Sunday, January 30, 2005
PAIN IS GOOD??
OWWWW!!!
MY FREAKIN FINGERS ARE KILLIN ME!
My band played last night in a space that was so tight it was almost laughable and right in front of a massive brick wall(!!) although with a large passthru area. The brick wall served an important function, damping much of the sound, so subsequently we could (had to) TURN UP to be heard. (i do like volume - there's a level of volume which, if you play below, truly prevents you from connecting with the passion wellspring you need in order to express your "source". Its kind of like trying to sing, and as you start belting it out, you only get a whisper instead of the natural resonance of your voice. Hard to put feeling into a song without any balls to it.
But I woke up this morning with all 4 fingers on my left hand burning.What I've done basically is to have separated the fingernails of my fingers from the skin just below the nail. There's an explanation of this curious phenom.
What happens as you're playing is this: basically the fretboard on a guitar is structured into a neat, precise, harmonically organized, area to put your fingers so that when you play, you are able to stay in tune. The problem is when you want to play outside this structured environment. Blues is a musical style which is tonally based on a couple of sounds which go beyond this strict, precise scalar concept. When you take the notes in the C scale = C D E F G A B C and play them in the blues environment its not enough to just play those notes. The emotional character of the music calls for more expression and so what happens regularly is that a couple of the notes generally the 2nd note, D, and the 5th note G,) end up getting stretched which sort of creates a type of anguished feel as you play. Essentially this note stretching was an integral part of the musical scale which its creators FELT and sang and eventually the style adapted to guitar because of the instrumants ability to easily mimic what was harmonically taking place with the singers.
So today, in mute testimony to the pain of the blues, my fingers, which were busy stretching the crap out of my strings in order to connect with the emotional fire in my soul, hereby affirm that "pain is good". Meaning that it must have been a damned good night last night in order for me to have hurt myself this effectively and to not have been aware of it as I was playing.
MY FREAKIN FINGERS ARE KILLIN ME!
My band played last night in a space that was so tight it was almost laughable and right in front of a massive brick wall(!!) although with a large passthru area. The brick wall served an important function, damping much of the sound, so subsequently we could (had to) TURN UP to be heard. (i do like volume - there's a level of volume which, if you play below, truly prevents you from connecting with the passion wellspring you need in order to express your "source". Its kind of like trying to sing, and as you start belting it out, you only get a whisper instead of the natural resonance of your voice. Hard to put feeling into a song without any balls to it.
But I woke up this morning with all 4 fingers on my left hand burning.What I've done basically is to have separated the fingernails of my fingers from the skin just below the nail. There's an explanation of this curious phenom.
What happens as you're playing is this: basically the fretboard on a guitar is structured into a neat, precise, harmonically organized, area to put your fingers so that when you play, you are able to stay in tune. The problem is when you want to play outside this structured environment. Blues is a musical style which is tonally based on a couple of sounds which go beyond this strict, precise scalar concept. When you take the notes in the C scale = C D E F G A B C and play them in the blues environment its not enough to just play those notes. The emotional character of the music calls for more expression and so what happens regularly is that a couple of the notes generally the 2nd note, D, and the 5th note G,) end up getting stretched which sort of creates a type of anguished feel as you play. Essentially this note stretching was an integral part of the musical scale which its creators FELT and sang and eventually the style adapted to guitar because of the instrumants ability to easily mimic what was harmonically taking place with the singers.
So today, in mute testimony to the pain of the blues, my fingers, which were busy stretching the crap out of my strings in order to connect with the emotional fire in my soul, hereby affirm that "pain is good". Meaning that it must have been a damned good night last night in order for me to have hurt myself this effectively and to not have been aware of it as I was playing.
