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Top 10 Tips for the Guitar Playing Songwriter by James Linderman

August 8, 2013

At just about any songwriters open mic night in this era, the guitar slingers will outnumber the piano players by a ratio of at least 10 to 2 but this would not have been the case pre Beatles. Before rock and roll, the guitar was certainly popular enough, but nothing compared to the post jazz era guitar hysteria that ensued. It now seems like there are a lot of us in this generation of songwriters who tell the story of seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and having that moment change our life in a guitar friendly way… or the story of learning 3 chords on the guitar as a kid at Pioneer camp and then somehow magically becoming a 6 string songster.Rock guitar isolated on the white background

Since many of us have very little of value to offer the world but a few songs about how love has done us right or wrong (and perhaps a few numbers about how we took revenge), I felt that it would be interesting to have a look at how improving on the guitar might make for even better songs. It was also evident that since I had spilled a lot of ink writing about the piano playing songwriter in previous articles that the guitar playing songwriter might deserve equal time and attention.

So here are the top 10 tips for the guitar playing songwriter. 

  1. Hello, My name is Gb but my friends call me F#. Getting to know all the names of the note on our instrument is so fundamental and yet many guitarists think more about the physical shapes of what they are playing (the D chord triangle or the Am blues scale box, etc.) than the elements required to create those devises. Guitarists who have a working knowledge of their fingerboard have the opportunity to turn that information into more invention and more precise choices. That means there will be more song ideas… which means more songs and those songs will express what we want to say more directly and may even offer us the option of having a wider variety of emotions to express.
  2. I Got Rhythm……I Get Music. Tom Petty’s song “Free Falling” and the Supertramp hit “Give a Little Bit” are both 3 chord songs using a 1,4,5 pattern (D, G and A) but what makes them distinct from one another as well as distinct from every other song in existence is the harmonic rhythm. In guitar speak that means the strumming pattern. More strum patterns applied to more chord systems instantly translates into more songs. Strum pattern options can be manufactured from rhythms found in Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4 Time or from stealing them from other songs…did I write stealing…I meant to write borrowing.
  3. Take Your Pick. Crosspicking is the fine art of using a flat pick to emulate fingerpicking. You lose some of the warm tone and multiplicity of finger style but you get a very usable arpeggiated effect with the advantage of the control the flat pick offers up. Take a chord progression you would usually strum and on each chord, pick 3 consecutive strings from the bass note “down picked” and then from the bottom string, ascend playing 3 notes “up picked” (ex. on a D chord pick down on the 4th, 3rd and 2nd strings and then pick up on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd strings and then apply to all other chords.)
  4. Drop Your Pick. Learn to play finger style. Sure, unless you get really good at it you may feel like you have less control then playing with a pick, but there are some great tonal colours fingerpicking offers and more intricate patterns since, in essence you are using the finger equivalent of 4 picks. In standard finger picking we use the thumb and all of our fingers but the pinky. The fingers are named PIMA from the Thumb outward. To learn traditional finger style patterns you can pick up a copy of Mauro Guiliani’s 120 Right Hand Studies which illustrates patterns applied to a C and G7 chord. Even during the classical era Guilliani suggested (in the forward of his collection) to experiment by varying the chords to come up with new and interesting options. One of those options might just write you the next “Dust in the Wind” or “Hey There Delilah” or “I Will Wait” or ….
  5. A+ in Chord Chemistry. Lots of guitar playing songwriters will tell you that they are always on the hunt for beautiful, (or in guitar language “wicked”) new chords. Getting to know an A+ (A augmented) chord may not deliver an easy harmonic option to add to your next great song but by doing the work of adding some interesting harmony, it may help make your next song great. Look to a book like Mel Bay’s Complete Book of Guitar Chords, Scales and Arpeggios for a very good selection of altered and extended chord voicing to start to experiment with. Look for new chords that challenge your ear but also challenge your left hand with stretches and shapes that are less familiar and even a little less comfortable and practice them into comfort and familiarity. Always warm up properly and slowly before attempting challenging hand stretches and certainly seek out a competent guitar instructor to learn warm up techniques that will make new shapes easier and not physically painful.
  6. Add Riffage to your Musical Diet. There are some iconic guitar riffs that make some of our favourite hit songs great. If we were to remove the riffs from The Eagles “Life in the Fast Lane” or from the Beatles “Day Tripper” or from The White Stripes “7 Nation Army” these songs would be more than slightly compromised. Imagine Clapton’s Layla without “da da da da da da da”. Once again we can look to the Mel Bay’s Complete Book of Guitar Chords, Scales and Arpeggios and by looking for interesting patterns in the scales or arpeggios we can come up with riffs to either add to existing work or to build new work from. Songs constructed on a hooky guitar riff also do not seem to require intricate chord systems to make them more interesting since so much of the listeners attention is focused on our sweet riff.
  7. Blackbird Singing on a Compound Third….There are as many great songs written on a theoretically identifiable harmonic pattern than there are great riff songs and this as also an easy application for guitar players. A song like The Beatles “Blackbird” is written with a series of intervals called compound thirds. The simple interval of a third can be heard by playing a G note and a B note together. What then makes the interval compound is to put a full octave between the 2 notes. On the guitar this would be the G note on the 3rd fret of the 6th string and the B note open on the 2nd string. If, like Paul McCartney we were to collect a whole set of compound thirds up the guitar neck, we could determine an original pattern to play them in, that we like. Music theory (Yes, I said music theory) offers up thousands of these kinds of options to build new music on and this application of theoretical concept is called “applied theory”. This article, and most of my teaching is built on the principle of only learning theoretical concepts that can be applied to consumable sounds and then turned into new music.
  8. Get Out of Town…and Take that Guitar with You.  Ok! You do not actually have to physically visit other cultures to derive some influence from them and then apply that influence to your music. I have never traveled to the middle east but because of a university course in the music of that part of the world I took while studying in the U.S, I am now possibly the only Dutch Canadian composer who has written and recorded middle eastern flavoured music….well, maybe not the only one but there can’t be that many of us. The point is that I would never have experimented with quarter tone composition had I not been open to it and curious about it. During that period I got so obsessed with making my guitar sound like a sitar that the middle eastern influence still comes out in one or two of my songs and makes them sound much more interesting.
  9. The Loneliness of the Sight Reading Guitarist. Acquiring and maintaining a fluent sight reading skill on the guitar is a mandatory requirement of any academic musician but I cannot truthfully claim that it is a small or easy undertaking. It is a skill that requires a lot of alone time for sure. Guitarists are also historically non conformist and rebellious gypsies who try desperately to not be everything a piano player represents and to a guitar player the piano is a reading instrument and the guitar is a playing instrument. Unfortunately, the widespread propensity for guitar players to not learn to sight read is one of the reasons lots of guitar songs end up sounding the same as one another, because the materials that influence all of those songs is all the same. A great source for new and interesting song materials can be accessed by sight reading pieces not available to guitar playing songwriters who cannot read notation. If we are influenced only by all the guitar materials everyone else is influenced by it stands to reason that our songs will end up sounding just like everybody else’s. Add an unusual and not easily attainable source and our songs stand a chance of standing out.
  10.   Go the Extra Mile for an Extra Style. Extending the suggestion in tip # 9, gaining just a little bit (or a lot) of classical or jazz guitar training has served many pop songwriters very well. Some classical training helped songwriter Paul Simon write much of his early catalogue and a few jazz guitar lessons then served his later solo career equally. Lessons with an experienced (but still enthused) instructor can be very helpful in this pursuit and it is not necessary (or even advisable) to replace your time or passion for writing songs with the a 8 hour a day guitar practice regimen but a little bit of a shift in focus to being a slightly better guitarist can go a long way to not only making songs richer and more interesting but will also enhance the performance of them at the next open mic night.

 

James Linderman teaches guitar and piano and coaches songwriting in studio in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada and over Skype to students all over the world. He is a Berkleemusic

Ambassador and a music journalist and presenter. Contact James at jlinderman@nullberkleemusic.com.

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