Fifteen-year-old Joe Hospodor parts his hair like Gregory Peck and plays surf music on an old-fashioned Telecaster guitar. This retro-minded teenager from Los Gatos, California, says he admires the Pink Floyd legend David Gilmour, but draws the line at Green Day: "I detest Green Day."
At 12, he told his father, Andy, a computer engineer and skilled guitarist, that he didn’t want to continue basic guitar lessons with him at home. The turning point? "I saw my dad reading tab one night,” Joe said. By his own admission, Joe is now "deep into tab” downloaded off the Internet.
Tablature, or "tab,” isn’t standard musical notation, but sheet-music-like diagrams that allow a guitar player who can’t read music to learn a chord, a solo line or an entire song. In tab, horizontal lines represent not a musical staff but the six strings of a guitar, and each note is indicated by a number on one of those six lines, representing the fret at which to play a given note on each string through the course of a song. (Chords are represented by clusters of fret numbers.)
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Tabs are now a controversial part of online guitar learning, with music publishers threatening copyright lawsuits to shut down sites offering unauthorized (and often inaccurate) transcriptions of songs. But the proliferation of tablature is only a small part of a largely online revolution in musical instruction. From the real-time animated guitar fretboard of workshoplive.com to the truefiretv.com on-demand guitar lessons to the animated courses of Berkleemusic.com, students are increasingly able to forgo formal lessons in favor of a la carte online instruction with as little or as much human interaction as they want.
Online learning exists for many instruments — notably electronic keyboards, which interface well with computers and the Internet — but nowhere does it appear more prevalent than with the guitar. With 3.3 million electric and acoustic guitars sold this year — nearly three times the number just 10 years ago — the guitar is the best-selling instrument in the US. (The growing interest in the guitar no doubt helps explain the wild popularity of a much-noted video on YouTube.com featuring a young Taiwanese guitarist playing an exceedingly difficult rock arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon.)
As informal online learning democratizes the musical experience, it also challenges the norms of musical education and raises questions about creativity itself. Of course a background in musical theory and an ability to read musical notation are preferred skills in all forms of music (though hardly essential in much of pop music). But are they really essential in a world where autodidacts can conceivably create hits on MySpace while holed up alone in their bedrooms with a guitar, a microphone and Apple’s GarageBand software? Similarly, does learning and playing with other musicians matter? Does hybrid learning in cyber-isolation create a tower of Babel with no one speaking the same language? Or does it foster individuality and musical innovation — which, after all, are all about ignoring established conventions?
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"You can learn all that stuff on your own sitting in front of a computer or a TV,” said Keith Wyatt, a guitar instructor and director of programs at the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, which teaches everything from bass to recording and offers accredited degree and certificate programs. But, he added, "at the end of the day making sense of a torrent of data requires old-fashioned skills like critical thinking, pattern recognition, the understanding of musical structure.”
Michael Manderen, admissions director at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, agreed. "What I do see is that if you do spend all your time downloading MP3s, being wired, sharing playlists, that you don’t spend much time learning to play scales,” he said. "Especially when you’re young, you really don’t know music — and I can’t prove this — if you don’t lay some kind of strong foundation and have some exposure, some connoisseurship.”
Tell that to Jimmy Tamborello, who never learned to play an instrument yet is one half of the successful pop duo Postal Service. It’s so named because Tamborello, an electronica producer in Los Angeles, would mail his melodic electronic backing tracks to his collaborator, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, to create tunes like Such Great Heights.
"I think it’s good to have actual personal contact while you’re creating something if you’re working with somebody else, but I’m not really comfortable working that way, playing with other people,” Tamborello said. "A lot of it’s just the fact that I don’t play any instruments. I can’t play even the piano really. It’s all programming. And I think this isolated way of working works better for people who aren’t traditionally musicians.”
Customized training isn’t limited to the guitar: More and more keyboard manufacturers are making keyboards that control virtual instruments inside the computers they are hooked up to. "Piano is kind of an old word, unfortunately,” said Tommy Reeves, director of keyboard programs at the Musician’s Institute. “Using the computer is the way keyboard players are going.”
Take the Disklavier, a kind of grand piano with a media center inside. A student practicing a Chopin etude can press a remote control to tell the Disklavier to record the piece, which can then be sent as an e-mail attachment to his teacher. Or a standard camcorder can be plugged in to the Disklavier to videotape the student. In July at the Minnesota International piano-e-competition at Hamline University in St. Paul, judges watched Disklavier video performances from around the world on a giant video screen. At the same time a Yamaha Grand on a stage played back each performance in perfect timing. “This is like time travel for musicians,” Jim Presley, Disklavier’s marketing manager, said.
If the Disklavier is like time travel, the iGuitar is the immediate future. In June, Patrick Cummings, chief executive of iGuitar, strode into the Apple Computer store in Palo Alto, California, to give a demonstration of “the world’s first USB digital guitar.”
Basically it’s a normal guitar that plugs into a computer through a USB port and allows students to operate recording software like GarageBand. The guitar enables a player to choose whether he wants to play a traditional guitar or transform it into a virtual instrument that plays back the sound of a piano or any other synthesizer.
Marc Schonbrun, the author of Digital Guitar Power and a guitar teacher in New York, uses the iGuitar to record his lessons and print out what he’s played in notation and guitar tab for students to take home and study.
He acknowledged that because students have the tools to compose their own music, they may not feel the need to join a band or perform. But for those too busy for a full-fledged music career, he said, learning music this way is better than nothing. “Making high-quality music at home isn’t a bad thing because it leads to self-expression in a society where schoolwork tends to dwarf all other activities,” Schonbrun said.
Back in Los Gatos homework makes it difficult for Joe Hospodor to pursue his passion. “The guitar is really nice to calm the nerves, but I have so many other commitments,” he said. Even so, he signed up for traditional music lessons last summer, and now he’s learning to read music. And he’s cool with that. So is his dad. “Apparently,” his father said, “it wasn’t that Joe didn’t want learn how to read music, he just didn’t want to learn from his dad.”
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