You Know What I Mean

The fine grey carpet fibers closely knit the pattern of an infinite plain. That’s the sort of carpet you find in electrical lamp showrooms, or maybe in a small over-the-warehouse office from the 1990s. Nothing more utilitarian. The short tight fibers will resist to ware, the abysmal color attracts no attention, and it’s much softer than wood or concrete should equipment be dropped on it. The later being the reasoning behind the prime choice of flooring of most recording studios everywhere-- which in decades past, beat out the previous solution: throwing down a plethora of cheap oriental rugs under any equipment, amplifiers, or instruments. 

“Hey, go ahead and tune up. I’ll be right in.” trailed out the doorway in search of a water bottle, or perhaps his glasses. 

And so I stopped staring blankly at the damn carpet, and set my eyes on the rack. Well-over four feet high, the electronic enclosure housed pre-amps, effect modules, tuners, graphic equalizers, multiple input relays, valve simulations, and thousands of dollars worth of other goodies. At the moment, I was watching the strobe tuner flicker ever closer to the target pitch at 440 megahertz. It wasn’t as if it needed much attention, since Lou made me into a convert of the heavy gauge strings, tuning stability was not really an issue. Well, now I don’t think convert is the best term-- after discussing in detail personal experiences with well-made strings and varying tensions I made a purchase. It so happened that Lou agreed with the said purchase, and let go a subtle mannerism which told of the high quality tone to follow out of my pickups. They were DR STRINGS. A jazz set, with a wound third. The eleven fifty-two gauge isn’t much to shake a stick at compared to what I use now, but it was a troublesome jump back then. Although I did lose that wound third, it was a bit too much, and have used nothing but plain thirds since. 

The industrial aluminum and glass desk to my back spanned the entire narrow width of the rectangular room. On it, proudly sat two large monitor displays. Powering them from below, was a monster of a G5. It was also loaded with every sort of music composition, audio recording, mixing, and soundbooth program you could ever need. Flanking either side of the desk were two very nice sounding audio monitors. On the right side display, a single spreadsheet window was open, showing the previous weeks’ lesson plan and covered materials. It was around this time Lou walked in. I should’ve played the lottery, it was a bottle of water and his glasses. My instructor: Lou G. Xifaras BM Berklee College of Music ’73. 

I suppose it was time to get down to business. My class met once a week, each lesson a little more than an hour or so. Despite the brief in-class weekly meeting, a workload fit for a prisoner-of-war interrogation chamber was assigned for the time between lessons. Depending on how confident I had converted the material to memory, practiced all the exercises, and gone through all the tunes to be sight-read through, it would be at this time I would plan to unleash a firework of filibuster. An hour or so may not seem like such a lengthy period, but during a one-on-one private instruction Lou found plenty of time to slice away my short comings in study, as if with a rapier. However, this week I had no such intentions. I had conquered my syllabus, I had memorized all of my harmonic formulas, the triads of any key flew off my tongue with fluency, modal exercises of speed and dexterity were all I did in my conscious hours, I was prepared. All of the agonizing and difficult torture was now a foundation on which the grand scape was forming. 

And it had been agonizing. Throughout primary and secondary school achieving good marks was not immensely difficult. Revising came sort of easy, or at least I had never found myself spending hours reviewing and preparing for tests and exams. Of course I knew of different learning styles, and study methods like flash cards, graphic charts, or writing repetitions. Some how I never made it to the point of actually crafting any of those ingenious plans for top marks. I remember recalling the last time I had needed flashcards to learn was in third grade, and for the purpose of memorizing the tables of multiplication. How shocked I was when I needed to make flash cards for triads. One card for each major, minor, augmented, and diminished triad in each key. Not only had I to verbalize the information, but had to fill countless pages of sheet music with the chords-- first all the triads, then the four part chords, five part chords, and six part chords. Measure after measure of penciling in stacked whole notes, I began to wake up in night-terrors writing and reciting dominant seven-sharp nine-flat thirteen chords in each key. 

Then it was the ear training. As if it wasn’t enough to recite the damn things like a mantra, and write them out on a staff, I had to instantly recognize them when they were played. A chord is a series of notes played together, and an interval is the space between two notes. Part of my weekly torture was to make sure I could recognize exactly how far two notes were from one another when played in succession or simultaneously, that was interval ear training. Once I got that down, chords were mostly easy to recognize-- it’s more akin to seeing colors or tasting flavors than mental processing. Major chords, minor chords, augmented ones, diminished ones, dominant sevenths, major and minor sevenths, or ones with flatted fifths: they all just taste different. Unique. 

As I said, I was prepared. The following examination of my efforts was nothing but exciting to me, as I had no fear. After all our harmonic review, we began what Lou called ‘Analyzing Tunes’. 

Now to appreciate what was the most fun, and valuable, portion of my time at Xifaras Music a small bit of insight to the secrets of music performance is required. A fake book is a slang term used to define a group of lead sheets of songs. The sheet music would have the melody line, basic chords, and basic lyrics-- in short, the very minimum required to learn and preform an impromptu arrangement of a tune (or to ‘fake it’). In a play on words a series of volumes of fake books, called The Real Book, is a two inch thick collection of jazz tunes with everything you need to preform and have a good time. 

A staple part of the lessons, Lou would have me take a tune out of the Real Book and ‘analyze’ it. This means I would label every chord relative to the key of the tune, write in which scales to use over all the chords (which would include consulting my own book of notes taken on the subject, and figuring out the correct scale or mode subject to a lengthy series of rules which people tend to call Music Theory). And of course ‘analyzing’ would include learning to play the melody, rhythm, and improvise over it. Standard operating procedure for Lou was to assign no less than ten different tunes out of the real book for me to analyze every week. 

A sight-reading component was always apart of the class, and this week it happened to be exercises out of what Lou called “the Berklee book”. Sight-reading music is just playing along to whatever happens to be on the page you’re looking at, and we did so out of three books which would revolve in use from week to week. All three were in fact published by the Berklee School of Music publishing house, however where one focused on melodic rhythms, and the second was filled with classical pieces transcribed for pick-style guitar, the remaining one which was filled with nothing but boring, torturous exercise was deemed “the Berklee book.” The book was comprised of sections which would cover a specific key. Using said key, the book would have you read unexciting runs up and down the staff in each position possible on the neck. In light of the books’ evil nature, the variety of the note runs was altered just enough to render it unpredictable-- as to insure the reader was in fact reading along and paying attention. Performed with a metronome at an allegro pace, this was not one of the portions of homework I looked forward to. 

Sensing the crippling weight of musical study, and not wishing to end the class in such a depressing manner, Lou closed out the night by teaching me a new tune. Rather than jazz, most of these fun closing session tunes we covered were more up my own alley, being blues, rock, and fusion. This is where all that tedious painful work comes in handy, because I can analyze the tune in my head, and appropriately play the correct scales and modes, and seamlessly connect them in every position, I can play incredibly impressive improvisation and it is all second nature. Lou conjures up two incredibly creamy valve tones for us out of his rack and asks if I’ve got any idea what I wanted to go over this week. I reply. 

“Got any Jeff Beck?”