Robert Johnson is considered to be one of the greatest blues performers of all time. His hits include “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” which has become a blues standard. Part of his mythology is a story of how he gained his musical talents by making a bargain with the devil. This story has been reused and retold many times as a part of rock mythology. Johnson was born on May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. As a singer and guitarist, Johnson is considered to be one of the greatest blues artists ever, but this recognition came to him largely after his death.
During his brief career, Johnson travelled around, playing wherever he could. The acclaim for Johnson’s work is based on the 29 songs that he wrote and recorded in Dallas and San Antonio from 1936 to 1937. These include “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” which has become a blues standard. His songs have been recorded by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. Johnson came to the attention of many musicians and won over new fans with a reissue of his work in the 1960s. Another retrospective collection of his recordings released in the 1990s sold millions of copies.
But much of Johnson’s life is shrouded in mystery. Part of the lasting mythology around him is a story of how he gained his musical talents by making a bargain with the devil: Son House, a famed blues musician and a contemporary of Johnson, claimed after Johnson achieved fame that the musician had previously been a decent harmonica player, but a terrible guitarist—that is, until Johnson disappeared for a few weeks in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Legend has it that Johnson took his guitar to the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61, where he made a deal with the devil, who retuned his guitar in exchange for his soul.
Strangely enough, Johnson returned with an impressive technique and, eventually, gained renown as a master of the blues. While his reported “deal with the devil” may be unlikely, it is true that Johnson died at an early age. Only 27, Johnson died on August 16, 1938, as the suspected victim of a deliberate poisoning or perhaps congenital syphilis. Several movies and documentaries have tried to shed light on this enigmatic blues legend, including Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? (1997) and Hellhounds on my Trail (2000).
/harry
Hello everyone.
Sorry it’s taken me so long to get to ‘I’. I think that improvisation is perhaps the most scary thing for most beginners. I have very few students who pick it up right away and the vast majority struggle to play things without at least some kind of boundaries to think about. With that in mind I generally start people off with a couple of very basic scale shapes. Starting off with the pentatonic and moving on to major and perhaps minor too if they’re using the first two usefully.
I also find that chucking people in a little bit can help. I like to set a couple of rules for each jam session during a lesson and I follow the idea of the power of three for these rules. People like choice but not too much choice, and things like “only use the higher three strings” or “try and stick to three note phrases ” helps to stop the budding Hendrix from becoming overwhelmed with the sheer amount of choice the guitar offers.
Once the student is comfortable with these basic ideas, we introduce techniques such as bending and slurs into proceedings. While these may not be unknown to the player, as they may have featured in songs that they have already learnt, it’s one thing to know there’s a slide coming up and put it in the song and quite another to plan for one in your own solo on top of note choice and rhythm and then execute it.
Speaking of rhythm, it’s often said that the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do, if not more so! I try to get my pupils to think in terms of speech. I find the best, most memorable solos sound like someone singing. Albeit someone singing very fast sometimes! Many of my students don’t have the confidence to sing out solos as practice but 99% of them have no trouble talking to me so I ask them to think of how they phrased the last question they asked and put notes to it. I find this is a speedily effective way of introducing thinking about rhythm as well as pitch.
For more advanced students there’s a whole raft of things out there such as tapping, sweep and economy picking and theory such as modes and arpeggios that can be applied to solos. Picking which is a favourite and working on it is the trick, trying to master everything at once is almost always going to lead to being a jack of all trades and not fully understanding any of them. One of my preferred avenues here is to take the humble pentatonic and work at it being not just a one or two box scale but extending it all over the finger board in as many keys as possible. Soon changes people’s views of it, I can tell you!
Any ideas for “J”?
/harry
Harmonics are musical notes created by making certain overtones louder or quieter on a guitar string. Most commonly this is done by lightly placing a finger on a string at a nodal point of one of the overtones at the moment when the string is driven. If you haven’t got the time to read an depth article on physics then basically a node can be thought of as the ends of the string. When we change the location of the ends by fretting the string and artificially shortening it for a time, the node moves and the pitch we hear changes.
Damping the string at a given point kills off all the overtones that have a node near the damped point. Leaving the remaining overtone with the lowest pitch to dominate the sound. Other harmonic techniques include pinching the string with the picking hand, tapping with the same hand and the use of feedback and tools such as an Ebow to vibrate certain portions of the string and their attendant overtones.
Learning to play harmonics can be difficult. Those with smaller fingers (young kids) can struggle to get the hang of pressing down to fret notes. Then when you tell them to touch the string more lightly, getting the hang of this new feeling can be a struggle. There can be many uses of pinched harmonics in rock music so there reaches a time where this can be more of a focus. The angle of the thumb has to change significantly for this technique and it is a difficult one to master. Not least because for each fret and each string the best position to pinch with the picking hand changes.
No substitute for practice!
/harry
One of the many challenges I fact as a guitar teacher in our age of modern music consumption methods is trying to get kids to listen to music as an activity on its own let alone listen to music with guitars in it. It isn’t that there isn’t the music out there and in fact it is even easier to get your ears on it than ever before. But the simple fact of the matter is that putting on a CD or heaven forfend an LP and just listening to it really is a thing of the past. Music is something that goes in films, in games and on the TV, something to be clicked on and listened to while you watch the video.
One of the best weapons in this battle for me is computer game music. Once you get to a certain stage of your life playing the guitar (and I am generalising here) you tend to be the same sort of person who enjoy video games. A lot of the teenagers I teach spend more time playing on the house Xbox (other gaming consoles are available) than actually practising the guitar. There was a time in my life where I did too!
If you can get the two to combine you’re halfway there. Role Playing games, and especially the ones set in a classic fantasy location are the best. A lot of them make use of, if not guitars, then plucked stringed instruments of one kind and another to produce both themes and ambient background music. If you can turn up to a lesson with something that reminds your student of the time they defeated a large and hungry dragon, they’re likely to have fun playing the music.
And if they have fun, I’ve done my job right
H is next. I’ll do my best not to just write a post about myself…. No promises though.
/harry