Author: ESS

General: Retired engineering professional who enjoys outdoor sports and activities, fitness, technology, nature, my three wonderful dogs and beautiful wife. Most mornings, you will find me writing, while evenings are reserved for playing guitar. On Writing: I have had a lifelong interest in writing, but, because of competing interests (other than the vast amounts of technical writing I did for my career in engineering project management), I simply never found the time to take on yet one more time and energy intensive activity. For me. it would have to wait until I retired from my demanding career and, even then for another ten years while I was working a few other important demands to some satisfactory end. I have spent countless hours travelling around and through the wild spaces of Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah, exploring such places while running, backpacking, mountain and road cycling, archery hunting, fly-fishing, alpine and backcountry skiing. Each trip, whether it was for an afternoon run with my dogs or a full month camped in the high county in pursuit of elk during archery season, was an adventure out of the world of my fellow man and into the natural world which couldn't be anymore different. It is from these experiences, along with things I took interest in during everyday life, that created the memories I write about today. My writing is rather eclectic because I'm a hugely curious person with an insatiable hunger for knowledge on too many fronts to imagine. You never know what you'll find in your next visit to my site, so I like to think that there's a little something here for everyone. Thank you for visiting. If you find enjoyment in reading any of my stories, please leave a comment. Thanks for stopping by! Eric S. Stone

How do you start improvising on guitar? I can play the scales and chords but I don’t know how to make it sound like music.

Originally Written for Quora

Context

I started playing and collecting guitars as a middle-aged adult fifteen years ago and have written all sorts of things about my love of the instrument, including posts on vintage acoustic guitars, collecting guitars, my favorite guitars and guitarists, “boutique guitars”, guitar comparisons, reviews, the state of the industry, guitar maintenance, improving technique, but not so much on learning guitar from scratch. There is already an overwhelming amount of information available online and via YouTube, which is already a big enough problem with learning guitar today.

This was a very specific question that both irked me in its unwitting audacity and had me feeling compelled to provide a solid answer for the “greater good”. Almost every player wrestles with”improvisation” (learning to be a good “lead” guitarist) and tries, with mixed results (usually ending in quiet, long-term frustration), to accelerate the process by cutting every corner they can think of.

——–

You mention chords and scales as if there are a few, when there are hundreds. No offense, but it’s become pretty mainstream to want to shave learning guitar down to a few simple stages. Because it’s become a part of popular culture doesn’t make it any easier than it was twenty years ago. In fact, with more and more people wanting to play, there’s so much conflicting and complete misinformation now that it may be more difficult than at any time before. Too many choices. Try to focus on what I’m telling you here.

Here’s the deal: If you’re that far along with chords and scales, then you invariably know your keys. This is the “playing by ear” part for each of us, or, at least where it really comes into play (NPI)…if not far sooner.

In the beginning, choose a popular (used in countless tunes, as, say “E” for blues) key in your preferred genre and load some slow to medium tempo backing tracks in the chosen key. You may be able to hear the chord transitions right away (or you can use an app that shows you…or, just lookup the song). Listen carefully and play along with the chords only to get the tempo and your rhythm down.

Next, use the applicable scale or scales that you wish to try, and choose a starting place on the finger board and, while listening carefully for the chord transitions, begin to experiment (improvise) with single note phrasings over the chords.

If you do this enough, your ears should take you where you want to go.

Then begin experimenting with some of your favorite songs, playing along and attempting to nail the leads note for note or see if you can compliment those leads as you might picture a “call and respond” session between two guitar greats sharing the stage. The tempo will dictate whether this is workable or there just isn’t enough space. You’ll note that they only do this fun exercise on certain songs. Then go back to challenging yourself and play your favorite genre on your preferred platform. I use Spotify the most. Play a station or selection of tracks on that search and see how you do without skipping through songs (which is fine at first) as you progress.

You’ll quickly find what your stregths and weaknesses are and what guitar styles you wish to emulate, while always bearing in mind that the ultimate goal is to find and refine your own style.

Take ample, separate, practice time to work on your technical abilities like bends, vibrato, pull offs, hammer ons, and all the tools necessary to turn yourself into a complete player.

You owe me $200! Ha! 😆

How Do You Feel About Hunting and Hunters?

First Written in Quora

A “Trophy-class” Bull Elk Bugling
inspiredpencil.com

In Colorado, during the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s, though I was engaged in all sorts of mountain sports, the season I looked forward to the most was hunting season. I was able to get an early start on my hunting life having grown up in Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York state, where you can begin your hunting journey at fourteen, as long as it is supervised by an adult. You are free to go about your business alone at sixteen and you could hunt both archery and rifle during separate seasons during the same year. When combined, as an “Adirondacker”, I could hunt for what amounted to two months each fall. During my time there, the seasons were each about a month long. This is the way it was (at least during the seven years (from age 14 to 21) that I hunted there, and for many years thereafter. The state managed Adirondack Park’s 2.6 million acres are comprised of both state and private lands under a policy designed to make a “Forever Wild” zone well distant from the much higher populations located farther south, and, of course, the population centers of New York City and Long Island, and, to a lesser extent, the Albany area and it’s two “Sister Cities”. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (ENCON) and the Adirondack Park Agency APA) managed hunter populations in the Adirondacks and ENCON alone managed the rest of the state’s hunting units, which varied greatly in hunter numbers throughout the state’s very different hunting regions. I learned by following my father’s size thirteen footsteps up and down some of the most rugged country in the northeast. For my dad and me, archery practice began in June or July, preparing for the season which opened in September. Rifle practice took place throughout the year and was not limited to a few days or weeks leading up to the season, which began right after archery season had concluded. Rifle shooting was just another part of life and we were always prepared for that year’s window of hunting opportunities.

After college, I followed my dream and landed in Colorado, where I would spend a good part of the next thirty years. Colorado is an “either-or” state, meaning you have to choose between archery and rifle seasons and cannot hunt both modes in the same year. If I had to choose overall, it’d have been archery because it’s nearly a month long versus the five to nine day allocations depending on which of the four relatively short rifle seasons a given hunter elects to hunt. Even nine days wasn’t enough time to satisfy my annual needs. So I began a schedule of two years of archery followed by a year of rifle. As I neared the halfway point of my hunting career, I made the switch to archery only and these seasons would go on to contain some of my best hunting memories.

But things changed significantly over the course of those three decades and by the time I reached my late forties, I was coming full circle with my thoughts and feelings about the sport. I can’t speak as knowledgeably about the other Western states other than to say that some are managing their big game animals, namely, deer and elk, better than others. There are simply too many tags being sold in Colorado and far too many hunters in a given game unit at a given time. Because of this, the gene pool for elk on National Forest lands has gotten weaker every year and continues to worsen. You can see it in the size and antler growth of many four and five year old bulls and the mature bulls are getting fewer and farther between in some of the most popular units. With such a huge shift over three decades, Colorado has become the Pennsylvania of the West. Too many small, ratty looking deer with ticks all over them. Ticks in these kinds of numbers are a bio-indicator, a foreboding sign of a tragically weakened ecosystem. I lived in PA for two years and never had any interest in the kind of slaughter that takes place there every autumn. Since the state is so populated with infrastructure such as roads and four lane highways every few miles, a good fraction of the deer get pushed out of the woods only to become roadkill.

For Colorado to recover, it is imperative that a rotation, not unlike those used on crop lands, be enacted for game units to be “rested” for a period of several years, with the units having the poorest health getting preferential treatment. Some adjustments need to be made to the availability of deer to be hunted, increasing the numbers of licences sold in many units with burgeoning deer populations. It’s become a complicated problem, perhaps one with which the newly released wolves can help once they’ve become established. But, because Colorado is the most populated state to have launched a wolf recovery program, we need to treat them with kid gloves and keep our heads about us if the program is to be a success. Only time will tell, but, based on many years of personal and intimate relationships with various parts of the state, I don’t see wolf reintroduction in Colorado as being viable, given how little space there is between populated areas.

At 64, with a weakened body due to several life altering illnesses, I haven’t been able to hunt in the manner I enjoy for several years and will reluctantly say that my hunting days are over. With things being as they are today, I wouldn’t want to hunt anyway. Perhaps armed only with a good camera and certainly not during hunting season. One thing is for sure, Colorado’s elk are in need of some radical policy changes, even if it comes in the form of a more limited income stream for the state. Though revenues from large numbers of hunters have at least been partially responsible for keeping Colorado’s smaller towns on the map, the deer and elk need to come first for a while.

Encountering a bull elk such as the one pictured while hunting on public lands (BLM, National Forest), in Colorado, has become an extremely rare event due to far too many hunters (as allowed by the vast number of hunting licences sold by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife) which has resulted in chronic herd mismanagement and the highly inordinate numbers of elk taken during Colorado’s hunting seasons. Put simply, it has been the short-term value state wildlife officials have placed on the huge sums of money put into state coffers at the longer-term expense of the well-being of the state’s elk (and deer) populations.

Kelpy Reconnoitering Hermosa Canyon

Originally Posted on Quora

Circa 2008 Canon G-10

My beloved Australian Kelpie, “Kelpy”, as named by my then six year-old daughter. Kelpy and I were spending the 2013 archery elk season (end of August through end of September) in our favorite place, up high in the “Middle of Nowhere”, Southwest Colorado. Our camp was just 30-feet behind where this picture was taken.

High Country Cabin Near Minturn, Colorado

Originally Posted on Quora

Circa 1997 Canon Digital Elf 3.2

One of Colorado’s more obscure backcountry skiing destinations, this cabin is located about twenty miles from the historic mining community of Minturn, Colorado. Four friends and I made the nine mile ski into the cabin for four days of fun and fellowship. It had been snowing on and off throughout our stay, making for some prime deep powder skiing. We skied all day everyday and were ready for some hard earned rest.

We hadn’t seen the sun in three days and, just as we were headed out (you can see our telltale single file trail), it magically cleared as if the snow gods were bidding us goodbye. I looked over my shoulder and waited a moment before snapping this pic. It was cold and sunny for the ski-out to the trailhead and our awaiting vehicles below.

What Advantages Might Adults Have Over Learning to Play Guitar at an Early Age?

Originally Posted on Quora

I’m glad someone (or something) finally got around to asking this very question. I don’t believe in the theory that starting anything that requires a lengthy and difficult learning curve is iinherently easier if begun at an early age. While the theory has been around forever, it has also been riddled with holes. The further back we step in time, the more value can likely be assigned to the theory, but our youngest of generations are very different from those who were in the same place forty or fifty years ago. Time has steadfastly moved forward but it could be argued that our young are not learning commensurately with the speed of change. The requisite skill sets have not kept up with the complexities involved in moving today’s ball down the field. It is my belief that getting started early, whether at guitar or any musical instrument, offers only the opportunity to have more combined time to learn over the course of a given lifetime and become highly accomplished at a relatively younger age – given the same amount of learning time.

For me, in particular, once I retired and made the conscious commitment in time and resources to become a solid player of both the electric and acoustic guitar, I knew precisely what I was signing up for. I’ve been at it, in earnest, for fifteen years now. Granted, I have been consciously proactive in living healthy and remaining active to mitigate the inevetable aging process and learning to play guitar is one of the things I subscribed to those fifteen years ago, to keep my brain functioning at the same level, if not higher, than I found it, awash with exhaustion and burnout from a demanding career in large project engineering.

But, after engaging in some smart things to remain smart, I recovered and have gone on to spend this period of my life working on my “creative side” by taking up writing to augment the guitar playing (on average, I play for sixteen hours a week and dedicate about the same number of hours to writing. I spent about an hour a day reading about things that interest me, which does not include the news or current events. I could say that my life post-retirement life has, almost to a fault, has been about learning. I do not recall having the wisdom to thoroughly “apply myself” at a much younger age. Since I’m sure that I’m not alone with having such a midlife epiphany, this would mean that our learning process takes years to develop and (prodigies aside) learning difficult things when we are very young comes far more organically than we’re constantly informed.

I cannot speak to childhood prodigies who, almost as if by magic, are fortunate enough not only to have some sort of major proclivity at something, but who have someone they’re close to be aware of it and point them in the right direction. And, I can only speak to learning guitar as my instrument of choice, but, just like anything else, there is a range when it comes to prodigies. I think it is safe to say that it they’re surrounded by music, perhaps dad is a lead guitarist for a very good local band and mom teaches piano, and, between them they have a large music collection from which to listen and play to, then any offspring they might have is invariably going to have a leg-up on the local competition. Perhaps prodigies are not so much born as such as they are steeped in a musical environment that gives them wings at an early age. I suspect that it’s nearly equal parts of having their brains wired a certain way at birth and soaking in that musical cookpot set swaying over a gentle fire. Again, I do not know enough on the study of childhood prodigies to fully comprehend the mechanisms behind it. But if we limit the conversation you young prodigies getting an early start, then of course they hold the vast majority of players starting at any age at a complete disadvantage. But these tiniest of tiny circumstances have little to do with my overall comparison.

This has all been leading somewhere because, at least for me, I don’t think I would be any farther along in my playing, if, say I began at 12 and was now 27, as opposed to my actual age of 64, with the same 15: playing years under my belt. I would put my own ability to think and learn up there with any of the younger people I meet. And, it’s not just me. I’d bet my last dollar that my 55 year old aerospace engineering wife could be counted on for the same thing, as could many of my professional friends of a similar age. I would guess that there are many middle -aged people who feel precisely the same way. As I’ve said, the cross-section of young people of today is simply not the same as those of the same age bracket three generations ago I see on a regular basis that without their smartphones, they are ill-prepared to supply answers to even the most rudimentary of questions, let alone have the thinking and, therefore , learning ability (and mental discipline) to take on something as daunting as learning to play a musical instrument.

The question asks “Why might adults have an advantage over younger people when learning a new instrument, like the guitar?”. My shorter answer is that adults have myriad advantages over younger people at learning many things, and they’re not confined to learning how to play a new instrument. If a child never learns strong “thinking” abilities (this takes years) they will be forever disadvantaged when it comes to “learning”.