Sciolism Rocks

Never count your lives. With my recent move to Publications, I’ve taken stock of the jobs I’ve had in the past. Not just at SAS, mind you, nor those throwaway jobs where you last only a couple of weeks. Real jobs, with real pay checks; jobs that make demarcations in your life. Here at SAS, I’ve mostly been a writer. Before that, I was a teacher, at the high school and college levels. I’ve also been paid as a movie projectionist (which I doubt is a real job anymore), a cooking instructor, a stand-up comedian, a stand-up comedian who got no laughs for several gigs in a row (unintentional), a close-up magician, and perhaps some others that I’m not willing to admit to just yet.

I spent some time this weekend with an old friend from one of those jobs playing Rock Band. For the uninitiated, the game involves staring at a TV screen with a plastic guitar “controller” around your neck, trying to push colored buttons in sync with the little colored chiclets that scroll down the screen, all 3-D-like, in tune with a rock-and-roll song that blasts in the background. After a brief eight to ten hours of this, pizza and adult beverages get involved as you contentedly congratulate yourself on your musical ability.

But I’ve been playing Rock Band guitar for many years, predating this game by more than a decade.

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(Warning : Links from song names open in iTunes so you can preview them)

What I mean by that, of course, is that I can play guitar and I cannot read music. Cartman (“Southpark”) may be correct when he says “playing real instruments is for old people,” but it’s more exciting and quite satisfying. Especially when you’re still single — you may not be a musician, but what the heck else do you have to do.

Rock Band partitions the complexity of its songs into “Easy”, “Medium”, “Hard”, and “Expert.” My Classic equivalents are:

Easy

Every book store has chord-based versions of popular music. Sort of an all-in-one keyboard-chord combo special, it’s something you can strum along to while asking your friends “Don’t you recognize it ? It’s Van Halen”. Here I show said simplification for 1984’s “Jump”. But you get past this kind of thing pretty quickly, unless singing “She’ll be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” for and afternoon appeals to you.

Medium

It’s a fact : guitar shops filled with pasty-skinned people in black are actually pretty cool places. Whilst in college, I stumbled into one where I discovered the miracle of Guitar for the Practicing Musician, a magazine that introduced me to tablature. Here’s my very first, impressively marked “$15 worth of guitar and bass transcriptions.”

Tablature is Rock Band for the 1980’s. Sheet upon sheet of music, showing you where to place your fingers, how to execute a palm mute, hammering on, pulling off, I mean the works. You’re at medium level when you can flawlessly Travis-pick your way through “Dust in the Wind” with a straight face.

Hard

I used to tune other people’s guitars for them, since I apparently had a good ear for that kind of thing. Fear not, though, as there are bunches of baubles that will bring you to perfect EADGBE every time. I think my iPhone will even tune a guitar these days.

EADGBE, the notes that sounds on non-fretted (“open”) strings, comes from the Spanish influence on our modern guitar. It never occurred to me until many years into my playing that this tuning wasn’t handed down from on high. In fact, many players don’t use this tuning at all, or at least deviate from it regularly.

The most elementary non-standard tuning arises wen you lower the lowest E-string down to a D. That so-called “Dropped-D” tuning is everywhere. “Embryonic Journey” (Jefferson Airplane), “Higher” (Creed), and my favorite, “Midsummer’s Daydream” by Triumph are good examples of the fullness that comes from this simple tuning change.

So once you can play a de-tuned guitar, you’re at the Hard level. Check out “Little Martha” by the Allman Brothers : tuned so that the strings play an E major chord when they’re open. Or any of a thousand Rolling Stones songs (“Honky Tonk Women”, “Start Me Up”). Not that I remember hearing any of *them* on the radio.

Expert

Now, produce something. Reading tablature is passé; writing your own is hep. I figured I hit Expert level in Rock Band Classic when I wrote the tablature for the acoustic version of “Big Love” by Fleetwood Mac, off their 1996 (almost-)unplugged The Dance album. Capoed at the 5t fret, Travis picked, and fast as lightning :

Unfortunately, I’ve probably forgotten more than I remember. And I’m spending my practice time tethered to a Wii.