PRESENCE - Volume 71
Inspiration For Guitarists
Boonerang 2024
Yesterday morning I sat down with a cup of coffee and a stack of music charts and wrote you part of this email before I'd even played the gig. Here's what I had:
It is 6am Saturday morning and I am spending the morning with a cup of coffee and a bunch of music charts. This evening I'll be playing a music festival in my hometown of Boone, NC. Walking distance from my house. It doesn't get much better than that.
The Boonerang festival draws 6,000-10,000 people and is one of my favorite gigs.
This year I am playing with my friend and fabulous singer/songwriter/guitarist Melissa Reaves and the super talented rhythm section of drummer Tim Roberts and bassist Jon Price.
Here is the reality of a lot of musical situations that folks might not see. Melissa lives in Arizona, Tim lives in Winston-Salem (an hour and a half away), and Jon lives in Asheville (2 hours away). So we've been rehearsing by email and text.
Melissa started things off by emailing us her rough ideas — recording a sketch of her playing and singing, sometimes "beat-boxing" the drum grooves she had in mind, singing bass lines, talking through arrangement ideas. I took those sketches, worked out some parts and arrangements, recorded them raw on my iPhone, and texted my ideas back to everyone. The ideas went back and forth like that, and that's how we built the songs.
We have our first and only rehearsal this morning at 10:30, in my tiny music room. Four people — including a stripped-down drum kit — packed into that space. Crazy.
This scene isn't that unusual, by the way. The economics of music rarely allow for much rehearsal time, so you get creative. Our arrangements will be loose, and there will be a lot of improv in the set tonight. It's exciting, and honestly, a little scary.
So that was yesterday morning. We had our one rehearsal, and a few hours later we walked out in front of a big crowd in my hometown and played.
And it went great. Genuinely one of my favorite gigs in years.
Here's the thing I want to point out, now that it's behind us: what we did last night wasn't really "improvising," at least not in the way people usually mean that word. None of us were making things up out of nowhere. We knew the key, the general form, the basic shape of every arrangement. Melissa's rough voice-memo sketches already had the bones of each song in them. What was loose was everything inside that structure — the fills, the exact phrasing, who answers who and when.
That's true of almost all improvisation, even at the highest level. It's completely free, and completely inside something. The freedom isn't the absence of structure — it's what the structure makes possible.
That's the same idea behind the things I often talk about like the Number System and CAGED, by the way. They're not cages. They're scaffolding. Once you know where you are in a song, you're free to move. The structure is what makes the freedom possible, not what limits it.
I think a lot of players get stuck because they imagine two options: play it exactly like the record, note for note — or just jam and hope for the best. But that's not really how it works for most working musicians, most of the time. We live in the middle. Someone hands you a rough idea, and the real skill is taking that half-formed thing and instantly building something real out of it — not memorizing, not freestyling, but responding.
That's what last night was. Four people who got one rehearsal between them, walking out on stage, trusting that the structure we'd built over texts and voice memos was solid enough to improvise on top of. It was scary for about four bars, and then it was just music.
-Dustin
P.S. — The Essential Skills Course covers the Number System, the Landmark Pentatonic System, and the CAGED System — the three frameworks I've used for 40 years to learn songs, navigate the fretboard, and actually understand what I'm playing. If that sounds like what you've been missing, the link above will tell you everything.