toughening up the fingertips of my left hand.  Most beginning guitar players have to go through the somewhat painful process of building up callouses that come from pressing down with your fingers on thin strings of metal or nylon.  Gradually I could play longer and longer without pain, but initially five or ten minutes was all I could take.  Today there doesn't seem to be a limit.

So what do I play?  This is where it gets a little weird.

As I've continued to "noodle around" I find I really like the melodies that emerge from sequences of chords that I seem to choose almost randomly.  Not only that, but I can now pluck individual notes within the chords -- something I've never done before -- and this adds interesting variation and complexity to the sound.  But the really weird part is that I'm doing this without really thinking about it or intentionally choosing the chord sequence or the notes.  I find myself just listening to what is being produced and being amazed at how pleasing it sounds.  If I start to focus on the mechanics of playing or on consciously trying to choose chords or notes, the whole thing goes sour and falls apart.

I don't know where this music comes from.  It certainly isn't from any natural talent that has ever been apparent before, nor is it the result of disciplined study and practice, as I'm sure I've made clear in recounting my saga.  As a crackpot pseudo-explanation I offer the term "audiophonic fermentation," an invented process whereby my brain has absorbed decades of visual and auditory encounters with guitar music and performance and somehow processed it into a potentiality for musical expression. (Wow, my knack for b.s. is still intact!).  Anyway, it is certainly enjoyable to be able to do something now that I couldn't do in my younger years, contrary to the usual Geezer trajectory of losing function.

Over time I've created a number of "structures" or "sequences" each with a different tonal quality and progression. I can choose to return to one of these, but once I begin to play the pattern takes on new nuances and embellishments that I don't plan nor consciously control.  An overly generous and limiting name for these structures would be "tunes" or "songs."  At present there are about a dozen of these, giving me a "repertoire" of roughly 40 minutes of music.

I should emphasize that this new-found skill is restricted to making stuff up -- I still can't play any well-known specific song, nor can I mimic a musical piece that I hear being performed by someone else.  However, what I invent does have a vague similarity to music I've listened to over the years,  and I can often detect the general influence of certain favorite performers and genres.  Maybe it's part of the "audiophonic fermentation" process -- my brain has extracted and distilled music I like down to different patterns of "potentialities" that are favored when I noodle around.

Some people have suggested that maybe this is the time to take lessons and develop my skill in a disciplined way, or that I try harder to perform known songs.  I'm not interested in doing either of these, at least for the time being.  For one thing, my childhood aversion to formal training has stuck with me.  A more palatable alternative is the rich trove of excellent instructional videos available now online, and I've sampled a number of them.  Although I get some good tips from these, I've found that attempting to copy the style or technique of the teacher leads to a degradation of my own.  I also don't have much interest in learning songs or tunes that other people might recognize because my current goal isn't to entertain other people -- it's a more selfish goal to explore a creativity I never knew I had.  If people like what I play, I am certainly appreciative.  But my main motivation is to produce new music that I enjoy.

It's also been suggested that I should buy a better guitar now that I'm taking it seriously. I've looked at a number of them and so far in every case decided that my old guitar sounds better.  It may be my pro-geezer bias operating, but I swear that my old Aria has a resonance and tone that the new ones don't have.  If I find one that is truly better, not just newer and more expensive, I might buy it.  But for now I'm following the example of Willie Nelson, who refuses to give up his 50-year old "Trigger" even though the sounding board is starting to look like Swiss cheese. [Take a look at this great video made by the man who is entrusted to care for Trigger, and also this one where Willie tells the story of Trigger.]

There are a few lessons from this 55-year saga.  First, never assume your abilities and limitations are fixed, nor that you even truly know what they are.  Processes we aren't aware of can lead to some very surprising developments in what you can and cannot do.  Second, conscious awareness isn't always necessary or even desirable for controlling behavior. There is an interplay or a balance between conscious and non-conscious control that can produce some astonishingly positive outcomes.  Finally, sometimes even very small things we do for other people can have dramatic effects on their lives. There are several examples of this in my guitar saga, but the most recent obvious ones are the impact of my friend's casual remark about electronic tuners and his spending 5 minutes to retune my guitar.  These small acts have opened up a whole new world of experience for me at just the right time in my life to me to greatly appreciate.  Me and my guitar are very thankful.....