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Topic: The fog goes away...slowly... |
Jörg Berger
From:
Germany
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Posted 7 Jul 2018 2:31 am |
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I started off PSG about two years ago with almost zero knowledge in harmony theory. Playing guitar for decades I got away with that. I soon recognized that without a certain amount of musical theory it will be very hard getting anywhere on PSG. So I dug in some books and sites.
I'm so glad it did that. More and more I began to reveal relationships on PSG. The biggest (small) recent breakthru came when I started to study all the triads in one position with no bar movement - pedals and levers only- and can play those chords slow but fluentely. My guitar playing benefitet also. I don't have to be worried anymore if someone is calling for a certain chord. Most of the time the required chord, whose name formerly sounds odd to me, is only a fret away.
What were your breakthru's over the years? |
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Fred Treece
From:
California, USA
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Posted 7 Jul 2018 10:02 am
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Glad you are making progress. It is a very satisfying feeling.
I’m in my 2nd year also. The breakthroughs are consistent as long as I practice efficiently and regularly, and they are related to technique mostly - shifting the positions, picking & blocking, bar handling, posture, foot & leg coordination. Specifically, the chord and harmony grips seem more natural now and I am able to switch right hand positions more accurately. Also, single-note melodic lines are working their way into my solo ideas and are sounding cleaner.
I have far more theoretical knowledge than ability to apply it to steel, so that has been the objective. The steel seems to hold a zillion little secrets, though, and it has opened my ears to new musical ideas.The occasional gigs that I do are like test days, and my own assessment is that I have gone from barely passing to pretty darn acceptable scores. |
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Tucker Jackson
From:
Portland, Oregon, USA
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Posted 7 Jul 2018 11:03 am Re: The fog goes away...slowly...
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| Jörg Berger wrote: |
What were your breakthru's over the years? |
Like you, Jörg, the first level was learning the most common major, minor, and seventh chords in the open position (some call this the 'pedals up' or 'no pedals' fret position). B0b does a nice job of describing it here:
https://b0b.com/wp/?page_id=960
Next was learning that same set of chords in the pedals-down pocket (The root is 7 frets above the 'no pedals' position in whatever key you're playing in. The pedals-down pocket uses that fret, along with the one two frets back to get the same set of chords learned earlier).
Next was learning to take advantage of the fact that I knew more than one place on the neck to play the same set of chords. There is a lot of power in smoothly moving between those two pockets while the strings are ringing, landing on either the same chord, or the next one in the song's progression.
Somewhere towards the beginning, I learned to play a single-note major scale in the open and pedals-down fret positions.
Next was learning 2-note harmonized scales starting in 3 different places: Starting from the open position (based on the 4th string), starting from the pedals-down position (based on string 3 or 6 with the B-pedal down), and starting from the A+F position (based on the 5th string with A-pedal).
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Another way to view all this would be to say that my early important breakthroughs were learning how to play the major scale as 1, 2 or 3 notes:
Single-note scales
Two-note harmonized scales
Three- (or more) note full chords. These are based on each the 7 tones of the major scale (that is, the Nashville Number system's 1, 2, 3 chords and so forth).
That's a full road map of the entire neck! Probably 98% of the steel parts of the masters I transcribe fall into that framework; the difficult things they're playing can be easily analyzed as falling into one of the common positions. Let me know if you need help with any of the positions mentioned here. |
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