The E Chord and Other Magic Spells

On teaching guitar and bass on my Castkills porch

“Ow,” says Brice, my eleven-year-old guitar student.

It’s his first lesson, so the finger discomfort is business-as-usual, as is his surprise and frustration. Brice’s mom has informed me her son excels at video games. He is discovering those skills do not transfer to guitar playing.

I have nothing against video games. But I am ever more grateful my childhood did not feature even a primitive Atari. In those days – the Days of Mystery – my deeply curious, deeply bored hands were just waiting for something. When I had energy to burn, they fell on a stringed instrument. I devoted untold hours to that wood-and-wire, monk-like. I lifted and replaced a stylus on increasingly damaged LPs, intent on learning songs by Led Zeppelin, Rush, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, and Peter Frampton, for starters. Via deep listening, sweat, tutelage from my best friend Todd (whose home was also bereft of an Atari), I cracked a few codes. (All by ear. I do not read music.)

Back to Brice and me, sitting on my porch, a weather-beaten wicker table between us. The afterschool sunlight wanes. Red-winged blackbirds and phoebes flit by, alight in the yard, pay us glancing attention. Brice grimaces at the dents in the fingertips of his left hand, dark furrows made from an attempt to form an E chord on a substandard Walmart steel-string acoustic.

“The E chord is the first chord I ever learned,” I say. I frequently note this, though no young student is ever really interested. I say it more to invoke the patience of aforementioned Todd, his long-ago faith a seed that begat an orchard. I learned long ago a similar investiture of energy in an avid pupil can reap benefits untold. It’s not hard for me. I am predisposed to optimism.

“Those dents will go away,” I tell Brice. “Eventually you’ll get callouses, which’ll also come in handy if you need to pick up something hot.”

Brice smiles wanly, as if I’m making a dad joke, but I’m not. Anyone close to me has seen me gleefully – and painlessly – grab a hot coffee cup, a cookie tray from a blazing oven, or a steaming ceramic plate from a server. This is one of my bush-league superpowers, the result of countless runs along a series of grimy fretboards, metal and maple and rosewood I’ve shaped like water shapes stones, and which have shaped me in return.

“You’ll notice your index and middle fingers respond the best, and hurt the least, right?”

“Index?” Brice asks. 

“Pointer. Pointer finger.”

Brice nods.

“That’s because we use those the most,” I say. I open my palms, extend all ten of my digits in the air above my battered Martin D-28 dreadnought. “When we lived in the trees, we used every finger, like our primate cousins still do. But since the rise of so-called civilization, we’ve come to depend mostly on just the thumb and the middle and index fingers. We barely use the ring and pinky at all. Most humans don’t take full advantage of what their hands can actually do. But with a guitar, you can. It’s pretty cool.”

Brice frowns at his aching fingers like they are foreign bodies.

“I know it’s a struggle right now,” I say. “It was for me, too, and every musician I know.”

My student regards me suspiciously. This is normal. As real as the memories are for me, the notion that I was once an exasperated beginner, with sore, unresponsive fingers, is hard for him to visualize. There’s no video proof, which I can’t decide is good or bad.

“But I promise you, Brice, your hands can do so much more than you think.”

At this point in the teacher-student relationship, Brice thinks I’m talking only about learning songs. That’s fine. It’s a little early to freak him out with the fact that the E chord is just one bit of elemental magic I’m sharing. Should he return to my porch for a few more lessons, I’ll reveal the whole truth: if he puts in the time, masters more chords, moves on to sequences, melodies, and rhythms, he’ll access centuries-old methods of time travel, bedazzlement, and deliverance. No electricity, no internet required. I will eventually risk overwhelming him with the fact that I am passing along tools that have granted me and many an audience transcendence from regrets of the past, worries for the future, and miseries of the day. (Not 100% of the time, of course. But enough.)

If he can forsake an hour of gaming here and there, Brice will get the not-so-secret knowledge, and my continued undivided attention. Claiming a “lack of time” doesn’t really cut ice with me. I’ve taught plenty of obsessive gamers, a couple star athletes, some SAT whizzes, some distressingly over-scheduled kids, and, most tellingly, some working parents, all of whom find the time to practice, and who, without fail, get better.

Although his pain threshold seems low, Brice’s eleven-year-old hands appear promising; long, tapered fingers; clipped, only moderately grubby fingernails. But I remind myself not to presume genetic advantage. I recall the kid a couple years ago with tiny, stubby fingers, and a dark disposition to boot, who nevertheless progressed astonishingly fast, nailing “Blackbird” in under six months, and who is now more technically skilled than I. Several of my students have become masters, which is both humbling and deeply satisfying.

I have taught the gifted, but, vexingly, that advantage is no guarantee they’ll keep at it. If they bolt, I get reasons like “I’m too busy” or “I’m taking a break” or no reason at all. Because I’m a compulsive storyteller, I make up more interesting narratives. Perhaps they abandon their instrument the way one would scorn a book of spells that threatens to alter their life beyond management, or the way, say, the superhero is ambivalent about the spiked blood that makes them dramatically different. I could go on.

I’m thinking of the physical therapist with strong, adept hands, a mom of two, an athlete, who spent a year learning the complex “American Pie,” mastered it, then quit. The teen who, within a couple months of his first lesson, blew my mind by taking on the complex (for me) “My Funny Valentine,” nailed it, suffered my amazement, then quit. The thirteen-year-old neophyte bass player with an out-of-the-gate sense of rhythm I did not acquire until my mid-twenties, who played a few joyous gigs, then abruptly quit to focus on his (admittedly very impressive) writing skills, his bass gathering dust in a closet, like so many instruments.

It’s too early to gauge whether Brice will stay or go, or if he’s a natural or not. The only way to find out is to press on.

“Let’s try that E chord again,” I say. “But this time, don’t look at your fingers while you make the chord.”

His eyes widen. This is normal.

“I know it sounds crazy. Your hands are smarter than you think they are, Brice. Everybody’s are. Your fingers know where to go. All the visual information coming from your eyes is gumming up the works. Just try it.”

Brice mutters OK, and swallows his fear of humiliation. He squares his slim shoulders, inhales a lungful of mountain air, closes his pale blue eyes, tilts his head back. As I predicted (and hoped, because this doesn’t always work), his left hand, looking now like an organism independent of the half-realized human before me, forms a perfect E chord, in the exact right spot on the guitar neck. Brice pauses, furrows his brow. His right hand is poised to drag his pick across the strings. He inhales again, a diver at the edge of a cliff. Eyes squeezed shut in surrender.

He strums. The cluster of notes known as the E chord joins the sounds of nature around us – the birds, the nearby creek, the leaves in the breeze… and Brice’s laugh.

When he opens his eyes, joy blooms on his face. I hold up my hand for a high five, which he gives. It almost hurts.

“Let’s learn another chord,” he says.