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Lesson 6
How to Play Cornerstone
6.1 And now... it's getting serious!
In this lesson I will teach you, or at least try to teach you, one of my own songs. The song is called Cornerstone, and the reason I chose this song is multifold. First of all, it's my own song so I can publish all the MP3's and tabs I want, without running into copyright and royalty-related issues. Second, Cornerstone contains all basic techniques used in fingerstyle guitar: hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, "boom-chick" thumb patterns, bass runs, syncopating melody lines, etc. etc. Third: despite that, the song is really not that hard to play, and even beginners should be able to come quite far (even though some effort, discipline and dedication will be required, of course). Fourth: the song does not sound like a simple beginner's song! And that makes it a very rewarding project for all guitar students.
Depending on your level, I guess your personal objectives will vary. Intermediate players (and better) will be able to play the song smoothly after a while. Even advanced players may get new ideas, may possibly be introduced to the versatility of Orkney tuning , and may want to add their own variations to the song. Beginners may want to concentrate on specific sections of the song, and so increase their basic skills.
The full tablature for Cornerstone can be found here in PDF format (PDF can be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader, if your PC can't interpret the file, free Acrobat Readers are available here). I suggest you download the file and print it, rather than reading the document from your computer screen. The tablature may be freely copied and distributed, also in digital form. The only conditions are that 1. the material is not copied in modified form, and 2. that no money will ever be charged for it. No commercial purposes: this tab is FREE.
I assume that, after lesson 5, you understand the basics of guitar tablature. If not, I trust you will get the hang of it after you compare the tablature for Cornerstone with the sound and video clips that follow below. (If not, I suggest you find one of the hundreds of instructional books and web sites explaining guitar tabs in detail.) I don't think understanding the tab will be your first problem, it will come with practice, probably faster than you will be able to play the music on guitar!
6.2 My suggested approach
Basically, tablature only tells you which notes have to be played at what time. Sometimes additional instructions are written in the tablature, such as 'slow down', 'strum' or 'slap guitar top', but overall, tablature is just the bare frame work of the actual music you want to play. Important aspects such as groove, feeling, timing and swing cannot be written in tablature. I therefore would recommend to always use an audio recording of the song as your basic reference, and treat the tablature as it were, e.g., an instruction manual for your mobile phone: you only use it if you really can't figure it out yourself.
The reason I tell you this, is because I know many people use tablature as their basic reference for the song. They will always study with the tabs on their lap, sometimes they are not even able to play the songs without looking at the tabs, and therefore they are so visually focused on the music, that they forget what music is really about: your ears. The first thing you should do if you want to learn a new song is listen to it. Try to recognize the different tones that are played, even when many are played simultaneously. Try to recognize the bass line, the accompanying harmonics and the melody, as if they came from different audio tracks. Try to recognize what makes the music special, or what it is exactly that you like about it. Then get your guitar and try to play something similar. Listen again, try to understand why your version sounds different. Try again. Try something else. Listen again. And again.
Of course this approach is not always easy, but it is the only way to practice your ears and your brains, and to appreciate all the delicacies in music the way they were intended. With music, it is very important to develop your listening skills, because it will be a tremendous help for anything you want to do with it, and particularly when you're learning to play a musical instrument. If you decide to focus on tablature only, there is a serious risk that in the best case you will play your music like a pre-programmed MIDI keyboard.
Not convinced? Listen to this sound track. First you will hear a MIDI version of a part of Cornerstone. Then you'll hear the same section, played by me on my Taylor 712. The notes are all identical, so, from a tablature point of view, there are no differences between the two! Get the drift? The difference you hear is partially caused by the sound of the MIDI card, which is (by far) not perfect. But that is not the point. If my guitar sounded similar to the MIDI card, I could still make it sound pretty well I guess.
The point is, that when someone plays guitar, there are hundreds of subtle effects that you can hear, and which make the music 'alive'. The interesting thing is, that even although I can appreciate and apply these effects in my music, I cannot explain to you exactly what it is. Let alone write it down in tablature! It's almost like a subconscious thing, something that comes from within you, after a lot of practice of course. The only way to learn these subconscious playing techniques is by: a) listening, and b) practicing. It will never come from musical scores or tablature!
So, I would recommend you get a copy of my CD (Whoa! Now you found the sneaky, commercial intentions behind these free guitar lessons! ;-), or otherwise start with the MP3 samples you can find elsewhere on this site.Tip: Use the Windows Media Player on your PC to play the samples, or the CD, and then use the 'Play Speed Settings' option to slow down the music. Interestingly, unlike the old vinyl records or 'cassette trainers', digital technology today allows you to reduce the speed of the music, but not the pitch. And that is a great help when you're listening to guitar music and want to find out what exactly is happening. It's almost as if the guitarist plays at half speed for you.
6.3 Let's go!
As a general rule, when learning a piece of guitar music, I would not start with the first note and then go from start to end, as if I were reading a book. I suggest you start with the section that you like best, or which is the most typical part of the song. In the case of Cornerstone, I would start with the basic groove, which is this (bars 49 through 52 from the tablature). Click on the tab below to hear me play it. Note: I use a capo on the second fret here!
  Cornerstone: bars 49 through 52 (capo on 2nd fret).
Click on the tab to listen.
Your first mission will be to play just that. By the time you can do it, you'll be almost half way the song! So, get your guitar and
1. Tune it to Orkney tuning (C G D G C D, low to high)
2. Put a capo in the second fret
3. Look at the tab and play it!
Now, particularly when you're a beginner, this may not be easy. If it were easy, everybody in the world would play guitar. The most important things for you are: a. Don't get intimidated, and b. Never give up.
So let's cut up the tab above into doable doses, and start with the first bar only. For your convenience, I put the first bar as separate tab + MP3 (4 repetitions) below.
 Cornerstone: bar 49.
Click on the tab to listen.
Here's a step-by-step approach:
- Place your left hand as follows: middle finger on the 4th string (4th from thin to thick, i.e. the low D string), second fret. Keep your ring finger hanging somewhat above the 3rd string at the second fret (but don't fret it yet!).
- Pluck the 6th string with your right hand thumb.
- Next, pluck the third string with your right hand thumb, and simultaneously the open (unfretted) third string with your right hand index finger (thumb plucks down, index finger plucks upwards, as if you squeeze the two strings together)
- Hammer down your ring finger on the 3rd string, second fret, fast enough to make the string sound, even though you do nothing with your right hand! That's what they call a hammer-on.
Presto! You just played the first half of the first bar. Now repeat it, until you can play it with your eyes closed, or your family members start throwing heavy objects at you, whatever comes first.
Then, get to the other half:
- Keep your left hand just as it is: middle finger on the 4th string, second fret, ring finger on the 3rd string, second fret.
- Pluck the 5th string with your right hand thumb.
- Pluck the 2nd string with your right hand middle finger.
- Now comes the tricky bit: pluck the 4th string with your right hand thumb, and simultaneously pull of the ring finger of your left hand from the 3rd string, sideways (down, towards the floor), to make it sound. The latter is called a pull-off, which is basically plucking the string with a finger of your left hand rather than your right hand. (So your right hand only touches the 4th string!)
Repeat, until... (yep!).
Then, try to play the two bits together. It's all right to look at the tablature, and it's fine to play slowly. You will probably find you want to speed up all the time, and then get lost. That's OK. Just keep going, look at the tab, play, play, play, and at a certain point something will 'snap' inside your brain. It's hard to explain, but you will recognize it when it happens. It may take an hour or more, but eventually it will happen. After a while, listen to the MP3 clip and try to recognize what you hear, in terms of what you have just been doing. You will find that now, you will experience the sound clip differently. It's no longer an avalanche of musical notes, but you start to recognize a structure, there a visual memory of your own hands playing the same thing. And that's how it all starts!
if you stop at this point, you may well have forgotten all of it next morning. That's normal. Get the tab, get back to work. This time it will come faster. Concentrate on this first bar, play it over and over again. Until you are ready for bar 50. This time, use the long MP3 at the beginning of this paragraph and play it from the beginning, at bar 49, but only start listening at bar 50! I did not make a short section of bar 50 on purpose this time, because it is a very good excercise to try and 'switch on your ears' at the right moment.
 Cornerstone: bar 50
Step-by-step:
- Middle finger of your left hand on the low D-string (4th), second fret
- Play the sixth string with your thumb, and simultaneously the 1st string with your ring finger
- Play the 4th string with your thumb
- Play the 3rd string with your index finger
- Play the 5th string with your thumb, and simultaneously hammer down your left hand's ring finger on the third string, second fret, and make it sound without touching the string with your right hand (hammer-on)
- Play the second string with your right hand's middle finger
- Play the 4th string with your thumb and the 3rd string with your middle finger (again, as if you were squeezing the two strings together).
- Now comes the easy part: do nothing (the funny sign in the tab means you can take a rest, for about 0. 2 seconds or so, enjoy it!)
When you practice this bar, you may want to read the text above, or look at the tab, whatever you prefer. Don't worry about speed! It's fine if you take 5 seconds per note. The most important thing is that you play exactly what the tab says. After a while, try to look at the tab only. Then, try to play without looking at the tab. Try to remember what you have to play from the sound of the melody. Try to recognize mistakes from the sound too. Look at the tab again to see what you do wrong. And most importantly: take your time, and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat... ad infinitum (well, almost).
When you can play bar 50 (more or less), go back to the first bar we did, bar 49. Odds are high that you forgot all of it by now. There's an easy explanation for that. When you first managed to play bar 49, yesterday, or an hour ago, whatever, the required picking patterns were memorized by your short term memory. That's the same memory chip in your brain that is used when you try to remember a new telephone number. The capacity of that memory is limited. So when you learned bar 50, the information to reproduce bar 49 was erased, and replaced by the information needed to play bar 50. Don't get frustrated by this, because it is perfectly normal and always happens to all guitarists when they learn a new song. In stead, work on bar 49 again, look at the tabs, and you will see that actually this time it will come much faster. There is also a simple reason for that. Part of your picking patterns have already been stored in your mechanical memory, which is the part of your memory that stores the information of, e.g., how to tie the laces of your shoes. When you tie your shoes, you usually don't think, you don't have to remember what to do, in fact, you will have a hard time writing down on a sheet of paper what exactly you do if you don't have your shoes with you! The entire series of motions comes automatically, as a pre-programmed set of instructions, and each motion is automatially triggered from the previous one, until all of them have been executed. This is exactly what happens when you have mastered a piece of guitar music to the ultimate level! You activate storage into your mechanical memory by just one thing: repetition! And, because you already repeated bar 49 so many times, now that you got back to it, some of your fingers' motions happen automatically, and this will make it easier for your short term memory to restore the old information. It's an interesting process, and if you're aware of it, it actually makes your picking excercies easier. So that's why I tell you all of this.
Another good technique to use when you learn to play new picking patterns and songs, is to look at your hands. As the fingering of your left hand is quite easy here, you will probably be looking at your right hand. Look at the motion of your fingers, and try to recognize the patterns. Try to recognize particular things that come back all the time, the specific shape that your hand makes, the symmetry of the distribution of your fingers over the strings, etc. This will make it easier to learn, because instead of your short term memory, you are using your visual memory now. Your visual memory is much more efficient. (For example: imagine you look at a sheet of paper with five numbers on it. Then look at your back garden, for the same amount of time. What is easier to do next day: recognizing all five numbers again, or recognizing five objects that you saw in the garden?)
At this time, you should begin to play the two bars together. This is where the fun begins, because you can repeat the two bars continuously now, and they will actually start to make a groovy tune!
 Cornerstone: bar 49 and 50.
Repeat until you can play it with your eyes closed!
One of the visual elements you will recognize if you play these two bars in a loop, is that your thumb actually makes a very regular and simple pattern: an alternating bass on the 6th and 5th string, (the 'booms') separated by a pluck of the 4th string (the 'chick'). This has been indicated by the yellow bar below:
 Alternating 'boom-chick' bass line (yellow)
This is where the term 'boom-chick' comes from. The rest of your fingers do a sort of an embellishment, or accompaniment. As an additional excercise, try to play the alternating bass part only (just the notes in the yellow bar) every second time you play the tab above. So one time you play all the notes, then just the thumb. Then all notes, then just the thumb, and so on. This will help you in getting a good feel for the 'independent thumb', which is so important for fingerstyle guitar. If you can recognize these patterns in your picking, it all becomes much easier to remember what you have to play.
As soon as you can play these two bars from the top of your head, it is time to become aware of a very important aspect of good fingerstyle guitar: your timing! In order to get a good groove, your timing should be perfect. An irregular beat really kills the fun of even the best fingerstyle songs. There is a simple method that will help in getting your timing right, which is (and I'm using Chet Atkins' words here): Tap your foot! Bang your foot on the floor, two times per bar, so that is four times for the tab above. Try to make your tapping as regular as a quartz clock. No fancy sweeps and rhytmic experiments, just a simple and regular TAP... TAP... TAP... TAP... TAP... Make sure the first note of each connected group in the tab always coincides with a foot tap. It's allright to play slowly, but... tap your foot! See video below.
 Main groove of Cornerstone, video clip (Windows WMV format, 1 Mb).
Double click to launch. Note my left foot tapping!
Note: In case your guitar seems out of tune, that's probably because I took the capo off. :-)
6.3 And now... you're on yourself!
I have reached the point where it's no use aymore to explain you each and every note of the rest of the song, in written text. Learning to play the rest of the song is something you will have to do yourself, because that is the only way it works! I hope that by now you have understood the mentality it requires. However, I will not leave you empty-handed. Below you will find five video clips that show you how I play all the main sections of the song. These clips, together with the tablature, ought to make it a doable project for you. Throughout your endeavors, remember the things I told you:
 It will be hard work! Cut your task into doable doses, proceed bit by bit, note by note. Don't think about when you will be done - instead, enjoy the ride! You will never be done! Learning to play guitar is for life. So you'd better enjoy it. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And then repeat again. And last but not least: Tap your foot!That said, all that rests me is wishing you all the luck and happiness wth your guitar. Inside this little instrument is an undepletable source of satisfaction and happiness for you to discover. So don't give up! If you ever get stuck with a question, just contact me. We will add a FAQ section on this website, for assistance with these guitar lessons as well as for my tab book. Here are the video clips:
So... seems like I'm done with my on-line guitar lessons. I can't believe it! It took me a long time to complete them (years!), because it simply means a lot of work, which I had to do in my spare time, of which I do not have that much. Moreover, I am not a professional guitar teacher, let alone author or webmaster. But it seems like I did it. That shows you what persistence may lead to. And now... it's time for YOU to get to work!
Enjoy the ride :-)
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