CYNTHIA MOORHEAD (HUMAN) CLAUDIA SCHMIDT/SKETCHY PEDALS (PEDAL)
BACK IN NOVEMBER, I was having dinner at Locanda Verde — one of Robert De Niro’s restaurants in Manhattan — along with the gang from Guitar World, Guitar Player, Martin Guitar and a bunch of other people, including celebrity chef (and guitarist) Tom Colicchio. (Sorry for all the name-dropping, but it was a fun night at a great place!) Anyway, someone at the table raised an interesting question (and I’m totally paraphrasing here): “Why don’t kids and new guitarists just start out with open tunings? True, they wouldn’t have a grasp on the fundamentals like standard tuning and all those nice, important chord shapes that go with it, but they would make sounds that are essentially ‘musical’ right out of the box. They could even play I-IV-V songs on the first day! The first seven minutes! They could even play Elmore James-style slide within the first hour! The fun would start ASAP, which might help get them hooked earlier!” BTW, I don’t know why I’m adding all these exclamation points; no one was screaming that night…
Anyway, my reaction (probably fueled by red wine and rustic potatoes) was something like, “Are you serious? Even Picasso knew how to paint realistic portraits years before he started messing around with Cubism and all that surreal stuff. New guitarists should work on the basics first — then they can, you know, wander off into nearby neighborhoods and experiment with slide, original tunings, open tunings and playing guitar underwater like Herman Li.”