Positive and Negative Modes of Enlightenments

I was re-reading that Intellectual’s Masterpiece on Spirituality, “Varieties of Religious Experience”, by William James, who had been a Harvard Professor at the turn of the 20^th Century; one should read such a classic every 40 years or so just to stay current, anyway, I developed a few fresh insights that I think evaded me on my last read through.

 

Firstly, subjective Religious/Spiritual Enlightenment Experiences are presented by the Mind, if I may be permitted to explain the phenomena materialistically, in order to resolve serious or even potentially life threatening Nervous or Emotional Breakdowns.   These occur when the involved individuals have struck ‘rock bottom’, so to speak, and turn desperately to “a higher power”.   This accounts for such a high number of very sincere Religious Conversions among reformed drunks and, since the Eighties, former cocaine addicts.   But it is not entirely necessary to get to the depths of despair simply through an excess of bad habits, which destroy the health, finances and all of one’s important social and family supports; no, one can also reach the bottoms of despair by being, well, neurotically Ideal enough to experience a Crisis of Meaning of Life, that is, to see all the ordinary events and happenings of Life as petty, shallow or even kind of dirty, and then to be appalled by anything that that seems predatory or hurtful, and it all becomes so much worse when such Individuals see all such behaviors as having impulses within their own Selves.  It presents a crisis of Value, where one wonders where the strength to continue such a miserable and even negative existence should come from, when all reasonable or compelling arguments would favor either an active suicide, or to simply allow oneself to wither away… or to drown one’s sorrows in drink, or reach for the artificial Exaltation of the Cocaine Experience… but this is putting us in a circle. 

 

It can’t be understated how thorough such Religious/Spiritual Resolutions to these Nervous or Emotional Breakdowns are – the Subjective Certainty that one has been rescued and is now and forever under the Protection and Care of an All Powerful, or All Important Higher Power is unshakable.  These people do from the depths of despair to the Olympian summits of absolute Delight… one can hardly help to envy such wonderful experiences going to drunks and those low-life sleaze-ball cokeheads, but that is simply how the Psychological Math of such Metaphysical Geometries tend to work out.   Higher Resolution Events occur to those in Crisis.  If one is living well, or even just managing to cope, then, well, if there is no Real Problem, then there is required no very important Solution.

 

The sad thing about reading “Varieties of Religious Experience”, if one is a dedicated Religious Spiritualist, is that the background Materialism of it all is rather compelling, and that we find that while the core Experiences and and the basic shape of the Effects have a certain uniformity, the actual Details involved can cover a frightful range of Beliefs and subsequent Life Style Choices.   I was able to come to some understanding of this when I read Saint Teresa of Avila’s “Interior Castle”, a real Spiritual Classic, which presents Spiritual Enlightenment more in terms of Process then I have so far seen in William James, that while the initial ‘Conversion Experience’ may be exactly as powerful as mentioned above, still, the Person who receives such an Experience certainly hungers for more, for Repeat Performances.  The Initial Glow of the Conversion Experience recedes and Life becomes dull again, and so my guess is that the Convert gets a bit Superstitious and Obsessive about recreating the original conditions of the First Conversion Experience.  The Drunk may relapse simply to get back into Crisis Mode (which makes a lot of sense when one listens to more than a few Alcoholics Anonymous speeches, and how there is almost a positive pride in recounting how many times they have “fallen off the wagon” only to re-achieve their victories), and the Religious Fanatic goes back to more and more severe fasting, mortifications of the flesh, and renunciations of any of Life’s small pleasures, all in order to re-establish that Crisis Level of Despair that would Trigger the Intervention of God.   Again, we need to remind ourselves that in many such cases, these behaviors can actually be life threatening.  With the Drunks this is easy enough to intuit, but with the Religious Fanatic we must imagine how the fasting and depravations can slowly be escalated until the Health is run down to such a frail degree that it finally just snaps.  At this point one can’t help but to have something of a mixed appraisal of Spiritual Aspirations, where the Proven and Demonstrated Paths to Enlightenment seem to straddle the fence just on the edge of effective Suicide.

 

But then I remembered good old Swami Ramakrishna whose approach seemed to emphasize more of the Positive, and if I can put it into terms which we have now established, that the ‘crisis’ can be one of Unfulfilled Divine Love, that is, a kind of Higher Pining Away.  Where the Monastic Catholic focusses on his own Dispair at being a Low and Unworthy Worm, trapped in a Body prone to Sin, which does in fact create something of an effective Emotional Crisis, one such as Swami Ramakrishna looks more at the Greatness of God then at any exaggerated view of his own Inferiority.  It comes out seeming happier overall.

 

Yes, Ramakrishna too was a ‘Chain Experiencer’, seeking for repetitions of this Peak Experience, but he would achieve his ends through, well, serial ‘Love Affairs’ with various Names, Forms and Aspects of God; and in India, there are plenty to choose from.   Not that Ramakrishna did not also have his ‘Superstitions’ – he could rant about ‘Women and Money’ as even the strictest Saint Francis, but at the end of the day, he had a woman doing his cooking and cleaning, and, well, he lived in Bombay and his rent money was coming from somewhere and wasn’t being tossed away.   It all seemed like his more positive Fanaticism was easier to moderate then the Negative Crisis Mode which really does seem to require Monastic Supervision for it not to be entirely too self-destructive.

 

Oh, the good news, from Saint Teresa of Avila is that the Repetitions of Crisis can eventually result in a Permanent Union with the Divine.  When Teresa arrived at this point herself, she became a bit more practical regarding the risks of extreme fasting and mortifications of the flesh, not wishing her subordinate nuns to go overboard in such practices, but still, it was unavoidable that she would still see the Path that worked for herself was indeed a viable and even exemplary Path.   Her emphasis was to see God as the Highest and Humanity as the Lowest, and such tension would bring on an inevitable Spiritual Crisis and God would inevitably come to the rescue.  

 

Ramakrishna’s Methodology, while seeming more wholesome, lighter and brighter, well, suffers from practical problems concerning execution, that is, how one is supposed to Love a God that is primarily an abstraction, that is, an Abstraction for one that has not had the God Experience yet.  It is all quite like falling in love with a girl that one has never met.  One may very strongly wish to fall in love, but that is not nearly the same thing as finally catching the eye of a girl we actually ‘do’ fall in love with.   Here, I think the feeling of Emptiness would come into play, as opposed to the Catholic focus on Human Inferiority and Worthlessness.  But here the problem arises with the natural tendency for Humans to ‘cope’ with their problems.  One can learn to ‘cope’ with the feeling of Emptiness by, well, resorting to the pleasures of “money and women”, where the Catholic Methodologies are structurally better suited to forestall any attempts for their Spiritual Aspirants to ‘cope’ with their impending crisis conditions.

 

Oh, back to William James and “Varieties of Religious Experience”.  It seems that back in his day, just over a hundred years ago, the New Age Movement was just beginning to get on its feet – he refers to it as the “Mind Heal Movement”, which he sees as a happy, optimistic and positive Movement for people who are basically happy, optimistic and positive already, and that all of its methods and aims are toward what we would see in our larger view as ‘coping’ mechanisms that do not lead to Spiritual Crisis, but rather forestall any possible chance of at a real Higher Integration of the Personality.    So it is that the New Age avoids Moral Conflicts and Crisis, and tells us to simply feel good about ourselves.  To Experience God we only need to understand God is in and around us already… and so there is nothing really wrong with Child Labor to make us our cool leisure shoes or paying our maidsfrom Central America less than minimum wage because they are ‘illegal’ and can go nowhere to complain.    When everything is already so Great, why would one ever want to have a Spiritual Crisis?   So the New Age comes off seeing the Old Styles of Religion and Spirituality as largely Negative, but the Religions bulk at the New Age Movement’s amoralism, inherent hedonism, naiveté and moral and intellectual shallowness.

 

Of course the New Age is not really new.  One can look at many Ancient Philosophical Systems and what even passes for Ancient Religion and see what are plainly just ‘Coping Mechanisms’ – ideas for accepting Life just as it is found.  I would site examples, but people are so easily offended, and so I would rather people arrive at these truths under their own steam, so to speak.

 

But the New Age has been gathering momentum.  Nobody really wants to engineer an intentional Crisis in their lives, even if it would give them God, if they can be made to believe that God is really there already… people being ready to accept a pure Imagination instead of the Real Thing.  But what I wonder is that the New Age was a Child of the Twentieth Century and its Prosperity and Optimism, but that the 21^st Century with its impending Climate and Economic and perhaps even Military Crisis’s will not instigate millions or even billions of Personal Individual Crisis’s of the Spirit.  With the Sea a boiling pot of carbolic acid, with sandy dry plains producing only Famine, and with a Mechanized Capitalism achieving an effective divorce from Labor presenting an almost Universal State of Unemployment, well, I can guess that it will become easier and easier to arrive at these episodes of Nervous and Emotional Breakdown, and that Spiritual Crisis might become rather more common than what we would really hope for, considering all of the other circumstances.  

Spirituality and Celibacy

 

Interesting question about whether Celibacy is essential for the successful pursuit of Spirituality, and given that so many thoroughly bona fide mystical traditions hold celibacy as of the uppermost import, I am surprised the question is not more often asked, except now that it occurs to me that with Today’s Cultural Temperament, to even think of Celibacy is to contemplate a price far too high, and so it is not even considered at all.  It is like myself knowing about most every car on the market and willing to give my friends advice on what to buy, until a friend asked me about Mercedes, when I honestly bulked and said that if he could afford one of those he was well beyond any advice I would have to offer, that is, that even the idea of giving up on Sex is beyond anybody’s consideration nowadays.

 

It is not that most people still find sex inherently repugnant… just now for themselves.   People are honestly sickened at the thought of homosexual sex or sex with minors, which, factually speaking, is not much different from, well, Sex, but when it involves themselves, all animalistic grossness is forgiven and cherished as some Beautiful Natural Act.  As long as Sex is limited to Marriage, the Catholic Church even claims to have ‘sacramentized’ it… eeeoooouuu!  yuck!   Oh, and though few people confess it to their partners, isn’t it true that many people experience at least some mild disgust with sex, once it is over and the urge relieved?

 

But what exactly is the problem with Sex.   Well, it may be entirely all Pretence, but Man and Woman are Idealistic Animals, that is, we do not think of ourselves as animals at all but as Spiritual Beings.  When it says in the Bible that “Man was created in the Image of God”, well, that is referring almost entirely to our Psychological and Cultural expectations for ourselves… well, many of ourselves, as there are a few Cults that have brought it on themselves to be ashamed at their Humanity and try as hard as possible to return to being just animals – all pure appetite and instinct.

 

So, thinking of ourselves as Spiritual Creatures, there are but three or four things in our lives which counter this divine pretention, that is, going to the bathroom, eating meat, having sex, and sleeping, though Sleep is lifted up somewhat by its allowing us to Dream.   I read an essay by a Frenchman once, and he stated the contention that people think poop jokes and sex jokes are found “funny” because they dispute our Spiritual Pretentions, that is, if we did not think ourselves better than poop or sex, then we would not be laughing so hard when the subjects would come up.

 

So really spiritual people, that is, REALLY spiritual people, who have connected and truly identified with their Ideal Spirituality, well, they are deeply ashamed of their sexuality.   At the same time their Spirituality is so vibrant and full of its own powers of support, consolation, affirmation, and even just simple Bliss, that they do not mind suffering in order to maintain their celibacy – so we have Saint Dominic rolling in a thorn patch to give himself other things to think about.  Oh, and that might be what all of the hairshirts and the mortifications and self whipping among the devoutly Catholic Religious is all about, that is, being a distraction to the sexual urge, or a sizeable atonement for the act in any case.

 

Just 40 years ago the Sikh Kundalini People… I remember Kirpal Singh, and his form of Kundalini Yoga, which mixed in a lot of Shaktipat from their Guru, that is, a very powerful initiation passed by touch or through the eyes, and they demanded Celibacy… six months of Celibacy before they could join.  Well, back then I was a horribly lucky handsome young buck and so I found easier pastures to graze, but I knew some people who did join the Kirpal Singh Group and, well, they all seemed quite genuinely Spiritual, as though it may all have been working as planned.

 

But is celibacy absolutely essential?  Hmmmm.  Well, the first awkward thing to come to mind is that nobody long refrains from pooping, and that act is not terribly spiritual either.   Rumors are that some rather genuine seeming Enlightened Gurus had their discreet sexual outlets.   Also, Morally Speaking, I can’t help to think that People over-focus on Sexual Situations as being terribly Immoral, while overlooking far worse Moral Infractions such as lying, cheating, stealing, greed, exploitation, voting Republican , Human Trafficking, etc, etc.

 

Personally, I have met many people who are so focused on either Sex or Money, or Both, that they never ever really think much about God or Spirituality.  It is all Career Goals or Chasing Tail, and Spiritually they remain in Darkness and their inner lives are shallow and stupid.   They only hint that they are missing something is that they have great talents for telling Dirty Jokes…. They don’t know to Cry at their loss of Spirituality, but they sure can laugh about it.

Learning Music, Playing By Ear

(forgive me... I need to come back and edit this thing...) 

I was speaking with a dear friend who envied me my music and said she would like to take up music herself, but was far too busy for such a commitment and would probably die before anything substantial came of it anyway.   Well, at first all of that sounded sensible enough, but then I remembered that not all music or musical instruments are deadly difficult, and some are rather intuitively easy as a matter of fact.  Yes, I suspect the Musician’s Community tries to encourage the idea amongst the General Public that playing good music is akin to magic, and that it requires prolific natural talent, and is as hard to learn as Chinese Trigonometry, and so therefore Musicians as themselves need to be worshipped as Gods, or at least given a livable wage.  But, thankfully, the Truth regarding the intrinsic difficulty of Music, in many cases, is not quite so severe.

 

But first let me wonder aloud whether everyone is cut out for music, and I am not so much thinking here of ‘talent’, per se, as of ‘inclination’, that is somebody may wish to involve themselves in Music because they think that Musicians and Musical People are held in high regard, or that Music is somehow necessary to show themselves as ‘well-rounded.   The problem here is that when they actually begin to apply themselves, well, their Minds and Bodies simply won’t cooperate, that while the Mind is willing, the Flesh just will never get up enough raw enthusiasm to put on a good Show.  So, I guess people considering the jump into Music should ask themselves something like the following questions:  

 

Do you really like music?  Do you have favorite songs?  Do you sing in the shower?  Do you dance to music when nobody is looking?  Do you dance when people are looking, that is, do you dance at parties or Clubs when there is a band?  On dates, if you are a woman, are you persuasive enough to get your cavaliers to get up and dance with you?  If you are a man, and on a date, do you ask her to dance the first time she glances over to the dance floor, or do insist she beg and plead in order to have a little fun?

 

Did you answer Yes, Yes, Yes in the affirmative about your appreciation for music on this day to day level of things?   Well, then, you pass, and  you should pick up an instrument right away. 

 

Or did you answer with more NO NO NO’s then you would care to admit?   Perhaps you kind of like music but have never listened closely enough to compile a list of favorites – and the music was always played so low or so much in the background that it simply wasn’t strong enough to shock you into starting to sing along, or makes you break suddenly break out into dance.  And you admit to yourself that whenever you have put on some Music, that it was not really as a primary entertainment but more as a background mood-enhancing kind of thing.

Well, then, does all that mean that Music is not for you and that you should give it up before really ever starting?   Well, maybe not. It’s certainly not encouraging, but if you think you might actually like Music, given the right exposure, then the next step is relatively easy… find out what you really like.  Do Web Searches for people’s favorite songs…. Search all the genres – Rock, Pop, Show, Country.   Start listening and find some favorite songs.  Really.  Songs that you like to sing along with and dance around to.  That is the hurdle.  Just liking a song.  Wanting to put on the CD.  If you can actually WANT TO play a particular song… when you walk in through the door at the end of a tough day, if playing your most recent favorite song is all you can think about, or, well, a high priority, then you should learn how to play music.  But if your search for some Good Songs that you like goes too far on and on without your being able to find anything that really stirs you, then, well, I’m afraid it would all be too painful and tedious to pick up music, and you should look to do something that you would more naturally enjoy.  

 

Anyway, so now at this point we can assume that you actually like music and you should go forward with it.  So now what?  Well, depending on your instrument of choice, if you decide to learn to play ‘By Ear’, then it can be a relatively easy and enjoyable process, with results appearing well before you would ordinarily expect.

 

Now, the easiest, most ‘intuitive’ instrument would be the synthesizer Keyboard, using  the Transpose Key or function to drop the song keys into the Instrument’s Key of C, that is, so all of the notes of the song will only be all of those nice big white keys all in a perfect continuous row.  The big advantage to the keyboard, in addition to its intuitive easiness, is that in not much time you could be using all ten fingers at a time to play rapid fire melody or pounding chords, or, best of all, a mix of them both.  Strings and horns could never give you that much, well, fire power.

 

But the String instruments can be a lot of fun.  Let’s talk about the violin family first.  Violins are fretless… no intimidating little bumpy demarcations on the neck to make you think that you have to know where to put your fingers.   How, you may ask,  do you even begin to learn how to play ‘by ear’.   Well, I would suggest that you start on just one of the strings … the 2^nd most high string next to the skinniest string is probably the best place to begin, and then you put on your Favorite CD and start playing along on just that one string.  I used to put olive oil on the string so I could more easily slide into the right notes.  At first it is hard and will give you a headache.  The first night you will get 15 or 20 minutes before you tire.  Fine.  The next night and the next night, you will go longer.

 

Oh, there is the matter of Playing by Ear Theory, in regards to what you expect yourself to be playing.  Perhaps you think you should be exactly overlapping  the notes being played in the Song, or exactly matching the singers voice.  Well, yes and no.  Firstly, no song is so fixed a thing, written in granite, that a certain level of variation could not be admitted, along as it seemed to fit the song, in tone and tempo.  So when you first start, you may find that you can only pick out a few notes along a fairly easy time structure that seems to ‘fit’ along with your dazzling favorite song, but guess what?... If you do indeed KNOW, because it sounds right,  that these few notes work in your relatively easy time signature, then as far as you are concerned, YOU ARE PLAYING MUSIC.  After that, it only gets better.

 

But maybe we should discuss this more, going deeper into theory.   Playing by Ear utilizes the Right Side of the Brain, the Intuitive Side, the same side that does our walking for us or allows us to balance a book on our heads with not too much practice.   You don’t have to think about Walking, or think about balancing that book… you just do it, and it seems like a kind of process that sort of does itself.  Yes, the Left Side of the Brain, the Analytical Part, can stand by the way and shout out instructions and advice – “Keep Straight!  Shoulders back! Quit your smirking”, but even with all that noise by the way side, still, the Right Side of the Brain is doing all the heavy carrying and lifting. 

 

Yes, at first, with a new instrument, the Left Side of the Brain is crucially important.  Turning on and setting up the keyboard.  Tuning the Violin.  The Right Side of the Brain has to sit on the Bench and wait before it will be called in to the Game and be finally allowed to play.

 

Oh!  And it is SO important that you DO finally let the Right Side, the Intuitive side begin to play.  Yes, at the very very beginning you might have to let the Left Brain tell you where and how to put your fingers… for instance, on violin and guitar, you should press the strings down to the neck using what is very close to the tip of your fingers, and you will need to consciously do this at first.  But as soon as you can you need to just let yourself go and stop planning ahead.  Think about something else and let your mind wander.  Without getting in its way, let the Right Side of your Brain find the part it wants to play.

 

This may be difficult to do with an instrument.  Almost the Entire Music Culture is fastidiously Left Brain oriented, not ever allowing you to simply ‘play around’ but from the very start dictates every move and every finger placement.  Yes, in a week or two, you can play a Song, but only like some automated robot.  But that is what everybody expects!  To just start trying with no Structure, well, that is what seems strange.  But it is essential, that is, if you want to REALLY play music, and not just be a programmed music robot. 

But, really, I am afraid that many people would not understand the idea of playing by ear.  That when told to start playing, they would simply freeze up and not know what to do.   So maybe, if it seems like that for you, then let’s start with something easier to understand, where you will get the ‘feel’ for what I am talking about.  Start with Dancing.   Yes, just put on your favorite CD and start dancing along, moving with the music.  Because dancing is so much like walking, in the sphere of the Right Side of the Brain, it will begin happening sooner.  And keep going.  The Music should give you the strength to go on for a full practice… the beat of the music should just carry you along.  That is why Armies once made such use of Drum and Pfife, as the rhythm of the beat lifted the soldiers into a March that otherwise would have been degenerated into a fatigued sauntering and stagger. 

 

Oh, and you should always practice MORE than an hour.  I know that the Common Wisdom says that practice should be an hour, but, honestly, from personal experience I know that only toward THE MAGIC NINETY MINUTES does the Right Side of the Brain really take over control and begin to TRY NEW THINGS ALL BY ITSELF.   For instance, you decide to practice dancing to see what I am talking about.  For the first 15 minutes you are bit awkward, but after that you loosen up and are flowing fairly well with  the music.  You feel you are getting better and better, but after about an hour you begin to wonder why you are dragging it on and on, and so you begin to get bored and your attention begins to wonder.  You are still dancing, but your head is thinking about dinner, or the politics and Work, WHEN ALL OF A SUDDEN IN A MENTAL FLASH THAT TAKES JUST A TENTH OF A SECOND, you realize that THE PERFECT MOVE for the next bar of music coming up would be to stretch your arms out to the side, whip into a turn, come down hard on your right foot, prance forward, jump, turn, and spin.  And then you find yourself doing exactly that!  That is the Ninety Minute Magic at work.  No, it was not Left Brain, because, how to explain, you really didn’t think of it, and although it can be explained linearly, that is not how the Idea occurred – it is really just KNOWING in a Flash what you are about to do.  It is that EYE THE TIGER thing.   All you have to do is feel it once… to see it happen once, and you know what I am talking about, and you will know how Playing By Ear really works.   But you need those ninety minute practices.

Oh, what if you decide to practice Dancing and an Instrument, or two instruments.  Do you have to dedicate 90 minutes to each one…. That would be 3 hours practices!?  Well, no.  I’ve found that one 90 minute stint will get you INTO THE ZONE, and you kind of stay there when you pick up the next instrument.  Well, you will have to do a bit of a warmup, but it all catches up quickly and you will be playing at your highest level in practically no time on the momentum of that 90 minutes already put into practicing something else.

 

Oh, remember, I was not kidding about how it seems like your mind is wandering and you can no longer seem to concentrate.  People think that means they should STOP practice, but just the opposite is true.  That means that the Left Side of the Brain is finally letting go of its strangle hold over your Practice.  Things are only about to get Good at that point.  But this is typically when all Traditional Music Practitioners usually quit and call it a night, thinking that the Left Brain is their only asset.  If only they would keep going, maybe they too would find that they Right Side of the Brain would have a Ninety Minute Miracle for them too.

 

Okay, now that we have some of that Play be Ear theory out of the way, let us get back to some suggestions on how one can start out playing Strings.  Remember where I left you, with just playing on one string at a time, well, maybe even before the first night is out, natural curiosity will lead you to the other strings.  Let me briefly talk about the interval tuning between each string, and how that makes the strings intuitively easy to play.  First, just from tuning the violin – ( oh, get an electric tuner that lights up with the Letter of the Note… on the Chromatic Scale.  Pitch Pipes, while for purists, are deadly difficult to use) – you will know that there are 7 Semi-Tones between each string.   So, that means that when you play seven semi-tones down on your Practice String, well, you could keep going further down the neck on that same string to get higher and higher notes, or you could simply just jump across to the next highest string.   Likewise, when you are already playing some really high notes on your Practice String and suddenly want a lower note, you could go all the way back up on your Practice String, or you could simply sneak over to the next fatter string over for that low note.  This all happens automatically – the Magic Ninety Minute Insights and Flashes.   Whether you can understand it well enough to explain it with your Left Side Brain, may still be left to question, but to the Right Side of your Brain, it is Intuitively kind of obvious, and you will simply ‘catch on’.  Oh, for instance, when I first started practicing on guitar, I found that my hand, all by itself, developed and ‘trick’, that whenever I wanted to play the Same Note three times in a row, my hand would shoot up toward the top of the skinniest string, and hit the target Note there, then my hand would jump about halfway down the neck of the next lower string, and hit the SAME NOTE there, and then finally drop down toward the bottom of the neck and hit THAT SAME NOTE on the third string over.  All without consciously practicing it… I just found one time when I pulled my mind back from wandering, that I was doing it.   It definitely showed that the hand itself was serious about knowing how each string stood in relation to the next, and that at a certain point it stops being 4 or 6 strings, but becomes One Big String, only set in highly predictable staggers. 

 

Oh, in case you were wondering, Guitars are the same as Violins except the spacing between strings is 5 Semi-tones instead of 7 semi-tones.   Oh, traditional tuning for the Guitar brings the toning up on the second from the last skinny string to 4 semitones away from the next fattest string…this arrangement makes most chording easier for the guitarists, and other turning options are also utilized.   But I myself  tune my guitars for 5 semi-tone spacing all across, so that it remains “intuitively easy and highly predictable” , and a lot of Lead Guitarists do the same as I and probably for that same reason – It guarantees that anything you can do between any two strings, you can do between any two other, that is you can start a scaled progression and just keep it going across all of the strings, without having to think of what you are doing .    Oh, and Basses – really,  just big guitars with longer fatter strings – they are great, because they are all tuned to a solid 5 semi-tones between strings, unless of course a special tuning is used to make a chord reach for a particular song.  But I have always just kept the standard tuning and have never felt handicapped by it.

 

Oh, I had mentioned earlier that the most easy and intuitive instrument is Transposable Keyboard, that is, a keyboard where you can ‘transpose’ the highness or lowness of the keys on the keyboard so that the Key you want to play in drops into just the White Keys – all in one easy intuitive row.   But, there is one fairly big drawback there for the fledgling musician – you have to know what Key the song is in… and about one in every twelve songs has a Key ‘Bridge’ where the song comes up in Key by  semi-tone or two or three.   Now, with Strings, it simply does not matter what Key the song is in… you will automatically learn to play in the right Key, as anything else would sound so bad you simply would not want to play that way… it is like balancing a Book on your Head – you simply KNOW the point of it is to NOT DROP THE BOOK, whereas in Music, you simply know o stay in Key.   Yes, it’s kind of like magic.  Now, the only reason it is a problem on keyboards is that there are two separate rows of keys on a keyboard – the Whites and the Blacks and the design prevents you from being able to simply slide into the right note as you can with Strings (and, regarding this, you may have to slide only once or maybe twice to hit the right note on a string, but then your fingers learn how to land it exactly the next time).   So, it is extremely helpful on the Keyboard to know what key you are in, and, yes, it is a huge complication for which I apologize.

 

So, once we admit we have a problem here and decide that we need to know what Key a song is in, well, the easiest way is to get a set of harmonicas, diatonic scale harmonicas to be exact.   There are 12 Keys and so you need twelve harmonicas.  Oh, don’t believe anybody who says some of the Keys are never played.  They are… every single one though some Keys a lot more often than others I will grant.  But the way it is is that Singers or Musicians will insist on finding a Key that allows them to sing or play both the highest note and the lowest note of a song that may have a very broad range, and so if need be they will insist that the band do the song in Ab or Db or F# , that is, whatever Key will let them fit both the Highest and the Lowest Notes they need to contend with…  so you do need all twelve harmonics.   Diatonic Scale Harmonicas  go for about $40 a piece.  Oh, and it helps that Harmonicas are very intuitive instruments, held back by only one factor, that the notes are different depending on whether you blow through them or draw your breath through.  But none of your notes will EVER be off key.  Getting the songs just right will take some time, but for now we are just concerned with using these Harmonicas as a kind of Pitch Pipe for Key.  What I usually do is set the Keyboard to the Key of C, that is, where a piano would naturally be, and while I play the song on the CD player, I hunt around the Keyboard, striking both Whites and Blacks and when I am sure a certain note fits, then I write it down.  The Key Note itself should sound very very ‘good’ in the song, as the notes 5 above it and 5 below it will also sound pretty good.  Each Key only has 7 notes.  So, with 12 White and Black Keys, you only need to find 7, and not even that many to begin to guess what Key the song is in.  You can use the Harmonicas to prove out your guesses. 

 

Oh, what are the Keys?  The First Key and the model for all of the others is the Key of C.  On a piano keyboard, it is all the White Keys – C, D, E, F, G, A, B.  Now, while there are 7 White Keys in a Chromatic Scale, there are only 5 Black Keys – lets simplify by just naming them as Sharps; there is C#, D#, F#, G# and A#.  Notice that there is no E# or B#.  On the Keyboard you can see this as two White Keys being together without a Black Key being in between. 

 

So, the entire Chromatic Scale, the full twelve notes would be as follows:

 

C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B.

 

The way to figure out how to Transpose, or even what each Key is, note per note, well, the easiest way I have found is to make two Rings of the Chromatic Scale… they are already on line… see, this is one from Wikipedia: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_scale

 

You make one Circle small enough so that it can fit exactly into the center of the larger circle and you thumb tack it into the wall, dead center so that the smaller circle can spin inside the larger circle.   To know what notes comprise another Key, simply line up that Key Note with the Key of C, and then write down only the Notes that correspond to the Whole Notes of C.  For instance, the key of E.  You line up the small wheel E exactly underneath the big wheel C, then go around, skipping the Sharps and Flats in C because the Key of C has no sharps or flats.

So for the Key of E we would have the following:

E under C

F# under D

G# under E

A under F

B under G

C# under A

D# under B

So the Notes in the Key of E are  E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D#. 

To Transpose a Keyboard so that E is played on all the White Keys, just count from C to your Key Note, or count down from C, whichever is closer.   The Key of E, since E is 4 slots up from C, would be Transposable with a +4, or counting down from C, -8.  The Key of A transposes to -3.  The Key of G transposes at -5.  The Key of F is either +5 or -6.

 

In my Music Studio, I have a homemade diagram on the wall, of the 12 Keys, all in the form of little Piano Keyboards.  If you think you know the Right Key, then, without transposing it, you can simply hammer out the Key notes, white and black, and if they all sound good, and the Key Note sounds particularly strong, being used especially toward the end of each musical phrase, then that is probably your key.  But prove it in with a Harmonica if you can.  With a little practice on harmonica, if you got the right key, then everything should sound PERFECT, but any little discrepancy… something sounding a bit off, is a sign that you are close but not quite spot on, as some keys are different by only a note and the Key Note  may be a magical 5 semi-tone (note slots) away from the Key you accidentally chose, which sound awfully close to being right.  For instance, the Key of G is the same as the Key of C, except it has an F# instead of an F, and the G is 5 down from C and so sounds very very good with C.  But you will soon hear it when it is not just right.

 

Oh, my explanation above brings me to a painful passage, that I have to tell you that Music Theory seems so confusing at times.  For instance, although there are twelve notes in a chromatic scale, there are only 7 “steps”, or 7 “tones”, but what makes this silly to me, is that, for instance, while E is right next to F and it is one Step, there is a key between C and D, but it is also just one “step” .  So you have to remember to call them semi-tones, or notes.  Or when talking of guitars to say “frets”… but the term Step is too fluid and relative and tied up in theory.  But for our uses we only have to know enough about music theory to not confuse Real Musicians when we have to talk to them.     

 

 

Now, WHAT YOU MOST NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PLAYING BY EAR is that you are playing music almost immediately, that is, the IDEA of the music you want to play, begins to happen almost immediately.  No, you aren’t playing perfect songs.  But what you want to happen begins to happen rather quickly.  Even when just doing the One String method of practice on your first few days with Violin… well, as you find yourself catching the right notes,   It FEELS rewarding.  It feels to you like you are actually playing music.  And honestly you are.  Now, after over 30 years of playing by ear, of course I am objectively much better than when I first started, but the feeling of just “playing” has never changed. The first time you find the right note in the dark feels just as good as anything you will ever do later, and the sense of Wonder never goes away.  It is as Good as listening to fine music, but so much more at another and higher level because you are in there and part of the Song.  Oh, and this reminds me.  The way songs are written and produced in our Capitalist Society.  Yes, great care is taken to make songs ‘Good’, but no one spends years working on and perfecting these songs and their production and final presentation.  But what about the Guys like me that Practice them for year after year after year.  Well, guess what.   Along comes one of those Magic Ninety Minutes when suddenly you get the Flash Idea for a Part, a Riff, that fits perfectly and sounds great, but was not part of the original song’s production.  Yes, you can rise up to the Level of the Song itself… not just copying and trying to imitate what you hear but actually Breath new Life into the Song and its performance.   

 

Or maybe we should just learn the songs by rote – learn to read music to show us the notes to the song, and where we should our fingers.   Yes, by doing that, we could learn individual songs faster and even better.  But what PLAYING BY EAR  does is that we LEARN EVERY SONG THERE IS OR EVER WILL BE ALL AT ONCE.  Yes, the traditional player will learn one song faster, or even a hundred songs faster.  But they will always be at a loss when it comes to just picking up their instrument and playing along with a new fresh tune.  If practice long enough playing by ear and are asked if you know any particular song, you can honestly say, like those old vaudeville musicians, “No, but if you hum me a few bars I’ll catch on”.