The Bluegrass Hierarchy of Needs

Bluegrass Hierarchy of Needs?  I thought that was Maslow.... It was but read on ... Perhaps you have gone to a management seminar recently.  Or maybe you’ve hired a consultant to come in and fix your business for you.  Or maybe you just finished up a course in high school macroeconomics.  In any of these cases, I’d be willing to bet you encountered some form of the layered pyramid, illustrated below:

Modeling complicated real world scenarios and representing them as layered pyramids can simplify things and reduce complexities to terms and concepts that are easily understandable.  

Since we borrowed the Hierarchy of Needs from Maslow and used it as our title, let's start there as an example of a layered pyramid.  This one attempts to explain human behavior:

If you are currently worried about where your next meal is coming from, you are probably near the bottom and shouldn’t be reading this blog. If you are feeling all cozy inside curled up by the fireplace reciting Shakespeare you are right at the top and you shouldn’t be reading this blog either as you will find it trite and unimpressive.  Most bluegrass pickers, such as myself, are stuck in layer three trying to figure out how to rebuild an intimate relationship with our spouse after an intense weekend of staying up all night picking and drinking with buddies and rolling in the mud at the local bluegrass festival.

Another example: In computer networking and telecommunications, there is the standard ISO model, which, in seven layers, enables an endpoint (computer, cellphone, teletype) to reach out and communicate with any other endpoint in the world (below).

  

Since you are almost certainly reading this blog online right now, you can thank the standard ISO model for the ability to do that.  The piece of software that you are using (e.g. a Chrome browser) is the top layer.  You don’t have to worry about the other layers until your dog chews thru the network cable (he just took out the physical layer).

It is outside of our scope to go into either of these models in any more detail.  However, as can be seen from a casual inspection of either of these examples, basic building blocks are represented in the lower layers and more advanced functionality is shown in the higher layers.  Individual layers take dependencies on lower ones and create something of value that can be consumed by layers above.  And the net result is an easy way to conceptualize a view of a highly complex topic such as human behavior or how computer networking works.

I’d like to take the same approach in representing music.  Please see figure 3 below.  Note that this applies to instrumental music. Songs with words are slightly different and will be covered in a later blog post.

Here, the concept of music is broken down into seven individual layers – basic physical concepts such as pitch and tone are in the bottom layers and more complex layers such as dynamics and emotion are at the top.  As in the two examples cited above, the idea here is that any individual layer will utilize building blocks from an adjacent lower layer, add their value, and then pass the result onto the subsequently higher layer.  Pitches and tones will be taken from the bottommost layer and assembled by the second layer as (say) quarter and half notes in a particular time signature and then passed on to the third layer to be assembled into a melody.  This process is repeated layer by layer until reaching the top layer – human emotion. 

Let us now proceed to describe the useful purpose of such a model.  One application is that of learning an instrument. The idea here is to master the lower layers before tackling any of the upper layers. 

·      Layer 1:  First, figure out how to get in tune and play in tune; learn how to produce a basic good, robust tone from your instrument.  An example: study the holding of the pick or the bow and how to get the strings to achieve a pleasant sound.  Important note:  I can tell you from personal experience that it can take decades to progress beyond layer one if the fiddle is your instrument of choice.  If you lack patience, choose a different instrument.  You can transition through layer one in a single day with a harmonica (no offense to harmonica players – you definitely catch up in the upper layers).

·      Layer 2:  Focus on timing – use a metronome and make sure you can play in time – learn how to place your notes on top-dead-center. Learn what it means to play ahead or behind the beat.

·      Layer 3:  Learn how to play the melody.  If you are to be a great musician, you need to focus on the melody before using fancy licks or improvisation, which doesn’t occur until layer 6!  Trust me, developing the skill to play melody will pay dividends in time to come – especially in the “taste” department.  Note that there are certain licks that are critical to a particular style (such as the archetypal licks used in Scruggs style banjo).  These are fundamental as well and need to be learned as if they are part of the melody.

·      Layer 4:  Put sparkle in your playing by adding syncopation and lilt.  Go back to the metronome and see if you can’t syncopate the 16^th notes that occur between the beats.  Better yet, buy a metronome (or a metronome app) that can ‘swing’ the time and set it to click on 16^th notes.  Play along with CDs and see if you can feel the groove.

·      Layer 5: Everybody loves machine gun style mandolin or banjo but it becomes monotonous after a measure or two.  Learn how to create phrases and spaces between phrases of notes.  Add some drama to your breaks with dynamics (loud and soft, building to crescendos and so forth).

·      Layer 6:  People frequently ask me how to improvise.  I have yet to come up with a clear explanation except that this is an emergent phenomenon that happens when you have reached a certain skill level on an instrument.  I will say that there is some risk involved – and like everything else in life, the more risk you take the higher the reward (and higher the pain is if you fail).  Some basic things to consider when improvising are as follows:  Think about what kinds of notes and licks fit well in certain chords or song structures.  Start with the melody – are there alternate notes that might fit?  Think about creating some dissonances and then resolve them back to the melody or chord structure.  Think about patterns – in the time domain, beating three against four, or in the note domain, perhaps adjacent “triplicates” of notes that aren’t necessarily in the key or chord structure.  

·      Layer 7:  If you have done everything right in the lower layers, and have things firmly encoded in muscle memory, you can now focus on the emotional aspects.  Do you want to convey sadness?  Excitement?  Discomfort?  It can be entertaining to go directly to emotion without going thru the lower layers.  I’ve been accused of this and two-year-old toddlers do it all the time. 

To summarize, our layered pyramid model of bluegrass music can help guide the learning and practicing of an instrument.  Be sure you have the lower layers nailed down before you start focusing on the upper layers.

As always thanks to my wife Andrea for inspiration, ideas and incredible editing skills. 

Keep on pickin’!