The Next 10 Years

I started playing guitar 10 years ago. To make a long story short, I was a professional trombonist until an overuse injury ended my brass playing career. After a hiatus from any kind of performing, my wife (now my ex) gave me a guitar for Christmas, and I was immediately hooked. Even as I was struggling with my first chords, I was planning a new career as a guitarist. I originally intended to play folk and Celtic music, but I drifted toward jazz, which is my main focus.

When I decided I was going to become a professional guitarist, I drew up a list of goals for the first 10 years. My overall goal was to become an "entry level" professional. To me, this meant attaining a skill level that was high enough that I could do a good job at gigs. It also meant that, while I wouldn't necessarily be the first call player in Atlanta, I would develop enough connections to keep me gigging on a fairly regular basis.

I'm rarely satisfied with my playing, but I would like to pause for a moment and be grateful that I met my 10 year goal. I'm not a world beater on guitar, but I'm pretty good. I sight-read extremely well. I gig steadily.

Okay, the moment is over, and it's time to look at the next 10 years. This is my overall goal: To become a well established freelance musician making a comfortable living as a performer, teacher, and church musician.

That's a pretty broad goal. Maybe it's more of a mission statement, but it can be broken down into several goals. To be a well established performer implies an increasingly higher level of musicianship, so the most important goals to me are in the area of musical development.

These are my goals for 2024:

• Play an average of 2-3 good paying gigs per week.
• Maintain a roster of 30 students.
• Increase the NWUUC Music Director job to 20 hours per week.
• Memorize 100+ jazz standards.
• Comfortably improvise guitar solos in the style of Joe Pass.
• Become a good scat singer.
• Become a competent piano player.
• Become a competent ukulele player.
• Be financially stable enough to take 1-2 yearly vacations.
• Live in a rented house, big enough for a studio space, in a quiet, safe neighborhood.
• Comfortably maintain a healthy weight of 190-200 pounds.

Having all these goals without devising a way to meet them is no good. I've broken each of these goals down into separate steps, but I won't include them here, otherwise, this would be a really, really long article. I'll break down a few choice goals into steps in future articles.

Getting this far was a blast. It was 10 years well spent. Time to get busy and make the next 10 years even better.

Tipping Point

Something very strange has been happening lately. I'm doing what I love, and money is coming in. (Usually I'm doing what I love, OR I'm making money.) Tonight, I realized that I haven't been stressed about paying rent for over a year. For a working musician, that's quite a feat! I'm not sure when it happened, but I feel like I have reached a tipping point in my pursuit of a freelance music career. I'm able to spend more time bettering myself as a musician and less time worrying about making my rent.

It has taken a while to reach this point, and I'm pausing for a moment to appreciate the journey. When I first began playing guitar, I set a goal of becoming a professional guitarist in 10 years. Surprise! Ten years later, here I am.

I'm far from being the best guitar player in town, but I seem to have carved out a place for myself. I have a part time music director job at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation, teach guitar lessons at home and at Tessitura, and am landing a fair number of gigs. If I had to rely on just one of these endeavors, I wouldn't subsist, but when you put them all together, it means that rent and bills are being payed, and I even have some cash left over at the end of the month. A miracle!

Things seem to be trending upwards in general. My church job recently expanded from 10 to 15 hours. (I'm hoping that this will grow to 20 hours over time.) I teach a little over a dozen guitar students and enjoy a good rate of retention. (I eventually want to grow the roster to 30 students.) I recently got in good with an event planning company that has already hired me for 3 gigs. (I don't want to be playing every single night, but I would like to eventually play 2-3 of these good gigs per week.)

Without doing something every day to improve my musicianship, all other success is hollow, so first and foremost, I strive to become a better musician. I have a long way to go as a pro guitar player, but, looking back at where I started, I'm pleasantly surprised at where I am today, and I'm excited about what tomorrow will bring.

Skype Lessons

I just taught my first Skype lesson to my niece, Mackenzie. This is something I've been wanting to try for a while, and I'm glad we got started with lessons. Mackenzie learned a few chords, and I am learning just as much. At times, I found myself starting to reach toward the computer monitor to correct a fingering. There are some obvious physical limitations to teaching online, but I think this will be good for my teaching (online and in person). When you can't adjust a student's finger, you have to do a better job explaining things verbally. Also, when you can't reach out to adjust a student's finger, she makes all the corrections on her own. It may make the lesson go a little more slowly, but being able to self-correct is a big part of the learning process. The ultimate goal is to help your student get to the point where she doesn't need you anymore.

One thing I didn't expect was how fun this was! Part of the fun was the technology, I suppose. This was my first Skype call, and so there was quite a bit of novelty on top of teaching and seeing some family online. It sure was convenient, too. I just planted myself in front of my computer while Mackenzie did the same (with mom and dad hovering in the background).

I'm going to teach a few more lessons to Mackenzie to get used to the technology and the teaching challenges. Once I've smoothed out some bumps, I'll hang out my virtual shingle.

Lessons Again

One of my goals for 2013 was to find a new teacher. Just as beginning and intermediate guitar players can learn from me, I can benefit from another teacher who is higher up the food chain. My new teacher is Dave Frackenpohl, who teaches jazz guitar at Georgia State University.

I would like to develop more comping ideas, develop more improvisation ideas, and memorize more standards. Dave added one more weakness to my list: I need to be better at transposing on the fly, so we'll be learning each new song in a few different keys.

Dave is one of those teachers who makes you feel comfortable right away, and he seems to have a knack for breaking big concepts down into smaller, more approachable steps. In terms of personality and knowledge, Dave is exactly the teacher I need right now. I'm looking forward to lessons with him on a regular basis to help regain some focus and to help take my playing to a new level.

Chord Hammer-On Exercise

Here's a chord exercise that's great for beginners. (It's a pretty good exercise for advanced players, too.) If you are just beginning to learn how to play guitar chords, you probably build your chords by putting down one finger at a time. Eventually, you want to be able to have your fingers form a chord shape all at the same time. Once you can do this, you'll be able to move from one chord to the next more smoothly.

This exercise involves "hammer-ons." To play a hammer-on, don't pluck or strum with your picking hand. Instead, use your chord hand to come down on the string quickly enough to make it sound a note. Here's the exercise.

Step 1

• Play any chord. Start with one that's easy for you. Try an E or an A minor chord.
• Sustain the chord to make sure each string is ringing.
• As you're sustaining the chord, let off the pressure of your left hand so that the strings that you are fingering stop ringing. Keep touching the strings. You want your fingertips to maintain contact.
• Now, without strumming, pump your left hand fingers while maintaining the chord shape. Squeeze quickly, hold a little, and then let up, still maintaining contact with the strings. If you are able to squeeze quickly enough, you may be able to get those strings to ring softly.

Step 2

• Form the chord again.
• You're going to use the same pumping action in your left hand, except this time, raise your fingers so they're just barely above the strings. Without strumming, see if you can pump your left hand fingers quickly enough to get a chord to sound. This is the hammer-on. Your left hand "hammers on" to the strings to make them ring.

Step 3

• After you're comfortable raising your fingers slightly and playing the chord hammer-on, try raising them a little bit more…just a fraction of an inch, then a little higher, and then a little higher. See how high you can raise your fingers while still maintaining the chord shape.

Quick Tip: Think of hammering on quickly rather than squeezing hard. If you focus on squeezing hard, you'll build up unnecessary tension in your left hand. That's the last thing you want. Try to keep your hand as relaxed as possible by moving quickly and loosely.

Practicing chords like this will help train your fingers to move as a unit instead of one by one. Once you can play one chord like this, try another one, and then see if you can move back and forth between the chords just playing hammer-ons. It's challenging at first, but you'll get better with practice. Soon you'll be switching from one chord to the next with ease!
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If you live in Atlanta and are interested in private or group guitar lessons, please check my website at www.godfreyguitar.com for more information or email me directly.