Return to table of contents. Am I Wrong To Be Intimidated By All This Stuff? If you are, welcome to the club. So was I. And I am now so more than ever. However, awe is also a feeling I revel in every day. I am constantly reminded of Isaac Newton’s remark to the effect that he felt like a dwarf cleverly perched on the shoulders of giants. How am I supposed to deal with all this? Am I really supposed to know all these things? Is that what it takes to….? Question One: Deal with it one diagram at a time. There is a powerful cumulative quality to learning music, if you start with excellent building blocks. Learn and keep re-experiencing for your self the joy of dong one thing well. Recognize and do not deprecate your accomplishments. One of the most brutal and difficult uphill battle is the smooth negotiation from one chord to another. If you get there, it is a very real and fundamental victory. The first two chords will feel like an insurmountable struggle for you at some point. It certainly did for me. And each stage I have developed was indubitably hard won. I won’t sugar coat that. The only consolation is that none escape this hurdle. You are fighting the same battle with the same frustration level that every single other player has had to wrestle with, and continues to agonize in a never ending combination of frustration and joy. You cannot have one without the other. No matter how far you progress on the instrument on a level of physical dexterity, that larger lesson of always finding new and unexpected experiences along a path of the pursuit of excellence will exfoliate into your life and enhance your insights into all you do. This is the primal source of music’s fascination for us all. Progress over the long haul is far more a result of ruthless hours invested than one’s intrinsic talent. Whether it is two chords of two thousand, if you don’t extract the joy, all you are doing is shoveling through the slag. And then the time has been wasted, whether a little or a lifetime. Question two. Rare indeed is the individual who has had time and motivation intersect for all these things. And most of them will turn and tell you that they still feel like they are scratching the surface. Sad to say, many of them are bitter people. Perhaps it is the Salieri Syndrome. Like language, a larger musical vocabulary will not necessarily produce a greater volume of truth. Use what makes sense to you. However, do not use this principle to justify self limitation. No matter how limited your chord vocabulary, that is no reason to avoid looking at the advanced chords, even if to try just one. Sometimes a strange chord will inspire you to a song idea. Or to a whole batch of new chords. It might be added that emotional integrity and imagination count in this game. Jimi Hendrix, a slef taight guitar genius, was not spectacularly endowed with scalar or harmonic knowledge. But he never lost his thirst for learning. That speaks for itself. Question Three: See the answer to question two. What it takes is you. Bear in mind the following notion: Great writing does not need to employ every word in the dictionary to express the utmost of beauty and truth. In fact, great writing strives to compress the broadest extent of meaning into the simplest and most elegant turns of phrase. However, no true writer feels completely at home without a dictionary. Be of good cheer, however. After I get through this labor of conscience, the four voice voice inversions, I will devote four chapters to more practical stuff, assuming I can afford to keep doing this. Return to table of contents.