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When a person begins learning guitar, they often start-out swamped in the nuts-and-bolts of scales, chords, rhythm-patterns, and perhaps finger-picking patterns. But I think few of us can long ignore the qualities of music itself which led us to learn to play guitar in the first place. I came to guitar with what I felt was a special, mystical love for the tone of the guitar, and I somehow felt at home with it when I started playing it. But I knew I wanted to be a songwriter and felt I needed an understanding of other instruments, so I could write for them. Are there other advantages to learning about other instruments?

The basic elements which we all start with in music are rhythm, melody and harmony. We could imagine these three in a Darwin pencil-sketch entitled, "evolution of music;" or a set-hierarchy, where melody contains rhythm, and harmony contains both. Then all of these things can be characterized further with qualities such as timbre, volume, dynamics etc. What guitarist learn about these things can be transferred to all the other instruments without difficulty. But each instrument has its own ethic, and occupies its own place within a group of instruments.

I was fortunate in that my first basement-band rehearsed in my own basement, and people left their stuff there. I haven't met a guitarist yet who didn't chance to mess around with all the other gear after the other guys went home. I went a little further. When I took a fancy to the drum kit, I took a book out of the library on drum rudiments. Rudiments are such things as para-diddles, ratamacues, flams, etc. At the same time, I was struggling to get past a plateau in learning to improvise melodies. Those drum rudiments provided an answer.

To begin with, each rudiment naturally suggests places for accents in a rhythm. Now, if I were playing a solo over an Am chord, it would stand to reason that A, C and E were notes that would stand out in a melody, and that other notes in the Am scale I was using would be better placed on weaker beats leading up to those notes. This insight made all the difference in being able to construct melodies, rather than pacing up and down the scales with no sense of direction or meaning.

Another instrument I learned was bass guitar. In a rock band, the bass provides a bridge between the drums and the higher melodic instruments. Another thing it can do, is provide pedal-tones, as a contextual anchor for when other instruments or vocalists work over a different chord or scale.

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