The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

Woman seated with Underwood typewriter, Library of Congress

When a beginner starts guitar, the best thing they can do is start by playing basic chords and learn how to strum. This is the vernacular of guitar, the most commonly spoken language. It is the language of pop songs.

What happens when a beginner outgrows the vernacular? Perhaps she would like to branch out and start playing melodies on the guitar. To me, this is playing lead guitar. Just like strumming and playing chords, playing lead guitar has hacks that really help the beginner to advance quickly. The Typwriter Method is the one of the best I've come across. First things first: pressure.

Each finger has a specific amount of pressure it must use to fret a note on the guitar. The pressure needed is magnified when more fingers are being used. More than one finger is needed to play chords, which means you need more pressure (it's worse for barre chords). This is not the case in lead guitar. In fact, when a finger is down that doesn't need to be down, it can make playing lead guitar more difficult.

Let's say that the melody you want to play has two notes, starting on your index finger. If your index finger lifts up en route to the second note, then you are maximizing your energy. If your index finger doesn't lift up, you are adding more pressure than needed:

I like to compare this to old time typewriters. The gears will get messed up if you accidentally use more than one key at one time. Same thing happens to guitarists. Use only what you need.

When it comes to soloing on a guitar, an instrument which doesn't require the player to breathe to make sound, it should come as no suprise that guitar solos tend to have very little space for rest. No need to breathe, no need to stop, right? Many guitar solos from the 80's hair-metal bands made their sound as big, fast, mean, and unrelenting as possible. No fault there perhaps, but it can be equivalent to a sentence with no space in between the words:

kindoflikethismassofwordsthatsomehowseemstoneglectyourreadershipbutblahblah.

The guitar solo's place in songwriting is often to bring the energy of the song to a fever pitch. Sometimes if the guitarist tries too hard it could end up like that jumbled sentence above. Again, if that's a stylistic choice, no faults. The beauty of not neccesarily knowing how to play solos is pausing becomes more natural. In this way, a guitarist can play without distortion, speed, volume, or perfect technical ability. Sometimes, it can be so lovely and striking! The solo might be spare due to neccesity, but what it lacks in technicality it can make up for in breath, space, and timing.

Guitar is full of technical challenges. Grasping a technical problem and solving it with effortless ability is not as difficult as it should be. I have observed this countless times as a teacher, and I think that the method described here might make sense to try if a technical problem rears it's ugly head (it often does, and it still does for me, years of playing notwithstanding).

There are two ways to approach any technical challenge. The first is the most common way: With excess tension. The second is a far more enlightened approach in my opinion: Allow mistakes to come and welcome them while feeling loosey goosey. Why?

The result of responding to any technical challenge with more tension is, well, more tension. Do we need more tension? I think not. Especially if we are planning upon playing with other people and/or performing. The pressure of playing music with and for others adds enough tension already! We don't need more of it. The result of responding "Loosey Goosey" to any challenge is that we see and accept our bodies failing to do what we really want them to do in the short run, but learning to adjust to play in a way that really works later on. This means trusting ourselves to get where we want to later.

I am fond of looking at the second way because it means, in a nutshell, that I trust my body to do what is best, eventually, to beat the challenge. The real trick here is how to accept mistakes, and allow yourself to feel really really awkward until the challenge is mastered, effortlessly. Accepting mistakes however? I realize that this is not something we are looking to do, but guitar offers important challenges, just like any other persuit.

Once again I'm reminded of the ever-quotable Miles Davis: "Do not fear mistakes. There are none."

Playing guitar and learning it is often a process of finding tension and getting rid of it. I've seen people hold tension in their arms, shoulders, ankles, and even their toes believe it or not. The following is a quick recipe for how to become aware of a very unknown spot of tension while playing guitar: The Mouth.

When a person is often playing anything that stretches the limits of their technical ability, one of the first things to receive tension is most certainly the mouth. I have noticed in my own practice that as soon as I can play a musical passage without moving my lips, toungue, or mouth in general, I know I have it. I figured this out while observing people in grad school. The ones that played well made it look easy, meaning no tension in their face.

This works great for scales that I love to use when I am showing off in Guitar Center, too. Just kidding. I really don't dig that. Practicing with a mirror and focusing on my mouth movement makes it very easy to recognize when a passage or scale is completely mastered. The less tension I have, the more fludity I gain. Also, the sooner I can get my scales together, the sooner I can bask in the attention and limelight of everyone in Guitar Center while I play them at 10,000 notes per fraction of a second.