Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 9: D major redeemed (dropped tunings)

“Died and were reborn,
and then mysteriously saved”

Bob Dylan: “Oh Sister”

I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this post: the post where the ugly duckling, despised by everyone, turns out to be a swan.

All it takes is to tune the sixth string one tone down, and something wonderful happens to the D major chord.

Let’s take it from the beginning and summarize the charges against D:

  • It uses only four out of six strings, giving it an unnecesarily crippled, thin sound
  • it has the third at the top, which is not necessarily bad, but requires some extra care.
  • Below that is a rigid octave/fifth skeleton, which — again — is not wrong per se, but which together with the third, alone at the top on the first string, gives a very bipolar, fixed sound.
  • It uses a lot of fingers, with very little room for maneuvering.

Then tune the sixth string down to a D, one tone lower than its standard tuning. It should sound like the fourth string, only one octave lower. This tuning is usually referred to as the Dropped D tuning.

The new D is played 000232, i.e. it uses all the strings in all their bassy glory. Now, magically, most of the complaints vanish:

We not only gain one but two strings: the A on the fifth string, which in the standard major chord is best avoided because it is not the keynote, is now a perfect support for the new fundamental tone: the low D on the sixth string.

The new D chord doesn’t change the position of the third — it is still up there at the top, in perfect isolation on the first string, and everything below it is just a sequence of octaves and fifths: D - A - d - a - d’. However, now that the fundamental tone is on the sixth string, we not only get two extra tones sounding in the basic chord 000232: we also get two extra intermediary strings — the fourth and fifth — which can be used for melody and bass lines, almost like with the G major chord. We can for example play the quintessential early Dylan folk/blues fill:

         :   .   .   .     :
------||-----------------|-----
-(3)--||-----------------|-----
-(2)--||-----------------|-----
-(0)--||-3---0-----------|-----
-(0)--||---------3p0-----|-----
-(0)--||-------------3---|-0---

All that is done with the long finger, which temporarily leaves its place on the first string. “3p0” means “pull-off”: strike the fifth string with the finger at the third fret, and pull off to produce the tone of the open string.

here’s an incomplete list of songs where Dylan uses the Dropped D
tuning:

So, you may ask, why isn’t Dropped D the standard tuning if it has all these advantages?

The reason is of course that the advantages are limited to D major; all the other chords become troublesome, to a higher or lesser degree. The low G, for example, is now all the way up on the fifth fret of the sixth string, and that makes the G major chord more tricky. There is a solution: since the tone D is also part of the G major chord, we can play it like this:

o oo
======
||||||
------
|1||||
------
||||34
------
||||||

 G/d

But note that this chord lacks the keynote in the bass. Hence, it is not suitable for songs in G major. For songs in D major, on the other hand, where G major is the subdominant, which is more like a variant of the keynote, this is more ok. Also, the third finger is in the same place in D major and in this variant G major chord, which is a good thing.

Another alternative, which gives us a G bass on the lowest string, is this:

  ooox      ooox
======    ======
||||||    ||||||
------    ------
||||||    ||||||
------ or ------
||||||    ||||1|
------    ------
||||||    ||||||
------    ------
34||||    34||||
------    ------
||||||    ||||||

 G/d

It is playable, but it requires you to shift the hand position up to the third position (“position” is a technical term, at least in classical guitar terminology, denoting the fret in which the index finger is placed).

The dominant of D major is A major. In standard tuning, this chord can use the open sixth string, since that is an E, which is a member of the A chord. In Dropped D tuning, the sixth string either has to be avoided, or it has to be fingered at the second fret. The most practical way to do this is with the thumb:

 o   x
======
||||||
------
T|111|
------
|||||| 

  A

But with this fingering, it is difficult to bend the index finger enough to let the first string sound. In most of the songs from the list above, you will hear that when Dylan plays an A chord, it is usually more muffled than the other chords — sometimes very muffled.

Finally, one last disadvantage: In the dropped D tuning, the D major scale runs as follows:

|----------------------------------------------
|-------------------------------------0--2--3--
|-------------------------------0--2-----------
|----------------------0--2--4-----------------
|-------------0--2--4--------------------------
|-0--2--4--5-----------------------------------

In other words: some of the important tones in the scale are on the 4th and 5th frets, which at times may be a problem, especially if one wants to play melody lines while strumming. In practice, one is then required to use the little finger quite a lot.

If one plays in a more blues-oriented style, however, all the notes at the fourth fret will be replaced by the third fret instead — as in the “quintessential riff” above. A lot of the songs in the list above are also in this style, such as “Hollis Brown”, “It’s alright Ma”, etc., for which it fits like a glove.

Here is a handful of songs which in different ways are typical of dropped D tuning.

Masters of War

On the album, Dylan plays this with a capo on the third fret. If you play it without a capo, it will sound very dark.

  Dm                    Cadd2 Dm                    Cadd2
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-1-----1---1-|-1-----1-0---|-0h1---1---1-|-1-----1-0---|
|-3-----3---3-|-3-----3-3---|-3-----3---3-|-3-----3-3---|
|-2-----2---2-|-2-----2-0---|-0h2---2---2-|-0h2---2-0---|  etc.
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---3---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---3---|
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|

Dm
Come you masters of war

You that build the big guns

You that build the death planes
         Cadd2         Dm
You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls
         Cadd2       Dm
You that hide behind desks
                   Cadd2
I just want you to know
      G/b              Dm
I can see through your masks

As usual, the tab means to indicate a general pattern more than exact
notes/strings to be played.

The three chords that are used in this song are:

ooo        o oo o    o oo o
======     ======    ======
|||||1     ||||||    ||||||
------     ------    ------
|||2||     ||||||    |1||||
------     ------    ------
||||3|     |2||3|    ||||3|
------     ------    ------
||||||     ||||||    ||||||        

  Dm       Cadd2      G/d

As you can see, the ringfinger is in the same spot all the time, and all the strings are used, although they are not always “correct”. This is one of the things you will see in the various altered tunings: since they usually emphasise one particular key, the tonal character is so strong that an occasional “off” or “odd” tone does nothing to obstruct that.

  • An essential part of this pattern — as Dylan plays it in the album version of the song anyway — is the constant, driving, hammering rhythm on every beat in the bass.
  • Also, there is a stronger emphasis on the first beat in every measure — indicated with full chord on all the strings, although it does not necessarily have to be played that way all the time.
  • The ground rhythm of the accompaniment is something like this:
      :    .    .    | :   .   .   |
    --------------------------------
      V    v    v      V     ^ v

    That is not to say that there is only one upstroke, but that that last upstroke in the pattern has a certain emphasis which brings out the dotted rhythm in that measure.

  • The hammer-ons should be fairly straightforward to figure out. They are embellishments and hence not absolutely obligatory, but it’s worth making the effort to learn them. Play the four measures above over and over again until your neighbours complain and your girlfriend leaves you — don’t worry, she’ll come back once you get it right.

Double Dropped D: The Ballad of Hollis Brown

The pattern in “Masters of war”, with a dominating Dm or D chord broken up by the sequence Cadd2 -> G/b at structural points in the song, is a trademark figure in Dylan’s acoustic repertory, in the early days of course, but also in his live work in the late 80s and early 90s. Another song where this features prominently is “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”.

This song is played in “Double Dropped D” tuning. This means that both the sixth and the first strings are tuned down one whole tone, so that they both sound like the fourth string.

As should be clear from this, Double Dropped D tuning is very centered around one chord, and all others are more to be seen as ornaments.

This gives the following main chords:

ooo  o     o oo o    o oo o
======     ======    ======
||||||     ||||||    ||||||
------     ------    ------
|||2||     ||||||    |1||||
------     ------    ------
||||3|     |2||3|    ||||3|
------     ------    ------
||||||     ||||||    ||||||        

  Dm       Cadd2      G/d

As you can see, the only difference from the chords in “Masters of War” is that the first string is left untouched in all the chords. In Double Dropped D tuning, that string already has a d', so there is no reason to mess with it.

The first chord is not really a D minor: there is no third in it, so from the chord chart alone, there is no way of telling if it is minor or major. However, throughout the whole song runs another trademark figure, where the minor third is prominent:

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----0-0-0-0-----|-----0-0-0-0-----|
|-3---3-3-3-3-----|-----3-3-3-3-----|
|-2---2-2-2-2-----|-----2-2-2-2-----|
|-0---------------|-0-----------3---|
|-0-----------3---|-----------------|
|-0---------------|-----------------|

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----------------|-----------------|
|---  etc. in the same manner  -----|
|-----------------|-----------------|   etc
|-0---------------|-0-----------3---|
|-------------3---|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|

This figure is played everywhere there is a continuous Dm.

Dm
Hollis Brown
                Cadd2      Dm
He lived on the outside of town

Hollis Brown
                Cadd2      Dm
He lived on the outside of town

With his wife and five children
        Cadd2 G/b    Dm
And his cabin broken down

“Mr Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

Mr Tambourine man uses Dropped D tuning in a way that comes closer to a traditionally harmonic three-chord song, using the chords D, G/d, and A:

D     000232
G/d   020033
A     202220 (with thumb)

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna fall” uses the same three chords, but in a quite different way. The chord shapes from Mr T-Man are used here as well, but during the “I’ve been…” / “I seen…” lists in the middle of the verses, another set of shapes is used:

======     ------        ------
||||||     |||1-1  3rd   |||1-1  5th
------     ------        ------
|||1-1     |||2||        |||2||
------     ------        ------
||||2|     ||||||        ||||||           

  D         G/d           A/d

Here, the half-barre version of D major comes in handy: keep the finger on those three strings throughout and slide it up to the third fret for the G chord and to the fifth for A.

That gives the following:

    D                       G         D
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
    D                                     A
And where have you been, my darling young one?
     G/d                     A/d          D
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
     G/d                        A/d         D
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
     G/d                      A/d       D
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
     G/d                    A/d        D
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
          G/d                       A/d        D
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
    *)     D                A            D                G
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
           D        A          D
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Dropped C tuning

The third main “Dropped” tuning is the Dropped C. Again, the sixth string is tuned down, but this time two whole steps, so that it sounds an octave lower than the c you get on the third fret of the fifth string, the fundamental note of the C major chord.

Dropped C is even more limited than dropped D when it comes to keys: it is hardly ever used other than for songs in C major.

It is great fun to play in: it gives a wonderfully strong bass. Most chord shapes in standard tuning have a fifth between the two lowest bass tones (exceptions are G and C major). This gives a certain fullness of sound. The C major chord in Dropped C tuning, however, has a full octave between the two lowest strings. Thus, the deepest C works more as a reenforcement of the fundamental tone. It is noteworthy that Dylan used this tuning to some extent during his solo acoustic parts of the 1965/66 shows, but abandoned it once he started playing with a band (where the bass guitar could take care of that deeper register).

Here’s a list of songs using dropped C. Go to any of them and try them out.

Bringing it all Back Home:
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,
Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Highway 61 Revisited:
Desolation Row
Blonde on Blonde
:
4th Time Around,
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,
Absolutely Sweet Marie
Live 1966:
Just Like a Woman
I Wanna Be Your Lover
Farewell Angelina
On A Rainy Afternoon/Does She Need Me?
What Kind Of Friend Is This?

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 8: Strumming My Gay Guitar

“Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” (Matthew 6:3)

“There should be no schism in the body; but the members should have the same care one for another” (1 Cor. 12:25)

Jesus and St Paul may not be best known as guitar tutors, but their advice, if taken together, not only becomes a mystic almost-contradiction (of the kind which probably makes sense if you’re a true believer — Merry Christmas!), but is actually sound advice. The problem is precisely how to combine the two statements.

A good strumming technique depends on the two hands being able to work together at doing things separately, without regard for what the other hand does.

Strumming techniques

As always, Dylan is our guide. I set out to go through all of his early, acoustic albums to find his strumming patterns, but I soon found that it was unnecessary: all the basic principles are there from the beginning.

So, the following patterns, which are mostly just variations of a few basic principles, recur again and again:

She’s No Good, Talkin’ New York Blues, Man of constant
sorrow, and many others

(the tab snippets will fit better in their frames if you view the post as a single post, and not from the main page with the sidebar. I’ll have to fix that theme one of these days…)

  C
  V   v   V ^ v ^       V   v     ^ v ^        V   v ^ V   v ^
  :   .   .   .         :   .   .   .          :   .   .   .
|-----0-----0---0-|   |-----0-----0---0-|    |-----0-0-----0-0-|
|-----1-----1-1-1-|   |-----1-----1-1-1-|    |-----1-1-----1-1-|
|-----0-------0---|   |-----0-------0---|    |-----0-------0---|
|-------------2---|   |-------------2---|    |-----------------|
|-3-------3-------|   |-3---------------|    |-3---------------|
|-----------------|   |-----------------|    |---------3-------|

Pretty Peggy-O

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----3-3-3-3-----|-----3-3-3-3-3-3-|
|-----0-0-0-0-----|-----0-0-0-0-0-0-|
|-----0-0-0-0-----|-----0-0-0-0-0-0-|
|-----0---0-------|-----0---0---0---|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-3-----------0---|-3---------------|

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .    :   .   .
|-----3-3-----3-3-|-----3-3-----3-3-|----0-0-----
|-----0-0-----0-0-|-----0-0-----0-0-|----1-1-----
|-----0-0-----0-0-|-----0-0-----0-0-|----0-0-----
|-----0-------0---|-----0-------0---|----2-------
|---------2-------|---------2-------|-3----------
|-3---------------|-3---------------|--------3---

House of the Rising Sun

    :   .   .        :   .   .        :   .   .
||------0-0-0-0--||------0-0-0-0--||------2-2-2-2--||
||*-----1-1-1-1-*||*-----1-1-1-1-*||*-----3-3-3-3-*||
||------2-2-2-2--||------0-0-0-0--||------2-2-2-2--||
||--2---2---2----||------2---2----||------0--------||
||*-0-----------*||*-3-----------*||*-0-----------*||
||---------------||--3------------||--2------------||

(The asterisks “*” mean: repeat.)

I think that should be enough to make a point, but before I summarize the evidence:

Whatever you do with the tabs above, don’t take them too literally, except on one point: the overall image.

I’ve written out some quite specific string combinations for the various stokes, but that’s mainly because the notation system dictates it. For example, I’ve indicated a differing number of strings to strike in the non-bass part; that’s just a way to distinguish between upstrokes and downstrokes.

The only thing that is important in the tabs is the distinction between bass strings and treble strings, and the general distinction between up- and downstrokes — not how many strings are played at each of them.

That is to say:

  • There’s a consistent emphasis of the bass notes at the beginning of every measure and at some of the major intermediate downstrokes.
  • Some times — such as if you are playing a bass melody — it is important to play some particular string alone, but in general “any bass string in the general area of the fundamental tone of the key” will do…
    • (that is to say: try to play the fundamental tone of the key at all major structural points.)
  • The last example in the first line above represents the “alternating bass” pattern. If used schematically, it has a certain “oompa–oompa” character to it, but for longer stretches on the same chord, it is a great way to create variety.
  • The second “She’s no Good” and the first “Pretty Peggy-O” example both represent a whole class of effects which may be called “preparing for the strong beat” — the first by leaving out the bass tone on the last beat of the measure altogether, the second by releasing all the strings and just strumming what happens to be next (in this case: the open sixth string). That way, the real bass tone, when it finally arrives on the first beat of the following measure, receives extra strength.
  • The second line of the “Pretty Peggy-O” examples contains a hint of a bass line, similar to the ones we met in lesson 5
  • So much for the bass tones. In general, one might say that the bass tones are responsible for marking where we are, in a melody or in the harmony, whereas the treble strings set the energy level. Giving some prominence to the upstrokes, as in the first examples, gives a certain forward drive; playing on all the subdivisions, such as in the second measure of the “Pretty Peggy-O” example, gives another kind of drive, whereas leaving them out, as is the case, e.g. in “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, gives a sturdy feeling. Compare also with the constant ringing of “Chimes of Freedom”.
  • One might go so far as to present it as an advice to play as little as possible. That may be going too far, but keep in mind (and try it out) that it takes less than one usually thinks to get great effect.

Hammer-ons and pull-offs

A hammer-on is what you get when you hammer a finger onto a string with such force that you get a tone when it hits. Here are two classics that both use hammer-ons in the bass to great effect.

First, play the following until your lips bleed and you have blisters on your fingers.

  Am
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|
|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|
|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|
|-------------|-0h2---------|-------------|-0h2---------|
|-0-----------|-------------|-0-----------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|

Notice how the rhythm in the second and fourth measure is exactly even: there is something happening on every subdivision of the measure, and everything happens at exactly the same intervals.

If your right hand starts to act up on you in the second and fourth measure and wants to do something — that’s when you ask yourself: “What would Jesus do?” And the answer is: “Nothing!” The right hand shouldn’t know what the left hand does, remember? Just because there is rhythmical activity somewhere in the system, that doesn’t mean that the right hand should break its own established rhythm pattern.

Working Class Hero

When you’ve gotten that, in practice, or at least as a concept to strive towards, you are ready to use this pattern for something useful: John Lennon’s classic “Working Class Hero”, one of the greatest Dylan songs Dylan has never written.

    Am                          G
    :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
||------0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----3-3-3-3-|
||*-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----0-0-0-0-|
||------2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----0-0-0-0-|
||--------------|-0h2---------|-----0-0-0-0-|
||*-0-----------|-------------|-2-----------|
||--------------|-------------|-3-----------|
As  soon as you’re born they make you feel
by  giving you   no   time in - stead of it
    pain is so   big  you feel nothing at
    Working Class hero    is   something to 

  Am
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0--||
|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-*||
|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2--||
|-------------|-0h2---------|-------------|-0h2----------||
|-0-----------|-------------|-0-----------|-------------*||
|-------------|-------------|-------------|--------------||
  small
  all                                              till the
  all                                               a
  be                                                a

  Am            G             D
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-----0-0-0-0-|-----3-3-3-3-|-----2-2-2-2-|
|-----1-1-1-1-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----3-3-3-3-|
|-----2-2-2-2-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----2-2-2-2-|
|-------------|-----0-0-0-0-|-0-----------|
|-0-----------|-2-----------|-0-----------|
|-------------|-3-----------|-2-----------|
  Working-Class Hero    is    something to

  Am
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|
|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|
|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|
|-------------|-0h2---------|-------------|-0h2---------|
|-0-----------|-------------|-0-----------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  be

The D major chord uses a very convenient variant with the thumb on the sixth string. If you’re still not comfortable with that, just leave that string out.

In this song, the hammer-ons are mainly used for rhythmic effect. In the next, it is responsible for the melody.

Wish you were here

Some points:

  • On the album, this is played on a 12-string guitar, hence the gorgeous sound.
  • Use the 320033 shape for G.
  • the rest is just those two fingers resting still on the first and second strings, and then the melody being played on the bass strings.
  • Make a clear distinction between the bass melody and the strumming. It doesn’t matter too much exactly which strings you strum at which beats.
  • When you get to the A7sus4 part, use the index finger in a half barre. I’ll explain the “sus4” part in a moment.
 G             Em7
 .   .   .     :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
-------------|---------3---3-3-|---3-3-----------|
-------------|---------3---3-3-|---3-3-----------|
-------------|---------0---0-0-|---0-0---0-------|
---------0---|-2---------------|-------------2---|
-----0h2-----|-----------------|-----------------|
-3-----------|-----------------|-----------------|

  G
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|---------3---3-3-|---3-------------|
|---------3---3-3-|---3-------------|
|---------0---0-0-|---0-------------|
|-0---------------|-------------0---|
|-----------------|---------0h2-----|
|-----------------|-----3-----------|

  Em7
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|---------continue with ------------|
|---------same strumming------------|
|------------ pattern ------0-------|
|-2---------------|-------------2---|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|

  G
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-0---------------|-------------0---|
|-----------------|---------0h2-----|
|-----------------|-----3-----------|

  Em7
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-2---------------|-----2---0-------|
|-----------------|-------------2---|
|-----------------|-----------------|

  A7sus4
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|---------3---3-3-|---3-3-----------|
|---------3---3-3-|---3-3-----------|
|---------2---2-2-|---2-2-----------|
|---------2---2-2-|---2-2-------0---|
|-0---------------|---------0h2-----|
|-----------------|-----------------|

  Em7
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|---------3---3-3-|---3-------------|
|---------3---3-3-|---3-------------|
|---------0---0-0-|---0-------------|
|-2---------------|-----2---0-------|
|-----------------|-------------2---|
|-----------------|-----------------|

  A7sus4
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|---------3---3-3-|---3-3-----------|
|---------3---3-3-|---3-3-----------|
|---------2---2-2-|---2-2-----------|
|---------2---2-2-|---2-2-----------|
|-0---------------|---------0h2-0---|
|-----------------|-----------------|

  G
  :   .
|-------
|-------
|-------
|-------  etc.
|-------
|-3-----

More songs to attempt

If this isn’t enough — and it probably isn’t — there are numerous other songs you might want to attempt using the same or similar techniques. One is Song to Woody, another is Pretty Boy Floyd.

sus-chords

We met the sus-chord in “Wish You Were Here”. The sus-chord is a single-purpose chord, one might say. Its effect comes from the special character of the third in a chord. The third: the vibrant, tension-laden, teenager son who determines the mood of the whole chord.

“Sus” is short for “suspended”. What it means is that the third in the chord is temporarily suspended — hung up — usually to the step above, the fourth, hence the name “sus4”.

This  implies that the sus4 chord is not an independent chord: it requires a resolution. One will usually see it followed by the standard chord, e.g.:

  Csus4   C
  :   .   .   .
|-----------------|
|-1-------1-------|
|-0-------0-------|
|-3-------2-------|
|-3-------3-------|
|-----------------|

Another variant is “sus2”. It does the same thing — suspends the third –.but this time to the tone below (so maybe it should be called “subpend”…).

  Csus2   C
  :   .   .   .
|-----------------|
|-1-------1-------|
|-0-------0-------|
|-0-------2-------|
|-3-------3-------|
|-----------------|

Sus-chords are ideal for picking out a melody in the bass strings, with hammer-ons and pull-offs, but before we go on to an example of that, here are a few points in clarification:

  • The whole point of the sus-chord is that the third is not present, so one should distinguish between sus-chords and the same chord with the third. E.g. x32030 is not a sus2 chord even though it contains the tone below the third (it’s the note on the second string: d). The proper name for this chord would be Cadd9, but I’ll leave the explanation for a later post.
  • Since the third is missing, it might be said that it makes no sense to distinguish between major and minor (since those are defined by the third). I would still argue that it makes sense: the sus-chord is a temporary replacement, and thus retains — in advance! — some of the character of the chord it replaces. Hence:
      Amsus4  Am        Asus4   A
      :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
    |-----------------|-----------------|
    |-3-------1-------|-3-------2-------|
    |-2-------2-------|-2-------2-------|
    |-2-------2-------|-2-------2-------|
    |-0-------0-------|-0-------0-------|
    |-----------------|-----------------|
  • Occasionally, a chord like Asus4 is used independently of A, as an independent chord. This is convenient, although theoretically dubious…
  • The sus4 chord is a distant relative of the seventh chord, since the function of both is to create tension, suspense, which require resolution. But it is also close to the subdominant: that extra tone is the keynote of the subdominant chord. E.g.
      Csus4   F/c
      :   .   .   .
    |-----------------|
    |-1-------1-------|
    |-0-------2-------|
    |-3-------3-------|
    |-3-------3-------|
    |-----------------|

World Gone Wrong

World Gone Wrong, and to some extent its precursor Good As I Been To You provides excellent examples of these techniques: picking out the melody, or just snippets of melody-like figures, just enough to give the impression of a line; complete with sus-chords and hammer-ons.

I’ve written something more general about the album before, but it may actually be useful to have the general image in place before we move on to the specifics, so here goes: World Gone Wrong is a Body In Sound.

The simpler examples, you should be able to figure out yourself, from the tabs/chords at dylanchords.

Here, one of the more interesting examples: “Two Soldiers”. Just so that those who are not Dylan geeks and have every single album can also take part, here is a sheet:

Two Soldiers

I’ve deliberately kept the chords simple, because that’s what it is in principle: three chords.

But then have a look at the tab file which shows more or less what Dylan plays:

        G/d              C/e  G/d   C
    1   :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
    ||--3---3-3-3---|-3---3---3---|-------------|
    ||*-0---0-0-0---|-0---1p0-0---|-1---1-1-----|
    ||--0---0-0-0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0-0-----|
    ||--0-------0---|-0---2p0-0---|-2---2-2-----|
    ||*-------------|-------------|-0h3---------|
    ||--------------|-------------|---------3---|
He was just     a     blue -  eyed  Bo    - ston
       do       your  bid -   ding, com   - rade
       mo - ther you  know    must  hear    the

   F
 4 :   .   .      :   .   .     :   .   .
 |-1---1-1-1----|-----1-1-1---|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|
 |-1---1-1-1----|-----1-1-1---|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|
 |-2---2-2-2----|-----2-2-2---|-----2-2-2-2-|-----2-2-2-2-|
 |-3---3-3-3----|-----3-3-3---|-----3-3-3-3-|-----3-3-3-3-|
 |-3------------|-3-----------|-3-----------|-3-----------|
 |-1------------|-1-----------|-1-----------|-1-----------|
   boy                                                his
   mine                                               If
   news,                                              so

   F                   G   C
 8 :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
 |---1-1-1-1-1-|-----1-0-0-0-|-0---0-0-0----|
 |---1-1-1-1-1-|-----1-0-0-1-|-1---1-1-1----|
 |---2-2-2-2-2-|-----2-0-0-0-|-0---0-0-0----|
 |---3-3-3-3-3-|(0h3)3-3-3(2)|-2------------|
 |-3-----------|-0h3------(3)|-3------------|
 |-------------|-------------|-3------------|
   voice   was   low     in    pain
   I       ride  back    a -   gain.
   write to her  ten -   der - ly.

11 :   .   .      :   .   .                 Fine
 |-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0---||
 |-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1-1-|-----1-1-1--*||
 |-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0---||
 |-2-----------|-------------|-0h2---------||
 |-------------|-------------|------------*||
 |-------------|-3-----------|-------------||
                                       I’ll
                                       but if

 Csus4 C/e G/d   G/d /e  /f    C/g
14 :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
 |---0---0---3-|---3---0---0-|-0---0-0-0---|-0---0-0-0-0-|
 |-1---1---0---|-0---0---0---|-0h1-1-1-1---|-1---1-1-1-1-|
 |-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0-----------|-0-----------|
 |-3---2---0---|-0---2---3---|-------------|-------------|
 |-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
 |-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
   you __ ride   back    and   I       am    left,   you’ll

 Csus4 C/e G/d   G/d /e  C/g                     DC al fine
18 :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
 |---0---0---3-|---3---3---3-|-----3-3-3-3-|-----3-3-3-3-||
 |-1---1---0---|-0---0---1---|-0---0-0-0-0-|-----0-0-0-0-||
 |-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0-----------|-0-----------||
 |-3---2---0---|-0---2-------|-------------|-0-----------||
 |-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------||
 |-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------||
   do      as    much    for   me.

(DC al fine means: from the top until the word “Fine” (which means: “end”). I’ve also numbered the measures, for later reference.)

Please don’t let all the details in the tab scare you away. First, let us strip it down to the barest details, to see what it is that Dylan is playing, fundamentally:

        G                           C
        :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
    ||--------------|-------------|-------------|
    ||*-------------|-------------|-------------|
    ||--------------|-------------|-------------|
    ||--0-------0---|-0---2---0---|-------------|
    ||*-------------|-------------|-3-----------|
    ||--------------|-------------|---------3---|
He was just     a     blue -  eyed  Bo    - ston
       do       your  bid -   ding, com   - rade
       mo - ther you  know    must  hear    the

  F
  :   .   .      :   .   .     :   .   .
|--------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|--------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|--------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|--------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|--------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-1------------|-1-----------|-1-----------|-1-----------|
  boy                                                his
  mine                                               If
  news,                                              so

  F                     G     C
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-------------|-------------|--------------|
|---------1---|-1-------0---|-1------------|
|---2---------|-------------|--------------|
|-------------|-------------|--------------|
|-------------|-------------|--------------|
|-------------|-------------|--------------|
  voice   was   low     in    pain
  I       ride  back    a -   gain.
  write to her  ten -   der - ly.

 :   .   .      :   .   .                 Fine
|-------------|-------------|---------------||
|-------------|-------------|--------------*||
|-------------|-------------|---------------||
|-------------|-------------|---------------||
|-------------|-------------|--------------*||
|-------------|-------------|---------------||
                                      I’ll
                                      but if

C               G             C
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-0-------0---|-0-----------|
|-3---2---0---|-0---2---3---|-------------|---------3---|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  you __ ride   back    and   I       am    left,   you’ll

C               G             C
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------||
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------||
|-------------|---------0---|-0-----------|-0-----------||
|-3---2---0---|-0---2-------|-------------|-0-----------||
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------||
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------||
  do      as    much    for   me.

If you strum the chords above the tablines and at the same time emphasise the tones that are written in the tab, you ought to be able to recognize the melody. At some places, it is more clearly audible that others; for example, at the line “his voice was low in pain”, the melody is hinted at more than played. It also jumps up one octave. But when you play that, anyone who knows the melody will hear it in the accompaniment, and be amazaed at how good you are.

If we now return to the full tab, you should see that it is basically the same, only with some ornaments and rhythmical subtleties added:

  • Measure 2: If you have been a good student and learned to play G major with the fingers that are not the index finger, you should have no problem with this one. Dylan gives it an extra touch by playing it with a pull-off, the opposite of a hammer-on: striking the strings with the fingers in place, and then pulling the fingers off the strings so that the open strings produce a tone.
  • M. 3: the first tone in the measure (the open 5th string) is a stylistic mannerism: using the open string for no reason other than — that it is there to be used. The same thing happens in mm. 9 and 16.
  • M. 9 is the most complex measure in the piece, and where the advice from Jesus and St Paul comes in handy. All that happens is that the chord changes are syncopated: they occur a half-beat earlier than expected. Really, that’s all: Think of it that way, and don’t let your right hand (which otherwise is responsible for marking the chord changes) be confused by the changed roles but play as if not knowing what the left does.
    If you play it from the tab, it may require a double dosis of training: first getting the notes “right”, then unlearning the “correct” notes approach and just playing it with the syncopated feel. Perhaps, if one disregards the tab at this point and just plays it by ear instead, one might be able to skip one of the steps (I for one can’t — I’m too much of a musicologist and sheet-music reader. At points like this, I always wish I would have listened more carefully to Jesus and Paul…)
  • The middle section is in fact a sus4 passage, although it may not appear as one. Again, the chords changes don’t fall exactly where one would expect them.

Flatpicking

What I’ve presented above is the best way I could think of to present Dylan’s flatpicking method/style: going from the simple, isolating the main points (separation of bass and treble; rhythm and accompaniment; picking out or indicating melodies or bass lines); via a simplified reduction of what he is actually doing; to end up with the full “score”.

But that means that I haven’t really said anything about flatpicking, only about strumming in general.

When it comes to flatpicking more specifically, I don’t really have much to say, other than: apply the general strumming principles.

Don’t hold the pick too stiffly — you will then get a very loud tone on the string you happen to hit and not much else — but don’t get too loose either (or you will lose the pick every once in a while). Ideally, it should feel like an extension of your body, not as something you hold on to.

*

For the record:

Should you think: “what a sad character. Doesn’t he have better things to do on a Christmas Eve?”, I can inform you that I’ve just had the best Christmas Eve ever, and I’m winding down with something I happen to like doing…

Not sad at all.

Merry Christmas. :)

 

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 7: Barre chords

My order has been messed up. I had intended to stick to a steady left hand — right hand — left hand etc. rhythm for the remaining posts. Today was going to be some more flatpicking/right hand techniques, but I realized that we need one more group of chords in place before we go further.

So: get ready to fail, sweat, and swear, with …

The first major hurdle: Barre chords

Dm7, one of the chords that were presented on Day 6, introduces the concept of the barre chord: a chord where the same finger is used for several strings at the same time. This two-string mini barre — xx0211 — is the simplest possible variant, but before the day is done, you’re going to have to at least have tried the full six-string barre.

Let’s start with Dm7 and extend it gradually. The two first strings should be played with the index finger. This can be done in three ways:

  • place the finger on the second string, then bend it down so that it also covers the first string;
  • place the fingertip on both strings at the same time. If you have very tiny fingers, this will probably not work.
  • lay the index finger flat over the three highest strings, then place the long finger in its position on the third string, second fret

In practical playing, you will probably end up using one of the first two methods — pick the one that suits you and your finger best. Righ now, however, we are going to work on the third method.

This may seem like a waste of energy: why put two fingers on the same string? That index finger isn’t doing anything useful on the third string, is it?

At the moment, no. At the moment, I’m suggesting this form mainly as a way to prepare for the full barre chord. That said, there are cases where it is actually quite useful, namely: If that finger is needed in the next chord you’re playing.

Say, for example, that you’re playing the progression Dm7 — Dm7-5 — C (don’t worry about the name of that middle chord; I will explain that in a later post):

  Dm7     Dm7-5     C
  :   .   .   .     :   .
|-1-------1-------|-0-------
|-1-------1-------|-1-------
|-2-------1-------|-0-------
|-0-------0-------|-2-------
|-----------------|-3-------
|-----------------|---------

If the index finger is already covering all three strings, all you have to do is to lift off the longfinger — no repositioning of the index finger is needed at all.

It’s not F yet, but it’s getting there

This Dm7 chord can be extended to xx3211, which is a simple way to play F major. Technically, it’s not even cheating: all the right tones are there. (If you want/need to cheat, you can play xx3210, which is not F, but it’s close enough.) What’s wrong with it is that you have two strings that you can’t use, just as with D major.

We must therefore proceed. The next step is to add the fifth string:

xx        x
======    ======
||||11    ||||11
------    ------
|||2|| -> |||2||
------    ------
||3|||    |34|||

Now, all that is left is to get the sixth string into the mix. The bass tone of F major is found on the first fret of the sixth string. That’s both good news and bad news.

The good news is that the index finger should be able to do that — it’s already well on the way there. All you need to do is to extend the mini-barre all the way from the first to the sixth string:

======
1---11
------
|||2||
------
|34|||     

  F

The “F” chord

The bad news is that … well, it takes some strength in the index finger to be able to press down hard enough. There’s a reason why it’s called the “f word”.

Barre chords are a hurdle, and should anyone actually have taken the “day n” thing seriously and done one lesson a day, this is probably where you will have some problems keeping the pace. Any chord chart, picking pattern, or odd chord combination can be learned in one day, but barre chords is not just about technique or rote learning, but also about physical stamina. It takes more than a day to build up that strength.

But don’t despair: it doesn’t take that much time, and there are things you can do to get there sooner.

Most important is to learn not just how hard you have to press down to get six sounding strings, but also how softly you can press. A good barre chord technique is not about training your index finger and thumb to be able to press as hard as you can, but to apply as much pressure as needed, but nothing more. A cramped, strained hand is something to avoid, at all cost.

This also means: apply the pressure where it is needed. In the F chord, you don’t need to burden your index finger with a lot of pressure in the middle of the chord — those strings are being taken care of by the other fingers. Think of it rather as if you are playing this:

======
1|||||
------
|||2||
------
|34|||

Don’t use any more energy on this than what you need to get a clear bass tone. Then lower the index finger to cover the highest strings as well.

This is not to say that you should not apply any pressure in the middle: it may be needed to provide the connection between the two outer parts of the chord. Besides, there are other chords where you will also play the intermediary strings with the index finger, such as F7:

======
1-1-11
------
|||2||
------
|3||||

Other barre-based chords

Half-barres are useful in many situations besides Dm7. One of the most common is the A major chord, where the three fingers at the second fret can be replaced by a half-barre:

 o   o
======
||||||
------
||1-1|
------
||||||
------
  A

The trick here is of course to bend the finger enough to let the first string ring. If that seems too difficult, it is possible to cheat by muting the string instead; just touch it with the index finger, and problem solved.

The same half-barre is used in a variant of A7:

 o
======
||||||
------
||1--1
------
|||||2     

  A7

D major is also a good candiate for a half-barre:

  o
======
||||||
------
|||1-1
------
||||2|     

  D

The living capo

Once you master this chord — and it will probably not happen the first day — you have what it takes to play literally thousands of chords. When your hand begins to ache and your index finger is about to go off, that may perhaps be a comforting thought.

If you’re saying to yourself: “Hey! This F thing — isn’t it just an E major chord played with the wrong fingers and with that annoying index finger across the whole thing?”, then you’re absolutely right. Barre chords could be thought of as if you’re using a living capo, one you can quickly and easily move wherever you want.

This also means that if you move the whole chord up to the third fret, you have yet another way of playing G major:

======        
||||||            1---11  3rd 
------   or       ------      
||||||  shorter:  |||2||      
------            ------      
1---11            |34|||      
------            ------      
|||2||        
------        
|34|||        
------        

355433

  G 

The second form of the chord chart is convenient if you move further up the neck — it saves a lot of |||||| lines…

The “E shape” is not the only barre chord type you can use. Another common and very useful type is the “Am shape”, which is the same as the E shape but on different strings. Bm is a common chord with this shape:

x
====== 
|||||| 
------ 
11---1 
------ 
||||2|        
------        
||34||        
------        
 
x24432

  Bm 

But just about any of the open chords can be used, although some of them are more tricky than others:


1----1      1----1            
------      ------            
||||||      ||||||            
------      ------            
|34|||      |3||||            
------      ------            
||||||      ||||||            
                        
 "Em"        "Em7"      


|1---1      |1---1      |1---1            
------      ------      ------            
||||||      ||||||      ||||2|            
------      ------      ------            
||234|      ||3|4|      ||3|||            
------      ------      ------            
||||||      ||||||      ||||||            
                        
 "A"         "A7"        "Am7"      

1----1
------
||||2|
------
||3|||
------
|4||||
      
  "C" 

The ones in the first row are based on the sixth string, and the ones in the second row on the fifth string. To find out which chord you are playing at a given fret, go to the chart of the neck, which I presented in lesson 4, but which I’ll gladly present again, extended a few frets upwards:

0        1         2        3       4       5      6    7    8
e'||----f'----|---f#'---|---g'---|--ab'--|--a'--|-bb'-|-b'-|-c''
b ||----c'----|---c#'---|---d'---|--eb'--|--e'--|-f'--|-f#'|-g'-
g ||----ab----|----a----|---bb---|--b----|--c'--|-c#'-|-d'-|-eb'
d ||----eb----|----e----|---f----|--f#---|--g---|-ab--|-a--|-bb-
A ||----Bb----|----B----|---c----|--c#---|--d---|-eb--|-e--|-f--
E ||----F-----|----F#---|---G----|--Ab---|--A---|-Bb--|-B--|-c--

How to use this? Say you need to play a B flat minor (Bbm) chord. From the chart, you can see that you have a Bb at the first fret of the fifth string and at the sixth fret of the sixth string. Thus, you can either play an Am shape with the “capo” — the index finger — at the first fret, or an Em shape at the sixth. Which one you choose is up to you.

A few comments on some of the other shapes:

  • I’ve indicated that you should use the ring- and little fingers for the Em/Em7/A7 shapes. With those chord types, you are in the fortunate situation that you can use the long finger to give extra support to the index finger. This is probably something that will happen automatically, and that is perfectly fine.
  • For the A/Am shapes, I have not said anything about the sixth string. In the long run, it will be best to let the index finger go all the way — you are going to need that last bass tone eventually, for fullness of sound and for alternating bass. For now, however, you are allowed to use only the five strings.
  • For the A shape, there is another alternative:
    |1---1     |1---1     
    ------     ------     
    ||||||     ||||||     
    ------ or  ------     
    ||444|     ||333|     
    ------     ------     
    ||||||     ||||||     
            
           "A"      
    

    A double barre! If it looks insane at first, don’t worry. Personally I use the little finger version most of the time. Again, it doesn’t really matter if the first string is muted (accidentally or on purpose), and should you happen to play

    |1---1     
    ------     
    ||||||     
    ------     
    ||4444     
    ------     
    ||||||     
          
     "A"  
    

    that’s not anything you’ll hang for either.

  • It is perhaps a bit mean to introduce the C shape at this stage. I know it took me a long time to get comfortable with it. Sadly, there are chords where that’s just about the only viable alternative. E/g# is one (476454 in shorthand); the only alternative is just as bad (422100, with some little finger acrobatics and plenty of chances to get it wrong).

Tom Thumb’s Blues

Using the index finger is not the only way to play these chords. You can also use the thumb.

I said earlier on that according to classical guitar teaching, the thumb should stay in the lower half of the neck, and actually using it to play something is reason for excommunication.

If your goal is to spend yor musical carreer sitting down with a guitar between your legs, then feel free to follow this. It has its merits: it allows your fingers maximum mobility.

But if you want to stand up once in a while, slide back in your couch, play in the back seat of a bus, etc., then get that thumb working!

The “thumb F” is much easier on the hand than the barre version. Start with the “extended Dm7 and bring your thumb up from behind the neck to play the sixth string on the first fret:

x              
======    ====== 
||||11    T|||11 
------    ------ 
|||2|| -> |||2|| 
------    ------ 
|34|||    |34||| 
                 

If you have a small thumb, you may complain and say that it can’t be done. That may be the case, but before you give up: You don’t need to twist the thumb all the way around and up on the fret board. It takes surprisingly little pressure — almost just a touch — to get the right tone.

This chord shape is a perfect candidate for cheating: if it seems like too much to play the mini-barre with the index finger and get the thumb around at the same time, then just let the index finger mute the first string:

     x    
====== 
T|||1| 
------ 
|||2|| 
------ 
|34||| 
                 

Some people also play the “Am shape” with the thumb:

     
====== 
TT|||1 
------ 
||||2| 
------ 
||34|| 
       

That’s way beyond me — my thumb is much too short and stiff — but if you can do it, do it!

Other movable chord shapes

The fewer open strings there are in a chord, the more freely you can move it around. The barre chords where all the strings are fingered, are the main exponents of this, but other chord shapes go in the same direction, and can be used higher up on the fretboard, with some care.

C7 is the best example. the four middle strings are covered, and that’s good enough as long as you stay away from the outer strings when you play. Thus, you can produce a D7 with a slightly different sound character by moving C7 two frets up and mute the first string:

x    x 
====== 
|||||| 
------ 
|||||| 
------ 
||||1| 
------ 
||2||| 
------ 
|3|4|| 
------ 
  D7   

Incidentally, if you do play the open first string as well, the chord you get is called D9. The chords-with-strange-names will be the topic of a later post.

And if you move it up yet another two frets, with the index finger in the fifth fret on the second string, you get E7. And lo and behold! Here, you can use all the strings, since the tone on the outer strings is e. This shape is a wonderful, full-bodied alternative to the first-position E7 (020100).

Incidentally, it goes very well together with A played with an E shape thumb chord at the fifth fret (577655): the ring finger is already in place on the fifth string, the index finger is where it should be on the second string, and the other two fingers fall easily in place.
This A, in turn, can be simplified to 007650, since A on the open fifth string is the keynote, and e is a legitimate member of the chord.

D7 and C are other possible candidates to be moved upwards, although they are not as versatile as C7 and the pure barre/thumb chords.

A final note about shapes

You may remember that I have recommended to play C with
the shape 332010

   o o
====== 
||||1| 
------ 
||2||| 
------ 
34|||| 
------ 
  C

This is not only because of the better sound, or because it can then be moved more easily, since four strings are covered, but for economical reasons: the shape of the three fingers is the same as in the E shape and the Am shape. You should see the advantage immediately once you start playing songs in C major, where you are bound to alternate between F and C quite a lot. With this C shape, all you need to do is to bend down your thumb a little to get it to the sixth string, and then shift the block of fingers one string down. You can do that whole operation almost without moving your hand at all. Compare that with the “simpler” C shape (x32010) and the full barre F, which takes a lot more energy and requires you to move the hand around a lot:

======     ======         
||||1|     1----1         
------     ------         
||2|||     |||2||         
------     ------         
|3||||     |34|||         
------     ------         
  C          F            

There are other shapes that reappear in several different chords. Here’s just a sample, without comments, just to have them in one place, and let you familiarize you with the idea…:

||1|||    ||||||    ||||||    ||||||                  
------    ------    ------    ------                  
||||2|    |1|2||    ||1|2|    ||1|2|                  
------    ------    ------    ------                  
|||3|4    ||3|4|    |||3|4    |3|4||                  
------    ------    ------    ------                  
||||||    ||||||    ||||||    ||||||                  


||||||    ||||||    ||||||    ||||||             
------    ------    ------    ------             
|||1||    ||||1|    |||||1    |||1||             
------    ------    ------    ------             
||2|3|    |||2||    ||||2|    ||2|||             
------    ------    ------    ------             
||||||    ||3|||    |||3||    |3||||             


||||||    ||||||    ||||||                  
------    ------    ------                  
||1|||    |||||1    |||||1                  
------    ------    ------                  
||||||    ||||||    ||||2|                  
------    ------    ------                  
|3||||    ||||3|    ||||||                  

A final note about rhythms

Why would one play, say the A–E7 combination at the fifth fret with barre/thumb chords, when they are so easy to play in the first position, with all the nice, open strings?

Other than variation, the main reason is: rhythm. The great thing about a barre chord is that you can easily mute it. In any kind of music with a snappy rhythm, such as swing jazz, rock’n’roll, etc., you would want to have short, crisp chords. That is much easier to accomplish with barre chords than with chords with open strings. Strike the strings with the right hand, then immediately loosen the grip on the strings in the left hand so that the strings are muted.

Once you get a hang of it, you have a wonderful rhythmical device at hand, which extends the capabilities of the guitar further over towards the drum kit.

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 6: Chords and Overtones

If less is more, is “lesson” the opposite of “moron”, or is it even more stupid?

More Chords

Forget all about which hand is most artisty — today it’s all about chords.

So far, we’ve covered most of the “simple” chords. Here are the ones that are left:

o   oo     o o oo     o oooo
======     ======     ======
|||1||     |||1||     ||||||
------     ------     ------
|23|||     |2||||     |2||||
------     ------     ------
||||||     ||||||     ||||||
------     ------     ------
  E          E7         Em7    

  ooo      x   0      x    o
======     ======     ======
|||||1     ||1|||     ||||1|
------     ------     ------
|2||||     |2|3|4     ||2|||
------     ------     ------
3|||||     ||||||     |3|4||
------     ------     ------
  G7         B7         C7        

x o        x o        x o
======     ======     ======
|||||1     ||||11     ||||1|
------     ------     ------
|||2||     |||2||     |||2|3
------     ------     ------
||||3|     ||||||     ||||||
------     ------     ------
  Dm         Dm7        D7

With these chords under your belt, plus the ones we’ve already covered, you should be able to play a large amount of the songs you will find on dylanchords or any other chordsite. The exceptions are songs with barre chords and songs with chords with long and complicated names, which will the topics of later lessons.

For now, just a few remarks on the most common chords.

  • G7: Note the similarity between G7 and C: the pattern is the same, only with the chord “spread out” on all six strings. Take advantage of this wen you play these chords and keep the movement as simple as possible.
  • E is the quintessential blues chord. Most of John Lee Hooker’s songs and a good share of the blues songs you will hear in pub bands are in this key. Its companion chords are A and B7. With those three chords, you can pick more or less any blues song and play it, and that is the first assignment today: pick any blues song and play it.
  • B7 is one of those four-finger chords, which may seem difficult to get in place all at the same time. It should work as a block of fingers, as I’ve talked about before — not as four separate fingers. This could be trained in the usual way: play E – B7 – E – B7 for two minutes, and chances are that you will come out with a fairly automatized B7. Again: the long finger is in the same place in the two chords. Use that as a stabilizing element.
    It is possible to cheat with B7 and play it x21200 instead, which — if you come from E — is just a matter of switching strings for the index and ring fingers. The “wrong” tone you will be playing is the high e’, and since you will most likely play B7 only in songs in E major, that is either completely wrong — if the “point” of the song is maximum contrast between the two — or completely ok. You decide — it’s your ears.
    In the more advanced direction, it is also possible to get a finger at the second fret of the sixth string as well, somehow: 221202. This would either be a half-barre with the longfinger, covering both the fifth and the sixth strings, or a thumb coming up from behind to the sixth string. I will come back to both these solutions later. For now, you’re probably better off cheating (I do that, most of the time…).
  • Dm is one of those spread-out chords, which may give some problems until you get used to stretching out your hand.
  • C: The common C major chord can be played in four different ways:
               x  o o
               ======
               ||||1|
               ------
               ||2|||
               ------
               |3||||     
    
       o o     x  o        x o
    ======     ======     ======
    ||||1|     ||||1|     ||||1|
    ------     ------     ------
    ||2|||     ||2|||     ||2|||
    ------     ------     ------
    34||||     |3|||4     3||||4      
    
           variants of C

    The shape at the top is the one we have used so far. It is the easiest one, at least insofar as it only uses three fingers, but I recommend learning the other three as well.
    The first (332010) is my everyday C. It has two great advantages: (1) it makes the sixth string less obtrusive, so you can actually play the chord with the full six strings; and (2) it works perfectly together with the version of G major with long, ring and little fingers that I recommended back in lesson 3: the ring finger is already in place (“already in place” is a thing to look for, especially when it’s the ring finger, the least mobile of the fingers), the long finger is almost there, and it’s a relatively small matter to slip the little finger down to the first string.
    Apropos — in the version in the middle (x32013) the little finger is already in place on the first string, and all you need to do to get to G is slip the little and ring fingers up to the fifth and sixth strings and let go of the index finger. The little finger on the first string gives this chord shape a very distinct sound: one high tone is ringing way above the next one. This makes it a nice variant, but it can also be too much sometimes. Use it with care.
    The last variant is a special chord, to be used in one specific context:

      ooo       x o         ooo
    ======     ======     ======
    ||||||     ||||1|     ||||||
    ------     ------     ------
    |2|||| ->  ||2||| ->  |2||||
    ------     ------     ------
    3||||4     3||||4     3||||4  
    
      G          C/g        G

    Here, two fingers are “already in place”, and slipping the long finger one string down and adding the index finger is easy enough. This is one of the cases where you are supposed to touch a neighbouring string: the fifth string should not sound, and muting it is the job of the ring finger. It happens almost automatically.
    The “C character” of the C major chord suffers here, since the bass tone is G and the fifth string should not be sounding. It is, in other words, a variant chord to G almost as much as a proper C chord.

  • G: I’ve said it before, but for the sake of completeness: try to learn to play G with the “bad” fingers — you will not regret it.

Overtones and sound quality

A few more words about the E major chord:

E is the biggest, fattest chord in the book. Since E is the tone of the deepest string, it follows that E is the deepest sounding chord you can play in standard tuning. But that’s not the only reason; there are things about the way the chord is constructed which emphasise this grandness.

Try this: Play the open 6th string. Then place your finger over the twelfth fret (and when I say “over” I mean that literally: directly over the metal band and not “in the box” where you will usually place your fingers), and touch the string lightly but without pressing down on the string. Then strike the string again. You should hear the same tone as the open string, only an octave higher, and with a somewhat flute-like sound (at least that’s what those people thought it sounded like who called this kind of tones “flageolets”, which means “little flutes”).

Do the same thing again, this time touching the string over the seventh fret, then over the fifth fret. The fifth-fret tone should be the same tone again, another octave higher. This should be the same tone as the open first string. The seventh-fret tone, on the other hand, is not an e, but a b, which should sound the same as the open second string.

What you have just played, are the first three overtones or harmonics of the tone E. When you strike a string, you are setting the string in vibration. But it’s not just the whole string that is vibrating. The two halves of the string are also vibrating, independently of what’s happening with the full string. So are the three thirds of the string, etc.

The parts of a string that are vibrating at the same time

The divisions which produce the overtones (from wikipedia).

What you are doing when you touch the string at the twelfth fret, is partly to stop the full vibration of the string, partly to emphasise the vibrations of the two halves of the string. The twelfth fret is the exact middle of the string, corresponding to the point marked “1/2” in the image to the right.

Similarly, the seventh fret marks one third of the string (“1/3” in the figure), and the fifth fret one fourth, etc. There are similar points at the fourth fret, near the third fret, etc. In principle, the series does not end, but it is difficult to isolate the higher overtones in practice.

They are there, however, and they are heard. The combination of overtones — which ones are more and which less loud — is one of the most important factors that determine how an instrument sounds. A violin has a different distribution of overtones than a guitar, and that’s why we can hear the difference between them. (The other main elements are the attack — how the tone starts — and the sustain — how it ends. If one cuts off the attack, it can be surprisingly difficult to recognize an instrument sound.)

But even one and the same instrument can have different sounds. If you strike a string close to the bridge, it sounds much sharper than if you strike it closer to the sound hole: you are in fact emphasising the higher overtones, whereas closer to the sound hole, you’re giving more punch to the lower ones, which gives a darker, mellower sound.

We can now go back to the E major chord, and summarize what we know: when we strike the deepest string, we also hear — among the overtones of that tone — three tones that are also part of the full chord, on different strings: the fourth, second and first strings are identical to the first, second and third overtones, respectively. The tone on the fifth string (B) does not correspond directly to any of the overtones, but it is at least the same tone as the second string, an octave lower, and will feel very much at home in the chord.

In other words: most of the tones in the E major chord are there already in the deepest-sounding tone. The rest of the strings reinforce the basic sound. Hence the full, rich sound of the chord as a whole.

The third

That leaves one string: the third. The tone of the third string is g# (g sharp), which is the third of the E major chord — the tone which decides if the chord is major or minor. Its position right in the middle of the chord is ideal: it does not draw too much attention to itself (as may be the case with D major, where the third (f#) is played on the first string), nor does it blur the chord (as may be the case if the third is placed closer to the bass).

The third is the unruly pubescent teenager in the family of chords: it certainly has character, and the chord would be a whole less interesting without it, but somehow, it is always either too big or too small.

This is not just metaphorically speaking: it is too big or too small. Or put differently: a third on the guitar will always be out of tune. This has to do with properties of the tonal system, which it will take to long to give the details about, but to make it brief: the fourth overtone (the one on the fourth fret) is two octaves and a third above the tone of the open string. This tone or one equal to it will sound in tune with the fundamental tone. The problem is that this tone can not be produced in a system which is based on a division of the octave into twelve equal (or rather: proportionally equidistant) tones, which is how the guitar is constructed, with twelve equal frets on an octave. This is also how modern pianos are tuned. The benefit of this system — which Johann Sebastian Bach demonstrated with his Well-Tempered Klavier — is that one can play equally well in any possible key. The cost is that every interval except the octave is slightly out of tune. With some intervals, it is hardly noticeable, but with the third, the difference between the pure and the tempered version is considerable.

You can test this by playing the fourth fret flageolet on the sixth string and comparing it with the tone on the fourth fret of the first string (g sharp). If the two strings are perfectly in tune, you should be able to hear the difference between the two tones clearly: the pure third, on the sixth string, is consideably smaller than the one you play on the first string.

This is yet another reason why the third in a chord should be treated with caution — just like with a teenager. In the middle, surrounded by caring and loving octaves and fifths — as it is in E major — it blends in more easily, but if it is allowed to ring all by itself on the top (as in D major), it can be jarring at worst (and interesting at best…).

*

My plan was to say something more about the blues today, but on second thought, I think I will leave it to the lesson on licks and riffs — after all, that’s mainly what the blues is all about.

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 5: All Strings Are Not Created Equal

It’s been said about guitar playing that the left hand is the craftsman, but the right hand is the artist. I first read that when I was a kid, struggling with some classical guitar etudes or whatever, and I thought it was a great quote — only whoever said it must have gotten the hands mixed up. Surely, the left hand must be the artist?

But no: even though most of the rehearsal time — at least as a classical guitarist — is spent on figuring out fingerings and practicing transitions between chords, that’s “just” craftsmanship. It’s the right hand that makes the music. Rhythm, as we discussed yesterday, is of course the main right-hand task. But also the sound quality in general — do you strike hard or soft, close to the bridge or to the sound hole, upwards or downwards, with thumb or fingernails, or with a plectrum? All these things that determine what kind of sound you make.

But also in the areas of melody and harmony, the right hand has a huge task. This is of course a shared area between the two hands, but the ability to pick out a melody or a certain harmonic progression is first and foremost a right-hand technique. This is going to be the main topic today.

All Strings are Not Created Equal

In the beginning — as far as I remember it — one is probably mostly concerned with placing the left-hand fingers in the right spot and trying to disregard the pain in the fingertips. The right hand does a rather crude job, mostly striking all the strings every time, or — perhaps — trying to avoid hitting the wrong strings.

The first step towards releasing the artistic potential of the right hand, is to realise that All Strings Are Not Created Equal. The guitar can do a pretty good job at filling in for the members of a full band: The three high strings — roughly speaking — provide harmony and play the part of the organ or the backup singers; the low ones are bass strings and do what the bass guitar does (and the right hand in general — with some help from the left hand — is the drum kit; the only instrument that is missing, is the solo guitar, which the guitar cannot mimick, unless you are very advanced, like Richard Thompson, e.g.).

In order to bring out these different roles — and this is something you should strive towards — you need to be able to treat the strings separately.This means: to be able to

  • strike only the bass strings or only the treble strings; and/or
  • strike a single string at the time.

Compare these two examples:

  v   v   v     v   v ^ v     v
  G                           C
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .
|-3---3---3---|-3---3-3-3---|-0---
|-0---0---0---|-0---0-0-0---|-1---
|-0---0---0---|-0---0-0-0---|-0---  etc.
|-0---0---0---|-0---0-0-0---|-2---
|-2---2---2---|-2---2-2-2---|-3---
|-3---3---3---|-3---3-3-3---|-----

and

  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .
|-----3---3---|-----3-3-3---|-0---
|-----0---0---|-----0-0-0---|-1---
|-----0---0---|-----0-0-0---|-0---  etc.
|-0-----------|-0-----------|-2---
|-2-----------|-2-----------|-3---
|-3-----------|-------------|-----

The exact strings are not important, but the general idea is: what you’re doing here is both adding some air (so that the music can breathe), and providing lines. Already in this little example, you are playing a bass line and bringing out more clearly at least a fragment of two other melody lines.

The most obvious line is the bass line:

  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .
|-------------|-------------|-----
|-------------|-------------|-----
|-------------|-------------|-----
|-------------|-------------|-----
|-------------|-2-----------|-3---
|-3-----------|-------------|-----

But also on the two upper strings there are melody lines that stand out more clearly, now that they are allowed to sound alone, without the mass of strings on their back.

This is the kind of lines that you should try your best to bring out in your playing. The good thing is that it will happen more or less automatically if you make a habit of varying your stroke. As a rule of thumb, the bass strings belong to the accented beats (the first beat in triple time, as in the example above; the first and third in 4/4), the treble strings to the unaccented.

(I realize I haven’t said anything about time signatures and such yet. I will add a section about that to the Day 4 lesson.)

Slash chords

Also, in a good chord file, the bass line will be written out for you. This is done with slash chords.

A slash chord indicates, in addition to the chord itself, the bass tone to be played. This is added to the chord symbol, separated with a slash. E.g. “G/b”, which means: G major, with b as the bass string.

In an ordinary chord symbol, such as “G”, it is implied that the bass note — the deepest sounding note — is also g. So although the G chord contains all three bass strings, the one that plays g is the most important one. This happens to be the sixth string —

(I realize I haven’t presented you with the whole scale and the positions of the tones on the fretboard yet. I’ve just added a section about that to the Day 4 lesson, which you may want to revisit.)

— so in the case of G, there isn’t much of a problem there: strike all the chords, and the lowest note will automatically be the bass note. Gee, it’s a great chord… But remember our hate chord, D? One of the reasons it’s such a despicable chord is that there are two strings — a third of your whole resource base — that you’re not supposed to use. In shorthand: xx0232.

Time to modify that statement a little. The sixth string is an E, which is definitely not part of a D chord, so that string is forever out of the picture — it will sound bad if you even touch it while playing a D chord. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But the fifth string is different. It’s an A, and the tone A is actually part of the D major chord. It’s there already: the tone on the third string should be an a.

So why is it forbidden, “x”ed out in the shorthand? Because it is not the proper bass string. The fundament of a chord should be its proper bass tone, and so there is nothing else to do than to leave out two of the swetest strings you have. Shit happens.

But slash chords can change that. There are circumstances where you want the bass tone to be something other than the chord’s proper bass tone. You could for example play an alternating bass pattern:

  D       D/a       D       D/a
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----2-------2---|-----2-------2---|
|-----3-------3---|-----3-------3---|
|-----2-------2---|-----2-------2---|
|-0---------------|-0---------------|
|---------0-------|---------0-------|
|-----------------|-----------------|

or, as in the earlier examples, bring out a certain bass line. The example that we started with could be written:

G    G/b    C

This is sometimes abbreviated to

G    /b    C

I will usually use the latter form if the chord itself is not really that important — what counts is the bass tone, as part of a bass line.

Both these forms of notation are confusing to some, but as you can see, it’s simple enough: the slash part of the chord is extra information that you can use to bring out a certain effect. Since it’s “extra information”, you are free to leave it out.

Blowin’ in the Wind Revisited

If you have been with me from the start and have played “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the version from Day 2, you may have noticed that even though it sounds more or less as the album version (at least it should), it’s still not quite the same. And if you’ve checked some tab site’s version, you may have seen that it’s not written in D at all.

That’s because Dylan plays it with a capo, all the way up at the seventh fret, and because he uses a lot of slash chords. The capo position means that he plays with chords shapes from the G major family but the sounds that come out of it are in D major.

If you followed the day 1 instructions and bought a capo, this is the time to put it on. If not, either run down there and get one right now, or play it without a capo, in which case it will not sound exactly as on the record (but it probably never will — no offense — so it may not matter that much …):

G        C     /b     D/a      G
How many roads must a man walk down
G          C    /b    G
Before you call him a man?
         G        C    /b     D/a        G
Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
G          C      /b     D
Before she sleeps in the sand?
         G        C     /b       D/a          G
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
  G            C  /b   G
Before they're forever banned?
    C   /b     D/a        G              C
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
    C   /b    D/a            G
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

You already have all the tools you need to play this, but since I’m a nice guy, I’ll summarize:

  • /b means “play the bass tone b (regardless of the chord you’re otherwise playing). In this case, this means the second fret of the fifth string: -2----.
  • D/a is a D chord with A (the open fifth string) replacing d as the bass string.

If you use the default bass string for the rest of the chords, and otherwise try to apply the variation between bass and treble strings, you may end up with something like this:

  G                 C       /b
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----3---3-3-3-3-|-----0-------0---|
|-----0---0-0-0-0-|-----1-------1---|
|-----0---0-0-0-0-|-----0-------0---|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-3-------2-------|
|-3---------------|-----------------|

  D/a               G
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----2-2-2---2---|-----3-3-3---3---|
|-----3-3-3---3---|-----0-0-0---0---|
|-----2-2-2---2---|-----0-0-0---0---|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-0---------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-3---------------|

  G                 C       /b
  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----3---3-3-3-3-|-----0-------0---|
|-----0---0-0-0-0-|-----1-------1---|
|-----0---0-0-0-0-|-----0-------0---|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-3-------2-------|
|-3---------------|-----------------|

  G
  :   .   .   .
|-----3-3-3---3---|
|-----0-0-0---0---|
|-----0-0-0---0---|
|-----------------|
|-----------------|
|-3---------------|

The exact strings you play in the treble section is not important — should you strike some bass chords, that’s just fine — and the rhythms I’ve written in are just the ones I happened to play this one time. The important thing is the bass notes and the variation. With this in mind (and in hand) you should be able to play the rest of the song, which is just variations on the same patterns as above.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Ready for another old gem.

     G             Em
Come gather 'round people
    C        G
Wherever you roam
      G            Em
And admit that the waters
 C              D
Around you have grown
      G            Em
And accept it that soon
          C               G
You'll be drenched to the bone.
        G       Am           D
If your time to you Is worth savin'
         D            D/c
Then you better start swimmin'
          G/b         D/a
Or you'll sink like a stone
        G     C          D   G . .
For the times they are a-changin'.

Some initial comments:

Em is a new chord. It’s quite simple: 022000.

In this song, Dylan plays G with the shape 320033 instead of 320003. It’s a subtle difference, which you are free to disregard, but it’s like that for a reason (and this is in fact yet another example of Dylan’s mastery in achieving effects with a minimum of effort): The tone on the second string in the regular chord is b, which is the tone that defines the chord as a major chord. By replacing that with the d’ on the third fret, the chord is almost released from that whole field of tension, and takes on a solemn character, a little like a tolling bell — quite befitting the theme of the song. All that, with just one finger…

As I said: you are not required to use the 320033 shape. It does involve all four fingers, and that may be too much to keep track of at this point. Although … some people actually find it easier to play than the standard 320003, because the two pathetic little weaklings, the ring and little fingers, can support each other. Try it, and go with what suits you best.

The ending is the greatness of this song (which incidentally was the first Dylan song I heard, although not with Dylan himself. I’ve written an emotional account of this first meeting in the introduction to The Uneven Heart.). Again, it’s the use of slash chords and bass lines that makes the difference.

The “better start swimmin’” lines could go something like this:

  D             D/c           G/b           D/a
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-----2---2---|-----0-0-0---|-----0---0---|-----2---2---|
|-----3---3---|-----3-3-3---|-----3---3---|-----3---3---|
|-----2---2---|-----2-2-2---|-----0---0---|-----2---2---|
|-0-----------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-3-----------|-2-----------|-0-----------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Better start swimming or y’ll sink like a stone

But here, you may have several objections:

  • “Hey! That thing in the second measure — that’s not a D chord!”
  • “Hey! That thing in the third measure — that’s not a G chord!”
  • “You said I could leave out the slash thing, but if I do, the second measure doesn’t sound right!”

And you’re right. But if you would just calm down a little, bridle your righteous anger over lying bastards who pose as guitar teachers etc., I’ll explain.

[ten seconds’ break to calm down]

There. Ok.

It all has to do with what is important and what is not. That section of the song could be seen as basically just a descending bass line over a sustained note: the single note that the melody has at this point, which incidentally is what you have on the third fret of the second string. So, stripped down to the essentials, the passage could be played:

  D             D/c           G/b           D/a
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-----3---3---|-----3---3---|-----3---3---|-----3---3---|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-0-----------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-3-----------|-2-----------|-0-----------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Better start swimming or y’ll sink like a stone

and nothing inalienable has been lost, really. Hence, we may consider the rest as ornament, filler. This is not to say that the filler is unneccessary, only that it can be dealt with somewhat freely, if other considerations are of greater weight.

Such as: ease of playing. If you were to play the D/c chord without cheating making it easy for yourself, you would have to use the little finger on the second string and the third finger for the c on the fifth string. That is playable, but here it is unneccessary. Much easier to move the stronger longfinger from the first to the fifth string:

xx0        x
======     ======
||||||     ||||||
------     ------
|||1|2     |||1||
------ ->  ------
||||3|     |2||3|
------     ------
||||||     ||||||

Note that I haven’t banned any of the open strings other than the sixth in the chord diagram; the fourth string has a d which can’t be all wrong, since it’s the keynote of the chord; and the first string — well, it’s filler. It’s a “wrong” tone, but in this case, hey, it doesn’t matter.

It can actually be defended not just out of laziness economizing, but as an element in an interesting melodic line. With the open e string in the second measure, what you’re playing is:

  D             D/c           G/b           D/a
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .   .
|-2-----------|-0-----------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-3-----------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Better start swimming or y’ll sink like a stone

Which works well as a a countermelody to the otherwise static melody line, and which is also parallel to the bass line.

Much of the same could be said about your second objection. Again: the important thing is the -2--3- skeleton — the rest is filler.

Note that you use the version with the third fret on the second string here, no matter what you do elsewhere in the song. This has to do both with flexibility (not being limited to one chord shape only) and economy (why use the other shape, when that finger is already in place?). It may not be something you need to hear right at the moment, if you think that just learning the basic chord shapes is more that enough, but the great thing about the guitar is that you can play the same chords in many different ways, depending on what is important at a particular spot.

So, in the third measure, we define x20030 as a legitimate replacement for 320003.

This gives the following transition between D/c and G/b:

  x          x
  ======     ======
  ||||||     ||||||
  ------     ------
  |||1||     |1||||
  ------ ->  ------
  |2||3|     ||||3|
  ------     ------
  ||||||     ||||||

The third objection is actually valid, and it exemplifies the problem of pinning down a set of chords/sounds to a common symbol — the chord sign. I’ll come back to this later when we take a look at “Boots of Spanish Leather”, but for now: why should I call the second chord D/c?

First of all: it’s a bit cheating. The c is the seventh tone in the D major scale, and hence the proper name for the chord is D7/c. When I don’t write it like that, it’s not just out of laziness, but because even though all the tones of a D7 chord are in there, it doesn’t feel or work like a seventh chord — it feels like a static D chord with a descending bass line under it.

For that matter, I could also have called the third chord D/b, and that wouldn’t have been all wrong either, although the tone d is the only tone in there that actually belongs to the D chord.

To test this statement, try to play that whole line with just a D chord all the way through (disregard the bass line for now), and say if that doesn’t actually sound quite right.

The lesson to be learned from this is that a chord name is not just a way to tell you which fingers to put where — it’s not just a name for a certain finger configuration: it’s also a way to classify according to function. This may go so far that a chord could be called a variant of, say, G, without even containing a g note.

This is also why, if you leave out the slash part of the chord names above, the second chord will sound wrong. We have defined the descending bass as one of the important elements in that line, and chosen the chord names accordingly. If we leave out the important part, we may have to find a way to put it back again.

One way could be to play the second chord as a C. That would give us the /c in the bass, and it would actually also account for the open first string, which we’ve allowed as “filler”, but which really doesn’t belong in the D chord. It does belong in the C chord.

A C there would also go well with the chord that follows: G. Even though C is not the dominant of G but the other way around, there is still enough of a bond between the two chords, that C G is a perfectly acceptable progression. (In popular music, that is. In fact, if we add the D to which we’re coming, we have the “Try with a little help from my friends” part of the Beatles song. In classical music, that progression is not permitted.)

When I name the chords as I do, it’s by choice: I choose to consider the passage as basically a drawn-out “D-with-variations”. The G/b is partly a concession to chord shapes — it is actually closer to a G chord than to a D chord — and partly as a way of acknowledging that there is a certain preparatory character to that third chord, which sets it apart from the other “D” chords in that line.

There. Calmer now?

Now, ’nuff talking. Back to rehearsal.

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 4: Tablature and Rhythm

My original idea was to write a post in this series each day for two weeks. Obviously, I won’t be able to keep up that speed, but I’m sure you can find things to practice on even on days without a new post.

One of the reasons why it takes longer than planned is of course that I can’t keep from blabbering on about theory and such. It’s an occupational injury I have, but I also happen to think it’s a good thing to know why things are the way they are.

You can take it or leave it. I try to separate the theory from the practical contents, so that if you just want the chord shapes and the hints on playing technique, it should be fairly easy to find it.

Feedback

I’d be interested to know if anyone actually follows this series, and if you do, what progress you’re making. Please also let me know if soemthing is unneccessarily unclear or just not explained well enough.
Use the comment area. Someone else may have the same question as you.

Dylancentric? Me?

Uhm… yes. But that’s beside the point.

I use Dylan’s music as a reference point and as material for the exercises, but that’s not only because this is a Dylan oriented blog, but because Dylan is probably the best guitar tutor you can get. His way of playing — when he plays unaccompanied, that is — is outstanding in many ways which are worthy goals:

  • Technically proficient. Don’t let anyone tell you that Dylan can’t play the guitar! Sure, there are wizards who can outplay him, but he has a solid technical foundation both in his right hand and in the left.
  • Musically interesting. It is obvious to me that Dylan knows what is going on in the music he is making (it is equally obvious that he has never read a theoretically oriented blog…).
  • Practically apt. Dylan is a performer — originally a solo performer — and his playing has to work on a stage and not just in a studio or in his livingroom. He uses a fairly narrow set of tools to maximum effect. It sounds much more advanced and complicated than it is. The good thing about that is that it is easy to borrow his tricks (which aren’t really tricks — there is no magic, just simple ways of doing things).

Reading Tablature

I am going to talk mainly about rhythm today, but first two words about tablature — “tab” for short.

Tablature is a representation of what happens on each of the strings of the guitar over time.

                          Time ----->
1st string (brightest) e' -------------------------------------
2nd string             b  -------------------------------------
3rd string             g  -------------------------------------
4th string             d  -------------------------------------
5th string             A  -------------------------------------
6th string (darkest)   E  -------------------------------------

The system is the same as for the shorthand chord notation: 0 means open string, 1 the first fret, etc. In fact, a stave of tablature is just a sequence of shorthand chords turned on the side. The sequence G – D – Am7 from “Knockin’ on Heaven’s door” would be written 320003 xx0232 x02210 in shorthand, and in tab notation:

  G        D        Am7
--3--------2--------0-------------
--0--------3--------1-------------
--0--------2--------0-------------
--0--------0--------2-------------
--2-----------------0-------------
--3-------------------------------

It takes a little more space (and a little more typing), but what is gained is (a) the time dimension, and (b) the ability to write melodies and other details which don’t involve all the strings, plus (c) the closer visual approximation to what’s going on in the music.

For example,

----------------------------------------
-----------0--0--0----------------------
--2--2--2-----------2-------------------
-----------------------4--2--0----------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------

is a melody we all know well: the beginning of Blowin’ in the Wind.

It gets even more clear if we also add the rhythm:

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .     :   .
|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-------
|-----------------|-0-------0---0---|-----------------|-------
|-2-------2---2---|-----------------|-2---------------|-------
|-----------------|-----------------|---------4---2---|-0-----
|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-------
|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-------

Each dot above the lines indicate a beat, the colon marks the first beat in the measure, and for extra visual clarity, the measures are separated with barlines, just as in ordinary notation. Tap your foot with each dot, and you should get a fairly stiff but essentially correct version of the song.

It should be noted that most tabs you will find on the net don’t follow this practice, but will notate the melody as in the first example above, perhaps with a slight but unsystematic difference in distance according to longer and shorter note values. I find that fairly useless (unless you more or less know the song inside out already, in which case you hardly need a tab), and all the tabs you will find on dylanchords use the more precise notation with the rhythms indicated.

One last thing: “tab” is short for “tablature” which is the name for this particular kind of notation. It goes back to the renaissance, but has seen its own renaissance in the days of the internet. Most of the files you will find on “tab sites” aren’t really “tabs”, but plain chord files — lyrics with the chord changes written out.

Not that it matters, but in case anyone wondered.

For the sake of completeness, here is a snapshot of the guitar neck, with all the note names written in. If you wonder what’s up with the upper- and lowercase letters etc., it’s the standard system to indicate octaves: the “Great” octave is the deepest you will find on the guitar; the “little” octave goes from c to b, the “one-lined” from c’ to b’, etc.

0          1         2        3       4      5
e'||----f'----|---f#'---|---g'---|--ab'--|--a'--|---
b ||----c'----|---c#'---|---d'---|--eb'--|--e'--|---
g ||----ab----|----a----|---bb---|---b---|--c'--|---
d ||----eb----|----e----|---f----|---f#--|--g---|---
A ||----Bb----|----B----|---c----|---c#--|--d---|---
E ||----F-----|----F#---|---G----|---Ab--|--A---|---

The full c major scale goes like this:

|-------------------------------------------0--1--3--
|----------------------------------0--1--3-----------
|----------------------------0--2--------------------
|-------------------0--2--3--------------------------
|----------0--2--3-----------------------------------
|-0--1--3--------------------------------------------
  E  F  G  A  B  c  d  e  f  g  a  b  c' d' e' f' g'

Rhythm

What makes the guitar so special is that it is rhythm section and harmony section at the same time. So far, we’ve mostly talked about the harmony section, for which the left hand has the main responsibility. The right hand is the timekeeper.

There are two main right-hand techniques: strumming (in one form or another, with or without a pick, etc.), and fingerpicking. We’ll leave the fingerpicking to a later post.

Strumming is first and foremost a way to mark the time. Time — that’s the domain of clocks. A clock — a good old one — has a pendulum that swings from side to side. Your arm can also be a pendulum, and that idea is the foundation of a good right-hand technique.

Instead of thinking of strumming as striking the chords when you want a sound to come out, it could be seen as this: move your hand past the strings in a continuous and regular up-and-down movement, and once in a while you actually touch the strings and make a sound. The movement, the rhythm, is there all the time, and the sound grows out of that movement (as opposed to: the rhythm comes out of the sounds).

That is to say: rhythm is primary — the actual sounds secondary.

When I say: “once in a while you actually touch the strings”, it shouldn’t be as random and accidentally as that may sound. You would usually follow a pattern. The two simplest patterns are:

  :   .   .   .                 :   .   .   .
|-v---v---v---v---|    and    |-v-^-v-^-v-^-v-^-|

"v" denotes a downstroke, from the deepest
to the brightest strings, "^" an upstroke.
Play with any chord you like.

On this foundation, the sky is the limit for variations and combinations of different patterns, from the simple

  :   .   .   .                 :   .   .   .
|-v---v-^-v---v-^-|    or     |-v---v-^-v-^-v-^-|

to the more complex

  :   .   .   .                 :   .   .   .
|-v-----^---^-v-^-|    or     |-v---v-^---^-v---|

Just to give an idea.

Disclaimer: The constant up-and-down movement is not necessarily something you should emphasise — that might seem stressful, e.g. if you’re just playing regular downstrokes — but it’s a good idea to keep it in mind as a mental image.

Rhythm and tempo

A particularly nosy and irritating student might ask: “But didn’t you say earlier that one should be climate-friendly and don’t waste energy? If my hand is already down there after a downstroke, why should I then move it up again without playing anything? Couldn’t I play:

  :   .   .   .
|-v---^---v---^---|

instead?

The answer is threefold. (a) Most/all music has an underlying pattern of weak and strong beats. The downstroke is heavier than the upstroke, and is therefore usually used with the heavy beats in the measure. (b) What if, after your first measure above, you want to play some shorter rhythms? you might end up with a mess like:

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-v---^---v---^---|-v---^-v-^---v---|

which is not necessarily wrong, but the regular pendulum movement of your arm is broken, and with that the most reliable tool to keep track of time and hold a steady rhythm.

(c) Your pattern could be seen as a twice as slow version of this:

  :   .   .   .
|-v-^-v-^-v-^-v-^-|

The difference is not so much the tempo itself, as the the way the tempo feels. If downstrokes imply beat, attack, emphasis, naturally a pattern like

  :   .   .   .
|-v-v-v-v-v-v-v-v-|

will sound more energetic than

  :   .   .   .
|-v-^-v-^-v-^-v-^-|

even though the actual tempo is the same.

Take e.g. the classic rock’n’roll pattern, which you should be able to play now, if not perfectly, then at least good enough for this example:

  :   .   .   .     :   .   .   .
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-2-2-4-2-2-2-4-2-|-2-2-4-2-2-2-4-2-|
|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|

Try it first with only downstrokes, then in the same tempo but with the down-up-down-up pattern, and feel the difference.

The extreme example of this relationship between time and pattern, is reggae. A typical reggae guitar will hardly ever play a regular downstroke, but rather mark the rhythm by muting all the strings on the downstroke, and then play the full chord on the upstroke:

  :       .         :       .
|-----^-------^---|-----^-------^---|  

or

  :       .         :       .
|-x---^---x---^---|-x---^---x---^---|

(“x” marks a muted stroke. This is most easily done if you play barre chords, which we haven’t come to yet: one releases the pressure on the strings but keeps the fingers on them, so that they are muted. For the full effect using ordinary chords, one would have to place a finger over the strings, which is not a beginner’s technique, but for now, you can just dampen the strings you have fingers on, or leave them out altogether, as in the upper version, and mark the beats with your foot instead.)

What to play with

Many — not only beginners — use the thumb for the right-hand strumming. I can’t say that that is wrong, but personally I only do that if I want some special effect, such as a softer sound or some kind of slap effect. I prefer to use the index finger, for several reasons.

One is that the nail gives the downstrokes a certain edge and, conversely, the upstrokes a certain softness. In other words, the difference between up- and down-strokes is emphasised. This is, coming to think of it, an aesthetic decision: I choose to strengthen the dynamic between weak and strong.

If that is too subtle and theoretical, the second reason is more practical: the index finger is more easily fine-tuned, you have (or at least: I have) more precise control over what you’re doing, than with the cruder thumb.

The third reason is that if one uses the index finger, the hand position is the same as with a plectrum. In fact, I tend to hold my hand as if I had a plectrum there.

This is not written in stone; it’s just what I do and why. There are other possibilities, such as playing with more than one finger, or using the thumb on downstrokes and the other fingers on upstrokes. That way, we’re almost half-ways to fingerpicking.

The disadvantage of using the index finger, is that the nail tends to be worn down quickly. That’s particularly troublesome if one, like me, uses the nails for fingerpicking. I’ll come back to the question about nails later on.

*

That’s it for today. I’d better post this now, and leave some stuff for the days to come. Tomorrow: some more chords, and some more interesting things to do with them, such as: ways to get from one chord to the next.

“The Learned Helplessness of Windows”

LinuxPlanet – Opinions – The Learned Helplessness of Windows – Where are the Pliers?

I don’t think I’ve written a single dedicated pro-linux post on this blog so far — not because I don’t think that way, but because I haven’t really had anything I have needed to communicate about, beyond the obvious.

This article from LinuxPlanet, however (in two parts 1 | 2), is the best presentation I’ve seen in a long time of the fundamental problem with Windows.

The post is “based on a true story”, as it’s called: Woman has a jammed garage door. Friendly Neighbour comes by and offers to fix it if she gets him a pair of pliers.

She told me her husband was not at all mechanically talented and she was even worse. Her husband had told her they were probably safer with no tools in the house than running the risk of trying to fix something themselves.

Best not keep any tools around. Better call the maitainance guy and pay him a couple of hundred instead. Better safe than sorry. No pliers in the house.

I don’t know what is worst in this story: the extra expense of having to pay someone who charges indecent amounts of money every time something needs to be done, or the self-imposed mutilation, the “Learned helplessness”?

What made me react to this particular article, was the level on which it operates: pliers. Pliers (image by Dori, courtesy of Linux Planet It’s not about operating a steam drill or a chainsaw. Sure enough: Linux provides you with tools to bring down the house if you want to, but as an average user you’re not even likely to know that you have them, and you don’t have to use them (unlike what the persistent myth about Linux keeps telling us). But a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, a hammer…

The post reminded me of a column I read, I think in the now defunct Tux Magazine. The author had been asked to name the main reason why he used Linux. Sitting down and thinking it through, he came to the realization that it was not because it’s free, even though that’s nice; not because of the politico-ideological aspects of open source as an instance of freedom of speech; not necessarily because it’s always better than Windows or Mac (which it sometimes is, sometimes not); but because he had control of his computer.

My sentiments exactly. I spend several hours a day in front of this beast. I interact with the world around me through it — it’s an extension of my body. The best thing about linux is that it gives me the possibility to control it on a day-to-day basis, and the tools to do so. If I break a leg, I’m glad there are doctors around to take care of that. But thankfully I don’t have to go to the barbershop if I need a shave, or call a carpenter if I want to hang some pictures on the wall.

I’ve got pliers, and I know how to use them.

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 3: More Chords — seventh and minor

You didn’t really think you were going to learn to play the guitar in two weeks, did you? If you did, I apologize for having deceived you. It takes a little more time.

And yet, in a way it is true: the guitar is not a very difficult instrument to get a decent sound from. It has a learning curve that is quite shallow in the beginning, and it really doesn’t get steep until it is time to pass from “intermediate” to “advanced”. Compare that with e.g. the violin, which will not sound good until you’ve played it for a couple of years and reached “intermediate”, or the recorder, which is very easy to produce sounds on once you manage to cover all the holes, but will never sound good (or at least not until youre “advanced”).

So the guitar isn’t so bad after all: with a few basic chords and some focused rehearsal every day, you could actually accompany the christmas carols a week and a half from now.

My way: Rudiments of a Method

You may even decide for yourself if you want to follow a “method”, or just play songs that you like and observe and enjoy the progress you’re making. I propose the following simple points as a rudimentary method:

  • Be smooth! Practice the transition between chords, the way I suggested on Day 1. Play
    D D A7 A7 D D A7 A7 ...
    D D G G D D G G ....
    G G A7 A7 G G A7 A7 ...

    until your fingers can do it all by themselves. Do the same for all new chords. Two minutes like this in the beginning will save you a lot of time later.

  • Be lazy! Pay attention to how many and big movements you make with your fingers, and see if you can minimize that. Move fingers as groups if possible. Don’t move your whole hand if slipping a finger to another string is enough.
  • Be straight. Related to the previous point is: pay attention to how you hold your hand. Don’t twist it, as many beginners do. As an ideal and a point of departure: strive to have a starting position where your fingers attack the strings from a straight angle, both vertically and “horizontally”: Your wrist should be next to where the chord you’re playing is — not in the area of the tuning pegs.
  • Be clear! Avoid touching other strings. Check that you can hear sound from all the strings you are playing.
  • Have patience (and expect the same of your surroundings)! If it takes two seconds to change chords and you are left hanging on “hang down your head aaaaaaaand…”, then so be it. It is not going to be that way forever, so just disregard it.
  • Have fun! Take advantage of the fact that the guitar is an easy instrument in the beginning.

Follow these steps, and you will be guaranteed a prosperous and happy future. I think.

What lies ahead

Here’s a survey of the topics I will be discussing in this series, arranged tentatively in the order in which they will be brought up, which should hopefully be the order in which you will be ready for them and need them.

  • Rhythm: the right hand
  • all strings are not created equal
  • flatpicking
  • picking out melodies
  • tab notation
  • barre chords
  • chord theory
  • a million chords…
  • fingerpicking
  • licks
  • open/alternate tuning

A lot of the topics are actually covered, in a more condensed form, in the help file at dylanchords. You may want to take a peek there already.

Can you tell me where we’re heading?

The learning goals I have in mind are defined by three Dylan albums: The Freewheelin’, World Gone Wrong and — as a bonus — Blood on the Tracks.

The Freewheelin’ is not only one of Dylan’s greatest albums, but also the most varied and advanced album guitarwise. His fingerpicking technique was never better, and songs like ‘Girl from the North Country’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ are good goals to strive towards.

If anyone had assumed that Dylan had forgotten his solo acoustic technique after near thirty years of touring with a band, World Gone Wrong proved them wrong. It’s his best album as a flatpicker, and the way he picks out melodies in the bass lines, incorporates licks, and positions the accompaniment in relation to the singing, is an ideal for any guitar player.

Lastly, the New York version of Blood on the Tracks is a superb example of the use of open E tuning. To be able to play those songs and make them sound like on the record is a thrill that no aspiring guitarist should be denied. The good news is that it’s not really very difficult.

But first things first: we need some more chords.

More chords: Am and C

  Am            C           Am7
 0   0          0 0        0 0 0
======       ======       ======
||||1|       ||||1|       ||||1|
------       ------       ------
||23||       ||2|||       ||2|||
------       ------       ------
||||||       |3||||       ||||||

x02210       x32010       x02010

Hopefully, it is not too confusing that the numbers mean different things in the two ways of writing chords: in the graphical representation, they denote the fingers, in the brief form: the frets.

Then two songs to use them in. They are both ideal for practice, since they consist of a simple series of chords that is repeated over and over again.

You Ain’t Going Nowhere

G
Clouds so swift
Am
Rain won't lift
C
Gate won't close
G
Railings froze
G                 Am
Get your mind off wintertime
C                 G
You ain't goin' nowhere

G        Am
Whoo-ee! Ride me high
  C
Tomorrow's the day
   G
My bride's gonna come
G           Am
Oh, oh, are we gonna fly
C                G
Down in the easy chair!

More verses.

Notice that “You Ain’t Going Nowhere is in the key of G major. That means that G is no longer just an auxiliary chord, but the Tonic. It is more important than it was as a Subdominant in D major. You are therefore urged to use the full form of G (320003).

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

G               D            Am7
Mama, take this badge off of me
G        D         C
 I can't use it anymore.
G             D                 Am7
 It's gettin' dark, too dark to see
G                D                    C
 I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door

Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can't shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin' down
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door

Again, the song is in G major, and again, a simple pattern is repeated over and over again throughout the song.

It looks like a six-chord pattern this time, and it is: G D Am7 | G D C |, but you will notice that the two halves of the pattern differ only by one chord: Am7 and C. And if you look at the chord charts above, you will see that those two chords in turn are virtually identical.

So while you practice knocking, I’ll do some more explaining. My apologies in advance for the following outpouring of theory. It is intended as reference material, not as something you are required to understand fully at this point. Again, the idea is not to burden you with things you need to know, but to give you a chance of knowing why things work, and why they work the way they do.

More chord theory: minor and seventh chords

We now have three chords with “A” in them: Am,  A7, and Am7:

  Am           A7           Am7
 0   0        0 0 0        0 0 0
======       ======       ======
||||1|       ||||||       ||||1|
------       ------       ------
||23||       ||1|2|       ||2|||
------       ------       ------
||||||       ||||||       ||||||

What’s the difference between them? What’s that “7” doing there? How are they used? And what’s with the C, which is so similar to Am7?

The Seventh chord

Let’s start with the 7. In brief: The seventh chord is a variant of a chord where the seventh tone counted upwards from the keynote is added to the plain chord. This spiced-up chord is frequently used when the chord stands in a dominant position, because the extra tone adds tension to the chord, in relation to the tonic.

Why is this so? In a scale (the classic do-re-mi, e.g.), the distance between the tones varies. In most cases there is a whole tone between the steps (two frets on the guitar), but in two places, between the third and fourth steps and between the seventh and eighth — mi-fa and si-do, or e-f and b-c — there is only a semitone or a single fret. And, to (over-)simplify matters a little, there is a certain attraction between the tones that belong to one of these semi-tone steps.

In the D chord, two of the string play the tone d: the open fourth string, and the second string, which is fingered at the third fret. (Try it; they should sound the same. If they don’t — check your tuning.)

The second string is fingered in the A7 chord too, but at the second fret — one fret away from what is played in D major. That is part of what gives the “drive” from one chord to the other: a semitone away from the keynote “wants” to be resolved.

The added seventh tone does two things to strengthen this drive.

First, the seventh chord is a dissonance, and a dissonance wants to be resolved even more strongly than a semitone. In the modern tonal world, the seventh chord is perhaps not perceived as a dissonance, because we are so accustomed to the sound, but if you play the two tones that dissonate alone, chances are that the dissonating character stands out more clearly. Try to play only these two “chords”:

x0x xx      x0x0xx
======      ======
||||||      ||||||
------      ------
|||2||      ||||||
------      ------

I.e., the fifth and third strings, first the open fifth string and the third string fingered at the second fret, then both open. The first is the tone A played in two different octaves (again: if they don’t sound the same, check your tuning), the second is the core of A7. The first should sound stable and calm — static, even: there is no drive anywhere, it’s just a tone. The second sounds displeased, somehow, happy to get somewhere else; or, if this is reading too much emotion into an interval: at least it sounds dissonant. That’s the first element of the added tension.

Besidses, the added tone (i.e. the tone g, which is the tone of the open third string) adds another pair of semitone-related tones. This is not so easily seen in this case: because of the most common shape of these two chords, the corresponding tone in the D chord is usually not played next to the open third string, but one octave higher. So let’s try this: play the first string, fingered at the third fret. Sounds the same as the open third string? Good. (If running ahead of things hadn’t been such a damned unpedagogical idea, I would at this point have disclosed that another way of playing A7 is indeed x02223, where the first string is indeed played at the third fret.)

First string, third fret: that’s again one fret (one semitone) away from one of the tones in the D chord — another driving force from one chord to the other.

As a final illustration, play the two semitone steps together, first only those, then with the bass note added:

 'A7'      'D'             A7       D
xxxx     xxxx            x0xx     xx0x
======   ======   and    ======   ======
||||||   ||||||   with   ||||||   ||||||
------   ------   the    ------   ------
||||2|   |||||2   bass:  ||||2|   |||||2
------   ------          ------   ------
|||||3   ||||3|          |||||3   ||||3|
------   ------          ------   ------

Hopefully, you hear the tension, and the delight of getting “home” when you reach D. If not: don’t despair; this is not your last chance.

That leaves just one more thing to be said about the seventh chord: it is almost exclusively used in the Dominant position. That almost goes without saying, given the mass of tension-generating features that go into the seventh chord, since “tension” is the dominant’s middle name.

The Minor chord

You probably know already what a minor chord is, and how it differs — at least in sound and character — from the major. Major chords are bright and happy — minor chords sombre, sad, melancholy, etc.

We haven’t had any use for the plain A chord yet, but for the sake of completeness and argument, here it is:

  A
x0   0
======
||||||
------
||123|
------
||||||
------

Compared to the minor chord, you will see that one note makes all the difference.

  A       Am
x0   0  x0   0
======  ======
||||||  ||||1|
------  ------
||222|  ||22||
------  ------
||||||  ||||||
------  ------

I won’t go into as much detail about the minor chord as with the seventh chord. A summary of some central points will suffice for now:

  • Notation: a single letter “A” conventionally denotes a major chord. The minor chord is denoted with an added “-m” (Am), or — in some systems — as a lower-case “a” (I consistently use the Am notation).
  • A song in a minor key also has a family of chords with specific relations between them. These are to some extent different from the corresponding major keys.
  • One of the differences is that the dominant of a minor chord is still a major chord. E.g. A7 is the dominant of both D and Dm.
  • The minor seventh (m7) chord, consequently, is not usually an ordinary seventh chord in the “dominant” sense, but rather a colouring of the plain minor chord.

The last point can be illustrated by “Knockin’ on Heaven’s door”, where there is a minor seventh chord, but it does not stand in a dominant relation to the chord that follows.

Another minor/major relationship: Am vs. C

One last thing before we call it a day: C and Am are closely related — so closely that they are called “relative chords”. The relation is not of the dominant kind as with D and A7, the quarreling siblings where the older brother always wins, but more like good old friends, one slightly melancholy, the other more on the gleeful side, but both deeply affected by and affectionate towards the other. That is why the two patterns in “Knockin'” are virtually the same. The colouring of Am to Am7 is in fact a way to make it even more similar to C.

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks, Day 2: First songs, first theory

So why is, then, that D is such a boring chord? To answer that, I’ll have to give you some theory. You probably don’t mind, since you’re going to rest your fingers a little while longer anyway.

“Grau ist alle Theorie”

If you think theory is boring, think again. Think of it, not as something you have to know in order to do something right (as most schools teach grammar, e.g.), but as a way of explaining what it is that you already know.

All chords belong together in families — the famous three chords, plus relatives and friends. Every song, at least in the popular music repertory, has a keynote (also called the ‘tonic’, hence abbreviated T), the main tone or chord around which the song revolves. This is almost always the tone/chord on which the song ends, and most frequently the tone/chord on which it begins, but that is not always the case. It is safest to go by the end.  A song in C major ends on a C major chord, etc. The keynote represents the stable level from which everything develops and to which it all returns.

In addition to the keynote, there are two different functions: that of extension, and that of tension. They are represented by the tones (and the chords built over these tones) a fifth and a fourth above the keynote, respectively. They are called the dominant and the subdominant.

The dominant (D) is the stable, loyal companion to the keynote, always there, not without its conflicts, but they are always resolved, and always in favour of the tonic – somewhat like a good old (or bad old, depending on the perspective) patriarchal marriage. In fact, one might consider all music within the western musical tradition (until the late nineteenth century in the art-music tradition, and until this day in the popular traditions) as nothing more than a play with the balance between these two scale steps. The dominant is there to generate tension, which is then resolved by the keynote.

The subdominant (S) usually stands a little behind the other two in the lineup – doesn’t have the self-conscious power of the tonic, nor the rebellious subservience of the dominant. It has a double role. Partly it is a chord closely related to the tonic, in many cases hardly more than a variant of it. In this capacity, it functions as a reenforcement of the tonic. But it also has a more expansive role, as the first step away from the tonic, especially in combination with the dominant, in some kind of cadential progression. The mother of all such cadences, at least in text books, is T–S–D–T (the beginning of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is an example). The dominant creates a tension which demands a resolution, back to the tonic, and the subdominant is a helper on the way to get there, roughly speaking.

What does this mean in practice, then? A few examples are in place, before you can go on to play them yourself.

Tom Dooley has two chords: the keynote (tonic) and the dominant. In this case, the tonic is D, the dominant A7. The musical “story” of the song thus is a simple one: Establishing the key; deviation; return. This is the basic structure of every tune you are ever likely to play. (Avant garde genres in classical music do what they can to eschew this pattern; the question is if they can ever succeed).

The beauty of it is that almost no matter how long one holds the A7, it will retain the memory of the keynote, and the urge to get back there will be stronger the longer it is sustained.

The Talking Blues genre is a perfect illustration of this flexibility, this time with the Subdominant taking part in the play. See e.g. “Talkin’ World War III”, where the buildup to the climax in the verses is accompanied — literally — by a gradual escalation through the S and D steps, which can be stretched almost indefinitely, to accomodate verses of different length, until the final resolution to the keynote and the textual punchline, to great effect. This is most clearly seen in the last verse, where the “half the people … some of the time” lines are finally released by “‘I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.’ I said that” — the young Dylan’s greatest punchline.

The legendary three-chord chords

To summarize: all songs have a primary key, and two main secondary steps. Just about every chord in any song in the popular music repertory can be reduced to one of the three chord steps. Thus, in theory it would be possible to learn only three chords and play everything with those. In practice, it’s a little more complicated, but the fact remains that three chords is enough to play 90% of popular songs satisfactorily.

The three chords in the most common keys, are:

+------------------------------------+
| Keynote  | Dominant  | Subdominant |
|----------+-----------+-------------|
|  C       |    G      |     F       |
|  D       |    A      |     G       |
|  E       |    B      |     A       |
|  G       |    D      |     C       |
|  A       |    E      |     D       |
+------------------------------------+

The Third Chord: G

With the G major chord, we have the full trio of chords in the key of D. Its basic form is:

G major
  000
======
||||||
------
|1||||        320003
------
2||||3
------
||||||

Beginners will face two problems here: it’s a bit of a stretch since it covers everything from the first to the sixth string; and it doesn’t share any fingers or finger positions with D or A7.

For now, this can be remedied with some cheating: leave out the two bass strings and play only xx0003. Then G goes from being the beginner’s first hurdle, to being almost the easiest chord in the book. You should not get into the habit of playing it like that, of course (and eternal damnation on you if you do), but it will allow you to play more interesting songs with fairly more ease. Why not the campfire classic “Blowin’ in the Wind”?

Blowin’ in the Wind

D         G            A7       D
How many roads must a man walk down
D          G          D
Before you call him a man?
D        G            A7         D
How many seas  must a white dove sail
D          G             A7
Before she sleeps in the sand?
D        G               A7           D
How many times  must the cannon balls fly
D              G       D
Before they're forever banned?
    G          A7         D              G
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
    G         A7             D
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

G, it’s good to see ya!

You need not pay much attention to what I’m about to say here at this stage, but if you need a break from Blowin’:

If D is my hate chord, G is the chord I love the most. It is full-bodied and versatile where D is thin and limited. I will save the full explanation for later, but if you know how to master the G major chord, you are a huge step towards mastering the guitar itself.

There are many ways to finger G. The form I’ve given above, with the index, middle and ring fingers, is usually favoured by beginners, because the alternatives all involve the pinky, which may be a bit awkward to use at this point:

G major, variant fingerings
  000       000       00 
======    ======    ======
||||||    ||||||    ||||||
------    ------    ------
|1||||    |2||||    |1||||
------    ------    ------
2||||4    3||||4    2|||34
------    ------    ------
||||||    ||||||    |||||| 

It may come as a surprise if I say that the middle form is the preferred, the goal you should work towards. Why bother putting that huge span over all the strings between the ring finger and its little brother when there are so much easier ways to do it?

It has to do with sonority and versatility. The rightmost version above does not just use different fingers, but has different tones as well, and it gives a different sound (incidentally, this is the chord shape that is used in The Times They Are A-Changin’ and which gives the special sound of that song). It it good to be able to vary the sound, and being used to using the little finger makes it easier to play this variant chord.

The second reason is a little further ahead in time, but I’ll mention it already now, to give you an idea where you’re heading. If you use the fingering in the middle, you have a space defined by the outer strings, and between them there are four wonderful strings that you can play melodies and fills on while still playing the basic chord, and two wonderful fingers (index and middle) that are free to play them, in exactly the right area. This is what makes G such a unique chord, and it’s no coincidence that many of Dylan’s greatest acoustic songs are in the key of G (Times; Girl from the North Country/Boots of Spanish Leather; It ain’t me, Babe; Blowin’ in the Wind, which actually uses chords from the G major family, although it is sounding in D major; Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door; You ain’t going Nowhere; etc.), and Dylan uses the “awkward” fingering with long, ring and middle fingers — so why shouldn’t you?

Compare what I’ve said about G with the D chord: three fingers are in use, in a rather fixed position; besides, since you are avoiding two strings, there isn’t much of a space to move in.

Further songs

Here are two more songs to practice on. First the definition of “bittersweet”: “To Ramona” off Another Side of Bob Dylan.

D
Ramona, come closer
                        A7
Shut softly your watery eyes

The pangs of your sadness
                              D
Will pass as your senses will rise
    G
The flowers of the city
                                    A7
Though breathlike, get deathlike sometimes

And there's no use in tryin'

To deal with the dyin'
                                D
Though I cannot explain that in lines.

(For the rest of the verses, see dylanchords).

Then one of the gems from his lastest effort, Christmas in the Heart:

          D
Come they told me, pa rum pa pom pom

A new born King to see, pa rum pa pom pom
A7           
 Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pa pom pom
         D                 G                
To lay before the King, pa rum pa pom pom,
D              A7
rum pa pom pom, rum pa pom pom
D
  And so to honor Him, pa rum pa pom pom,
A7       D
When we come.

If this is not enough, you may take it as an exercise to find other songs and see how you can make them work with your three chords. Everything will not work, but most blues-based songs will.

Try to use the full version of G, but you are allowed to cheat. For now.

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Learn to Play the Guitar in Two Weeks (and Impress Your Girlfriend)

So you want to be a guitar hero? Here’s how:

Day 1

Go to your local instrument dealer and buy the following items:

  • A tuner. It’s essential to have an instrument in tune, otherwise it will sound bad no matter how well you play it. You will think it’s your fault (and so will your girlfriend), and you will give up on the whole enterprise after day 5 or so. You play with your ears just as much as with your fingers, so you might as well get good habits from the start.
    You can get a good tuner for very little money. Make sure you get one where you can choose which tones to tune to, and not just to the standard tuning. You’re going to need that later on.
    You don’t have to buy a tuner, of course; there are excellent tuner programs around, which do the job just as good or better than a standalone tuner. I can’t give recommendations of tuner software for  Windows, but google “free guitar tuner windows” and you should find something that works.
  • New strings. They produce the sounds, not your fingers or your ears. Bad strings — bad sound. Again: your girlfriend will think it’s your fault, and so will you.
  • A new guitar. OK, this one is optional, at least until day 12, but even a great guitarist will only sound half great on a bad guitar. Besides, a good guitar will be easier to play on, hence easier to learn on.
    Nylon strings are easier on the fingers than steel strings. You will get sore fingers no matter what kind of guitar you have, so be warned.
  • A capo. This is not essential at this stage, to be honest, but you will need one eventually, so you might as well buy one while you’re in the store. There are three main types: Nylon capo the cheapest ones fasten with a piece of elastic or nylon. The elastic models cost less than a beer, but are also the weakest, so they may not be able to press down all the strings with the necessary pressure and thus produce a buzzing sound. Besides, they will break, eventually. If you want to stay in the cheaper range, go with the nylon model to the left. Shubb lever-operated capoThe spring based model is more expensive. Many players love this kind. I don’t. Tastes differ. For what it’s worth, I use the lever-operated, no-frills capo to the right: it does what it’s supposed to do, and it will last forever.
    Make sure you get a capo that fits your guitar. Nylon string guitars have a flat fretboard and need a flat bar, whereas most steel string guitars have a curved fretboard and need a curved bar, as in the picture to the right.
  • You may also want to buy some plectrums. They vary in thickness and elasticity. “Find the one that suits you best,” would be something to say to someone who has played for a while, so I won’t say that. I’ll say: get a Dunlop .71 mm. It’s glaringly pink, but other than that, it’s ideal: not too rigid (which will make it stick between the strings and you’ll loose it), nor too sloppy (which will produce more clicking than real guitar sound). Peter Stone Brown has told me that there is a brown Dunlop plectrum that is identical to the pink one. Ask your dealer.

You can now leave the shop and go home, change your strings (or ask the nice people in the shop to do it for you), tune your guitar (this you should do yourself — you will be doing it a lot, so you might as well get into the habit), and grab hold of your guitar.

Update: You may want to know a little more about tuning. If you’ve been a good student and done as the professor ordered, you can use your tuning device, and all should be fine. If you’re rebellious, obsessed about personal freedom, or for some other reason don’t have said device, here’s a quick run-through:

  1. The standard tuning of a guitar is (from deepest to highest): E – A – d – g – b – e’
  2. Tune the deepest string to an E. If you don’t have an instrument to tune to, find a CD, and go to dylanchords.info to find a song that ‘s in E. Most of Blood on the Tracks would do. Shooting Star is in E. Etc.
  3. When that string is ok, press it down on the fifth fret. The fifth string should sound like the tone you get.
  4. Repeat with the next two string pairs: the fifth string fingered at the fifth fret should sound like the open fourth string, same with fourth -> third.
  5. Between the third and the second strings, the distance is smaller, so you will have to finger the third string on the fourth fret.
  6. Between the two highest string, it’s again the fifth fret.
  7. The sixth (deepest) and first (highest) strings should sound the same.

Now what?

Chord charts

Chances are, you are going to read a lot of tabs from the Net. I will get back to the topic of how to read tab later on, two words about it now, before we move on. A common way to write down chords, is as a string of numbers, from the deepest string (E) to the brightest (e’). It is common to number the strings in the other direction, so the “first string” is the brightest, and the “sixth string” the deepest.

“0” denotes an open string, a number indicates the fret to push down the string in, and “x” means that the string should not sound. Thus, 000000 means all strings open, and — slightly more exciting — 022000 means: place fingers on the second fret of the fifth and fourth strings.
This could also be written graphically, like this:

 o  ooo
 ======
 ||||||
 ------
 |23|||
 ------
 ||||||
 ------

This time, the numbers denote the left-hand fingers (1=index, 2=long, 3=ring, 4=pinky, and — when we get there: T=thumb from behind the neck).

Above the chart are signs that show what to do with the open strings. “x” means: “don’t play this string.” “0” means: this open string should sound.

There are other signs as well, but this will have to do for now.

The first chord: D

Learning to play the guitar is a drag. The main reason is that the first chord you’ll have to learn, is the most unwieldy chord in the book. I’ve secretly hated it since I first learned it, 35 years ago. It’s a D major chord, and it looks like this: xx0232, or:

xx0
======
||||||
------
|||1|2
------
||||3|

In other words: index finger on the third string, second fret, long finger on the first string, second fret, and ring finger on the second string, third fret.

The frets are the strips of metal that run across the neck. When I say “at the second fret”, it really means “in the space between the first and second metal bands” — “in the second box”.

Place your fingers as close to the middle of the “box” as possible. The whole point of putting a finger there is to “break” the string with an edge against the next fret band. If you press it down too close to the fret, you will have to press down harder to get that edge, and if you get too far back towards the first fret band, you may not get a sharp enough angle over the next fret to “break” the string. In both cases, you will either get a buzzing sound, or a very muffled sound (or no sound at all).

This is the first challenge with the D chord: to get the ring finger far enough up into the third fret and away from the two fingers at the second fret. I remember having struggled with that, and I’ve seen beginners sweating blood over it. If it’s any consolation, I can’t imagine now what the problem was; it does become second nature, and quicker than you might think while you’re cursing that little bugger of a ring finger. The same goes for all the chords, by the way.

Try also to place your fingers so that they are as perpendicular as possible to the fretboard. This should not be overdone, of course, but it is essential to good playing that you don’t accidentally stop one string with the finger of another string. This risk is minimized by the straighter attack from perpendicular fingers.

According to classical guitar technique, the thumb should be placed somewhere below the middle of the neck. If you’re just going to be playing chords, this is impractical, but the reason for it is well worth keeping in mind: the thumb is not there to hold the guitar, but to give support to the other fingers. Hence, it should be where it is most needed, which will be opposite where you finger the strings. So, don’t grab the neck like it was a stick. Instead, hold your arm out, let your hang hang down, naturally relaxed (like the zombie-posture, or something). Then, holding that position, twist your hand upwards, and you have your starting position.

Again: the goal is to be relaxed. Save as much as your energy as possible for when you really need it.

The D chord is a drag for two reasons. First, it’s boring. I’ll explain why tomorrow. Second, because it’s rigid: it fixes the hand in a certain position, and there isn’t much you can do with it. Both reasons have to do with the two “x”s in the chord chart: you should not play on the two deepest strings. That means that for your first chord, you will not be able to take advantage of the full sound potential of your instrument, which means that your girlfriend will only be slightly impressed — if at all.

But you’ll get there, don’t worry. For the time being, you have what’s needed to play — “Frere Jacques”. Finger your D chord and strike the strings with your thumb or — as I would prefer — the nail side of your index finger. Strike down in a steady rhythm where there is a dot. Try to avoid the two deepest strings:

.       .         .       .
Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping
.       .     .       .
Brother John, brother John?
.                 .        .                 .
Morning bells are ringing! Morning bells are ringing!
.           .     .           .
Ding, ding, dong. Ding, ding, dong.

That may be thrilling, I don’t know. Perhaps not. One is almost nothing; two is almost many. Let’s add another chord.

The second chord: A7

The second chord is a close relative of D. It is called A7 and looks like this:

x02020

or

x0 0 0
======
||||||
------
||1|2|
------
||||||

Here, you are allowed — even encouraged — to strike the fifth string as well. That’s good news. Even better news is that it doesn’t really matter if you happen to hit the sixth string as well.

I’ll explain the relationship to D tomorrow. At the moment, you may notice that the two fingers that you use here are in the exact same position as they were in the chord of D, only moved one string up. That brings us to the first real exercise (after you have strummed to Frere Jacques for a while):

Changing between chords

The secret of guitar playing — one of them, at least — is to learn how to be lazy, how to economize with your energy. Since the fingers are already in position, don’t lift off the whole hand from D to regroup the fingers for the A7; rather move the two relevant fingers as a group. This may sound obvious, but it does take some time to get it into the fingers, especially since you will also have to lift off the ring finger completely.

The exercise is simple enough: practice changing between the two chord shapes in a regular fashion: two strokes D, two strokes A7, two D, two A7 …:

D  D  A7 A7 D  D  A7 A7 D  D  A7 A7 D  D  A7 A7 ...

Focus on the index and long fingers — if you wish, leave out the ring finger completely from the D chord. Continue until you can do it as one movement with two fingers, rather than moving two fingers separately. Try to avoid touching other strings than the ones you are fingering.
At last we can play a “real” song:

Tom Dooley

D              .         .      .
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
.              .        A7    .
Hang down your head and cry
A7             .         .      .
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
.                .        D    .
Poor boy, you're bound to die.

When you can play this without making an embarrassing pause before “cry”, you will probably have fingers that as so sore that you can relate to poor Tom. Time to take a rest and prepare for tomorrow’s lesson.

All the Lessons

[catlist name=Lessons numberposts=150 order=asc orderby=date excludeposts=419]

Christmas in the Heart (2009)

I love this album. It’s a perfect follow-up, not to Dylan’s trilogy of albums vacuum-cleaning the American song tradition for inspiration, but to his Theme Time Radio Hour. (And for the record, my negative evaluation of his latest studio albums does not stem from indignation over ‘theft’, should anyone have gotten that impression, but from a number of lacklustre performances of material of declining quality.)

It’s hilarious. Finally, the ‘wolfman’ voice has found a home where it belongs: as a counterweight to the saccharine, a way to scare the living soul out of the unsuspecting innocent, and perhaps – just perhaps – blow some meaning into these songs again.

Because surely it’s hilarious. But that’s not the main reason why I’ve played this album more than any Dylan album since Time out of Mind. The reason is simple: the way he sings ‘ad Bethlehem’ in Adeste fideles sends shivers down my spine; his demonstration of Santa’s laughter in Must be Santa is the funniest thing since ‘Talkin’ WWIII Blues’; the sombre tone of Do you hear what I hear? is stunning and a perfect counterpart to the angelic serenity of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, perspectivizing both qualities and leaving us, not somewhere undefined in the middle, but somewhere where there is room for both sombre and serene, hilarious and breathtakingly beautiful.

Of course, it’s a brilliant idea of Dylan to make a Christmas album, because it’s the last thing anyone would have expected (and, for that reason alone, perhaps not at all surprising). But Christmas in the Heart is much more than a funny idea, a joke, or, for that matter, just a nice way to do charity. It’s obvious that he loves this stuff. And somehow, amid the croaking and the frolicking, he manages to communicate that love, at least to this listener.

And when love is communicated, what more can one ask?

Have yourselves a merry Christmas!

*

[Update:] But wait, there is more. Two things more: “Dylan and tradition” and “Dylan and religion”.

Dylan and tradition

Quite a lot has been made out of the fact that this is a 1950s version of the American christmas song tradition. Someone pointed out that seven of the songs are from Frank Sinatra’s 1957 A Jolly Christmas album; others that Dylan secretly wants to be Dean Martin, another source for many songs.

I won’t repeat all that has been said about that. Here, just a brief remark about harmony. If there is one thing that runs through Dylan’s entire production, all period included, it is his consistent avoidance of the plain dominant, especially the dominant seventh: the strong harmonic tension generator, which is resolved to the key note, e.g. G7 ? C. Even when he plays covers, or when he relates to fixed genres, such as the blues, he usually finds ways to modify the dominant relation.

Not so here. In no other Dylan album will one find as many chains of dominant seventh as here. Just a sample:

Christmas blues has F#7   B7 E7  A7 Dmaj7
I’ll be home for christmas has Bm7-5 E7 Am7 D7 G
Here comes Santa Claus A7 Dm7 G7 C
Have yourself a merry Iittle Christmas, B7    E7 A7  D7 Gmaj7

This is not in itself surprising — that’s how the songs were written, and the room for taking liberties is smaller in this genre than in folk and blues. What is interesting about it, is the degree to which (and the ease with which) Dylan has subordinated himself to the style, without feeling the need to make a statement about it, the way he did on Self Portrait, the only album which is comparable in this respect (but not in many other).

The same can be said about the way he treats melody: he actually sings the tunes, straight up, with none of the trademark “you couldn’t even recognize the melody” treatment. And he does it wonderfully. He takes his mastery of vocal delivery into this — for him, as a public persona — foreign territory, and does it convincingly.

Dylan and religion

This one is inevitable when Dylan chooses to make a Christmas album. What does he mean with it? Is it a clear sign that he’s still a Christian, or is it a just as clear sign of the opposite; that it’s all “just” heritage?

Coca Cola SantaI have no idea, and I don’t care (there is only one song that has made me wonder what he thinks in this area, but it’s not on Christmas in the Heart). What I do know is that the lyrics to “Here Comes Santa Claus” in the version that Dylan sings is a most fascinating mix of symbols. From the “jingle bells” intro with the smooth, soft jazz choir, and through the first two verses, it’s classic American pop culture Christmas all the way, with reindeer, stockings and toys.

But then, in the third verse:

[He doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor]
for he loves you just the same

Oh, that was Santa, was it? For a moment there, I thought I was in the wrong song — I thought that was Christ or something.

[Santa knows that we’re God’s children]
and that makes everything right

St Nicholaus
The real Santa: St Nicholas

OK, so it was something in that direction after all. From here to the end of the song, it is quite clear that this has something to do with God, but it is delightfully unclear if it’s Santa or someone else who comes as God’s gift to Man on Christmas day.

This is emphasised by the arrangement: the alternation between the slow, solemn “Let’s give thanks to the Lord above” and the jinglebellsy “Cause Santa Claus comes tonight” is … Well, I have no idea what to call it. Hilarious? not quite. Blasphemous? Not at all. Devout? Get out of here!

At the same time, it’s all of those, and more. The best way I can describe this album is as a balancing act. A balancing act that you can only perform if you’re enjoying yourself and what you’re doing, perfectly unaffected by the 70,000 fathoms of thin air between you and total disaster. Dylan seems to have been staring into that abyss for quite some time, ever since he first tried to shake off the yoke of being some Generation’s Voice. Christmas in the Heart is a sign that he is finally free.

Saved (1980)

While there is general agreement that no matter what one thinks about the lyrics on Slow Train Coming, musically it is one of Dylan’s strongest, the general verdict is not equally lenient with Saved. With its ghastly cover — rivalled in tackiness only by Shot of Love — and its unequivocal title, it has proved to be an even bitterer pill to swallow than the precursor.

Which is understandable, but not quite fair. Saved is an excellent album, provided one can endure the obnoxious born-again evangelization. It may be a far cry from Slow Train Coming in the areas of polish and commercial appeal, but it has an energy, a punch, and a new approach to communication and message that is quite unique in Dylan’s production, and, as such, quite refreshing.

It should be said, however, that this more positive verdict is only partly true about the published album. Saved is unique in connection with Dylan in consisting only/mostly of songs that had already been tried out on stage for a long time before they were committed to vinyl. There is critical and historiographical consensus that the album suffered from this: by the time of the sessions for the record, the band (the same band that had played the songs on tour — another Dylan rarity) was already tired, and the spirit of the live renditions, which even the staunchest critics could not deny, did not translate well into a studio production.

There may be something true in this. Many of the songs are exuberant numbers of praise and thanksgiving, which  come better into its own from a stage, where extatically jubilant confession seems more natural than on a record.

This applies to the title track, a born-again statement if there ever was one, slightly too over-eager to be taken quite seriously (unless one shares the sentiment), perhaps, but a powerful and driving gospel rock number all the same, which I don’t mind listening to.

The same could be said about the brother-in-arms, “Solid Rock” (or, as the full title goes when it is presented during the shows: “Hanging On To A Solid Rock Made Before The Foundation Of The World”); and, to an even higher degree, to  “Pressing On” og “Are You Ready?” — the intensity that grows out of the slow build-up of these two songs during the live concerts can make even the hardest of heart jump to his feet and rejoice: “Yes! I’m ready! Take me, Bob! Take me with you!”, but that is mostly lost in the album version.

It probably couldn’t be any other way. None of the songs I’ve mentioned are among his strongest — from the gospel period or any other — but their effect depends on presence — the physical presence of the person and the band producing a sound of wall to bang one’s head against, and the temporal presence, exploiting the contrast between the indefiniteness of not knowing where this is going to end, and the inevitability of the process set in motion by the first “on-an-don-an-don-an-doon”. In the absence that the record medium necessarily entails, some of that is naturally lost. But some remains (and five bonus points for trying).

Besides, it doesn’t matter: there are strong songs left that do make the transition from concert stage to recording studio. Partly, perhaps, because they are stronger songs altogether, but mainly because they don’t depend on the live situation to the same extent.

“In The Garden” is easily Dylan’s most harmonically complex song, and although it shares some traits with the likes of “Saved”, such as the escalating intensity and the lyric repetitiveness, it depends more on the harmonic meandering to hold our attention.

Both “Covenant Woman” and “Saving Grace” are harmonically interesting, although not as wild as “In the Garden”. They are also touching, introspective reflections on the role of faith and salvation in the trials and tribulations of everyday life (at least that’s what a theologian might say about them). Especially “Covenant Woman” stands out in this respect, in a way which transcends the religious sphere. Lines like:

He must have loved me so much to send me someone as fine as you.

and

I’ll always be right by your side — I’ve got a covenant too.

work well with or without God in the equation.

This leaves the two real gems. “What Can I Do For You” gives us Dylan’s best harmonica solos ever — for once captured better on an official album than in any live rendition, at least among the ones I’ve heard. It is inventive, it is raw, and it is fragile, all at the same time. (It may be to go way beyond what kind of metaphors are appropriate for this particular album to say so, but there’s good sex in those two solos.) The sound of the mix in general comes across to me as a bit on the hard side, but the harp sound is unsurpassed.

And last but not least, and the opener, “A Satisfied Mind”, which in my book is one of Dylan’s crowning achievements as a singer. It’s not powerful, it’s not showy, at times he breaks like a little girl, but there is an intimacy in the delivery which gives the message credibility and urgency. The interaction with the backing singers is exquisite all the way through, and my mental image of the song is that of calm deliberation, there is actually an intensity which just grows as the song progresses. There happens remarkably much in a little less than two minutes.

Have I made my point clear enough? Damn, this is one hell of an album. If you’re a godless heathen, don’t let the cover scare you away from this album. And if you’re a true believer, don’t let your benevolence and agreement prevent the album from grabbing hold of you in ways and places you might not have expected.

Someone Please Fire Jack Frost

… or at least his little helper. You know, the little guy who sneaks in when Mr Frost has gone for lunch, and turns knobs that are best left alone. His intentions may be the noblest, but as we all know, Satan sometimes comes as a Man of Peace.

Frost, who also goes by the name of Bob Dylan, has produced a number of said artist’s records, and one would suspect that he, of all people, would agree with Dylan’s harsh verdict in a recent Rolling Stone interview on the sound quality of records today:

You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.

fairly recent blogpost by Sean Curnyn takes up this statement and turns it back on Dylan. Curnyn refers to a series of posts by Pete Bilderback on his blog Flowering Toilet, which give graphical examples of the difference in dynamic range between LP and CD versions of the same songs.

Here’s the LP version of ‘Thunder on the Mountain’:

Thunder on the Mountain, LP version

And here is what most of us — who are not sound geeks and have therefore bought the CD — hear:

Thunder on the Mountain, CD version

The difference (according to the two posts — I’m no expert in sound engineering), stems from the abuse of compression, a technique that is used in order to fill the sound-space as much as possible, and make the music stand out more clearly, even in the soft moments. Put to moderate use, it can enhance a recording, but as a weapon in the “Loudness War”, it is lethal — it kills the dynamic range in the recording (as the above examples show), and since dynamics is one of the most important tools to make music alive, we may have a serious baby and bath water situation here.

I refer to the other posts for further evidence and explanation. I, for one, am convinced, and it’s ironic that the “static” that Dylan refers to is so predominant on his own latest albums.

Why there should be this difference between the CD and the LP versions, I don’t know. One of the commenters at the Flowering Toilet mentions that the same difference could be noticed between the version of ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothing’ which was given out as a free download, and the version on the released album. So apparently the little helper works late, and only in the CD plant.

For the record, if I consider Modern Times and especially Together Through  Life lacklustre and on the whole unsucessful, it’s mainly because of the material. But a sound (huh…) advice for Dylan/Frost might be: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot — shoot the sound engineer instead.

Thanks to Heinrich Küttler of SEAL fame for bringing those posts to my attention.