During the last few weeks, I have rediscovered my love of blowing hours aimlessly playing the guitar. And in so doing, I had a thought about how simple technologies are going to create a super class of guitar maestros in the near future.
When I was in high school, I had to learn how to play songs the hard way. Playing songs on repeat while trying to work out the parts. Or I would shell out hard-earned cash for sheet music with tabs. Or most likely I would beg a friend to teach me. As a result, it was hard for me to build a growing repertoire of songs that were challenging but fun to play. However, in my most recent phase of music playing, whenever I hear a great song that I’d like to learn, I fire up YouTube and search for “how to play ______ on guitar” and I usually have a number of video tutorials to choose from. This has made it infinitely easier to learn licks and riffs that I never could figure out on my own. In the past four weeks, I have gotten better at guitar than I did in the past six years. That is exciting. That is disruptive. And that makes me excited to see what kids who grow up with this infinite supply of free lessons make of it.
Here’s one video that I recently watched while learning how to play Neil Young‘s “The Needle and the Damage Done.”
Needle and the Damage Done Tutorial
I have had my Mac for two years. And I have been playing guitar and bass for fifteen. And while I’m not a programmer or a professional musician, I certainly think about music and technology a lot. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how my own playing and rudimentary songwriting has been influenced by technology. I’m not talking about electronic music here. I’m just talking about how different musical technologies have changed the types of music I write even though I’ve never done more than write guitar and bass parts for very straightforward rock songs. Here are three songs – in the order that I wrote them – that provide a visceral illustration of how my exploration of Apple‘s Garageband has evolved my songwriting. Keep in mind that these are more sketches of songs than real complete works.
1. This brief snippet is a simple chord progression with a few different parts all recorded with the same guitar. None of them have any loops nor any effects. Total simplicity.
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2. This song shows me learning how to add electronic sounds to approximate other instruments that I didn’t have laying around, such as drums and organs. However, all the guitar sounds I used had no effects on them.
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3. This song snippet is me going nuts. It’s very layered with weird sounds but every single sound (except for the drum loop) was created by an acoustic guitar and then sent through some sort of effect processor.
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I can only imagine the strange sounds and songs I’ll be writing in the coming months.
