 About
the book
Despite
the comic-strip format, PlaneTalk is not a book for beginners,
rather it's aimed at the thousands of guitarists who are fluent with
the basics but who have hit a wall in their learning — they're
still looking for the TRICK to it all, in particular, the key to
improvisation.
The comic strip format allowed me to give a voice to
all the questions I'd been asked over the years. My student, who
I have sitting beside me on a long flight, is given a crash course
in the structure of music in plain old English, then learns about
a very succinct way of looking at the fretboard -- the whole fretboard
-- a simple visualization technique. A Question/Answer sections follows
and the Slide Rule crystallizes the lesson graphically, so much so
that I have refrained from displaying a clear image of it. The book
is 72 pages, the slide rule is worth a thousand.
Whether you're a reader of notation or not (I never
learned myself) this simple way of tuning your brain can become the
only thing you ever need do to keep track of all music on the fretboard,
from nut to sound hole. The DVD is an hour long demonstration of
the technique. Read about it here.
How this book came to be
Like many guitarists, I never learned to read or write
music. Back when I started playing, in 1961, the guitar seemed to
be one of those instruments you were supposed to figure out yourself,
which I set about doing and with the help of my ear and the hundreds
of other players I met over the years, I slowly formed my own view
of how the pieces of the musical puzzle fit together.
When I moved to Australia from my native Canada in
1975, I started being hired for recording sessions (not for my reading
skills or knowledge of theory, but for my sound and 'feel') and I
quickly realized I needed a shorthand way of viewing the fretboard
and picturing music. The producers who were hiring me didn't need
someone taking up valuable studio time figuring things out. When
a solo was called for, I had to know the rules; when a chord in the
chart asked for a particular extension, I had to know where to look
for it; when the instruction was 'Play it up and octave', I had to
be able to do so instantly. What I needed was a mental map I could
follow — a
'condensed' view of music, a 'decoded' picture of the fretboard and
I found what I was looking for.
It
was only after other players started asking me 'how do you keep
track of it all?' that I realized I'd boiled everything down one
very compact, uncluttered mind-set. Nothing to do with scales or
modes; nothing to do with 'boxes' or 'grids' ... something much more
musical and practical and something that never, ever, let me down.
I began to teach the method and stage clinics and I wrote a 14 page
booklet which became PlaneTalk, once I'd decided on the comic-strip
format. It took me many months and cramps to illustrate it all — as
an illustrator I make a great guitarist! — but
don't let the format fool you. As one of my customers says in his
testimonials, this may well be the last book you ever need to buy.
The Guitar Slide Rule is—if I dare say so myself—a neat little folded-sleeve-with-insert affair that graphically
shows how everything discussed in the book comes together on the
fretboard. An old friend, who had been playing for years and years,
looked at it when I first put the book out. He studied it briefly
and told me "I just
learned more about the guitar in the last ten seconds than in all
the fifteen years I've been playing." It really is all-revealing. |
