A Notebook – Since 2007
I’ve been working on the coderoad
Just to pass the time away
Someone’s in the kitchen with AI
Bowing on the old cello
Soprano alto tenor bass
The four each know their place
One has a deja vu
Looking back at you
Oats peas beans and barley grow
Timeline full of doodly squat
Do you or I or anyone know
How code from AI grows
Rounding off we come to end
Our four part harmony
She prompts you and you bump him
Tomorrow we’ll meet again
One summer, I worked for one of my Dad’s friends in the body and fender shop at a Ford dealership in Culver City. He entertained the idea of getting a race car and I would be his driver. He foreshadowed the advent of the short surfboard. “Why are the boards so big?” he asked. “You could ride a two-by-four if you could get up the momentum.” Another summer my Confirmation sponsor hired me to work as a lab assistant at UCLA, where he was working on a graduate degree, the chalkboards in the lab covered with formulas and equations that looked like hieroglyphs left by sanderlings bicycling around the wavelets at El Porto.
The first thing my Dad taught me about plumbing was to name the tools, so I could hand them to him when needed. And I learned to dig a trench with the correct slope, for “shit falls downhill.” I worked odd plumbing jobs with him and knew enough of plumbing to know a plumber by trade was not what I wanted to be. Today, though, I feel some affinity for the plumber’s craft, even if my Dad would not now recognize it as the same trade, the new plastic pipe, the special tools, the glues that have replaced the lead and oakum joint jobs. Boiling the molten pig of lead in a lead pot then working the cooling lead sealing the oakum with a cold chisel around the lip of the cast-iron pipe. Yarned and roped, poured and caulked.
One day, my Dad, a plumber by trade, he would say if asked, asked me what I wanted to do, to be: a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber. I wanted to surf, which he knew, his garage a surfboard shop, but while I was a good surfer, I wasn’t an excellent swimmer, like my two best friends who were county lifeguards, but we all knew we weren’t going to surf our lives away. And I played guitar, but as an ambition as aimless as walking on a surfboard, for while I was a good guitarist, I wasn’t an exceptional musician, and had no taste for the business. And cars, beginning with the 1956 Chevy I bought for $75 from Gary, who was headed for Vietnam. I became a wheeled and track vehicle mechanic, MOS 63BC20, which helped see me through school, that talk with my Dad over and out.
What’s all this got to do with Benjamin Wood and his novel “Seascraper,” recently longlisted for the 2025 Book Prize?
“The horse needs feeding up and harnessing. He gets into his boots on the back doorstep, rolls a ciggie underneath the rusty canopy his grandpa built from corrugated iron – it’s hanging by loose screws, and one more heavy rain could bring it down. He’s not repaired it yet, as mending stuff like that requires an aptitude he doesn’t have. His talent is for something else – his grandpa would decry it as a waste of time if he were still alive to hear him sing a tune, and if his ma knew anything about the pocket watch he gave to Harry Wyeth in trade for his guitar, then she would make a bonfire of it in their own backyard” (5).1
That talk with my Dad I replay like old vinyl, now full of scratches of course. I might pick an electrician to be, and maybe I’d specialize in electrical musical instruments. Or I might have moved from carpentry to lutherie. Those are indoor jobs. Do you want to work indoors or out was not a key question for a kid growing up in Southern California, where the weather was taken for granted. There were a dozen guys I knew having conversations with their Dads similar to the one I described above. Families just scraping by, recovering from one war and beginning another, and then another, or couples with a cache of war bonds that would see their two kids through USC or Stanford.
“It never used to foul his mood this much, the cold, the loneliness, the graft, but that was long before he harboured any aspirations for himself besides what he was raised to want. He used to think it was enough to fill the whiskers up with shrimp each morning and accept the cash for them by afternoon. Providing is surviving – that’s what Pop would tell him, and what else should any man desire? Perhaps a wife, if he could find one that’d have him” (12).
He has more than a job, an occupation, he’s a seascraper by trade. He both loves and hates it. For love, the culture and tradition, the brawn and brack, the freedom. For hate, the cold and wet and muddiness, the poverty, and not enough time to devote to his true calling:
“He was thirteen when he first went out to sea with Pop and, in those days, few adaptations to the old equipment had been made – the cart still had two wagon wheels with metal rims, and he felt queasy after half an hour of riding in the seat with him. It was supposed to be a weekend job, that’s all, and it was something he would beg his ma to let him do, believing it to be a rite of passage. Every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa who had putted barefoot on the beach alone with just a push-net and a basket on his back” (34).
Scraping for money, too. There’s the rub. And he learns and loves to read, fatal flaw. And comes under the spell, though he’s naturally wary, of an outsider who sees just some kind of romance in the beach and sea and fishing for a living, and who wants to make some kind of movie about it, with him the star, and the promise of some big bucks. He’s not sure.
“The folk club at the Fisher’s Rest begins at eight, and if he wants to play tonight he’s got to put his name down on the list by quarter to. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to wait a week, rehearse his songs a few more times before subjecting people’s ears to them. He’s not in a position to refuse that kind of money. ‘I dunno,’ he says” (32).
What’s the catch? The empty promise of a false calling. And who is calling? You’ll meet all kinds of charlatans wanting to hear your story and help you to tell it. How could you tell? He’ll make a tourist scene of your livelihood. Tom Flett is the only seascraper around who still works with a horse and wagon. The others use motorized carts. He’s like a plumber who might still be using lead and oakum. Idealized and sentimental. The tourist view doesn’t see behind the facade. There’s no money in the songs. There’s no money in the seascraping. What’s he waiting for? To know his song well before he starts singing?2 What’s he going to sing about? Seascraping. Dangerous work, and just scraping by.
“He’s committed now and has to see it through. ‘Bear with me, then. I’ve got to work the nerve up.’ The guitar of Harry’s is much bigger at the body than he’s used to and its neck seems thicker when he takes hold of it. At least it’s strung the right way up. The frets are old and blackened, but it sounds in tune. ‘I need to warn you, I’ve not sung this more than twice from start to finish. It’ll come out ragged, but you’ll get the gist’” (161).
There’s a full moon this week, the daytime temps near 100, so we’ve been out walking late, out for some cooler air, the house so hot. A while back I made a playlist of songs with the word moon in the title:
It’s Only a Paper Moon, Moonlight in Vermont, Moon River, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonglow, Paper Moon, Moondance, Moonlight in Vermont, Havanna Moon, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Blue Moon, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, The Moon Song, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Serendade, Moonlight Becomes You, No Moon at All, Oh You Crazy Moon, Shame on the Moon, Walking on the Moon, How High the Moon, When My Moon Turns to Gold Again, Au Clair de la lune, The Stars the Night the Moon, Shine on Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon, Moonlight (Claro de Luna).
When we got back from our walk I played a few of the moon songs on the acoustic guitar. Still later, still unable to sleep, I got out of bed and from the open window took a photo of the moon. There’s nothing special about that photo, taken with my cell phone, of the moon over the fir trees over the old they say extinct volcano in the city.
“Ah, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one we’re after,” sang Leonard Cohen, in “Sing Another Song, Boys” (1971), which doesn’t have the word moon in its title, so it didn’t make the playlist.
Things appear different at night, are different. There are so many distractions during the day, chores, reels, but it’s different at night.
“It’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926.
But a full moon can take the edge off of things at night, soften the heat. Draws you up. And besides, unlike Hemingway’s Jake, lately I’ve been looking forward to the night, a book waiting on the nightstand, moonlight streaming through the open window, lucky to have Susan by my side, not having Jake’s problem, my playlist of songs with moon in the title streaming in the kitchen earlier while I put together something cold for dinner, playing in my memory. Memories of the Moon. Moon Momentoes.
And you don’t want to go getting too literal about it, so-called science of the thing, the light of the silvery moon, how it’s dead, and it doesn’t really have its own light, but is simply reflecting the sun. The mechanics of the thing. There you go again. See, you’ve ruined another night. The moon is a cartoon.
“Country Afternoon in the City,” a mellow piece played on the Gretsch G2420 Streamliner Hollowbody Electric Guitar with Chromatic II Tailpiece (year 2021: with Maple Top, Back, and Sides, Nato Neck, Laurel Fingerboard, and 2 Humbucking Pickups. “Village Amber” finish). Strings are D’Addario Chromes Flatwound Jazz Light. Fender Champion 20 amplifier set to: Voice = 02 Tweed Deluxe (Green) and FX = 10 Delay+Reverb (Orange). Gain, Volume, Treble, Bass, and FX Levels all set to 5. Filmed with cell phone, 3 mins 14 secs.
“Tele Piece #1” is the title finally settled on for the first of a planned series of short pieces played on the Telecaster Squier guitar.
Squier not to be confused with Squire, as in Chaucer’s “The Squire’s Tale.” I considered titling the piece “The Squire’s Tele.” Chaucer’s tale for the squire is characterized by a bit of rambling, seemingly planned for a long piece, if planned at all, but interrupted by the Franklin, who might be in terms of social class considered subservient to the up and coming squire. And the Telecaster Squier guitar is often considered subordinant to the Fender American made Telecaster. Fender acquired the name Squier when it bought the Squier brand, a family name, in 1965. The V. C. Squier Company out of Battle Creek, Michigan began in 1890 and made strings for violins, banjos, and guitars.
But the early Telecaster Squier is now considered a classic in its own right. In short, it’s a good guitar. Close to 20 years ago now, I was playing my Tele on Thursday evenings at a local wine bar, which closed almost as soon as it opened, victim of The Great Recession. I wasn’t up front or on a stage. I set up with a small room amp (Crate GFX-15) in a corner and played background instrumental pieces, mostly impromptu and rambling, or taking off on standards and going often I wasn’t sure where. Anyway, one night a family of four with some time to spend before their movie started across the street stopped in for a drink. They seemed inordinately interested in what I was doing. Most patrons just ignored me. Then the son, in his twenties, came over to chat. He and his father played guitar, and from where they were sitting he said they couldn’t tell if I was playing what he called a real Telecaster or a Squier.
One of the first guitars out of the new Fender factory opened in Japan in 1982, this one is fitted with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups, and it’s strung with D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings .011-.050 Jazz Light.
The amplifier used in “Tele Piece #1” is a Fender Champion 20, with the Voice knob set to 02 Tweed Deluxe, and the FX knob set to 03 Reverb Hall. This combination gives a bit of mild amped style without too much distortion or fancy effects taking over. Filmed with a cell phone leaning against the bottom of the amplifier.
More rain. More “Traveling Sprinkler.” Paul Chowder hasn’t been playing his new guitar much, though. Instead, the former bassoonist has found an interest in electronic music, and he’s bent on creating jingles and jangles and hums and beats and calls it dance music.
“I worked for several hours today on a new song called ‘Honk for Assistance.’ I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slightly percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhymes made with the Funk Boogie Kit” (190).
Where is music, today? Where was it in Claude Debussy’s day? I’m listening now, suggested by Paul Chowder, our narrator of “Traveling Sprinkler,” to Debussy’s “Preludes,” via YouTube Music on my Chromebook. I don’t have my hearing aids in, and the Chromebook speaker is not exactly a Marshall Super Lead 100 Watt amplifier stacked with two humongous speaker cabinets towering overhead, so maybe I can’t really say I’m listening to Debussy’s “Preludes,” anymore than I can say I’m in the kitchen nook typing while getting wet from the drizzle outside.
Around page 128, Paul spends ample time discussing the benefits of stereo versus mono. What he does not mention is asymmetrical hearing loss, a condition where you hear less volume in one ear than the other. You’re sometimes unsure which direction a sound is coming from, and it can make you a bit paranoid as you navigate your way around town. You have to be extra careful crossing the street, particularly if there are electric vehicles in the neighborhood. And bicyclists and joggers coming up behind you and passing full of assumptions and presuppositions about their position startle the shite out of you.
“I put the headphones on, and I lowered the needle on Zubin Mehta conducting The Rite of Spring, and suddenly I was there, enclosed in the oxygenated spatial spread of stereophonic sound. I was there with the panicked piccolo, and the bass clarinet was a few feet away, and the timpani surged over to the left, mallets going so fast you couldn’t see them. I couldn’t believe how big a world it was – how much bigger and better stereo was than mono….You need two ears” (129).
Or three, or four. One day, back home, I rode my bike down the Strand to Mike Mahon’s place in Hermosa, carrying with me Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music,” on the Impulse label, from 1965, still new and noisy around the early 70s. Mike was a classically trained pianist, although like Paul Chowder, had decided he wasn’t good enough to make a career of it, and went back to school for a PhD in English Literature, specializing in Yeats and Joyce and company, but still Mike was an audiophile, and had the latest equipment. He took my album and ran it through an electronic vinyl record cleaning machine he had, then we listened to some of it on his impressive and expressive and expensive sound system. Then he pulled from his album collection a copy of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” and we listened to the “Infernal Dance” piece. Talk about “attack phase.”
I played a bit of “The Firebird” just now, switching off the Debussy. I’m immediately reminded of Poe’s “The Bells”:
Hear the loud alarum bells—
Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
I can only handle a minute or two of “The Firebird” this morning (or Poe) before switching over to Segovia playing Bach on his acoustic guitar, from Andrés Segovia: Bach – Gavotte from 4th Lute Suite for guitar, Allegro Films.
In butterfly mode, Paul Chowder continues, in “Traveling Sprinkler,” from acoustic guitar to electro sounds to his girlfriend Roz and his neighbor Nan, parking his car here and there to get some writing done, in other words, in and out and back in again, listening to every day sounds and how they wrap around the cans and cannots of one’s thoughts. But Chowder keeps mentioning songs and music I’ve never heard of. Where have I been? And I asked myself again when and how and why it was I got Nicholson Baker’s “U & I,” and “Traveling Sprinkler” to begin with. So I looked them up. I thought I had purchased (and said in a previous post) “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris. Not so. I purchased it new from Amazon in June of 2023 (though it was not sold by Amazon – a bit confusing all of that, how Amazon works sometimes). And just now, about two years later, I’m getting around to reading it, “Traveling Sprinkler” (though I had given it a try a couple of times before), while “U & I,” I got used on Alibris in February of 2019, also giving it a couple of tries, but unable to fall into it, yet.
Anyway, it’s all old stuff, the books, the references, the music, not to mention the many political digressions, arguments with backing but often rants of a sort, Paul Chowder takes off on. He’s a pacificist, who, as I mentioned, attends meetings, though he’s not a full member, but which is why I thought the acoustic guitar was a good fit, him being a pacificist. But it depends on how you hear sounds. Last night late (after watching the Dodgers beat the Athletics in a record-breaking score of 19 to 2) before bed I played through a few of the Leo Brouwer “Etudes Simples” pieces, as I do almost every night, on my 1977 acoustic Takamine C132S. Number 1 is not all that pacific sounding, but Number 2 is lovely, particularly setting the tone for sleep.
The political arguments, by the way, though now aged, just over a decade away, are effective today, without stirring up too much dust. I’m increasingly finding I’d rather listen to decade old or older music too. Timeless music. Anyway, thinking back to that business about stereo and mono, I’m reminded of the Jimi Hendrix album “Axis: Bold as Love.” The first piece, titled, “Exp,” is an amazing example of stereo at play. It’s very short: 1:56. You can give it a listen here.
Over the weekend, I read two articles somewhat related to one another: “How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters” (apparently some subscribers are losing track) in The New York Times, and “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” (If a tree falls in the forest?) in The New Yorker. Too many subscriptions, paid or free, and the emails begin to pile up like old zines on a rusty rack in an empty barbershop, and come to be treated like spam and deleted, at issue, at bottom, simply this: more than we have resources to profitably or efficiently manage. Millions of miles of Substack track and only one effort is nominated. And part of the success formula is still will you get picked up by a traditional publisher. But there are great novels precursors to Substack serials: Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope. Maybe serializing your novel no one hears on Substack is the theme of the Great American Novel.
Having finished “The Paris Library,” and in long pause from Substack, I perused my small shelf (24 and 1/2 inches, to be exact) usually full of still barely opened or half read or unread books, but also some to-read-again books (as over the last few years I seem more inclined to reread something I particularly liked in a previous reading life rather than risk something new to me that might leave a bad taste or go permanently unfinished, a yucky slice of green pizza). Today, I counted 25 books on the to-read shelf. I feel no urgency about reading from the shelf. Every so often (periodically, but without a period), I wipe it clean and replace the books with a little vase of a freshly cut sprig or two.
About that phrase above, “to be exact.” Am I the type of guy who says things like “to be exact”? I don’t want to be. I knew a guy who habitually talked about other guys, and he frequently introduced his comments or opinions using the phrase, “He’s the type of guy….” He was the type of guy who used the phrase, “He’s the type of guy.” Well, there you have it. And even if he didn’t use the phrase, you felt categorized nonetheless. You got typed, along with the other guy, for you are either the type or not the type, and if you’re not that type, you’re some other type. So, to correct matters, it’s best to avoid any such shorthand phrases, for they are cliched and unnecessary, like most comments or opinions, I hasten to add, this one included. In fact, and in any case, the shorthand ends up making things longer, as I think I’m in the process of showing here. Of course, once you start to strike through stuff, you might end up with nothing. Hang out the shingle, “No Post Today.”
From the shelf of the unread, I picked “Traveling Sprinkler” (Penguin, 2013) by Nicholson Baker. I like Nicholson Baker, though I’ve only read one of his novels, “The Anthologist” (2009), which I enjoyed. But I’ve read most if not all of his New Yorker pieces (but I’ve not seen him there in awhile). I purchased “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris some time ago. It’s a sequel to “The Anthologist.” It must have got wiped from the to-read shelf, not sure when, because it was just a few weeks ago I discovered it on another shelf and moved it back to the unread shelf. It had been sitting next to Baker’s “U and I: A True Story,” which twice I’ve tried to break into, both times unsuccessfully. “U and I” sat on the to-read shelf for weeks before I consigned it to a distant shelf. But I’ll get back to it, sooner or later, maybe.
Anyway, I like Nicholson Baker for several reasons. First, I very much enjoyed “The Anthologist.” I even did a bit of research, the basis for a fun post titled “Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Carr, and Googling Clothespins.” Second, Nicholson seems like a nice guy. For example, he seems to be one of the few fairly well known writers who if you follow them, on Instagram, for example, they’ll follow you back. Not that they actually check you out ever, but still, it’s nice to get followed back once in a while. I’ve not conducted a study on this, but I’m willing to guess that more than, say, 99 followers or following, assuming regular postings from either, and keeping up becomes an impossible challenge.
Baker’s latest appearances on Instagram tracked his efforts to draw, and then he came out with a new book, “Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art” (April, 2024). I’ve not read it, nor am I likely to add it to the to-read shelf anytime soon. Speaking of his wife, who’s an artist, Baker says: “She also draws with colored pencils and weaves fabric. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, she just does it.” I like that, not making “a big deal of it.” I saw it in the “Read sample” of “Finding a Likeness” at Amazon. Anyway, “Finding a Likeness” looks like a cool book, but I’m already out of room on the to-read shelf. Not that I have to self-limit to the 24 and 1/2 inches, but really, enough is enough.
And I’m enjoying “Traveling Sprinkler.” I’m only about a third of the way through it, through page 109, which ends Chapter 12, to be exact, so I probably shouldn’t try saying too much about it, until I finish it. It’s about the type of guy that’s largely unsuccessful in his career, though he doesn’t seem to have put that much into a career. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what his career is. He’s a poet of some sort, but I don’t think being a poet qualifies as a career. One reason you become a poet is to avoid a career, or to hide what you really care about from a career. Although there’s not much need to hide anything in a poem, given the unlikelihood anyone’s going to read it anyway, or if they do, understand it. He, Paul Chowder is his name, the narrator, started off as a musician, playing the bassoon. He gave up on the bassoon because he didn’t think he’d ever be good enough to make a fixed go of it. He sold his bassoon, a gift to him from his grandparents, for $10,000. I didn’t know bassoons cost that much. And that’s old dollars, before a tariff or two. He had a Heckel bassoon. He comes to regret having sold it. A major regret. I looked up bassoons just now. You can get a Moosman bassoon today for around ten grand. And if you don’t have that kind of dough (or a well endowed grandfolk) to blow on a bassoon, you now have two words to juxtapose in a poem. But what Paul wants now, and, in fact, has purchased, at Best Buy, no less, is a cheap acoustic guitar.
I didn’t know Best Buy sold guitars. Best Buy is where I bought the Chromebook I’m now typing on. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any guitars in the Best Buy where I purchased this laptop. And Paul wants to ditch poems for songs. You might begin to understand why I said I like Nicholson Baker and “Traveling Sprinkler.” You learn a lot of footnote worthy stuff reading Nicholson Baker, that the poet Archibald MacLeish was a founder of the CIA, for example (105-107). And Baker himself played the bassoon. So is Paul a stand-in for Baker? No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t work like that. That’s too easy. All I wanted to suggest is that what Paul says about bassoons is probably reliable. He says Debussy was a fan of the bassoon, but then anyone could look up something like that.
Paul reads a lot, and attends Quaker meetings, though he’s not a full member. When he was younger (he’s on his 55th birthday as the book opens), he wanted to be a composer. He listens carefully to popular music now, but he divulges he’s never really heard or paid attention to lyrics, but he does now. I’ve made a note of a few of the songs he mentions, that I’ve never heard of, thinking I might look for them on YouTube. Kind of funny, looking a song up now, since the book is now 12 years old, and I’ve never heard of the songs he mentions, and most popular songs don’t have a very long shelf life. But then why would I have heard of his songs? And even if I had, I don’t hear lyrics either, unless it’s a Patti Page or Hank Williams song. In most rock songs, the voice is just another instrument, part of the noise. So he goes on about songs and poems, and Paul gives us the good lines from some poems, so we don’t have to waste time reading the whole poem. There’s much so far, in the first 109 pages, that I relate to. Not that you need to relate to everything you read, or anything you read. It might be better if you don’t relate. Develop new tastes. I wish I’d have discovered Penelope Fitzgerald, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and Henry Green earlier, but sometimes you have to wait until you’re ready for something.
Paul clarifies the difference between the oboe and the bassoon, and I was reminded of the jazz appreciation class I took in college, and the instructor told the class the oboe was not played in jazz, no jazz oboe players, and I raised my hand and corrected her, pointing out that Yusef Lateef played jazz oboe. Turned out, she didn’t know that much about jazz, lectured from notes, said I was wrong about Lateef and jazz oboe. Yusef Lateef also played the bassoon. Paul probably knows that, or Nicholson Baker does, but they haven’t mentioned it yet, through page 109 of “Traveling Sprinkler.”
And so Paul buys the cheap guitar, takes a lesson, though it doesn’t sound like the lesson was much help, but he’s enthusiastic about making up some songs:
“Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then these chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration” (104-105).
That’s a perfect rebuttal to the academic’s put down of popular song lyrics when compared to poetry.
This is the fourth blog post in a row about playing the guitar, inspired by one of my sisters, who has asked me for some ideas to further her own playing. The guitar is a folk instrument, by which we mean knowledge of the instrument and techniques for playing it are passed along to others usually orally and informally. When the great guitarist Julian Bream attended the Royal College of Music in the late 1940s, the guitar was not admitted, being considered, well, a folk instrument, and not suitable for classical music study. Bream did much throughout his career to change the reputational plight of the guitar in the conservatoire, as did Segovia. Frederick Noad in the 1960s was another guitar teacher who did much to popularize methods for formal study without losing the folk flavors.
By method, we mean an incremental or developmental approach to learning that follows a purposeful outline. But most people pick up a guitar and learn a riff or two, a chord or three, and try to imitate what they’ve heard on some recording. If they chance to perform, in the living room or garage, the problem of sounding like that recording is overwhelming. If someone requests, for example, “Stairway to Heaven,” you might be able to pull off the first part on your used acoustic Silvertone, but you’ll soon realize you need either to make the song your own or invest in a mountain of electronic and drum equipment to attempt a sound like what folks hear on the radio and would have you replicate in your garage or bedroom.
The guitar for some time now has had the reputation of being the easiest of instruments to play poorly and the most difficult of instruments to play well (a perspective attributed to Segovia). Having not attempted the oboe or French horn, bagpipes or pipe organ, kazoo or spoons, we’re not sure, but about the guitar we know enough to say it’s easy to get to a certain point of technical frustration. When that happens, it’s often useful to, as Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” Then again, Thoreau didn’t play the guitar. He played the flute.
One way to simplify guitar is to play a melody. Keeping within the C scale of notes will also keep things simple (no sharps or flats). Take, for example, the opening notes to the song “Over the Rainbow.” Position your hand over frets 5 through 8, and play the melody from C (3rd string, 5th fret) to C an octave up (1st string, 8th fret). The next note you’ll find one fret down, a B (1st string, 7th fret). Then a G (2nd string, 8th fret). Then A (1st string, 5th fret), B (1st string, 7th fret), and C again (1st string, 8th fret). See if you can figure out the rest of the melody. You’ll be learning to play the guitar.
Having learned a method of limbering up the fingers, and of finding notes on the guitar, we’ll now take a look at how to make chords.
We saw that the C Major Scale of notes is useful because it has no sharps or flats. We’ll find that it’s particularly useful in other ways for the guitarist.
Let’s review the C Major Scale of Notes. C to C gives us an octave. We can number the notes. We’ll use the numbers to build chords:
| Numeric Note | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| Letter Note | C | D | E | F | G | A | B | C |
A major chord is built stacking the 1st, 3rd, and 5th of a scale. We can build a chord that begins with each letter of the C Major Scale. When finished, we’ll have the C Major Harmonized Scale of chords:
| Chord # | I | ii | iii | IV | V | vi | vii |
| Name | CM | dm | em | FM | GM | am | b-dim |
| Notes | |||||||
| 5 | G | A | B | C | D | E | F |
| 3 | E | F | G | A | B | C | D |
| 1 | C | D | E | F | G | A | B |
The C Major chord (I, or CM in the table above) contains the notes C, E, and G, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th steps of the C Major scale of notes. The D minor chord (ii, or dm in the table above) contains the notes D, F, and A. Why is it a minor chord? A minor chord is built also using the 1st, 3rd, and 5th steps of a scale, but the 3rd is flatted, moved a half step down, which, on the guitar, is one fret down. I thought you said there were no flats or sharps. Here’s where things get a bit tricky.
Let’s take a look at the C Chromatic scale of notes. This is a scale that shows all the notes, including the flats and sharps. A sharp is indicated with a # sign, and flats are indicated with a b. Note that a C# and a Db is the same note, called a flat when moving down and a sharp when moving up):
| 1 | 1#2b | 2 | 2#3b | 3 | 4 | 4#5b | 5 | 5#6b | 6 | 6#7b | 7 | 8 |
| C | C#Db | D | D#Eb | E | F | F#Gb | G | G#Ab | A | A#Bb | B | C |
The C Major scale of notes uses just 7 of the notes of the Chromatic scale above. As we have seen, those notes include: C D E F G A and B. What happened to the sharps and flats? We skipped over them. How do we know where to skip? That’s a given. To build a major scale, we skip over the 1#2b and the 2#3b, but notice there is no 3# or 4b, and there is no 7# or 8b. So we have notes that skip like this:
1 (skip) 2 (skip) 3 4 (skip) 5 (skip) 6 (skip) 7 8
C (skip) D (skip) E F (skip) G (skip) A (skip) B C
In other words, there is no 3# or 4b and there is no 7# or 8b. There is no E sharp or F flat and there is no B# or Cb in the C Major scale. If we want to flat the F, we get E. If we want to flat the C, we get B.
It might be useful now to take a look at the whole guitar fretboard (depending on your device, you should be able to slide right to see all the columns):
| Open Strings | 1st Fret | 2nd Fret | 3rd Fret | 4th Fret | 5th Fret | 6th Fret | 7th Fret | 8th Fret | 9th Fret | 10th Fret | 11th Fret | 12th Fret | 13th Fret |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| e | f | g | a | b | c | d | e | f | |||||
| b | c | d | e | f | g | a | b | c | |||||
| g | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | ||||||
| d | e | f | g | a | b | c | d | ||||||
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | a | ||||||
| e | f | g | a | b | c | d | e | f |
And here are the same notes using corresponding numbers:
| Open Strings | 1st Fret | 2nd Fret | 3rd Fret | 4th Fret | 5th Fret | 6th Fret | 7th Fret | 8th Fret | 9th Fret | 10th Fret | 11th Fret | 12th Fret | 13th Fret |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||||
| 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | |||||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | ||||||
| 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | ||||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Notice the 1 skips a fret to 2, but the 3 does not skip a fret to 4. Same for 7 to 1. The 1 corresponds to C, the 2 to D, etc.
If we start a major scale on D and use the skipping method of counting through the Chromatic scale, we get:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 1 | 2#3b | 3 | 4 | 4#5b | 5 | 5#6b | 6 | 6#7b |
| D | D#Eb | E | F | F#Gb | G | G#Ab | A | A#Bb |
If we build the D Major chord using the 1, 3, and 5 of the scale in the table above, we get a chord with the notes D (1), E (3), and F# (5). The D Major chord is built using the notes D, E, and F#. Taking the D Major chord of D, E, and F# but flatting the F#, we get D, E, F. The chord is now a 1, flat 3, 5 chord, or, a minor chord.
Now, back to the C Major Harmonized scale, which is built with the chords C Major, D Minor, E Minor, F Major, G Major, A Minor, and B Diminished. The chords are shown in the table as
| I | ii | iii | IV | V | vi | vii |
| CM | dm | em | F | G | am | b-dim |
It’s a bit tricky to say all of the chords contain no sharps or flats, since we saw that the D minor chord has a flatted third. But the flatted third of a D chord, as we’ve seen, gives us an F note, not an F#. You can work it out for the E minor and A minor, as well as the B diminished (which flats both the 3rd and the 5th notes of a scale). What you’ll find is that the chords as expressed in the C Major Harmonized scale appear to have no sharps or flats. They are built with “natural” notes, meaning not sharped or flatted notes.
| Chord # | I | ii | iii | IV | V | vi | vii |
| Name | CM | dm | em | FM | GM | am | b-dim |
| Notes | | | | | | | |
| 5 | G | A | B | C | D | E | F |
| 3 | E | F | G | A | B | C | D |
| 1 | C | D | E | F | G | A | B |
Here are some suggestions for practical application:
The Coming of the Toads 