Beneath everything in the universe lies a form of energy. Even smaller than the atoms and subatomic particles that are perceivable by man’s most recent and powerful scientific discoveries, lies this energy.

Within this force is contained the thought forms of everything that has ever been created in our universe, or ever will be. Some call it the Universal Consciousness. Some examine it in Quantum Theory (as the past, present and future co-existing in infinite possibility). I personally believe it’s a little bit of all those things working together through the mystery of what we know is God (if you have a problem with the word or concept of “God”, bear with me. I’m not talking about the old man with the beard). :-).

An example might be a giant slab of stone. Underneath its surface lies the masterpiece waiting to be created, the Venus de Milo or even a Mount Rushmore. But for guitar players and musicians, the songs we create in reality do not have the same tangible forms as did the stonecutters of aeons ago, since modern music is now recorded on to computers, CD’s and the internet. All of these forms are digital mediums and are based on magnetism on computer hard drives or binary code (1’s and 0’s ie. cd’s and internet). And yet the source of these creations can similarly be traced.

Let’s shift our focus to perceived reality for a moment. If you have never pondered this before it may blow your mind, if you have…it might be time for you to start contemplating it more often.

Question: Are the things we see and hear really real??
Answer: It depends on what you consider real.

Let’s take for example the simple sound of one note played on an acoustic guitar. Say an “A” note. You pluck the note on your guitar and the person standing in front of you can hear the note, right?

Not really.

Here’s what’s really happening

1. You strike a piece of wire that is stretched over a piece of wood (the A string).
2. This wire is tightened to the point that when the pick collides with it, exerting enough pressure, it is set into motion and it vibrates back and forth at a rate of 440 cycles per second.
3. The movement of this string vibrates the air around it, and sound waves of displaced air are transferred outward.
4. The ears of the person in front of you pick up the sound waves causing their eardrum (tympanic membrane) to vibrate.
5. The bones in their middle ear pick up these vibrations.
6. Those vibrations pass through their ears’ oval window to the cochlea, setting the fluid inside in motion.
7. This motion moves the tiny hairs in the inner ear called Cilia. They cause special nerve cells to turn the sound waves into electrical impulses.
8. These impulses are sent to the brain which interprets the electric signal based on its cycle of vibrations, velocity and duration as as an A note played on an acoustical guitar.
9. All of that happens in a fraction of a second, and is completely dependent on what they have heard in their lifetime.

Now hold on, cause were just getting started…you didn’t think you would learn the secrets to tapping the Universal Consciousness without doing a little brain work first, did you?? =)

To anyone that has studied psychoacoustics and physics my explanations might seem oversimplified, but keeping in mind that we are using this technique for guitar playing and songwriting, for the sake of simplicity & keeping this lesson smaller than the Old Testament, I’ll condense the pertinent info.

So at this point you may be saying to yourself, “Yah, I knew that about vibrations, and cycles and ears and stuff”, but are you familiar with eyesight and its relation to color and wavelengths as well?

Let’s say you’re sitting at a picnic table looking at fruit in a basket beside you. You see a yellow banana and a ripe red apple. The unusual part is that you’re not really seeing the colors! Once again, you’re interpreting them based on vibrations or wavelengths and how your eyes react to the reflection of light off of them and the vibrations they create.

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Michael Blaber at Webexhibits.org described it this way in his article of The Wave Nature of Light.

Much of our present understanding of the electronic structure of atoms has come from analysis of the light emitted or absorbed by substances. The number of complete wavelengths, or cycles, that pass a given point in 1 second is the frequency of the wave.

(frequency=cycles/second)

Understanding the speed of a wave
Imagine you are on the beach watching the ocean waves go by, and you want to know the speed of the waves. There is an island offshore with a palm tree that will serve as a convenient frame of reference. You count the number of waves that pass by the tree in one minute:

Normal humans have three different types of cones with photo-pigments that sense three different portions of the (color) spectrum. Each cone is tuned to perceive mostly either Long wavelengths (reddish), Middle wavelengths (greenish), or Short wavelengths (bluish). The peak sensitivities occur at light wavelengths that we call red (580 nm), green (540 nm) and blue (450 nm), provided by three different photo-pigments. Our mind determines color by comparing the different types of wavelengths the cones sense.

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What Michael did not touch upon in the explanation above, is that on top of ALL of this, is yet another variable, color is subjective. If as a child your parents had taught you that the color of the sky is called “green”, then your mind would relate the look of the color blue, to the construct of the color green.

“SO…What about the damn guitar lessons” says the student!

The point that I’m making is this…

What you perceive to be reality, IS NOT.

The same can be said of the many mysteries of the universe, the creation of art and music being one of them.

Do musical ideas really come from us, or somewhere else?

My feelings are this: When you hear really bad music, yes, it came solely from the artist (HeeHee). When you hear music that touches you deeply, yes and no; the artist is helping to shape an outside idea that is coming into his brain. The trick is getting out of the way of your own ideas and letting this inner voice, this muse, this Universal Consciousness speak through you. Once you begin to realize that you’re just the vehicle, the utensil that the music arrives through, you’ll be WAY ahead of the game.

I believe that all knowledge (similar to wavelengths or radio frequencies) is floating all around us at all times in an energy form that science has yet to document. In reading books on great inventors you can see the parallels: many of their ideas seemed to channel through them, as opposed to emanate from them.

Speaking of science: In the history of Quantum Mechanics, there have been several great minds on our planet, 1000’s of miles apart, isolated, working on the same experiments, only to come together at a later time and compare their notes. Talk about life imitating quantum mechanics, imitating life!

This same Universal Consciousness influences great composers and soloists. These are energy forms of the past, present, and future, all coalescing. All one has to do to begin to tap into them – is acknowledge their presence! For me, this is acknowledging Gods presence, and how I first sensed God moving in my life. It was NOT in church, but through gradually building experiences, acknowledging coincidences and supernatural realizations. The acknowledgment that there is something bigger than ourselves at work in the universe. An intelligent lifeform in the spiritual realm. You can either choose to work with it, against it, or become passive and let it lead you where it will.

Fear of the unknown
Once upon a time there were rocks that many believed to contain some great magic power called Loadstones. These stones could move by themselves (uhm..creepiness) and behaved in ways that defied gravity creating horror in certain religious men. At the same time some people were trying to harness their powers for medicine. 1000’s of years later children play with these everyday at school, they’re called magnets! So keep in mind that just because science has not yet acknowledged the concept of Universal Consciousness, doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

So then how do we tap this energy?

It’s more like day dreaming than creative problem solving. Here are several exercises and techniques you can work on to help you get started.

1. Mental Principles:

1. Listen to all styles of music every chance you get.
2. Get in touch with your feelings. If you can’t do that, how do you expect to express them through your music?
3. Stop using your fingers to write solos or songs, instead let you’re mind and soul guide you. In filmmaking there is a saying that editors often say, “Kill your darlings”.
   Here is what this means:
   Say a director had filmed a particular scene in a movie and one of the actors after saying her line turned a certain way and the light reflected a shimmer in her eyes. Now, this was not something that was written into the script, it just happened on-set. But the director watched it again and again and fell in love with it. The problem is, that when it came around to editing the film, this particular scene did nothing for the exposition of character, story or the films momentum. At this point the director would have to “kill” the scene he fell in love with (his darling) in order to keep the story moving forward and building momentum.

Songs can be this way as well. We can fall in love with a riff or melody that we feel we need to add to the solo because it’s so cool.  DONT!

1. Instead, listen for the inner voice (the Universal Consciousness) to tell you what needs to be in that section. It may even go against your better judgement at first. But the melody from the heart is the one that will convey its power to the audience. And since we are all part of this Universal Consciousness, the listener will somehow recognize the part you have written!
2. Stay in touch with your higher source (whichever religion you believe in), give thanks to The Great Creator for your life and your music. (I believe this is the conduit for your connection.)
3. Learn to start following your intuitions. Get a good book on meditation and begin to clear your mind from all internal dialog/thoughts.

2. Physical Principles:

A) Breaking old habits

1. Play random notes in a the key of Am. Play for 5 minutes.
2. Now Play random notes that are NOT related to any key. It should sound like a 70’s computer sound effect. Play for 5 minutes. Try to continue playing notes that have nothing at all to do with one another.
3. Play both of the above exercises at an constant pace of steady and even 8th notes and increase the speed every 30 seconds until your mind or hands become fatigued at the randomness.
4. Now: Launch into a lead that you’ve never played before. Don’t fall back on your old habits!! Do not play any riffs or patterns that you are familiar with. Do this for 5 minutes non-stop. This whole exercise should last 15 minutes total. You should do this everyday for several weeks before moving on.

B) Music in your head

• Try this exercise with a song you are very familiar with, either someone else’s song or one of your own. Sit back in a comfortable chair and playback the entire song in your head from beginning to end in real time. That means that if the song is 3 1/2 minutes long, it will take you 3 1/2 minutes to listen to the song in your head.

  At first you might feel like your just going through the motions, but after years of practice, you will be able to hear whole complex arrangements in your head. This is something you should devote 15 minutes to each day.

C) Applying this technique to your songwriting

• When writing a solo, vocal line, melody or whatever for a song, make a scratch recording of the background tracks (Drums, Bass, Rhythm, etc.) I like to use my smartphone memo recorder or a stand-alone handheld digital recorder (IMPORTANT: A small recorder you can keep in your pocket/purse is imperative. It must be with you, by your bedside, in your car, everywhere at all times for this to work). Now listen to this recording all the time, at home, in your car, wherever there is a recording device for at least a week. Every time you listen through the song, try to hear in your head what the guitar solo might be doing. Don’t force this, just listen and musically daydream.
  You may need to listen to it about 20 times first, but soon you will start hearing riffs and melodies in your head for the tune and every time you play the recording again, more of the song will start writing itself. NOW after this week passes, sit down with your guitar and figure out on the fretboard what you have been hearing in your head. THEN turn on your recorder and for the first time actually solo to the song. I guarantee this technique will do wonders for your solo/songwriting!!

3. Putting it all together:

Combining Pt. 1, Pt. 2 and Pt. 3

• This is where the fun starts! The idea is to play a song over and over in your head while letting your mind write new parts. Make sure to have a recorder handy to pick up your instrument or hum the ideas into it as they pop into your head. Once you become adept at this, you may discover what I have: the songs start writing themselves! Just like your heart beating or lungs breathing, it becomes part of your Autonomic Nervous System and it works on auto pilot. It’s like a audio loop running in the back of your mind; each time the song is replayed your mind will connect with the Universal Consciousness and add a few more notes or changes to the song. Sometimes this takes weeks, with slow progress. Other times, it comes in HUGE leaps where you need to fire up that recorder and dictate large sections, changes or bridges into it. Unlike Pt. 2, when you get proficient at this, you can condense the songs and don’t have to play them in realtime, or you may choose just to loop the section you’re working on in your mind.

These are some of the times that work best for me:
* In the shower
* Lying in bed before falling asleep
* Upon waking up
Discover what the best times are for YOU, and follow your own internal clock.

Just remember the more you work at this – the sooner it will become second nature.

DON’T BE ALARMED:

A few times this skill has caused some odd things to happen. Once at bedtime a song kept playing over and over in my head and would not stop even after I willed-it to. Don’t be alarmed if this happens, just ignore it and it will eventually go away. Fighting it just makes it worse! Also don’t be surprised if you wake up in the morning or the middle of the night and need to go to your recording device to document a song idea that was playing in the background of one of your dreams (like a soundtrack)! I have had about 10 of these and plan on releasing an album entirely based on this someday.

A Final Note

The whole solo or melody usually doesn’t come in its entirety using this technique (but the best parts do). So you will still have to sit down and put the pieces together with your ears and fingers, and heck ya, I like to throw in some pyrotechnics in my solos here and there. But the end-point is this, never again let your fingers dictate the solo to you. Use your mind, soul and your heart to tap into the Universal Consciousness. Learn to get out of your own way, and as the song says, “Let the music do the talking”.

Now go and write the best song/solo of your life!
-Tommy Merry