Chris Hickey - Guitar Instructor / Performer

When I take a look at the fret board I think of it as the big ocean. First, I need to decide what I want to get out of the ocean. I can swim along the surface, I can dive deep or shallow. I can stay on the sandy shore and just look at the ocean and clap. I need to decide what I want to get out of my guitar just like the ocean. Do I want to focus on the rhythm of the waves? Do I want to go big game fishing? Do I want to dive for pearls? Do I want to frolic in the surf? Do I want to fish? What kind of fish do I want to catch, small fish or large fish? These analogies may seem silly, but they are mapped perfectly to learning Guitar. I can simply learn easy-to-play tunes so that I may sing along with friends on the front porch or learn jazz with layers and layers of complexity. I could also learn any flavor of music that I like; spicy, sultry, bluesy, jazzy, funky, classical, rocking and rolling, blue grass and there are many others. Don't try to boil the ocean all at once. We will take it one small step at a time.

How do you want to experience your big ocean today? What does your dream look like? Would you like the confidence and comfort of standing up in front of any audience and singing and playing your favorite song? Would you like to be able to express your deepest innermost feelings through your instrument or would you like to simply exercise your mind and stretch your thinking? Have you always wondered how a particular song is played and you really wished you knew how to play it?

For me, I use playing music to add balance to my life, regulate my emotions, slow down and tap into a side of myself I didn’t know existed. It’s meditative.

The fear is that music theory is difficult and should be avoided at all costs, which is like saying you should learn to speak and not understand the alphabet. One of the beauties of learning music is that we have the opportunity to use 100% of our mental acuity to learn music, we exercise our emotions, our intelligence, our logic, our intuition, our mathematical skills and our physical dexterity, there’s next to nothing other than music that allows us to use 100% of our mental acuity all in one place.

The theory is just one small piece of the puzzle of this acuity if you can count to eight, you can learn music theory. I will show you how.

Everyone knows the difference between a major league and minor league pitcher. Most everyone knows the seventh inning stretch. Everyone knows the difference between first base, third base, and a home run. These concepts map perfectly to Music so if you can learn one, you have practically already learned the other, we just need to embrace one truism -  music is simple, but it is not easy and that’s why we practice, but there is joy in practice, and there is joy in watching ourselves move in the only direction that is possible in music and that is the direction of improvement. It’s impossible to unimproved when playing or learning music. Part of the joy is that we are always improving moving forward, learning more material, honing our skills and being able to express our ourselves, which is joyful.