pfgpowell: Bit by bit by bloody small bit this hopeless guitar player is becoming just a little less hopeless. Onwards and upwards (or whatever cliche you prefer, you know what I mean. Never stop trying, something it has taken me a little longer to learn than others)

NB Included in this post are some tunes which your browser should be able to play, though sometimes certain browser/OS combinations cannot. If you want to hear them but your browser is refusing to cooperate, try a different browser.

One thing I had long planned to do when I retired was to take piano lessons. But I haven’t. Instead I am taking guitar lessons. I would still like to be able to learn to read music and play the piano, but the fact is that if you spread yourself too thinly, you end up doing and achieving very little, and I had already long been playing guitar. Then there was the fact that a reasonably sized keyboard, let alone a full-sized upright piano would be hard to fit into anywhere in the cottaged down here on the edge of Bodmin Moor.

As it is my wife, a farmer’s daughter, hoards pretty much everything and is loth to get rid of anything, so space is at a premium. Then there is all the baby crap my daughter has introduced into the house - she splits her time between her and my grandchild living here, usually during the week, and at her boyfriend’s house 17 miles away at the weekends, mainly because he and his parents all work and the house would be empty during the day. (Incidentally, my heart really goes out to new mums with a young baby stuck several stories up in a high-rise tower block of flats, seeing and chatting to hardly anyone and locked into a routine of feeding and sleeping.)

If and when, of course, there would still always be time to try to get to grips with the piano, but I decided to learn to play the guitar properly. It’s not that I can’t play guitar - I can and I have been able to play for many years - it’s just that like so many other players, I got stuck in my groove, simply playing what I could play and not in the slightest bit pushing myself. So, of course, like everyone else stuck in a similar groove, you don’t really improve at all. Anyone reading this will who plays guitar will know what I mean: you do a bit of this for 20 or 30 seconds, then a bit of that, then a bit of t’other, then back to the first bit, and convince yourself you are playing guitar. Well, strictly, you are. But you’re not getting anywhere, and won’t ever.

I have been ‘playing’ pretty much since I was 14 and at boarding school. There was always a few guitars lying around to be picked up and strummed and it is as easy as pie to learn the two chords everyone learns first of all, because they are the same shape: E major and A minor. Then it is on to D major and D minor and - whizzo - before you know it you are playing a G major and then C major. The E, A and D are enough for you to bang out a passable blues, and the G, C and D will take you passably into folk and country music territory. And, of course, using just those simple chords, depending upon how much you practice, you could easily sound - and be competent.

The next step involved looking up the chords to various songs you wanted to play - in my case (52 years ago, remember) it was songs by The Beatles - and by and by discovering ‘bar’ (or ‘barre’) chords and the several variations which make music more interesting but which initially are not quite as easy to master as the simply major and minor chords - the major 7th being one of the most prominent.

Yet even religiously learning the chords to a song was hardly ever satisfying, particularly as I had an older brother around who was gifted in ways I could only dream of. When he played guitar, he sounded like someone playing guitar. When I did, I didn’t. (My brother also had a natural gift for drawing and a very good brain, so good that he could excel at whatever he turned his mind to. Sadly, all too often he couldn’t be bothered putting in the effort and also sadly he had some flaw in him which meant that - as I now know, but didn’t then - he was already demonstrating obsessive behaviour from an early age, and by the time he was 12 when we were living in Berlin, my parents took him to a child psychologist.

Over time, it simply got worse and worse and worse, so that from his early twenties on and until he died a few years ago at that age of 67, he was in and out of mental care, lived in doss houses and generally didn’t have a very happy life. The medication he had been taking for many years eventually brought on dyskinesia, which distressed him even more. RIP Ian.)

So there it was: I was ‘playing’ guitar after a fashion whenever I found one knocking around - there was a battered old acoustic in the flat I shared in 23, Castle St, Dundee, with Eric Clyne, Dave Pilkington and Nigel Selwyn which could never be properly tuned and which was so cheap and cheerful it was murder to play. But I never had a guitar of my own until I was living in Milan in 1973.

I can’t think why I finally decided to buy one, but get one I did (at a guitar shop near Milan’s central station if I remember), a bright orange ‘Spanish guitar’ style item which sounded awful but was within my modest price

range. The first thing I did was to remove the nylon strings and instal metal strings, which everyone who knows about guitars and his dog will tell you is a complete no-no: the guitar’s neck is simply not strong enough over time to survive the tension of metal as opposed to nylon strings and will warp. Well, mine didn’t.

Possibly the neck did warp, but I didn’t notice, and my playing still being of a rudimentary standard it’s a moot point whether I would even have noticed. Eventually, while living in Birmingham in the mid-1980s I also bought an electric guitar, a Les Paul-style shape, and a small amp. My playing, though, didn’t improve because I was still in the groove of playing this, that and t’other for 30 seconds or so and not pushing myself.

I moved to Cardiff in 1986, into a ground-floor flat in Richards Terrace off the Newport Road, and while I was in Germany visiting my sister (and not having checked before leaving whether or not the back door was locked), I was burgled and both guitars were stolen. I can’t remember when I next bought a guitar, a Fender Strat copy, but I was still living in Cardiff and it was there I took my first lessons. They were, however, a complete waste of time as I simply didn’t go the scale exercises my tutor set for me.

. . .

This is all getting a little long-winded and to be frank beside the point. So here’s a tune, Witchcraft played by Jimmy Bruno, and the kind of music I should like to play and at a standard - a bloody great standard - I should like to reach. I doubt I ever shall, of course, but there is no harm in trying and seeing just how far I can get.

Witchcraft - Jimmy Bruno

I have indeed made progress, for two reasons: first I am now regularly practising various exercises and also because I have a very good tutor, Paul Berrington in Padstow, who, though, has one tiny fault - he teaches too fast and by the end of my weekly hour my head seems about to explode with all the stuff he has told me. At first I was a tad despondent, though I didn’t tell him, and wondered whether I would ever get my head around any of it (it was the music theory I was interested in as much as becoming more dextrous).

But by and by some if it began to accumulate and in that odd way these things have, the more you understood, the more you were able to understand, and the more you understood, the more you were able to ask pertinent questions. Furthermore, all the - for my baffling - mystique of many jazz chords became far less baffling as I got to know more and more music theory. So, for example, if looking up the chords to a song I came across Bbm7b5 (B flat minor seventh, flat fifth, all I could do was to memorise ‘where the fingers went on the fretboard’ - and there are several shapes/inversions for every chord - and trust I would remember. I never did.

Now, such chords hold no fear for me, or rather less. It’s not that I understand music theory, more that I can now see how I might understand music theory and if that sounds a little too Irish for some, please bear in mind that your average Irishman or woman is more than a tad brighter than the rest of us.

Knowing the theory will not necessarily make you a better player. But practising the scales and particularly arpeggios does wonders for finger dexterity, muscle memory and finally - the Holy Grail - of playing instinctively what you want to play without thinking about it at all.

I have to be off now, so here are a few more tracks by guitarists I like. If I could become even a tenth as good I would be reasonably happy, though I suspect if I were to become a tenth as good, I would then try to become even better.

. . .

Here’s another favourite tune of mine, Lullaby Of The Leaves. I have five versions on iTunes, two guitar version, two horn versions and one by Art Tatum. This one is by guitarist Grant Green.