on piano, on guitar

happy halloween! a quick reminder of my upcoming show on 11/16—no tix necessary, just show up ✌🏼

for me, the primary difference between piano and guitar is thus: the piano governs the player, the player governs the guitar.

besides messing around in garageband on my dad’s macbook as a kid, my first real engagement with music began with piano lessons at age eight. these lessons were mandatory, and it wasn’t until high school that they were moderately tolerated.

back then, I was building a relationship with music based around the CDs and iTunes tracks I had just started to collect. pre-YouTube, the iTunes store had a page where you could watch just about any music video that was popular. at first, they were free; pretty soon, you were paying $4.99 to watch anything beyond a 30-second preview.

but the piano lessons continued independent of my technological experimentations, and when my family moved from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Charlottesville, Virginia, in the mid aughts, I needed to find a new teacher.

a few years removed from elementary school, I was also ready for a challenge. as such, it was a blessing when, after a couple lessons that missed the mark, I was referred to a local jazz pianist.

jazz brought to life an instrument I had previously conceived of as stodgy and restrictive. more so than cool, it made playing the piano interesting.

and the theory! there were progressions, alterations, augmentations, and resolutions. I struggled through 2-5-1 drills and can recall the first time I truly realized what a tri-tone substitution was.

more so than technical ability, I was driven to understand the rules that governed this complex musical discipline. no matter how deep I got, there was always another scale or framework to understand—I had never encountered a subject so vast and rewarding.

and so, in early high school, even as I was listening to Led Zeppelin and started to pick up a guitar for the first time in my life, I fell in love with jazz.

the theory of jazz music appealed to me because it represented the body of knowledge that underpinned the ability to improvise / make up music as you go.

a core tenant of jazz, the concept of improvisation had never occured to me prior—and here I was, faced with a canon and teacher that could unlock that ability. I don’t recall when I began genuinely applying myself to the piano, but at some point being a jazz musician became core to my identity. it made me feel capable in a way that very little else did, and I wanted to foster that feeling.

but jazz also had rules that I struggled to understand. at more advanced levels, cats tripped out into odd time signatures and bizarre harmonic concepts, listenability be damned. at some point, it became tough to hear.

also, not many of my peers shared my connection with the genre—this unpopularity, to a junior in college, carried an inconvenient stigma.

“the Beatles got chicks, man. AC/DC got chicks!”

my friends and I wanted to emulate the laid back stoner aesthetic of Dazed & Confused. we played volleyball to deep cuts off the Top Gun soundtrack, performing to one another as we prevailed to determine who could represent their idols to the greatest extent.

this era demanded a rock n roll aesthetic, so I picked the guitar up again and struggled through the chords I knew inside and out on the piano.

but another change was a-coming, as my friend since middle school Sam came back after graduating from the U to stay with me weekends during my senior year of college.

he turned me on to a group that specialized in live improvisation while ditching the constraints of jazz—one that turned psychedelic rock music, R&B, and even disco into vehicles for musical exploration.

the song was “Bertha”. the band was the Grateful Dead.

suddenly, I faced a new musical reality: it was possible to improvise without complexity as the ultimate purpose. you could just make music for fun.

equipped with this potential, I started to practice the guitar as much as I could.

mastery feels different depending on the instrument.

on the piano, each pitch only exists in one location—identical-looking octaves stack on top of each other all the way up the keys.

on the guitar, the same pitches are peppered across the fretboard several times.

identical inversions exist in different arrangements up and down the neck, which makes learning the guitar an exercise in building an image of the fretboard in your mind. smaller chord structures are combined to build systems that help you place the relative and absolute locations of each note.

this has several effects:

1. many consider it easier to read and compose written music on piano than guitar as the piano’s visual structure mirrors a musical staff

2. pianists can play 10+ voices at a time with their two hands—guitarists are limited to 6 and often play fewer

3. guitarists search for simpler theoretical means of progressing on guitar as advanced structures are tougher to visualize than on piano—this helped form the technical basis for the blues and thus rock n roll

other factors contribute to the experiential differences in playing the two instruments

• with the invention of the pickup, guitars gained the ability to be amplified. this led to the invention of styles that emphasized and modified that amplified sound

• the guitar is much smaller and doesn’t require complex mechanics to produce sound. this leads to guitars getting smashed quite often, while pianos can really only get lit on fire

• guitar notes can be bent, which has become a key stylistic component of many popular genres of music. acoustic piano notes cannot be bent

the result is that you have much more physical control over the guitar’s output than you do for the piano.

the guitar is wielded—strapped to your body in manner that is commonly recognized as phallic. the piano is demure and must be negotiated with. it will not move, at least not easily or without wheels.

this, ultimately, is why I am so appreciative of having learned the piano prior to the guitar. it takes a humility to play the piano and receive what it is willing to give you. the guitar is easy to dominate, and many turn to doing so for lack of more meaningful inspiration.

but rather than to trying to pass judgment, I want to emphasize that bringing the lessons of one to the other allow me to build a deeper relationship with both instruments.

playing the guitar helps me recognize the areas for malleability with the piano. playing the piano allows me to be gentle and respectful of the guitar. I consider myself fortunate that both instruments have played such an important role in my life.

want album updates? they’re happening on instagram for now. stay tuned!

“there is one rule in the garden above all others. you must give to nature more than you take.“ –Alan Chadwick