Music Lessons
By Greg Beckett
Music has always been an important part of my life. I can remember listening to the radio as a kid, hoping to record favourite songs, and I still recall the first cassette tape I bought (Depeche Mode’s Some Great Reward). My tastes have shifted over the years, or perhaps expanded, but I have always retained a soft spot for punk and new wave and the sounds of 70s and 80s electronic music.
I’m drawn to the music from that era partly because it helped shape my tastes. But aside from the biographical connection, I love the sense of possibility that came from that music — they made it seem like anyone could do it!
I did not come from a musical family. It was in the background sometimes, or in the car, but not discussed much. No one in my family played an instrument, except whatever they had to play for a few short years in school. Growing up, I moved around a lot and from grades five through nine I went to a different school each year. Five schools in two cities. I was put on a different instrument each time— trumpet, clarinet, saxophone. Maybe others, I don’t remember. I never learned to play any of them and didn’t learn how to read music either. When I got to high school and had a choice, I quickly switched to visual art.
And yet, it was in high school that I first began to play music. I had heard that a local music shop rented guitars, so on a lark I got one and spent the next few months in my room, learning chords by shape from a book. It was a large acoustic guitar with a thick neck and big frets and I struggled with it, but as soon as I began to get a few chords down I was hooked. I saved up for an electric guitar and in less than a year I was playing in a band with friends.
I often say that the guitar is the most democratic instrument, by which I mean it is an instrument of the people — affordable, easy to play, and lending itself to popular forms of expression like folk, rock, and punk. Of course, there is a deep tradition of classical guitar or jazz that is highly technical and associated more closely with the world of instruction and art music. But for me, at fifteen, the idea that I could make music at all was transformative.
I learned guitar by playing, reading books, and getting taught chords and riffs by friends. When I went to shows, I would watch the guitar players, eager to figure out how they made their sounds. Being untaught had its advantages because it opened me up to experimentation. And it lent itself well to the kind of music I was most interested in making. But a part of me always wanted more—I wanted to learn to read music, to know theory, to understand the how and why of it all.
It wasn’t until two decades later, when living in Chicago, that I finally took some lessons. I took a class on theory for guitar at the Old Town School of Folk Music—a truly unique and amazing place. Their approach was that anyone can make music, and almost all lessons are group lessons, which I found intimidating at first. But the group approach was part of that folk—or democratic—spirit that had first drawn me to the guitar. That class helped me understand the guitar better, but they didn’t teach music theory in a formal way, and they didn’t teach us to read music.
About a decade later, I finally started to learn to read musical notation, but it was not part of my guitar practice; it was because I wanted to learn piano. A part of me had always wanted to play, and I envied friends who had learned piano as kids, because music seemed so effortless to them. When my wife (who is an excellent musician) and I decided to sign up our daughter for piano lessons, I was excited to finally have a piano around the house! I started using my daughter’s books to learn the basics.
Playing piano has been another transformative experience. I’m not great, but I’m getting better and at my age now it is pleasantly humbling to be bad at something—to be bad at it and enjoy it anyway. More than anything else though, approaching musical theory through the keyboard rather than the fretboard has made it all make a different kind of sense. And having to read music has been an important challenge too, in part because it has inspired me to pay more attention to technique and to practice with a metronome, both of which have improved my guitar playing too.
These days, I play the piano more than the guitar. I like the novelty of it and the challenges that come with it. These days, when I write songs, I tend to write them on the piano, and then later bring them to the guitar. That has given me a new appreciation of composition, helping me understand how bass lines and keyboard parts can work together with the guitar—which in turn has freed up my guitar playing. And having a basic sense of the keyboard has brought me full circle to the DIY approach of early electronic music too, helping me think of new ways of making music with a Midi keyboard and my computer.
I used to think of the piano as an inaccessible instrument, and above all as a marker of social class and distinction. It felt like a door that would always be closed. Now, I see it much as I saw the guitar as a teenager, as something that opens new realms of possibility. Thelonious Monk once said, “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” If you play something and it sounds off, well, you just need to figure out what to play next to resolve it!