Hello and welcome back to another episode of Tash teaches I’m Tash and in today’s video I wanted to talk about something a little different than I usually do on this channel most of the videos if not all of the videos that I’ve made have come at teaching music from the perspective of a
Producer focusing all of my efforts on documenting my use of software of uh typing and clicking and downloading plugins and all of that and while of course production and the use of electronics is indeed a huge part of my life in my relationship with music I am a music producer by
Trade I feel as though I’ve never really shared with you guys a far deeper and more intimate part of my process which is playing instruments a lot of the times when meeting new people and talking about what I do and what they do music will
Come up and they’ll say oh what do you play and uh in the past when I had maybe a little less confidence about what it is that I now do uh with my fingers and bows and whatever it is that you put in
Front of me I would say oh I I play the laptop you know and I would sort of jokingly say that I’m I’m an expert laptop player but I you know I I don’t play any instrument very well um but nowadays I sort of cheekily half uh half
Joking half serious I will answer well I play every instrument and that’s not me saying that I play every instrument technically correct or that there has been some authority figure out there who is capable of bestowing upon me the title of being a guitarist or a basist or a drummer or a
Pianist merely that I play any instrument to play an instrument is to play it’s not to to work on an instrument it’s not to work for the instrument it’s not even necessarily to work with the instrument it’s to play with it quite the same as you would play
With a child you know who’s chasing bubbles on the beach it’s more of a a playful and directionless but perhaps more meaningful approach to music than trying to achieve anything one of the or two of the prerequisites the only two prerequisites I would say that you need to be a person
Who can play any instrument are curiosity and honesty first and foremost curiosity allows you to pick up any instrument whether it’s something that you may be familiar with like a guitar that you may have played since childhood to some extent or whether it’s something that frankly you don’t even know how
You’re supposed to hold it you know and you don’t know the name curiosity is what will allow you to very quickly bridge the gap between yourself and this new instrument to sort of find a common ground that may or may not be the same common ground that everyone else finds
With it but instead to sort of develop and harness your own intimate relationship with the possibilities of sounds that can come out of that instrument or device so a lot of the times you know somebody will hand me something strange from West Africa and they’ll often say how do you do it how
Do you do it and really I just I don’t know other than the fact that I’ll pick it up and I’ll I’ll play a few sounds maybe I’ll I’ll hit it and I’ll focus on seeing what I can do what are the possibilities of sound that can come out
Of here and I think one of the sad things that I I see and I hear people say when they maybe are lacking a little bit of confidence or say the confidence required for curiosity is that they’ll sort of they won’t do anything they’ll be
Frozen in this fear of the fact that if they do something that is not fantastic you know if they pick up a guitar and they don’t play a DME bag darl solo first time that then they don’t have worth they don’t uh have wor Worth to play that instrument it’s not
Worthy of them to share what they are able to do or what they are able to discover on the instrument and I wholeheartedly disagree and I say that you know what it is that you bring to the table is so unique that it’s almost a shame for you to not make a few
Mistakes so that you may find what means something to you on the fretboard or on the the the keys or whatever it is so curiosity is something that you first need to uh work on building up the the Curiosity to to try things to step outside of your comfort zone uh because
Of the fact that you know that there is greatness on the other side of the darkness you know around every corner there may be something new that you can incorporate into your very being as a musical human the second of all is honesty and I don’t mean as much honesty with others
Here you know that I don’t feel good enough I mean honesty with yourself in that when you play a thing you know how do I feel does this feel good to me am I moved if you can be honest with yourself about the fact that a very simple thing
Can indeed make you feel a certain kind of way you don’t need to worry about whether or not it’s making anyone else feel that way because at the end of the day I believe that a relationship with an instrument a relationship with music is a personal
One and if you look at all of the greats throughout history who we have been moved by you’re likely going to find that the main reason why they sha so brightly and why they had such a dedicated voice uh with their instrument and their craft and music is because it
Was a personal one it was like the Saints and sages of the religious practices they had developed a sort of uh solo communion with their instrument that allowed them to be honest enough to have a dialogue with music so being able to sit down at a
Piano for example and just play a bunch of random notes and not get so caught up in what other people think or whether even it’s good or bad but instead how does it feel will allow you to when the sounds are nice harmonic pleasurable it
Will allow you to feel the joy in them when the sounds are discordant dissonant difficult it will allow you to feel the tension in them in such a way as to sort of will your existence into resolving that tension there’s a a very strange sort of magical connection I believe
Between our emotions and an instrument when we allow them to flow now a little bit of backstory about me um I’ve always been a very logical person and you know I’ve I’ve sort of prided myself on the fact that I could think myself out of
Anything and uh you know I was far less at the the whims of a capricious mind who wanted to hurt me but as a consequence I think for most of my life I negated the fact that I did have feelings I I do have feelings and I’ve often told myself the story I’ve
Collaborated on the story with those around me that I’m oh sort of a feelingless machine and while that’s been funny and while it’s also been you know beneficial in certain situations when I’ve been able to sort of rather stoically uh just accept things as they
Are I realized in later years that I was missing out on a sense of feeling a sense of connection with my own uh Deeper Self um somebody told me recently that the most important thing is to foster a deep relationship with your primary or to to deepen your primary
Relationship and uh a lot of us may think that maybe that’s our spouse or maybe that’s a child but uh our deepest relationship should be with oursel and for me a lot of my efforts have gone into connecting with others in such a way as to ensure that they are
Comfortable often at the expense of my own uh sensory experience in life and I found that music for me has always been an Avenue for the very real Melancholy Nostalgia at times depression that existed below my Surface it music allowed an Avenue for me to let that out
For me to Alize that pain uh that loneliness that anxiety into something that allowed me to feel through sound what it was I was feeling inside myself or was I I was uh refusing to let myself feel so if in any ways any of these words uh resonate with you I encourage
You to open your heart more to music in a sense of allowing yourself to be vulnerable with a fretboard with the keys of the piano to open oneself up to these emotions being able to flow through you and be converted into sound okay so one of the things that I
Want to talk about out today uh Beyond everything I’ve just mentioned is my history with guitar um when I was younger I had a lot of guitars guitar was actually my first instrument I always wanted drums at the time but we lived in a small apartment
So I got a an acoustic guitar um guitar was something that I idolized various players you know I I wanted to be a sort of rock star like my idols and as such I got the guitar and I learned to play the C chord and I learned to play the a
Minor and uh I learned to play the G and the F major and all of these chords were very helpful because they then allowed me to take the songs that I loved that I listened to on my iPod uh that I listened to on the CDs and I could try
To play them too but the issue with this was that it invariably set me up with this sense of not being good enough because instead of trying to play these songs for my own satisfaction and pleasure I tried to play these songs so that I may play them
Better each time that I did and you know there’s nothing wrong with Improvement there’s nothing wrong with refining one’s process but if one’s relationship with music becomes a relationship of not quite being there yet one starves the soul of the nourishment of being grateful for whatever stage of Music you’re at now a
Lot of people have suffered uh trauma in their life and particularly in the creative Fields musical a lot of people in their childhood experienced some form of trauma that has blocked them from being able to be pure and honest uh and present with their experiences whether that was um having
Tiger helicopter parents who forced you to play piano probably at times for their own gratification the fact that they thought that you must or they thought that if you played piano it would bring them Joy um or on the flip side maybe you loved playing guitar you loved singing and in
School you showed a very vulnerable openness to wanting to play to learn and perhaps a teacher who themselves had suffered some form of uh sort of creative trauma took that out on you and maybe they criticized you and they brought into your experience for the first time a sense of doubt and Dread
And so a lot of people grow up never quite losing uh their sense of desire to commune with music but also never quite getting past and growing through the very real pains attached to uh childhood creative trauma and so for me a lot of my approach to guitar as I grew up was
This sense of not being good enough when I picked up the instrument however hard and however deeply I wanted to be able to make myself cry with the guitar there were so many guitarists who were better than me who had mastered their scales more proficiently than me who had
Written More chords who knew how to pay play more diminished chords and as such it meant that I came at it very much from the perspective of every time I sat down I would do things I had already done in a bid to do them better and
Everything changed um around the time of me discovering open tunings now some of you may be familiar with open tunings some of you may not but the concept of uh an open tuning is that by default the guitar is tuned currently to e a d GB this is what allows us
To play chords in the way that we’ve all been taught them what an open tuning is is putting the strings into uh a configuration harmonically where frankly you don’t even need to fret anything because the strings are tuned to a cord now there are a number of open tunings
Such as open D was my first one which instead of being E A GBE becomes d a d f a d um then there’s say Dad Gad which is a a sort of Celtic tuning I say Dad Gad it’s d a d g a d but the one for me that
Has been the most liberating is called an open D5 tuning and the D5 indicates that there is the D and it’s fifth which in this case is an a but there’s no thirds there’s nothing to indicate that we are in any scale other than something to do with d so
Before we jump into that I just want to show you how we get to the open D tuning from the regular tuning here and you know a lot of the time I will use a tuner if I’m tuning up to play with somebody else because it’s very
Important obviously to be in tune with each other but um I tend to when I when I sort of jam for my own pleasure I tend to sort of tune by ear because I feel as though that slight bit more intention to listen really sets me up for uh a more
Intimate experience with the instrument and on the guitar we have an e we have an A and A D these a and these D’s those are the only two notes we need in order to tune this whole guitar down to this open D5 tuning so I’m going to
Take the E string this bottom one and I’ve got this D and all I’m going to do is I’m going to play them both intermittently and I’m going to tune down the E string the same as doing a drop D until these sound the Same now some of you may know that this is called a drop d tuning this is what allows you to do sort of rock and roll kind of stuff now we want to take the top E string this High one and we’re going to do the
Same thing so I’m going to take that D that we had that we tuned the lower one too and I’m just going to tune that top one down until we now have three d’s we’ve got the low One now next up I’m going to take this a string this second string from from the top and I’m going to take the B string and I’m going to tune the B down to an a as well So now what we have is a d a d g a d this is that Dad Gad tuning I was talking about and you’ll notice already that if I were to just strum this oh it already sounds beautiful we’ve got um an open chord here but
We’re going to carry on one more and this is what’s going to allow it to really um free us up on the fretboard is we’re going to take that G and this may sound a little bit crazy but we’re going to tune that g all the way down to a d
It’s quite a it’s quite a big drop this and potentially tuning it back up again disclaimer you may snap a string but um we’re just going to tune it down for now so I’m going to take this G and this middle D and I’m going to make them both the Same now because of the the looseness of that string although they are tuned the same the G string obviously in theory should be tighter so we’re going to end up with at times a bit of a kind of flang phy sound because that g string is
Looser than it should be but this is actually part of the sound now I may have to do a couple more little adjustments here to to to make it all fit just because of the fact that we have loosened the tension of the neck
But um what I’m just going to do is I’m going to play all of these and I’m just going to not just listen but I’m going to feel in sort of my heart region um for that Harmony I’m going to feel for the connection between those notes So there we go so now if we listen to the strumming of all of this together we have a d a d d a d we we’ got a little bit of buzzing because this is a kind of a bit of a funky guitar but that buzz is kind of cool
It’s almost like a sitar in Indian classical music so now let’s just just just strum and I urge you if this is your first time playing around with an open tuning to not rush yet don’t don’t jump straight into thinking that there’s anything to learn or there’s any goals
To achieve use this as a time for yourself to connect with the possibilities the the realm of opportunity that now exists for you as a person who has no idea what there is to do on the neck this is kind of a an opportunity of you to go sort of solo
Traveling to a new city but instead of it being a city in in a in a kind of building structure it’s a city of possible harmonic connections and every time that you go out and you find something new you can mark it on your map as you sort of learn the Topography
Of what means something to you so first first foremost let’s just let’s just have a little Strum you notice that I can do anything with my other hand now if I wanted to I could fry an egg because of the fact that we have this open D we have a again it’s not a D major it’s not a D Minor it’s just a
Sort of a a basis of D now I just want to take a quick moment to sort of highlight one of the things that uh most appeals to me about this form of of music playing I grew up with my father loving India my family in general we we
Loved India and he had spent some time there growing up and as such I grew up listening to a lot of Indian classical music and the way that Indian classical music differs from western music is that the harmony we have over here is very much based off of changing chords you
Know so you may have a c that goes to a G chord to a D minor and sometimes we even modulate keys you know so we go from being in C major all of a sudden now we’re in c minor but um Indian classical music takes a slightly
Different approach in that you have a sort of drone this is usually laid down by an instrument called a tampura which is a four stringed instrument that is literally just tuned to a root a fifth a fifth and a roote as well below so it’s similar to this and we Have and that sets the foundation for whatever instrument or vocalist on top to explore the nuances of individual scales which in Indian classical music they called ragas or Rags now the interesting thing about these is that they aren’t just like we have in Western scales a selection of notes but they
Often have with them as well uh a very real sense of patterns in Ascension and dissension they also fit different times of the day different times of the year so a particular rag is is probably meant to be played in Autumn between 8: and 10:00 a.m. and whether or not you’re a
Sort of an open-minded spiritual person and you you sort of resonate with the meaning of this these frequencies uh sort of aligning with the frequency of a particular time of day or whatever or whether or not you just see this as a purely sort of inum instrum interesting
System upon which to sort of explore music I think there’s something really rather beautiful about the idea of there being this very real um connection between sound and the experience of life that the instrumentalists are living through so what’s cool about this open tuning drone sound is that the tempura will play and
The sitarist there sort of a large I believe 32 is string instrument with some resonators and all that or a bansuri which is a flute or whether it’s a vocalist is those vocalists are playing Melodies more so than they are playing chords as such you have a far
More intervalic relationship in that the Drone is setting this tone and then the Melodies of the satar or the bansuri the vocalist whatever it is is playing in relation to that drone and allowing then for very small adjustments and simple at times more complex Melodies to stand in contrast to the feeling of
That drone and let me just demonstrate here why these open tunings are so cool number one is that as we’ve already mentioned not putting any hand on the fretboard already gives you a sort of Rich thick chord and not just that but a sense of resolution I haven’t even
Played anything else yet and we already feel this could be the beginning or the end this is home so what’s cool is I’m now going to take the the second string from the bottom which is an a here and I’m going to play no Frets and then on
That string I’m going to play the second fret and then I’m going to take my finger off and just play none again and you’ll notice that when I when I take my finger off just to make it very clear I’m going to put my hand up Here notice how the very simple addition of one finger took us somewhere and then the removal of that finger brought us home if you can feel that you’re already halfway there to making yourself cry with any instrument so let’s now try another one I’m going to go to the
Fourth frat so I’m going to do open two four open and again this is just all on the same string I’m using one finger just my index finger on that string and see how how moving this can be with just the most minimal of Effort beautiful maybe we could try going from the five to the seven now one of the other fascinating things about this tuning or any tuning that is just a D5 or a C5 or an A5 is that because there is no real difference between the strings there’s nothing
Tuned in such a way as to require you to learn this is the same position but all of a sudden it’s different up here which can be very confusing in a standard tuning whatever scale it is that you’re playing along the neck on any string you
Can put that onto any other string and it will work so let’s take for example that uh zero the two and the four that we had Here and I’m going to play that descending on the high the the highest pitch string all the way down to the lowest and you’ll see that the scale that I’m playing there that 42 zero works on every String now if you find say that you want to explore a little bit more of the bluesy realm well instead of doing the two and the four all you have to do is play a slightly different shape of scale so in this case I know that the three
And the five and the zero give me this feeling of sort of Blues similarly if you were to find any other collection of notes on here that works well for you So that would work on any string now this whole idea of playing around with uh the Drone means that really your exploration is sort of safe safeguarded by the fact that whatever it is that you’re exploring with very simple adjustments to your fingering on the fretboard you’re supported by this rich and Lush
Bed of sort of backing Harmony so I’m just going to show you quickly I’ll do just a quick demonstration of how I like to play around and sort of improvise with this and I’m going to do it with the zero two and the four Vibe and maybe
It’s important as well to note that that this particular scale if I wanted to play in major on every single string it’s Zer 2 4 5 7 9 11 12 similarly if I wanted to do say mixian some of you may know that that’s just a flat seven so I could Go you can discover whatever it is that you’re looking for in your heart on this this flat fretboard and just know that you only have to play it on one string or maybe you could combine two strings so in this case I’ll do the two on the
Top string but then I’ll do the four on this string maybe I’ll swap them now maybe I’ll do the five and the seven maybe I’ll do a five on both of them but notice that because of the fact that I’ve got this drone whatever it is I do I’m Supported now I like to combine this approach of playing the Drone and letting it ring out with a a little technique that I sort of have come to come to realize is my own really and this came from the fact that I’ve never taken guitar lessons I’ve found it very
Difficult to learn to to play guitar through YouTube videos because uh a lot of the time it seems that people as I mentioned before they come from this approach of teaching an instrument in uh this is how you should do it this is the correct approach and for me any
Instrument is best learn Solo in a sort of more monastic um more vulnerable openhearted way of of finding what your own personal relationship is with it needless to say I’ve developed a couple of probably what you know guitar teachers would call bad habits and I often joke with my students and say that
If you do something wrong for long enough it just becomes your personal style and so my approach to playing guitar is that most of the time I just use my index finger and my thumb my thumb will play the sort of drone and my index finger here and then I’ll use the
Rest of my hand to just mute it so if you take the the body of the guitar I’m going to take this part of my hand and I’m just going to place that flat and I then at a 45° angle following down here I’ll strum across and this gives me a muted sound
If I want to then unmute it all I do is I just lightly lift my hand Up you can play around then with slightly different rhythms there so you see that I was doing a rather simple but if I then speed up my finger and really I’m just doing this all it takes is just that’s a double speed and this is regular speed combine those Two so that’s one sort of sound that I go for and when you combine that with some interesting fretting here let me just demonstrate I was going to say do something with the sort of the two and the four Um you can really start to create these really rather delicious dynamics of sort of mute to quiet so the other technique that I sort of developed um because I really wanted to be able to have a slightly more rhythmic back in to my playing you know I was
Doing a lot of sort of like finger picking things like This I wanted to be able to sort of pick it up and have the equivalent of almost a drummer and so if you slap with the finger downwards motion but as soon as the finger has come down you place the Palm I wonder if you can see it like
This as soon as the fingers come down and you can just practice doing that until you can comfortably create what’s almost like a A melodic snare Sound if you mute those two top strings the high ones you can get a really rather cool snare sound and um I use this sound a hell of a lot when I’m sort of playing around and creating kind of more rhythmic grooving section so let me demonstrate quickly Anyways playing around with that sort of slap is a great way and the technique for that that I use is I’ll first and foremost I’ll do Thumb thumb followed by snap and then maybe I’ll come back up So and I’ll take my hand off with that ring Through so let’s try that slowly thumb slap with with the m and then as I bring my finger back up I take the arm off so we’ve got thumb slap finger up and if you can just practice that on Loop thumb slap up obviously don’t lift your hand up here
That’s unnecessary I’m just using it to Demonstrate very nice you can also of course as we looked at before start to bring in sort of a double speed one so so notice on the probably the second of these I’m going to do boom b boom boom boom B that’s me doing a thumb and a finger before I do the slap so anyways the combination of using these sort of slapping and muting and uh ultimately being able to use the real power of that drone to divide that backing and ultimately that relief of uh of resolution when you’ve tried
Something and it’s worked out you’ve made yourself feel a certain Way all I’m doing is just being open to the sounds that are coming from my fingers and as soon as I let go I’m home I have resolution which means that I’m now able to sort of pack up and go on another adventure maybe I’m going to go here Now let’s come home let’s go on a slightly longer trip now and maybe we’ll go to the S and then to the 9 then to the 11 and then we’ll come Home I think you’ll agree that it’s a very interesting approach to music being able to sort of explore and then come back and that it’s that coming back that is is unique to this approach of open tunings that I find to be so uh rewarding and sort of spiritually engaging when when playing
Along so if if you know you’re the kind of person who many years ago started playing guitar and you know you know your a minors and you know your F majors and all that kind of jazz but you feel stunted you feel as though is this all
There is is is there ever going to be a day when I feel connected to the music that I’m trying to play I urge you to try out this open D5 tuning um if if you’re interested in this put a comment in the in the
Put put a comment down below and I can make some more music about I can make some more videos about working with these open tunings but I’m going to leave the video there at this point because I think um this has been a really nice uh video to sort of open up
The floodgates of my deeper desires to be able to share these parts of myself with with yourselves and the World At Large and one thing that I would like to sort of Stand By and open up to is the the fact that I feel as though I have
Been worried in some ways I have been anxious about sharing these deeper parts of myself even though I knew that potentially I would be able to provide uh a sort of going off point for for many people out there to go and discover their own relationships with music on a
Deeper level so one of the things I’d like to do moving forward is as well as continuing to make my videos about bitwig and plug and Ableton and as well as working onetoone on coaching people with their music production is that I would like to start helping Mentor
People who feel stuck who feel trapped who feel unable to fully Express themselves and to improvise and to open their hearts to music in music with music so if at any point you know in the SE in the the coming days weeks months you feel as though you would like to
Have a chat with me about how maybe I may be able to help you to unlock some of that maybe to come together to be able to explore some of what may be holding you back from being this pure being of music then please don’t
Hesitate to reach out to me in my email Alex at glitter Cowboy or you can book a a free 30 minute consultation with me over on the link down below which is my calendly slash teers um also if you’d like to take your support for me a step further and maybe
You’ve been a watcher for a while but you would like to be able to enable me to keep doing what I’m doing I would really appreciate it if you would become a member of my music production and creative mindset community that I’m still building we’ve now got 119 members
It’s uh called Tash tribe you can find the link in the description down below uh we do live stream events with feedback of listening to your songs and I give my guidance I’m going to be doing more track breakdown as as well as these I do these just random master classes I
I’ve been doing some on using AI to make music um but I think that I’d also like to start now doing some more of these kind of live stream uh group work um of just exploring why it is that maybe at times we feel a bit stuck with music and
How it is that we can go about freeing ourselves and clearing those channels so that we can dance with music again so that we can commune with and connect with the Divine Spirit of music that connects us all so I’m going to leave the video there and uh as always friends
Happy Tuesday and happy creating uh much love to you all and stay safe
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