posted 06-10-2002 05:20 AM            

I've not heard of the Jackson-fractal thing, one thing is certain though, followers were never as successful because they were only copying style. This culture puts a high regard on the individual and originality, its aesthetic is based on it.

posted 06-10-2002 09:40 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by frailerdude:
"Fingers only discover what resonates to the mind."

....I believe that fingers discover whatever they happen to land on. If it just happens to resonate with the mind, the player remembers what the fingers just found and uses it in a later "composition." This discovery process is independent of the musical mind.

IMHO,
Steve

---

Really Steve -- do you really think the finest details of the smile on the Mona Lisa was in someone's mind before it was painted? I don't think so. You just couldn't paint that way otherwise you'd be a virtual xerox machine producing everything exactly as it was in your mind's eye (or ear). That would be awfully limiting to the creative process. I happen to think that every stroke of the brush caused the painter to adjust latter brush strokes until the entire compsoition met an obscure vision of compleition as deemed so by the painter. Every stroke created new decisions and perhaps even the inclusion of some visual "riffs" to tie together parts of the composition.

Likewise, every riff (aka musical sentence) casue the composer to er-think the next riff. I just don't think the creative process is that well planned -- it experimentation and inspiration combined. You can't have one without the other.

Again, we're not all Segovia, Pattis or Bensusan -- so in order for us to progress as performers (and composers) of acoustic guitar music we must first develop an ability to play, memorize, recall, play again and modify our guitar music using a vocabulary of riffs, melodies, harmonies, ryhthms, meter and registers.. and yes soul.

Is it noodling? Well at first, to some extent yes -- but as Larry suggested, the noodling leads to more cognitive and emotional activities of developing composition which in my mind is where the musical mind kicks in.

posted 06-11-2002 02:59 PM               

"I have never thought of myself as a guitar player. I prefer to think of myself as a guitar listener. I listen to sounds that surprise me, because I tune the guitar weird. I just play it and make a lot of mistakes and suddenly I hear something that I haven't heard before. It's not something that's difficult to play, because my fingers aren't really able to do anything particularly amazing. But because the guitar is tuned weird, I hear some voicing in it I haven't heard before. So that gets me thinking about where it could go. And I follow it. If there is someplace it needs to go to, and my fingers can't do it, I change the tuning again to make that chord easier, and I figure out how to play the rest of it accordingly. And little by little, the guitar plays for me a song that I haven't heard before"

Most would agree that Mr. Wilcox has composed some great tunes - not bad for a noodler hehe

the rest of the article can be found here http://www.fingerstyleguitar.com/html/wilcox.htm

FM

posted 06-12-2002 05:15 PM               

There are an literally an infinite number of ways to paint Mona's mouth (different colors, brush strokes, paint thickness, lip thickness, size of mouth, etc. etc.) 1000 painters would paint it 1000 different ways. NOT so with the Yellow Pages Method of guitar composition. Listen to original compositions in Open G or DADGAD and you'll hear the same riffs (or very similar ones) in compositions by different artists. Furthermore, most of these pieces instantly telegraph themselves as originals.

Why is that? Because unlike Mona's mouth, the fingers in noodle mode are selecting from a limited number of readily available notes. Naturally, if we just let our fingers do the walking we're all likely to sound a bit alike because we're all walking thru the same tuning turf. If, however, our musical integrity is in charge, our original creations will be very different because our musical essences are.

Mona's mouth would be more on point with guitar noodling if the artist were given a color-by-numbers template and told the he had a limited choice of colors and had to put them within the marked lines. Now that's riffing.

But the Mona example raises an important and very interesting issue and forces me to clarify my position. I do not submit that a piece of music should exist in toto in the musician's mind prior to the onset of the composing process. Did Leonardo da Vinci just whip out Mona's mouth "from within his artistic soul" in one feel swoop one fine day in 1506? Or did he experiment, white-out, re-do, again and again, searching until it was just right? I imagine it was the latter. Was he then "noodling?" Perhaps. But there was something he was craving and he gradually worked towards it through a process of experimenting with an infinite number of options. Da Vinci's noodling was in fact an impassioned search for the one perfect mouth that would resonate with his soul. That's fundamentally different from our latching onto one of the first riffs that emerges from our fingers during our Yellow Pages soujourns.

(Incidentally, according to Dr. Lillian Schwartz, Mona's mouth is probably da Vinci's own. http://library.thinkquest.org/13681/data/link2.htm. So maybe he just copied and this fine example we're using is historically unsound. But it's still a great example.)

As for David Wilcox, the above quote is indeed a great example of Yellow Pages in motion. I can't recall whether I've heard his original compositions. Curious what others think of them.

c.u.
steve baughman http://www.frailing.com

posted 06-13-2002 06:01 AM               

BTW Steve - I have to agree that the Wilcox approach is as close to the the Yellow Pages approach as I have seen -- he admits to using accidental note sequences as sources of inspiration -- having never heard Wilcox, I can't offer my opinion on whether his "musical soul/mind" contrives his compositions or whether it is pure riffing. But he admits to changing the guitar tuning often just to fit the physical limitations of playing the composition he has in his head -- so is he really disconnected? Hey who knows.

posted 06-13-2002 06:04 AM               

From millring: My best guess is that good composition may be arrived at by accident and experiment carefully and knowledgebly edited.

Creativity is not a linear process. “Ill start here and ends up there.”

It’s an iterative process. “I have a creative problem that wants to be solved. Let me try this. What works. What doesn’t work. Where does that take me. How does it fit with the creative premise. What else can I try. How do these disparaging elements come together. Has the concept been enriched. Is the product greater than the sum of its parts.”

posted 07-22-2002 07:20 AM               

I guess I am still quite surprised that you use the term "soul" so often. You are making an assumption about the player's desire, appreciation and love for the music which is unfair. Simply because the player isn't creating a pleasing and complex musical experience for you, you assume it's just "finger stuff" -- you can hear the riffs coming a mile away and it turns you off.

I have read that many of the great players try to play their guitars like some other instrument (hence internalizing the affects most difficult to produce on the guitar) and thus I agree with your suggestion to immerse yourself by listening to the (non-guitar) music genre you wish to express.

But a player who chooses to use his acquired technique/style (as developed/limited as that may be) to interpret Celtic melodies in a manner other than the traditional Celtic style has not disconnected his "soul" from the effort, he's simply chosen a different style.

To me, in your defense of this position (in this thread and in the article), you seems to have made value judgments against and/or in favor of certain guitar music. And it's an awfully precarious position to defend since there's room for a wide variety of styles in this genre of music. And its all got soul. Every bit of it.

Frankly its the kind of intolerant editorial I read too often by the editors of Guitar Player Magazine.