The Vikid School of Music

Love, Dexterity and Unchartered Territory

Love

I fell in love with music as a child. Some of my earliest memories are of me being almost completely enraptured in a trance listening to the Ragas of Indian Classical Music and the emanations of Deep Purple. For this I have to thank my uncle who had the interest to pursue the best India had to offer and for having these special metallic tapes, which produced such a high fidelity sound that the music completely filled and entered the space around you. I also have to thank my father for buying the best hi-fi systems available in the early 80’s, which played these special tapes and allowed the Ragas to shine in all their magnificence.

My next memories of me lying down on dorm room bed in boarding school, KOSS headphones on ears, listening to Jimi Hendrix’s, Are You Experienced. The first time I listened to “Hey Joe”, I was floored. I had never heard something with so much soul. Hmm… the the word soul has been captured in music but I can’t think of a better word right now. That album just got inside of me. Then funnily enough it was Bon Jovi’s, “Slippery When Wet” that had me listening for hours, Guns & Roses, The Beatles, Clapton, Juan Martin, Dire Straights and many many others too, with a list that could fill many pages. I never felt as much ease or joy as when I listened to music, perhaps only the game of Tennis or a ruckus in the middle of a Rugby scrum, gave me so much joy.

First Musical Interlude, this is just so good!

Dexterously Challenged

As a lover of Lord Krishna I decided to try the flute at the age of 8… but that was a total failure. The lessons bored me, I had absolutely no talent, reading music was like looking at Chinese. Unfortunately, my fingers were dexterously challenged. These concerns were then confirmed when an advanced aptitude testing company came to our school. In Math, I was above the 90th percentile, same in Reasoning, Spacial Manipulation, etc… etc… smart boy apparently, but in mechanical drills & physical skills, etc… bottom 10th-30th percentile… I gave up music.

Harmonica

Years later and into my 2nd year of college I discovered the diatonic (blues) harmonica.

Revelation… no fingers needed!

Suddenly, I was in love again. I could play tunes by ear (simply by listening to them ) and I carried that instrument in my pocket always. I literally played it everywhere, given any chance. I even remember playing it on the airplane to everyone’s astonishment!

But there was a problem, I as I got better, I learned about advanced techniques like tongue blocking, different types of note bending etc… and each harmonica was only in one key, so I bought 12… then more and of different varieties. It all got complex, I wasn’t getting better and life after college took over.

I started to loose interest. I am not sure why but it was capped off after I went to a harmonica retreat in Hawaii a few years later again, in an effort to reignite the passion.

I had an amazing time there, listened and learned from some of the best players in the world including Howard Levy. That guy is an absolute phenomenon but I still lost interest and stopped playing pretty soon after.

Enter Guitar

I picked up a Fender Esquire (an entry level electric guitar) during my 3rd year of college. We had this student in the building, an acoustic player from the US. He was very inspiring and just a natural finger style player with American flair.

I tried to copy him but my dexterity was really causing me issues. I tried so hard playing barre chords that I close to permanently damaged my forefinger on my left hand. I still get this shooting pain up the back of my hands if I play too long. It hurt so much that perhaps 15 years of my 20 year career as a want to be guitarist has been plagued with an inability to play due this self inflicted injury.

But the love and desire to create music, however bad, never went away. My guitars still litter the house. I have instruments of every variety and of all shapes, some from the Amazon (the jungle, not Bezos Inc.) and other indigenous tribes too. I seem to love collecting instruments I can’t play! My latest acquisition is a pTrumpet which a made of plastic as I have always wanted to toot a horn. It only uses 3 fingers compared to the 8 to 9 needed on the guitar!

Theoretical Issues

The dexterity issue still follows me around but not just that, Music Theory is absolutely nuts too. At one point, I was convinced it must have been devised by some kind of a sadist who also happened to be an autistic savant, for added pleasure!

Here are some of my notes trying to make sense of theory…

Here, above, I am trying to figure out scales.

Here I am trying to use circles and pentagons in the hope of seeing some light through the madness.

More circles, tables and searching for meaningful patterns.

I have even tried using Hindi (Devanagari) and Japanese (Hiragana) script to try and find something that makes sense to me.

I have notes books filled with this kind of stuff. I have scoured the Internet, bought a variety of courses that offer “secrets” that promise to make me a guitar hero and yet something evades me. It seems that the Vikid doesn’t understand secrets!

Why? You might ask would I waste so much time trying work something out in a new way when the current system has apparently been successfully used from Bach to Yanni?!

Perhaps I have met my challenge and should admit to being a Musical Idiot (MI), without the savant part?

Well it might just be my wicked instinct but I think the Western System while clever (and we will soon get to why), is flawed in many ways.

(Here, “flawed” may be the wrong use of the word. I just mean that there may be more ways to look at things that commonly taught.)

The problem I find is that I understand music very well on a visceral level.

Then, why is the theory part so out of sync with the natural understanding?

Let’s have a closer look… but first a Musical Interlude. Listen to this and be mesmerized:

Musical Systems

A lot of Eastern music is microtonal. That means that it has more than the 12 notes used in Western music. Indian Classical Music (ICM) for example, consists of 22 notes or tones. Arabic Music has its own system and various cultures around the world have used a variety of systems differing from the Modern Western System (MWS). Most people who are used to the MWS find microtonal music jarring. They don’t get it.

Secondly, my body is quite natural in Dance. What I lack in my fingers is made up for in whole body movement. At least it used to be… ha ha…

Music feels like a language I understanding without the ability to communicate with it.

The long and short of it, is that while I can hear, enjoy and be with what is happening in music, on the theory and production side, nothing makes sense. It looks like gibberish. And here I am, the guy who is meant to be good at theory!

So I embarked on a multi-year quest to find a theory that did make sense.

Before we get into this, it is an interesting question of why ICM has so many more notes than WMS and more interesting to ask if having more notes is better?

Well it turns out the answer is both yes and no, depending on what you are looking for. We don’t need to get into the math here and frankly we don’t need to, to understand why.

This is how it works roughly and with a lot of exceptions. It’s like French, you learn a rule, and then the 100 exceptions to the rule, so don’t shoot me if I get it wrong, this is just my understanding so far…

With all those extra notes, melodies in ICM are far richer and more nuanced that in MWS. (Remember the exceptions!)

You can literally get into the soul and rearrange things with the higher precision given all the extra notes. ICM is awesome on a spiritual level for that reason.

But it comes at a high price.

All the extra notes come at the cost of Harmony and this is where the MWS shines. MWS is designed with harmony in mind, which means that you can have many multiple lines of music playing at the same time to simulate awesomeness.

Have you ever heard of an Indian Classical Orchestra?

I didn’t think so…

ICM shines with one or two lines of music with highly complex’s & irregular rhythms. This is great for improvisational virtuosos but not so good if you want 20 musicians playing together.

In the West you have much larger bands than the East and complexity is generated by groups of musicians or instruments such as a piano and guitar that are really organized around harmony.

When you get to real virtuosos many of these differences get erased. Virtuosos are not called virtuosos for nothing! We are talking in the general case here.

There are rhythmic differences between ICM & MWS, we don’t need to get into it. Let’s suffice to say the reasons are similar too.

There is a trade off between Melodic & Harmonic Complexity.

The Vikid School of Music

I have always charted my own path, for better or for worse and with my musings on music theory, I am still convinced that we can make an improvement on the way we understand MWS.

Here, I am not saying that the music itself needs to be (or can be) improved but rather the approach to understanding it, the notations used to describe it or learn it, can be improved.

I absolutely love MWS music and it is what I primarily listen to. What I have been thinking about it is how to approach MWS theoretically. And here, I think I have had some results, Circles, Pentagons, Numbers and all.

Just this week I had a breakthrough in understanding the Guitar Fretboard. Articles will be published soon.

With that, as lucky subscribers, I welcome you to The Vikid School of Music!

Membership to the school currently stands at 1, myself ;-),

but I do hope you enjoy my writings about musical theory (& practice) and the practical novel approaches taken to try and understand it.

And that’s all Folks,

The Vikid Truth