This was a long process for me as it was totally different than other things I've done with music and being close to 50 probably wasn't helping things either. So weeks went by before I had the fingering down for all the sections, now it was just a matter of getting the solo section up to speed so I could play the song with a backing track at tempo. My wife and daughter heard me playing one day and were really enthusiastic as to what they heard! I was beaming! I was beaming until... I went online and saw a live version of Eric Johnson play "Cliffs of Dover" with a long improv intro. When he got to the tune and started playing, it dawned on me that although I was playing something that Eric Johnson "had" played, I sure wasn't in the ball park as to "How and What" he can play. The light went out and the journey was over. I realized my effort to "prove to myself" was not as fulfilling as I had expected. After all, there are kids on YouTube that can play this tune. However, I learned an invaluable lesson! With enough effort and serious study, there's nothing that you or I can't do! I haven't played the song since that day and that's fine. But, this exercise helped me so much in overcoming challenges in music, so much so that years latter it would be a big part of why I accepted the challenge to take on the bass guitar anthem "Teen Town" which I covered on the Megatar.
Check out my cover of Teen Town here: Teen Town cover by Pete Gonzales on Megatar
Covering "Teen Town" by Jaco Pastorius, was the same process as covering "Cliffs of Dover", but this time I had to add "Two hand tapping" in addition to learning how to play the bass solo with the accompanying chord in the right hand. Now there are plenty of lessons on learning to play "Teen Town" for sure, however tapping adds some new challenges like getting the proper "Attack" with just one hand and playing notes that would have been open strings as fretted notes when playing Touchstyle guitar. Unlike "Cliffs of Dover", as I approached the full tempo of the tune, some fingering wasn't working at faster speeds so I did one of the hardest things I've had to learn. How to Unlearn fingering! If your a guitarist, you know how difficult it can be to retrain your fingers to not follow a "pre-learned" pattern. The minute you get stressed or fatigued all those old fingerings just show up! So with the fingering changed and the tempo getting much closer to the recorded speed of the tune. I found other sections needing new fingering as well! Oh brother! So there I was once again relearning portions of the tune that I've been playing for almost 2 months.
The final push!
Unlike, "Cliffs of Dover" I had planned on recording "Teen Town" as a video from the start. So I had the tune worked out and felt great about it, I setup the umbrella lights and blue screen and got ready to record all my hard work finally. Well... I got everything set, I hit record and then it all fell apart! Argh!
What happened? The intro was great then the verse blew it, then the intro and verse was great but the ending was terrible. On and on it went so after about 30 takes I said. STOP!!! I had to think about what was going on! So when the camera's were off It sounded fine.. hmm.. Ok, so I went to the internet again and searched on "learning fast guitar solos etc.." Found it!!! So the masters seemed to concur on one thing, if you're going to master playing fast you need to be able to actually play it faster than what you're going to use in actual performance, that way there's no struggle! Eureka, that was it!!! So "Teen Town" is recorded at about 128 beats per minute so I actually began practicing the tune at tempos up to 140 bpm. When this was sounding good not "great" I went back to 128 and it was sounding great. So I setup once again about a week later and recorded the video on my channel in about 10 takes. It still wasn't as smooth as when the cameras were off, but it was time to wrap this up and move on.
So what did I gain from these efforts? Well, I feel like "Learning new things" is always a good thing and these efforts have proven to me that learning specific tunes doesn't make you a master, so to be a true master there's more. Right? Wait, perhaps to a degree there might be "less"? What if the difference in the grand scheme was the mastery of the little things or better yet mastery of the individual components that make up the language of music. Components like Scales, modes, harmony, intervals and chord structure. But knowing what tones make up scales and chords is not enough, we need to be able to hear them and use them in a manner that creates true music and not just rehearsed patterns. That's why Eric Johnson can take his tune and add 5 minutes of free improv over the tune with ease. When I watch lessons by the masters like Joe Satriani and others they have such a great understanding and feeling for the components of music that I can't think there's a magical formula or bloodline for playing great just true mastery of all the parts.
Of course, its easy to recognize these items but yet another thing to actually be able to do them! So now I ask myself how bad do I want it? Every time I want to throw the instrument out the window I need to remind myself of where I once was and how far I've come. Its never fast enough for us but then again what great thing happens in overnight? There's a saying.. "It takes about 6 years to become an overnight success"!
Well I have at least 4+ years before I hit that milestone I guess? Time to get to work!
