Letting I Dare Not Wait Upon I Would

So here’s some songwriting notes. With capital letters and quasi-justified right margins for variety. Gaff My Wheel I play now in “First Position”… the usual D, E, and A chord every beginner learns… and in two different sets of three-string-barre variants. This puts my highest note three octaves above my lowest. (On the guitar. On vocals I’m a pure banger with no theory whatever. Yet.)

I’m quite proud of my recent development as a guitarist, so I’d better admit it right away. Still a beginner of course… but now with, to name only the most obvious thing, a lot more chords to choose from.

The first thing was to understand that First Postition Chords could be “slid up the neck”: an “E” chord, played with fingers 234 instead of the usual 123 (for example), can be moved “up” (higher notes; “down” to the untrained eye) the neck by one fret to produce three notes of an F chord; one then adds a “barre” with finger 1 by simultaneously depressing all six strings to get the full six-string F chord.

Two more frets gives G; two more gives A; so on (one somehow knows that A-BC-D-EF-G-A is in effect… a picture of a piano is helpful…). Likewise for A chords: A-plus-one is B-flat etcetera etcetra.

My friend “Henry” plays plenty of both of these types (E-plus-n and A-plus-n) but can’t be persuaded to take the trouble to learn how to compute their names; I consider this pretty amusing but expect it’s also pretty common. He can’t break a phrase down either: “Here: just do this” being about as good as it’s gonna get. This “resistance to theory”, as I here propose to call it, hits a note I’ve been blogging about recently.

Anyhow. That’s the bit I’ve “always” known… since the 70’s most likely. Somewhere in the 80’s I’ll’ve added in what might as well be marked as the First Exercise in my designed-on-the-fly (and still-in-progress) Learn The Neck method. To wit. Take a C chord (with fingers 234) and raise it five frets. Now instead of a barre at the fifth fret, depress only the third string (at the fifth fret). Call this “open C-form E”; by “open” I mean to refer to the fact that both E strings… the highest and lowest on the guitar… are to be strummed. The rest of this exercise should now be easy to describe. Open E-form A and Open E-form B. That’s it. You can do a twelve-bar blues with these. You can stay up late doing it for hours.

I just had this feeling that it would be a good idea not to let this pinkie finger go to waste; these chords looked like a good way to make it stronger. I went out of my way to a certain extent to use more of the harder C-form chords as I developed this routine. I think I’ll have guessed well. (Full disclosure: C7-form chords use all four fingers too but I learned those without conscious design. There’ll be much else that I’ve forgotten.) Anyhow, all this around the time my first marriage busted up. Never went much past it until last summer. Started working out a bunch more C-form stuff… again, essentially in the form of exercises-designed-as-such (each is of course understood also to be a song-waiting-to-happen; it’s an exercise until I start writing down lyrics). But it’s the three-string barre stuff that’s the real stylistic breakthrough here. And that came slowly and as it were by accident, mostly via “Ringing the Neck”.

That, and “Pinkie’s Blues”. That one’s a blast too.