Category: guitar

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]

How to Die with a Clean Grave (aka Ten Blessed Minutes in Hell With Your Host Lou Reed)

I have to do this in a bulleted list, because that’s as long as I can hold a thought: why this is the most glorious ten minutes I’ve spent in any hell in a long time (at least since Christmas in the Heart)

  • The beauty of seeing an acid city slicker singing delta blues, which proves that there are many paths to the blues — too much of either whiskey, cotton picking, broken hearts,  or cocaine and educational electro shocks @ young & tender age
  • If Take no Prisoners is Lou Reed’s best album, this is the best remake of it: the refusal to let it die, the refusal to let the beauty of whatever you’re singing take over, and the song’s refusal to take your refusal into account.
  • if you’re ugly from the start and manage to communicate sublime beauty in/despite that condition (alternatively: if you choose to communicate your desperate take on sublime beauty in an ugly form) you will not age, and since you don’t age, you will never die.
  • Anyone who watches this and still wants a strat instead of a tele should have his brain checked (unless he has black curly hair, enormous hands (and you know what they say about big hands), and died in 1970).

(Thanks to Meinhard for putting this up on his Facebook profile)

World Gone Wrong — A Body in Sound

World Gone Wrong (1993) is a body. Not just a great body of work, but a body.

The greatness of this album of folk and blues classics is that there is one voice speaking on it and one person speaking with this voice, whether he speaks guitar, harmonica, or English.

I’ll try to make it a little clearer. Continue reading World Gone Wrong — A Body in Sound

Good Links: Theme Time Radio and Tell Tale Signs

Scott Warmuth, who first discovered Dylan’s extensive borrowing from Henry Timrod for the lyrics to Modern Times and went on to dig deeper into the Ovidian connection, presents more findings in his blog. Well worth a visit!

The third season of Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour is well underway, and it’s as good as it used to be.
Get the shows, and read up on them. Highly recommended!

Acoustic Guitar Magazine has an online lesson with the basics of the guitar styles of Maybelle Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Harvey, and Riley Puckett, compete with music examples, a video, and thorough background material.

“What I Learned from Lonnie” pt. V: three times 2, and 7 and 4

[This post concludes the series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]

When Dylan talks freely, he can be very eloquent, and one feels one is snapping at the heels of pure genius. But once he starts giving examples, it all sounds quote mundane, and very banal, and one is left thinking “Was that it?!”
And of course it wasn’t — one realizes that some people are better poets than teachers.

Let this be the introduction to this last installment in the Lonnie-series, where the shroud of doubt is lifted and everything is explained:

* * *

Today’s lesson is from I Chronicles, Ch. 4

In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic there are five. If you’re using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice. It’s indefinite what you can do, and each time would create a different melody.

Now, what is he talking about?!
In a way, it’s very simple. In a scale there are certain tones, and if you pick some of them and put them together in a sequence, “a melody forms”.
I doubt it, however, that his point is as trivial as that. He’s not describing just any melody, but rather a way of creating counter-melodies that — for some mysterious reason, which in Dylan’s version of it is connected with the symbolic force of numbers (or with the force of numbers tout court) — will always yield good results.

2, 5, 7, 4, 2, 7, … whaat?!

And this melody – just what is it? First of all, I severely doubt that the exact tones he mentions has anything to do with it; most likely, they are whatever numbers popped into his mind at the time of writing it (the passage in the book resembles the kind of vague ramblings that he occasionally gets himself into during interviews). But for the sake of completeness, let’s take his example at face value and see what the result becomes. In the key of G, we get the following: 

  Chord    Scale                       alternatively:
||--3--||-----------------0--2--3--||  --1--3---||
||--0--||--------0--1--3-----------||  ---------||
||--0--||--0--2--------------------||  ---------||
||--0--||--------------------------||  ---------||
||--2--||--------------------------||  ---------||
||--3--||--------------------------||  ---------||
           1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8        7  8
||--------2--------2--||-----------||-----2--2--||
||-----3--------3-----||-----------||--1--------||
||--2--------2--------||--2--2--2--||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
    2  5  7  2  5  7      2  2  2      4  7  7

The first thing we notice is that the steps 2, 5, and 7 incidentally form a chord: D major (or D minor, if we use the minor seventh for the ‘7’). This might be a clue to a solution, but I don’t think it is, for several reasons. The main reason is that the tones and the melodic fragment that is mentioned here, a broken D major chord against (or even ‘in’) the key of G, is not something I recognize from Dylan’s music making. The dominant is not very important in Dylan’s music — one might say: other than by being absent (in which capacity it draws some attention to itself).
The other reason is that the D major chord emerges out of the numbers 2, 5, 7 only on the assumption that Dylan uses the traditional numbering of the tones in the scale, but this is not necessarily so. We know from the terminology of blues musicians that there are many ways to refer to chords and scales. I don’t know if Lonnie Johnson is known to have used any particular terminology in this respect, but at least one alternative is worth mentioning before we abandon the search for a meaning in those particular numbers: If we shift the relation between numbers and scale one step, so that ‘1’ denotes the first step up from the keynote, we get the following:

  Chord    Scale                       alternatively:
||--3--||-----------------0--2--3--||  --1--3---||
||--0--||--------0--1--3-----------||  ---------||
||--0--||--0--2--------------------||  ---------||
||--0--||--------------------------||  ---------||
||--2--||--------------------------||  ---------||
||--3--||--------------------------||  ---------||
           0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7        6  7 
||-----0--3-----0--3--||-----------||-----3--3--||
||--0--------0--------||--0--0--0--||--3--------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
    2  5  7  2  5  7      2  2  2      4  7  7

This makes far more sense: a playing around with the main steps in the chord, with a sixth thrown in for good measure. This accomodates both the ‘sing-song’ style of singing that we all love so well, and many of Dylan’s trademark licks.

Another take

In a more thorough study than this, I would have gone through a number of tapes and searched out examples to corroborate this interpretation. Here, I’ll let it remain as a vague suggestion. The main reason for this is not laziness (although that is part of it), but the strong suspicion that the search would be futile; one might find such examples, but they would not prove anything. A more fruitful path is, I believe, to take Dylan’s statement more as an indication of a general principle than as an exact example.
This principle would consist in

  • a selection of some scale steps, either within the chord or, for that matter, outside of it,
  • which are combined to simple patterns
  • which are repeated or combined as building blocks.

This not only makes sense in relation to Dylan’s music making since 1988, it also makes sense as a description of an improvisational system. In order to be usable in practice — not the least as a ‘learned’ system — such a system should be simple, and it should be based on or related to a wider musical system (in this case, e.g. the musical grammar of the blues and its descendents).

A little music theory (has never hurt anyone)

A tonal system means a system out of which meaning can be gleaned from conjunctions of tones. Fundamentally, musical meaning does not lie in the connection between certain tones and something in the outside world (i.e. a piece of music cannot in itself mean love, rain, brick walls, etc.), but is founded on connections between certain combinations of sounds and certain experiences and expectations, and this must be learned, through repeated exposure to the connection and to the regularity by which the sound is accompanied by the experience. This is what we know when we know a musical style: we know that in a blues tune an E is followed by an A, and we expect a turnaround at the end. In this way, and only in this way, can the tones of “Another Brick In The Wall” mean meat grinder, inhumanity, and bricks.
Musical meaning thus lies in a habitual fulfillment of the expectation of this kind of connection to take place — and the constant adjustment of expectations against the experienced fulfillments.

A complex system at the base allows for a wide array of possible meanings within the system. In the classical music tradition, harmony has been the central field of development since the fourteenth century, culminating in the invention of the twelve-tone technique in the early twentieth century. Thereby, the range of possible connections between tones was stretched to the extreme (some would say: beyond that): everything is accounted for (or accountable) within the system.
But that is not the only option. Expectations can be established temporarily. Play an ever-changing series of tones, and nobody knows what to expect for the next tone — play 2, 5, 7, 2, 5, 7, and you have already established a pattern with certain inherent rules, and play that against a song which follows another set of rules, and you already have a quite complex field of potential meaning, created with very simple means.

Against this background, Dylan’s description can be rephrased in more general terms:

  • Make patterns out of any selection of tones, and repeat and combine them;
    by repeating the patterns, you thereby temporarily establish a new tonal system, exploiting the field of tension between the musical backbone of the song and the new pattern;
  • this meaning is brought out in the interplay between expectations and experience — between the cultural knowledge that the listeners and the musicians have, and the newly established tonal system;
  • in order for this to be recognized as a new tonal system, however ephemeral, in the short time that is at the musician’s disposal, the patterns must be simple;
  • but if they are, and a balance is struck betw een redundancy and inventiveness (there is a limit to how long you can play 2,5,7,2,5,7), it will always work, with these very simple means.

A translation

This is, I believe, the core of Dylan’s technique, which he has explored — with varying degrees of success, but mostly ending up with a huge surplus in the balance — during the 90s and the 00s. It also explains some of his other statements where he explains his system in more general terms:

A song executes itself on several fronts and you can ignore musical customs. All you need is a drummer and a bass player, and all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system.
. . .
The method works on higher or lower degrees depending on different patterns and the syncopation of a piece.
Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players.

This can be translated fairly exactly, if not word for word, then at least concept by concept, into the following:

A song can exploit several different meaning systems at the same time, and you are not limited to the rules set by one such set of musical customs. Since I play rock, I need a drummer and a bass player, but all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system, since this system is based on a conscious play with ‘inventive redundancy’ and not on the intricacy of the base system and the technical prowess of the musician.
. . .
Since the system works in the interplay beween the song and the newly established fields of meaning, the concrete way of playing or singing will have to be adjusted to the different patterns already present in the song. Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players.

“Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology”

Wired News: Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology

Kinda interesting, this one… Especially the last couple of paragraphs.

Beginning in January, the Music Publishers Association, of which Warner Chappell is a member, will begin pursuing a campaign against 5 to 6 such companies, according to MPA CEO Lauren Keiser.

“Lost revenue for rights holders is in the millions,” said Keiser, “We’re not going after fan clubs, but websites that make money.”

True, I do have that “small donations welcome” link hidden away at the bottom of some frame, but I guess that doesn’t really count — I’m a small potatoe here (sob! my ego is hurting!).
Anyway, for various reasons, I will not make any drastic changes quite yet, but stay tuned.

Thanks to Per Egil at www.chordie.com (another Norwegian in the tabbing trade) for the link.

“Song sites face legal crackdown”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Song sites face legal crackdown

Before you act: there’s no point in writing comments like: Where’s the zip file? I want the zip file. Can you please send me the zip file?

well well… What can I say? Several people have sent me links to this and other similar news reports, concerned about what is going to happen to dylanchords.
I understand the concern — I share it, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
On the one hand: I don’t want to go to jail, and I can’t afford a 500,000$ lawsuit. Those are two good reasons to shut down the site right now.
On the other, I keep telling myself that I don’t have much to worry about: all the lyrics are already freely available from bobdylan.com; all the tabs are my own interpretations and “intellectual property” in some sense of the word, I haven’t copied them from anywhere, and god knows I haven’t cast so much as an eye on the official chord books — heaven forbid! (in fact, had the publishers done a decent job on those, I would never have started this site); to my knowledge, chord charts in the form and with the contents you will find on dylanchords.com have not been copyrighted; etc. All in all, if I were the judge, I couldn’t really say that the site is much of an infringement.
Then again, I ain’t the judge.
The Australian Copyright Council writes:

If you own copyright in a musical work or lyrics, you are generally the only person who can:

  • reproduce it: for example, by recording a performance of it, photocopying it, copying it by hand, or scanning it onto a computer disk;
  • make it public for the first time;
  • perform it in public;
  • communicate it to the public (including via radio, television and the internet);
  • translate it (for lyrics); or
  • arrange or transcribe it (for music).

That would mean that I would need Dylan’s permission to arrange the songs, even though the “arrangements” (i.e. tabs) are my own.
However:

Unless a special exception applies, copyright is infringed if someone uses copyright material in one of the ways set out in the Copyright Act without the copyright owners permission. The special exceptions include fair dealing with copyright material for research or study, or for criticism or review.

The disclaimer about “research, study, personal use” etc. is a standard mantra in headers of tab pages, which I’ve never really taken seriously, and I doubt that anyone has — especially not the publishers and copyright holders. Whether or not a use is fair depends on four factors, listed in the US Copyright Act:

• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyright work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright work as a whole; and
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I’d say I score a point on #1, but I lose on the other three.

All in all, the situation is too unclear for me to see through it, but also to just sit and wait. I have therefore decided — actually while writing this — to take down the potentially offensive parts of the site until the situation has become clearer. There will be a solution, I’m sure, but until then: have patience! This is not a goodbye, but a “We’ll meet again”

And — not that I think it will have any effect whatsoever, but there’s a petition one can sign at http://www.petitiononline.com/mioti/petition.html

Chimes of Freedom

Chimes of Freedom was, I think, the first Dylan song that I really made an effort to transcribe. This was before the days of the Internet and in my case also before the days of Lyrics, so if I wanted the words on paper, I had to write them out myself.
Which I wanted, and which I did.
I was spellbound by those words. The layer upon layer of different meanings connected to different sensual experiences: the thunder storm, the lightning, the sounds, the “we”, which is not explained in the song, but I imagined a loving couple, on their way home from a date, to . . ., well, you know – all these and more, working together, flowing in and out of each other and each other’s natural domains, lightning itself evoking sounds, not by laws of physics, through its companion, the thunder, but by laws of association.
And all this channeled into Freedom, even giving that flashing sound a political or at least social dimension. No wonder the post-pubescent me had to love it.
And I had to see it on paper, to savour it, possibly also to understand the bits that escaped me in their sounding form. I only had it on vinyl (of course, this was back in those days . . .), and it’s only owing to my quick (and illegible, to anyone but me) handwriting that there aren’t more scratches and dents in that track. Somehow, I managed to get through it, and even solve some of the textual mysteries.
For this and other reasons, I have quite a special affection for the album version. I don’t know if it is because of this, or because Dylan has never really done it better, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his live versions. They always leave me cold, don’t do it for me, and the result of having listened to all these versions that leave me cold, has been that the song itself has lost some of its attraction.
Then came No Direction Home. I won’t claim that this is the best version ever – it probably isn’t. The singing is the whining, slightly tense, 1964 voice – not his best year. I’ve even heard the track before, without any noticeable effect.
But this time, somehow, it worked.
I can’t explain why – probably a combination of circumstances (I was listening on headphones, walking around in our local grocery store, looking for some aubergines and some washing powder), and the thing that caught me was something as insignificant as the guitar playing between the verses.
It goes something like this:

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

Nothing much, and yet…
At first, the performance disturbed me. Especially two of the between-verses passages, where he keeps strumming this one G major chord abnormally long. I thought, “Damn, he has forgotten the lyrics.” It has happened before. But this time, “phew”, he managed to get back on track again. Until next verse, same thing again, even longer this time. But both times, the following verse with all its intricate images and assonances followed without any hint of a problem, so relieved by this I ended up listening to the sheer sound of the guitar: never have I heard a more perfectly ringing, shimmering tone from Dylan’s hand. It’s not that it’s simple word-painting or anything – that would have been trite; they don’t sound like church-bells, those guitar chords – especially not the kind which are caused by lightning. But they chime alright.
And I started wondering, if he hadn’t forgotten the lyrics, perhaps there was a reason he did it like this? Playing the waiting-game like that – unless one believes it’s just a mistake, and all one can think of is how painfully embarrassing this is – it forces one to notice that which is going on in place of that one expected but which is not. And what goes on here, is sound – simply sound. “Only silence is more beautiful.”

The Battle of Wichita — the full story

OK, here’s the full story of the battle of Wichita, as requested.

It sounds pretty easy at first — just a run down similar to so many other songs (The Wicked Messenger, Down the Highway, and quite a few others), but when it came down to figuring out the details…

One thing was for certain: the highest string had to be tuned to the tone that is ringing throughout — there was no way in the world that that was going to be a fingered tone, the dexterity that would have been involved in that, would have been quite alien to Dylan (no offense). So there was one string…

For the rest, I worked with the different tunings that I knew Dylan used at that time, and I worked on alternative tabs in each of them, but I never even got through the initial run. (I can’t — at least I don’t want to — count the hours I’ve spent, listening to 3-second segments at reduced speed.) The special things about the tuning that he actually uses are the fifth between the first and second string and the major third between the bass strings (4th and 5th). The second of these has the acoustic effect of producing a lot of clashes between overtones in the audible range, which might create the impression of a different tuning. This, together with the bassy/slightly distorted sound of the two Freewheelin’ outtakes, made me believe that the deepest sounding string was lower than it actually is. I had made a tab in open D, I think it was, which was acceptable, but still clearly wrong, both because it was impractical to play and because it had the wrong tones in it.

Now, working out a tab when you know the tuning, is fairly straightforward. It may take some concentrated listening and occasionally some extra technological aid, but it’s not that hard, once you’re used to it. Working out the tuning is usually also straightforward — each of the common tunings have their specialties (I’ve expanded on this elsewhere — in the FAQ section of the main site). But this was an unknown tuning, with specialties that pointed in different directions. The figure that is heard in the second bar of the downward run, on the 4th and 5th strings, sound like the common E-Esus4-Em-E figure in standard tuning (Baby Please Don’t Go, Lost Highway, etc.), but other traits pointed clearly to an open tuning. I had worked out which pairs of strings had to be at which distances from each other, but putting it all together…

The CD had another version, the live version he played in Cynthia Gooding’s appartment some time before he recorded it, but in the same arrangement. There, he used some other chord shapes more consistenly (the A7 chord 003300), which gave me hope that I might break it because of them, but again, …

The CD only has the song itself, but since it was originally from a longer tape, where this was the second song, there ought to be some useful information to be gained from what happened before and after the performance itself, I thought. So the other night I posted a request at the pool. The morning when I got up, there was indeed a file waiting for me.

With trembling fingers, tossed between Schylla and Charybdis, high hopes and deepest desperation, [etc. — building up to the dramatic climax] I played the file, and what do I hear, if not Dylan tuning the guitar, string by string… Exactly what I wanted. All I had to do was, then, to follow his tuning, put on the capo, and play along…

Tab Tools

After the story of the battle of Wichita, here’s some info on the tools I use when I tab.

  1. Ear. Couldn’t do it without it.
  2. Plain text editor. Well, not quite, but in principle. No fancy tabbing software, just typing. Tabbing is an ASCII art form…
  3. Occasionally, pen and paper, but nowadays, I can hardly write music on paper anymore. Although that’s where I come from, it now feels odd to write down a guitar part in standard notation. Only when there is doubt about the tuning, as in the Wichita case, do I write down the actual notes.
  4. Technical equipment 1. Ah, back in the good old days, back in the late nineties, when tapes were still the standard trading commodity (remember them? Small plastic things, with stuff in them that could come out and make interesting sallad-like patterns on your floor or in the car — cats used to love them). For the first few years, I would make most of the tabs from a lousy walkman. Even stuff I had on CD I would record onto a tape, because the rewinding function on CD players is usually horrible, for this kind of work, anyway.
  5. Then came Winamp, which made my life a whole lot easier, for one major reason: the back arrow. One press of a button sends you five seconds back in time. Excellent. No more rewinding of tapes, which would always go too far back, so that when I finally came to the tricky point again, I had lost concentration, and had to go back again, etc. Five seconds, that’s something even my attention span can handle. Also, no stupid mouse-clicking (the mouse is great for BreakOut and Quake, but for serious work I need a keyboard), and no ctrl-alt-comma-tilde-up combinations, just the back arrow. And it works with CDs as well.
  6. There is a plugin for Winamp called Chronotron which slows down the song without too serious damage to the sound quality (there are several that do the same trick, but this one works best for me). Sometimes it is very helpful to hear a passage in half speed. It’s cheating, I know, but what the heck.
  7. The ultimate tabber’s tool is Transcribe! You can fine-tune both the pitch and the tempo, but best of all, you can analyse the wave spectrum to hear precisely which tones are sounding during a certain time interval. Once you learn how to disregard the harmonics, you can actually work out quite exactly which tones are played. It was a surprise, e.g., that the deep sounding bass tones I was certain I heard in Wichita, weren’t there… It has a decent set of keyboard shortcuts too. A wonderful tool!