Good Sounds: Why everyone can kinda play guitar
I’m no hippie but I do believe that pretty much every human being is inherently musical. Or at least, they have the potential to be. I also think every human can make music, in one form or another. Now I’m not insane, I don’t think all that music will be ‘good’ – but that’s a different discussion.
Recently, I’ve been ‘teaching’ my flatmate how to play the bass guitar on a second hand 90 Euro Jazz bass copy I picked up a couple of years ago. Teaching is a loose term. I’ve only taught guitar a couple of times in my life - classical Spanish guitar to a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old during high school, and a friend electric guitar in college. The latter was fun, but the former was torturous. Young children really do not want to learn classical music; they want to run around. Despite technically having classical qualifications, I’m a poor technical musician myself. I haven’t read sheet music in a couple of years, and I don’t know what key my own songs are in. As a teacher I seem pretty unequipped to impart the basics of musical knowledge. This is why I don’t try to.
I do not think my flatmate will be the next Jaco Pastorius. I would love to be wrong, but he’s headed towards his late twenties and that level of technical expertise may not be feasible. I do think that if he approaches the instrument on his own terms, he has the potential to be a really unique player. This is why I refuse to teach him scales, or any of the traditional musical terms. Some of my favourite musicians (both Sufjan Stevens, and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman) picked up the guitar a little later than most people assume is possible, especially those in the more formal classical and jazz genres. To paraphrase Karly herself – oh shit anyone can do this.
If my flatmate knows what a quaver is called will it make him a better alt rock musician? Or will all the terminology and ideas of ‘the right way to do things’ get in the way of him playing music. I tend to lean towards the latter, especially in the ‘indie’ genres where aesthetic, writing, and feeling go further than technical ability. Instead, I want to rely on the belief that everyone is inherently musical, and guide with the lightest hand I can – after all, who am I to say that I know how the bass should sound. If we can end a session with him holding down a bassline he wrote that I can play along with, even if he has no real idea how he is doing it or what he is doing, I call that a success.
I feel like lots of people, especially those who when they think musician, think classical protégée or Van Halen level shredder. A musician can be someone playing the Garageband drum machine just well enough in a lo-fi project for a singer songwriter to play over. Can we get the idea across? Can we enjoy the feeling of playing music?
I can never really figure out how I feel about the music industry, but it seems as though we’re stuck in a race to the bottom, to figure out how to create the most homogenous musical landscape we can imagine. Just look at the atrocious names for Spotify’s curated playlist (and refer back to our article on the everything is something core phenomenon by Milica Ružić) and it seems like it would be a good thing to have more people playing and making indefinable music. Music and sound is a mystical and powerful force, and we should never think its something that can be categorised and knowable. So go play that guitar in the way that feels right.
