Deconstructing the Guitar Puzzle

A guest post from guitarist and educator Jeb Sherrill

Hey all, Scoob here! I’m off to Japan for the next few weeks to play some shows and work with some artists out there. Jeb was a recent great guest on my podcast and agreed to share some of his musical wisdom in a series of guest posts, which will lead up to the release of the episode of the pod he’s on! I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll share some pictures from Japan when I return! - Scoobert Doobert

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What is music, anyway? I mean, what is it really?

I guess we know it’s about sound. Other than John Cage’s 4:33, silence has rarely been accused of being music:

The lack of sound can be beautiful for certain, though hard to dance to! It can be as simple as some guy on the street corner with four hardware store buckets and a couple of wire clothes hangers. Or, we could get into a three-hour conversation about experimental music, Harry Partch, and whether or not rain pitter-pattering on the roof is music:

But for the most part, music is pretty easy to identify. Music is about moving you in one way or the other. It’s emotion translated into sound.

Rhythm of Life

First, there’s rhythm. Everything from ancient man beating on a hollow tree to Son House accompanying himself with nothing but rhythmic clapping, beat is a fundamental part of the equation:

Whether we look at it as a bastardization of our natural heartbeat, the click-clack on train tracks, or the thundering knock on a door, the beat is something we all understand. It wakes us up in the morning via the clanging clock. It’s the snapping of fingers, the clapping of hands, and the pounding of feet. We do it solo or in groups, but we all understand what a beat is. What thunder is. What life runs on.

Melodies of the Heart

Second, melody is a song. Whether it came from voices, flutes, or harps, most cultures understand the octave. We understand plucking a string makes a certain pitch related to that same piece of string cut in half. The notes in between have always been under debate, but we each set the rules according to mathematical alchemy.

Scales can vary from five to 42. One could argue for more or less, but it will always come down to a relationship between the notes we use to play.

Harmonious Relationships

Third, harmony may be a little more complex. But it’s still a matter of using the alphabet of 12 or so notes and the various relationships between them to create a range of sounds. From the chanting of monks to a rock band to a full symphonic orchestra, the layering and overlapping of sounds can create a rich texture.

Jazzy Complications

Jazz perhaps takes this to its zenith of complication, although jazz is also something more abstract. That weird edge of music where the tapestry begins to unravel and float out into space. It’s hard to pin down because the edges keep tearing as we try to tack them to the floor. But how can something so complicated create one mood, while that drummer with a single, slow, throbbing beat can set your heart on fire as well?

How You Play It

What’s that they say, it doesn’t matter what you play, but how you play it?

A good player is a good player. And a bad player just hasn’t gotten there yet. But we don’t play simple or complicated to be better. We do it to get various effects.

Consider Yngwie Malmsteen shredding, his fingers moving from slow to fast as he flicks arpeggios off the fretboard like he’s warding off cocaine-addled mosquitos.

Or B.B. King making more out of a single vibrated note than some can with whole pieces:

Or Ritchie Blackmore ravaging the guitar neck like he’s trying to shake some money out of it. Glenn Gould. Mozart. Paganini. It’s never been about who is best. It’s about how they do it. It’s about the fact that they somehow managed to understand their instrument so well, they could speak through it as if it were their own voice.

Burning Questions

So what is music? To you, it might be a silly question. Maybe it’s like asking what is life? Or what is God? They are what they are and that’s enough for most. But it’s not a question I can let go of without understanding how to do it myself, and that has taken me the whole of my life to this point. 

“Just Play, Man!”

I’m the kind of person who has to see things on such a nuts-and-bolts level that it’s hard for me to create if I don’t grok it. Some things I do grok naturally, but not music. Sometimes I feel like an idiot for needing to do that. I can play music in my head. I can whistle… badly. But I can’t fully trust myself on an instrument unless chords and scales and progressions and everything all make sense to me.

Perhaps it’s my autism. My obsessive compulsiveness. My…whatever else. Regardless, I really want to understand all this stuff many musicians probably take for granted. “Just play, man!” 

I wish!

I wish I was a real cat. Someone who just drowns in the sound and lets blood flow out without questioning why it is what it is. I think of the early jazz players who took the forms and patterns, the rules of the past, and decided to step off a cliff into the sea of sound below where the guide rails became strings of dissolving spaghetti. Where chaos was somehow wrangled into a new form of music.

In Love With Music

I love all of it. I love the idea of it. I love the academic perspective and I love the free-flowing, heart-led music. I love the singer who covers a song listeners have heard a thousand times, but somehow makes the piece their own. I love the improviser who digs down into the music, the jam session or the backing track and swims in it like a current. They find the notes and the rhythms in just the right places and pulls something not from nothing, but from the music in their ears. I love how a group of practiced players can feed off each other, finishing each others sentences, predicting each other’s moves, sharing each others blood in the frenzy of creation.

So, what is music?

I don’t know, but I’m starting to see the pattern. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Jeb

(Stick around for the 2nd installment of his 3 part guest series next week.)

Jeb Sherrill is a guitar player, Novelist/short story writer and perhaps the geekiest guitar teacher on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok. He specializes in patterns for making fretboard visualization simple and intuitive. Jeb invented The Musical Chair System, a form of visual music theory applied directly to the instrument. His system seems to be favored by neurodivergents, engineers, physicists, guitar nerds and others for whom the traditional approach hasn’t worked.

MusicalChairSystem.com

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For an accompanying chair system discussion on a complimentary medium make a note of Jeb’s upcoming appearance on the Love Music More podcast hosted by Scoobert Doobert and produced by Beformer on Tuesday October 29th. Music on!

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