Congregational Guitar

I recently realized that I don’t post a lot about music here, though I often do post songs and tunes. It’s odd, given how important music is in my life, though my mode of engagement with it has changed over time. In the last few months, I’ve spent considerable effort picking up guitar, mainly so that I could accompany myself when leading Shabbat and holiday services. The guitar I chose, a Gretsch resonator model from their Roots series, is easy for me to play because of the round neck, and sounds loud and twangy even if I’m not using amplification (honestly, given how much of a beginner I am, if there’s one microphone, I’d rather it caught my singing than my guitar!). Similar guitars were played in gospel churches a hundred years ago; it’s a proper congregational instrument.

You’d think a guitar would be a practical instrument to pick up when young; there’s an instrument lying around anywhere you go, and it’s fun to play and sing with others. But I started off on flute and organ as a kid, played flute and keyboards in various ensembles and bands, and started playing a drum kit last year. This was so much fun! I even got to play drums with a klezmer band last year. So, I’m a rather late arrival to the stringed instrument world, and I’m definitely not a natural. My current learning curve is all about accompanying myself with confidence without looking at my hands. Out of the triangle “sing well, engage with the audience with your face and presence, play the right chords” I can usually get A and B or A and C, but not a perfect combination of all three, and that is where strumming in the dark comes in (really!). It’s already much better than it was before the high holidays, which were a big lift in a variety of musical and liturgical aspects. Now that the dreaded September-October extravaganza is behind me–I singlehandedly organized and led the Simhat Torah music/dance/art/Torah/joy event–I can think a bit more about what playing guitar has taught me about music so far.

My first observation is that, perhaps by contrast to other instruments I’ve played, guitar playing makes it obvious why certain songs are harmonically set the way they are. Take, for example, one of my all-time favorites, R.E.M.’s Man on the Moon:

You’ll notice that the stanzas alternate between C and a special permutation of D, which sounds very sophisticated and elegant–until you realize it is a choice driven as much by comfort as by harmony: the hand keeps the exact shape of the C chord and slides two frets in. The more I play songs with chords that seem like genius choices at first glance, the more I notice that the harmonies are driven by hand position mechanics.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that a perfect pitch is a liability for guitar players almost as much as it is for singers. When playing flute, one notices that each note has its own color, and of course the mechanics of sound production with your lips have to change with each note, so you become acutely, and sometimes painfully, aware of why certain songs are set in certain keys. But when you sing, you need to be flexible, for example when you’re singing a baroque aria with an orchestra tuned to 415 as opposed to singing the same song a half-tone higher, with a piano tuned to 440. What the capo–a device that clamps on your strings to create a new set point for the guitar–does for you is liberate you from the need to think about scales. Many simple songs, and thankfully lots of traditional Jewish tunes fall into this category, have a limited number of chords in them, and the path of least resistance for a slacker song-leader is to pick the fingering that presents the least challenge and just use the capo to adjust the instrument to a key that congregants are comfortable singing in. To do this, however, you have to liberate your mind from the anchor of a particular key, and this is where perfect pitch is the enemy.

Third, I’ve noticed that I feel vastly more comfortable finger picking than I do playing with a pick. A friend once told me she read a study that posited that some people work better with tools while others work better with their bare hands. The closest thing I’ve been able to find is this article, which looks at the use of tools and the role it plays in motor skills. They argue that using tools requires “distributed cognition”–which is not just about the physical dimensions of a tool but also the interaction between the tool and the object that it is being used on. To the extent that this insight relates to what my friend found, I have felt all my life that I was better suited to the second category (bare hands). Even when knitting and crocheting, I do a lot of the yarn manipulation by hand, and I prefer freehand drawing to working with stencils. The pick-to-strings feel is something I’m still working on quite a bit–not for lack of trying, and certainly not for lack of clear explanations and demos from my fabulous teacher, Rob Snavely, who helped me so much. If I’m still a clumsy beginner guitarist, I’m certainly a thousandfold less clumsy and beginner-y than I was before I started learning with him, and if anything is a testament to the value of lessons, it’s the few summer months when I worked on rock songs and saw steady improvement.

Once my schedule opens up a little (it’s been a tough couple of months and the next four will be just as tough) I hope to get back to a few things I enjoy, including guitar lessons and swimming practice.