How the Guitar Made Me Lazy as ****

Or: How I Took My Guitar’s Help to Be Lazy

I haven’t always been playing the guitar. It’s only been about 9 years since I started. Before that, I was singing. I never realised back then, but I was paying a lot of attention to the music while singing. I was always focused on hitting the right notes, constantly being on my toes with the pitch and diction. I was controlling many aspects of my voice to get the music out correctly.

This was not to be the case with the guitar.

The guitar had frets. My only responsibility was to tune 6 strings. Once I had done that, I could play any note by just holding the right fret.

Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about. Don’t worry, I can explain. Usually, the guitar has 6 strings and each of these vibrate to produce sound. Each string vibrates freely between the bridge and the nut. Don’t worry about the terms. The important thing to note is that the string vibrates between two fixed points. If we want to increase the pitch to play a note we have in mind, we hold the string at the corresponding fret. This makes the string vibrate freely between the bridge and the fret. The smaller effective length increases the pitch.

Here’s the problem with guitars, especially the inexpensive ones I could afford: they have intonation issues. Good intonation means having the correct note play at every fret. In many guitars, the intonation is not perfect right out of the box and by the time you’re at the 6th fret, you’re either flat or sharp in pitch.

This can happen for multiple reasons and each problem has its set of fixes.

A temperature change can cause the neck’s wood to warp and change the effective length of the string’s vibration. The fret distances may have been set for a slightly different effective string length, so this throws previous calculations out the window. Usually guitars have a truss rod to bring the neck back into shape. This is very handy when you travel a lot with your guitar.

The frets may not have been placed at the right distances to start with. This happens with really cheap guitars. My solution is to never buy such guitars. I’d rather wait and save up for a better guitar.

The bridge may be misaligned. The bridge is on the body of the guitar and is one of the fixed ends for string vibration. If it’s slanted or if its height is not what it should be, there could be some intonation issues. Changing the bridge orientation or making grooves in the bridge can both help fix intonation problems caused by this.

There are more reasons for intonation problems but let’s not allow boredom to burden us.

The bottomline is: intonation problems can happen.

When I’m singing, it’s a somewhat more fluid process in my head. You just hit a note. If you don’t get it right, you vary the pitch till you’re singing the right note. The process of modifying pitch feels the same when you’re in a comfortable range.

With the guitar, you have frets. Frets turn the continuous spectrum of notes into discrete pitches. Bending the strings introduces some of the continuity of pitches but you can’t bend a string indefinitely, it will snap or you’ll hurt yourself (or both). What you have is twelve discrete notes with some room for increasing the pitch of each note by bending.

I was used to controlling the pitch to quite an exact degree when I was singing. On the guitar, it felt more like pressing buttons. This made the process of hitting a note very simple. On the other hand, it made me lazy.

I began to see pitches as fret positions. I began to think in terms of discrete pitches instead of being aware of the incredible variety of pitches I had at my disposal. The 12 equal-tempered notes became my world. I lost all the notes in between.

I’m not swimming in money and extravagance, so the guitars I bought were never the top-of-the-line kind. They all had some degree of intonation error no matter how hard I tried to correct the problem. Human that I am, I began to adjust to the bad intonation. I began to accept notes that didn’t sound pleasant.

I lowered my standards of pitch. If the 12th fret sounded too sharp, I told myself that it was alright and it wasn’t that big a difference. This led my sense of pitch to suffer for the next few years.

My voluntary adjustment to wrong pitches made my tuning skills worse as well. When I tuned the 6 strings, I wouldn’t always get it pitch perfect. My overall skill with sound was at an all-time low.

Only when I began learning to play the cello did it occur to me how many more pitches I had forgotten about. Also, now that I was playing an instrument without frets, I could make microtonal changes to pitch. I wasn’t stuck with 12 notes. I had the gift of many.

I saw how my ability to identify resonance had diminished to the point where I was finding it hard to hit the right notes on the cello. I was indifferent to small changes in pitch, thinking of a slight modification as sounding the same to my ears.

When I began learning Dhrupad singing, I was made even more aware of how much of my pitch sense I had forsaken for the sake of convenience. No wonder my singing was labelled atrocious in the 4 years leading up to that point. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the ability to sing the right notes. I had just become so used to singing approximations of notes that I felt a slight change in pitch was no big deal. In Dhrupad, the entire spectrum of notes is used quite thoroughly. Microtonal shifts in pitch carry great emotion and meaning in a Dhrupad concert. Precision is a much-needed skill.

Learning to sing again, I became more conscious of the notes I was singing. I had to imagine notes exactly in my head and reproduce them without error. After my heedless approach to playing guitar, this was definitely a challenge.

Another musical ability I had let wilt was my tonal ability. When I sing, I have to consciously think of my tone. Random, unintended fluctuations in tone can distract the listener from the meaning in my musical expression. I had ignored the tonal aspect of the guitar for many years.

It took a lot of listening to understand why I sounded weak compared to a seasoned guitar player. The guitar is not about just plucking a string so it sounds out a note. There is so much more I can do. I have the ability to control the tone by changing my way of plucking, holding the fret differently or even changing the alignment of the guitar for a different resonance. I should be singing with the guitar. I need to give it life with my music. I need to breathe notes into it, not just draw them out with robotic actions.

I had become an inert guitarist from an active music learner.

The guitar didn’t do this to me. I did. I approached the guitar with a lazy ear and ironically, that’s exactly what I got after years of this habit.

I have a classical guitar and a fretless guitar now. Though I hardly play the fretless one, it’s made me much more aware of the pitch variation that is possible, and I apply this knowledge to my classical guitar playing.

This is how I approach the guitar now:

This is how I approach the guitar now:

• Imagining notes exactly and holding them there. Approximations of notes won’t do. I need to imagine notes exactly as I want them to sound.
• Tuning perfectly. Without absolutely perfect tuning, the guitar will not be able to produce the notes you want
• Being aware of every single note as I play. It isn’t enough to think of the guitar as an external, mechanical contraption for making music. It is a voice, and a voice is nothing if it can’t truly sing. Singing requires awareness of every single note.
• Being sensitive to flaws and defects. Intonation problems can be there at any point of time. I need to correct them as soon as I hear it. I can’t sit idle and adjust myself to bad intonation.

If you’re experimental enough and you have movable frets on your guitar, or are skilled enough to correct intonation errors with bending, you still need to be aware of every note you produce. To give an analogy, if you could avoid slurring while speaking, you would. Similarly, avoid bad intonation in your mind, because you can.

Listen, and you will sing.

_/\_

Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.

Improve your sense of rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) as you read about my journey through the world of rhythm. How’s that for combining a lesson and a story into one? :D

Get a better grasp on notes with my 3-part How I learned to speak with notesseries: Melody, Harmony and Connection

You might even find these interesting:
The Sound of Water, The Mirror in the Music and The Voice of a Story

You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh