Crosby Stills & Ecklie

I've been focusing on the fundamentals of the bass guitar. Bought a book of music theory specifically for the bass, and I'm trying to learn intervals and scales and whatnot. You know, the dull, boring part.

But one bit of advice that I found somewhere recommends that no matter how bad you are when you first pick up an instrument, one of the best things you can do is to start playing with other people. Those other people are almost certainly going to be better than you are, and your natural inclination not to look like an idiot means that you'll learn a lot faster than you would on your own.

My friend and compatriot Marc Rosenbush is of course the person who sorta kinda led to this whole guitar-playing thing in the first place, and as a director, he ain't never been afraid of criticizing someone's work. (As someone whose work is known for its rhythmic sense, he is particularly stringent about trying to get my own rhythms up to snuff.) I play with him fairly regularly, on specific material. But Marc also plays regularly with Marc Vann, and when those two got together the other night, after a couple hours I hauled my bass over and joined them.

(And of course Marc Vann has been in lots of movies and TV shows, but is best known for playing the hard-ass boss Conrad Ecklie on CSI--hence the working name of our band. Although I've also suggested, and am rather fond of, Government Work. As in "Close enough for...")

Marc and Marc had been rocking out on Jethro Tull stuff before I arrived, and were both reciting John Lennon's shout "I've got blisters on me fingers!" But I was able to join in on two Pink Floyd numbers, "Comfortably Numb" and (of all things) "Echoes," complete with spacey whalesong improvisations. And to close out the night, the real CSNY's "Find the Cost of Freedom," as we worried less about instrumentation and worked very hard on vocal harmonies.

And if you're enjoying the thought of Conrad Ecklie pickin' and singin', then you had almost as much fun as I did.

Metronome

I should've bought a metronome the same day I bought my first guitar.

Time is, of course, one of those annoying absolutes. In the music world, the tempo of a song is inescapable and always present. And when I first got the acoustic guitar, I pretty much ignored the whole question of tempo--I just wanted to learn where the notes were, how to make chords, etc. I'd worry about tempo later.

This despite the fact that I knew, from my singing days, that I do not have a natural sense of rhythm. My internal clock works great at getting me up at the right time in the morning, but it does not instinctively know how to count one-two-three one-two-three. Not accurately, anyway.

The good news: it's definitely learnable. There was an HBO program a few weeks ago where Dave Stewart interviewed Ringo Starr, and Ringo mentioned that when he first started drumming he really couldn't keep time at all. Say what you will about Ringo's drumming--he was always known as a rock-solid timekeeper. So this stuff can be learned. I just need to, you know, actually learn it.

As mentioned before, when I bought the bass I also bought a metronome. A couple weeks ago I finally reopened one of the learn-guitar books I bought months ago, before the bass, and decided to start again from page one--this time with the metronome. Turns out, it made a huge difference. When the ticker keeps ticking, you don't have the luxury of waiting till your fingers find the right note to play--you just have to soldier forward, and if it's wrong you either press on then try again later, or you stop and go back to the beginning.

Because a song is what it is, and the notes must be right, and the time signature must be observed. That's all there is to it. I would've been far better off if I'd observed this reality from the beginning.

And by the way, I'm picking things up on the bass far faster than on the guitar. I've already got one song pretty well down ("Comfortably Numb") and am learning another ("Come Together")--whereas on the guitar, I still don't have any songs all the way down, still struggling to put together "Here Comes the Sun." And as friend Buffie (the real musician of our little group) put it a couple weeks ago, after Marc and I successfully played "Comfortably Numb" start to finish, "Looks like you've found your first instrument." Yay. But still more, more, more to learn.

I'll tell you this, though--there was some sturm und drang this weekend, of the serious sort--and I suddenly discovered that having guitars around helped enormously. It was wonderful to just pick up the acoustic and noodle for a while, to take my mind off things. In this way, one falls in love with the instrument that little bit more.

Just one last question. Would a metrosexual gnome be called a metrognome? I'm just askin'.

(And anyone who thinks I wrote this whole entry just so I could tell that one joke, gold star for you!)

The Guitar Goes Plural

I was definitely not going to buy a new guitar. Even though for the past couple days I’ve been roaming the internet, looking at prices and models of electric basses, it wasn’t because I was planning to buy one. When my birthday comes around in a few months, then, sure, a nice cheap starter bass would be a wonderful present for myself. But not now. Nope, definitely not now.

Oh why do we persist in lying to ourselves so?

I had just been to the post office, mailing off the last of the tax forms. (One drawback to being self-employed: paying estimated taxes every quarter. Blah.) After months of work, the whole tax thing was finally completely done. And as it happens, the nearest post office branch is quite close to the venerable West L.A. Music.

“Well,” said I to my lying self, feeling good about the end of the whole tax thing, “when I do get a bass, I’ll definitely need a metronome with which to practice. It is a rhythm instrument, after all. Maybe I should just go get a metronome now, so that I’ll have it when the time comes.” While trying to decide this I was walking home, in the opposite direction from the music store, so that I ended up making a long tortured loop to get back to the store. Where I was definitely going to only buy a metronome. And maybe a pickup for the acoustic guitar, but that was it, for sure.

And the guy behind the counter--who happened to be their bass guitar expert--had to enter some stuff in his computer, during which I just kinda looked around, around, drums, keyboards, guitars, basses, and . . . “Hey, I’m not gonna buy today, but do you think I could maybe try out a couple of your basses?” Just so I could get a feel for a model I might like. You know. When the time comes.

Now, I’ve never played so much as a single note on a bass. But it is, really, the instrument I’ve always been drawn to. When I listen to music, it’s the bass line that my ear always follows, the bass line I always find myself humming. It’s probably true that I only bought the acoustic in order to learn the rudiments of stringed instruments before getting a bass. And being such a rank beginner, I wasn’t even considering a fretless bass because, really, you need to be an expert to play one of those. But the guy at the store, he asked what kind of bass work I was likely to want to play, and, thinking of the ne plus ultra bass work in “Come Together,” I said that I probably wanted something with a really fluid sound.

He immediately picked up a fretless bass. But it turns out that Squier (the cheap division of Fender) makes a fretless bass where, and this is just brilliant, the fret lines are painted on the neck. All the sound of a fretless bass, but there are still guides for beginners like me to follow. Dead simple—and as soon as I hit a couple notes and ran my fingers up and down the neck, well hell, I was completely hooked.

But still, I said “This is great, I’m definitely gonna want one of these in a couple months.” The clever guy, he said maybe he could drop the price a little, and went off to check. At exactly this moment, my phone happened to ring with some very good news about a meeting Marc Rosenbush had just had that went really quite remarkably well. Suddenly I was feeling, oh that most horrible of things, optimistic.

Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a bass. And an amp too, of course. And a strap. Plus that bloody metronome.

The acoustic is a complex instrument--six strings, and lots of chord-playing in infinite variations. A bass has only four strings, and you can get away with a lot by just playing one string at a time. It just sorta works for me, it makes an immediate kind of sense, in a way that the guitar still doesn’t. After only one day of practice--mostly spent endlessly repeating the various notes along the E string, trying to drill them into my brain, and keeping time with the metronome--I still don’t know much at all. But I’m having a hell of a time.

(And now I have to go down to San Diego for the weekend, and leave the bass behind. Which suddenly seems like a very great sacrifice indeed.)

Not buying a bass. Yeah, right. Tell me another one.

Catching Up

Some random stuff...

The guitar playing is going along reasonably well. There was a point about a month ago when the very thing I'd predicted happened: my usual learning curve curved when it should, and suddenly the things I'd been doing badly just kinda got better. It was definitely sudden: one day I was as bad as I'd always been, and the next day I picked up the guitar and started playing as if I'd been doing it for years. The trick is, the stuff I was good at was only the stuff I'd been practicing--so now I've added a couple more chords to learn, and I still haven't got any single song all the way down, so there are still miles and miles to go before I begin to feel any sort of real competence. Still--when I pick up the guitar, something resembling music does actually happen. This is the first great step. Now comes the trick of keeping up my enthusiasm over the long haul...

Sales of Incorporation for Artists are going along reasonably well--I'd made back the expenses of putting it together in just a couple hours on the first day--but it hasn't quite taken off yet. It's just a question of figuring out the advertising--I was at the big Screenwriters' Expo for the last few days, and when I mentioned the book to some people they got very enthusiastic, so I'm pretty sure it's just a question of getting it in front of the right people. The very definition of advertising.

The skies are slowly turning blue again. And I can pretty well breathe again. The fires aren't out, not by a long shot, but the Malibu fire is contained and the bad ones down south, by San Diego, are slowly being brought under control. Even a couple days ago, the skies were still yellow, and the air quality was decidedly awful. But it's getting better, each day a little better than the one before. This is a decidedly good thing.

Plus the Red Sox won the World Series again, and that's just great all over. Maybe next time I'll tell my version of the Bill Buckner story...

Is It Progress?

I have now owned a guitar for two weeks, and I have been practicing at least a little bit every day. And so far...

...well, so far I still suck.

See, the frustrating part is that it's such a huge thing to learn because the guitar is more flexible than I'd realized. Chord fingerings for the left hand to learn, and not just a few of them--I've seen chord books for sale that advertise "1,000 chords diagrammed!" The techniques of strumming and picking for the right hand. The infinitely tricky separation of the right hand from the left hand. Learning to read tablature. Learning to read chord charts. Learning to read musical notation. A metronome to keep me on track rhythmically. Not to mention the necessity of actual physical changes that are required: the growth of callouses on the fingertips of the left hand so that there isn't so much, you know, pain when I play. ("I got blisters on my fingers!" shouted John, and now I get why.)

But it's been two weeks, and I've been practicing regularly, and I've learned to play five of the principal chords (A, C, D, E and G) pretty well. There are a couple very simple melodies (played on just two strings, involving only three frets) that I can now make my way through decently. I can sit down with tablature or a chord chart and work it through, slowly, but I can do it. But that's about it.

I still can't put any of those five chords together--I've been trying for days now to shift from A to D and back again, and although I'm slightly better than when I started, it's still pretty horrible. (The fingers just keep ending up in bad places for the D chord, and when I try to play it at speed I always get at least one dead string and another one buzzing badly.) Considering that this shift from A to D is part of only Lesson 2 of a course I'm taking, it feels pretty discouraging.

But perhaps part of the problem is that I'm trying too many things at once. When I purchased the guitar I bought a DVD and book for the Hal Leonard method. And while I like the book, the DVD jumped almost immediately into reading notation on staves, at which I am really terrible. So I poked around on the internet and found a course almost universally recommended called Jamorama, put together by a New Zealander named Ben Edwards, and it only cost $40 so I bought it. And I definitely like it, but that's the one where I'm already stuck on Lesson 2, with dozens of lessons still to go. Then I bought a book containing lots of guitar chords, along with scales and arpeggios, all nicely diagrammed, so part of my practice now involves slowly working my way through, say, the C scale.

It's definitely possible, though, that all that is part of my problem. I'm doing a little out of the Hal Leonard book, a little out of Jamorama, a little scales work, and so forth. I'm not following any one course systematically, I'm trying to design a scattershot program on the fly without any idea what the hell I'm doing. Which is probably exactly why all I can see at the moment is the vastness of the task, instead of just focusing on, say, nailing the transition from the A to the D chord.

I ain't quittin' yet. No sir. I mean hey, I've got these fresh callouses on my fingertips, so that's one thing I've succeeded at. Time and repetition, and there they are, just like they're supposed to be. It would just be silly to quit now.

In Which I Acquire a Guitar

The other day, a friend of mine decided to take advantage of a pretty amazing 2-for-1 offer at West L.A. Music. He went shopping for an electric and a new acoustic, to replace the entry-level guitar he'd had for years. I went along, always happy to watch someone else spend money, but once there, I had practically nothing to do.

I play no instruments, it's just not something that comes naturally to me. I took a music theory class and found it even harder than math--this with a very good teacher, Tony Tommasini, who is now one of the classical music critics for the New York Times. I also took exactly one piano lesson from Tony (won it in an auction), who declared that I had good large hands with a long reach, but never said anything about my having any observable aptitude for the instrument. I pretty much decided it was all too hard, and let the whole thing drop. Sure, I taught myself to sing reasonably well, even did a little recording with a madrigal group, but believe me, I've heard Pavarotti sing and the man has nothing to worry about.

And yet. When you watch Inside the Actors Studio and James Liption asks his list of questions, one of them is always "If you couldn't do your current profession, what other profession would you choose?" And every time, for me, the answer is one of two: either astronomer or musician. And astronomy involves math, really ridiculously high-level math, so you know how likely that is.

So I went along on this guitar-buying excursion because I figured it was the only way I'd ever actually participate in the process of buying a guitar. And like I said, once there I had little to do because I had almost no idea what anyone was talking about. I would be asked "How's this one sound?" and I would say "Sounds pretty good" every time.

Then the next day I went out and bought a guitar of my own. Because damn it, that little trip put a bug in my head and I knew I wasn't going to be able to shake it. But hey, I've always intended, for years, maybe decades, to try to learn an instrument some day. And since I don't have a time-consuming dayjob anymore, now seemed like an ideal time.

My friend went along because honestly, I could pick up a guitar and strum it, but I was utterly unequipped to tell a good one from a bad one. (Plus he needed an amp for his new Strat.) I'd seen on the internet that Fender makes a beginner's kit with a guitar, a strap, some picks, a tuner, some extra strings, a gig bag and a DVD with some lessons on it, all for $200. Fender's a good name, it seemed like a good deal, and it was in stock at the Guitar Center in Hollywood. Off we went.

In the end I picked a guitar that wasn't part of a kit, it was simply a solid $200 Yamaha (the FG700S, in case you're curious), then I bought the other stuff separately. Took it home, and since then I've been going through the exciting, agonizing process of learning the guitar, completely from scratch.

And what can I say? I completely suck. My fingers hurt (and when I took a shower this morning, oh how they throbbed in the hot water), there are chords I can barely manage even when I spend five minutes trying to get them right, my sense of rhythm is beyond shaky, and even though it's hot I always close all the windows because if there's anything a neighbor doesn't want to hear, it's the fractured sounds of a novice guitar player wafting through the air.

No, not wafting. These sounds definitely do not waft.

But at the same time, I can now (laboriously) form four of the principal chords, and a couple days ago I couldn't have picked those chords out of a lineup. It's a start. And I know from my experience that my learning curve has always gone like this: when I first start something I am beyond terrible, and I stay that way for a frustratingly long time. Then, at some point, suddenly it all clicks, it's all just kinda there. So I'm going to keep on with this: I've spent the money, I have the time, and for years now I've had the desire.

If only there was some way to skip the whole protracted-suckiness stage and just get to a basic level of competence, that would be soooo cool.