Stop Collecting and Start Connecting on the Guitar

[00:00:00]Mr. Elmer's Music.

[00:00:04]>> All right. The other day I made this awesome video on all the triads in the key of G major. I got this one question over and over. In fact, I get this all the time. I'm going to get to the question in just a minute, but in the video essentially I did a G triad to right A minor triad just moving through the key E minor to C to D to E minor and then to the diminished back to home G. Okay, the question I got was this, and this is what you've got to develop was, "Well, how do I I love all those triads. Oh my gosh, light bulb moment, mind blown. You played them all right there on different string sets." I said, "Yeah." They're like, "How do I make music with that?"

[00:00:43]Which is what this is about. The skill you have to cultivate from day one is your musicality. You, your sound. So, I can't tell you how to do that. I can give you some frameworks, and that's all I ever do. I can show you things that you haven't been exposed to. And that's the goal of this channel is just to get you to be to see all the things my teachers never taught me. So the first thing you got to do is you got to get your thinking deeper. You can collect information for years on a guitar and if you don't know how to connect it, you're cooked. And that's what musicality is.

[00:01:16]So for example, these triads, what's amazing, the point of that video was is look at how I didn't move all over the neck. Everything's right here. And right here, look. G, A minor, B minor, C, D, E minor, diminished, back to G, home. So, right now, here's what you got to do.

[00:01:37]This is just a framework for you. I want you to try this. I want you to make music with it. So, this is about thinking deeper. So, the first thing I would do if I were you, okay? And if you want to drop comments how you do this, please do it. Help everyone out. I have a G open chord here. This is home. You always got to know where your tonal center is. You're always going back home. I got a G bar chord. I've got that one chord, that triad, which was the focus of that video. In fact, all the triads overlap. So, I put the G triad in green cuz that's home. Okay. You've also got what else? You've got a G major scale all the way. Okay. If you want to run it all the way from low to high E, you've got the G pentatonic stripping away a couple notes. Right? So you've got all these elements to make music with now. So, okay, let's go back. I could, you've got to think like a songwriter. So, what could I do using just the triads? Well, what if I start on the four chord C? Okay. So, what if I arpeggiate and I go to the E minor back to the G. Okay. Or what if I went and all I'm doing there is now I'm creating parts. I'm I'm being musical.

[00:02:51]I'm making music. I'm sounding like me.

[00:02:54]So, what did I do there? Again, these are just frameworks. I cannot tell you how to make music using this. That's you're the driver. Okay? That's up to you. You just got to show up and put in the rest. So, I just did I took that C triad from the video and I did a little slide just using one of the notes in the key A.

[00:03:12]D to E minor D to G. Okay. Or what if we start on open chords? What if you did something like this? What if you did open G? And again, this is just how you think deeper. What could I do? Open G. I'm going just you're hunting sounds that move you emotionally, that move the listener.

[00:03:35]Okay? Even if it's just you in your bedroom, you are the listener of your playing.

[00:03:39]I don't want you to make your own ears bleed. Okay? And I do that to myself sometimes, too. So, don't stress. So, what if we did open G to C triad, open G to E minor triad? Okay. Now, let's go back. How could we Now, here's where it gets a little deeper. How could we connect some of the melodic stuff into it? So, let's just use what I showed you two seconds ago that's available to you.

[00:04:03]Again, your musical mentality has to be high level in order to translate to the technical part of playing the guitar.

[00:04:11]So, I have a G major pentatonic here, and I've done videos on this. What if we did a little lick out of that and then we went into the open chord and then a try? That's where we went.

[00:04:32]Okay, another funny question I got was I did this really hard. There's a D major triad here. D F# sharp A 1 35 and that's the five chord in G. Okay, this is why you got to know basic music theory or listen if you don't learn the book in part of it. Your ears are music theory, too. So, if your ears know where to go, then you you know music theory with probably the most important part, your ears. Okay? So, don't get caught up in all the but I just love the puzzle of it. So, everyone asked me, why did you do this D instead of this one? And my answer was simply this. This was the flavor I wanted. I wanted this. I wanted the A D G string set over this. This is an inversion. Okay? And I wasn't trying to play the OB D. So, I went up shank. Okay. Rhythm always keeps moving.

[00:05:39]All right. So, you just got to play around with it. It's going to sound kind of like rough. You're just taking your clay, your clay of musicality, and you're going to mold it into what you do. Again, you can only be as musical as the tool set you have. So, as you start learning new things, like if you just learned something in this video, like if you didn't know this G major triad right here on the DGB string set, let's say you never saw that shape, you never used it, you have it in your toolbox now.

[00:06:09]Now, it's up to you. What can you do with it to be musical, to make music, cuz that's all that matters. None of this stuff matters, no matter how much information, you know, if you can't connect it musically, and that is musicality. So, I would do like D minor triad to the G tri.

[00:06:34]Sometimes it's something as simple as just playing one triad and bending a note like it's going to come off the tracks. So you kind of perk your ear ups over D shank d. It's okay.

[00:07:00]There we go.

[00:07:04]Bar chord to the triord again. You guys look the reason everything I show you is to make this so much more fun. Okay, this just is the tip tip tip tiny tip of the iceberg.

[00:07:28]Okay, so whenever I make a video on here or you watch a video on your favorite creator's channel, it's up to you to figure out how to make music with it.

[00:07:37]Okay, I mean maybe you take this G major pentatonic scale. We'll just close it with this. And you do like a little funk thing. You hit all the strings. Okay, and you saw how raw I made this video. I was kind of like getting kind of rough there, right? But that's what developing a musicality is. There are no mistakes if the rhythm train doesn't suck.

[00:08:07]All right. Pick throw.

[00:08:09]So don't be afraid to sound horrible in order to sound great. Okay. But again, everything you collect, all the information you learn out there in the wide world web, you have to figure out how to connect it musically. And then if you do that, if you just think like that, okay, and roll back. If you've got too much information, roll back, simplify. Okay? That is the skill set you want. There is no endgame in music.

[00:08:35]There is no there's you're going to learn forever, which is the beauty of this instrument. Music in general. So deep. Tightens up your thinking. helps you develop a growth mindset. But what I want you to do is I want you to simplify, go deeper, and develop your musicality, which means finding your sound. That's kind of the peak, right?

[00:08:54]That is the peak. Okay? If there was a peak, that's the peak is sounding like you. So when you play and someone hears it, hears you, they know it's you, even yourself. Okay? So start thinking like this. We'll keep building this out.

[00:09:06]Can't wait to show you the new studio build. Trying to learn this beast piano, too. I can sort of play it again. Got to develop my musicality on that. All right, you're amazing. Drop jellyfish or your favorite sea creature in the comments. Where are you watching from?

[00:09:19]What you working on? Remember, only you can stop. You don't stop. See you in the next video. Peace.