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Here is a transcript of the video:
You may have wondered why some guitar players and teachers go on about the need to learn to improvise. Well, the main reason I teach improvising skills is that, in my view, learning to improvise is the best way to become a musician.
Notice that I differentiate between a person who can play a number of things on the guitar - no matter how competently they can do that - and someone who has genuinely become a musician. For me, a musician has the capability to do three things that a mere guitar player may not necessarily be able to do.
A musician can Compose music. They can predictably put together a series of chords, a melody and rhythm to create pieces of music that sound pleasing to the ear. A Guitar player may well be able to do this by trial and error. Most of us start on the road to song writing, simply by experimenting with how different chords and tunes sound together. But a real musician can do this predictably because he or she understands the relationship between these elements.
The second skill I expect a musician to display is the ability to transcribe music. To be able to listen to a piece of music and write down the chords, melody and rhythmic construction of that music.
The third skill is to be able to improvise.To successfully create alternative melodies, licks, riffs and rhythm guitar figures over a given bass line or chord sequence.
These three skills are intimately connected to each other and can, in fact, usefully be viewed as three aspects of the same skill.
Musicianship, in a nutshell then, is simply having a practical understanding of music and being able to apply it.
To be able to improvise on the guitar, you need to have a few scale patterns, chord shapes and arpeggio fingerings under your fingertips. And you need a degree of understanding of how these things work together and to have developed the knack of careful listening so that you can put all this into practice when you create improvised fills or rhythmic embellishment or come up with a complete solo to a piece of music.
Once you have these skills developed, composing music is relatively easy because composing is about applying exactly the same set of skills, but without the pressure of having to do it on the fly.
And once you can compose, you can transcribe. Because transcribing music is simply composing done backwards - reverse-engineering of music that others have composed.
This relationship between Improvising…Transcribing…and Composing…forms a triangle that we can put to use to develop our own musicianship. I like to call it the …Magic triangle of Musicianship!
It’s magical because the work you do in any of these three areas automatically helps improve the other two.
For most of us though, working on developing Improvising Skills is the easiest and the most fun of the three. So that’s why I think that is a great place to start focusing your efforts. Once you have learnt to improvise using a few different scale, chord or arpeggio patterns, and developed your understanding of music theory to the point where you have some grasp of how chords and scales relate to melody and rhythm in music, then I recommend having a go at transcribing.
Working out the chords and notes someone else has composed, gives you insight into the art of song writing. So I advise that as the focus for the third stage in your quest for musicianship.
This Magic Triangle lies at the heart of the design of the Secret Guitar Teacher Website so, by following our step by step courses you will be developing as a real musician whether you like it or not!
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