Inside the Crown of the Continent Guitar Workshop – Advanced Rock with Shredder Tobias Hurwitz

By: Debra Devi

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I’ve heard that a few times, but it never sunk in until I took Tobias Hurwitz’s daily three-hour Advanced Rock class at the week-long Crown of the Continent Guitar Workshop. If you’re a “play by ear” guitarist like me, I can’t recommend enough that you put your anxieties and prejudices aside and sign up for an intensive workshop like this one.

I never studied the guitar. I just bought a Fender Jaguar one day for $125 at a pawn shop and started stumbling around on it.

I could barely play a power chord when I got into my first band, a hardcore punk outfit. During the audition, trying desperately to keep up with the bassist and drummer–who had taken off like a shot after the singer screamed “1234!”–I nicked a knuckle on the bridge. Blood spurted everywhere as I flailed away. I got the gig.

I used three methods to learn to play the guitar.

1) Program a chord progression into my foot-long Casio keyboard. Hit repeat. Find notes that sound good. Try to remember them.

2) Get to rehearsal three hours early and practice the songs so as not to make a fool of myself when the rest of the band arrives. Pretend I just got there, too, when they arrive.

3) Ask other guitarists to show me something.

I play pretty well these days, but I still can’t tell you what key I’m in or what notes I’m hitting half the time.

Luckily, my bass player went to Berklee.

I’ve spouted the same excuses for avoiding learning the notes on the fret board, or any music theory, that you probably have: “I don’t wanna sound like everybody else.” “I play what I feel.”  “I’m more original and creative when I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I do get some happy accidents. But I’m also secretly tired of flying blind.

I’d planned to sign up for Matt Smith’s highly regarded Advanced Blues class. I already play the blues decently, and figured it wouldn’t expose too many of the huge holes in my guitar knowledge.

The Great Guitar Goddess in the sky had another plan. Matt’s class was full, I was informed, as we students milled about the two-story log cabin under the mournful gazes of ginormous stuffed bison, elk and caribou heads.

“We’ve signed you up for Tobias Hurwitz’s Advanced Rock class instead!” a staffer chirped.

My stomach dropped. Hurwitz is a Shredder with a capital S. He’s a guitar wizard who hangs with speed demons like Michael Angelo Batio. I don’t know a mode from my elbow.

I started to sweat in the dry Montana air.

The next morning I got in the shuttle van with my fellow Advanced Rock students – who ranged from a skinny young guy with short black hair and a Wiccan Army patch on his jacket to a couple of longhaired Skynard fans—and one other woman.

I wasn’t the only one feeling a tad resistant. As Hurwitz wrote some tablature on the board, one of the Skynard fans announced, arms crossed, that he doesn’t read tab and doesn’t plan on learning how.

“Well, by the end of the week, you’ll be able to read a little,” Hurwitz replied calmly.

He quickly took the measure of everyone in the room – asking questions about our playing and our goals. “Look, you guys,” he said, “I’m here to teach you what you want to learn. So just let me know what that is and we’ll do fine.”

With that he led us through a chromatic scale warm-up and taught us clear and useful ways to figure out notes on the fret board. He taught us the first of his “note naming games,” a variation on Battleship. Hurwitz threw out string and fret coordinates, we had to name that note.

I was probably the slowest person in the room at naming notes – but the games Hurwitz taught us have made it easier for me – and now I have a method for learning them that makes sense to me. I’ve had people try to explain the Circle of Fifths to me before and could barely keep my eyes open. Hurwitz made it relevant to me as a rock guitarist. I was freakin’ riveted.

The fret board is starting to light up; I’m no longer flying totally blind. It’s exciting – and I truly get now why I need to know this stuff.

Strangely, Hurwitz was looking vaguely familiar. I couldn’t place him until one morning he referenced my friend Phil Sudo’s brilliant little book Zen Guitar.  Now I remembered where I’d seen Hurwitz before. He’d performed Phil’s exhilarating jam song “One Sound One Song,”  at Phil’s memorial service. He also co-authored and produced Phil’s posthumous book and CD The Book of Six Strings.

I wrote the song “Get Free,” when I came home from that memorial service with a heavy heart, looking for meaning in the too-young passing of a friend. It’s the title track on my band Devi’s Get Free album. The Great Guitar Goddess was looking out for me, indeed. She and Phil must be up there jamming.

“Carry an empty cup. Check your ego at the door of this dojo,” I could practically hear Phil say, and he was right. It had only been ego and fear that had kept me from learning everything I possibly could about this instrument I so love.

Over the next week, Hurwitz won even the most stick-in-the-mud guys in the room over with his sense of humor (he had us in stitches demonstrating stage moves and joking about shredding: “Nobody wants to hear that!”), his extremely deep knowledge of and obvious love for the guitar, his clear teaching system and his encouraging vibe. You could practically hear light bulbs clicking on above our heads all week.

“Really, I developed my system for myself, because I’m always trying to get better, Hurwitz noted, “And to get better I discovered that I have to study six different things: sight reading, ear training, music theory, technique, improvisation and repertoire. Studying those six things enables the seventh, which is the X-factor or creativity. If you study these six things, chances are whatever creativity that is inside will come out more easily.”

The Sanskrit word for teacher is “guru,” a word that has been twisted and abused so much its original meaning has gotten pretty murky. In fact, like so many Sanskrit words, guru is a combination of two words – gu, which means darkness (goo, anyone?), and ru, to remove. A teacher removes darkness, plain and simple.

By the end of the week, every person in the class was reading tab and naming notes. We were tapping and bending. And yes, we were shredding.

Check out Tobias Hurwitz’s CD Zen Shred Zone and his new project Dreamer with singer-songwriter Terry Gourley

The Crown of the Continent Guitar Workshop offers intensive weeklong workshops in Acoustic, Beginner, Classical, Jazz, Blues, Rock, Bass and Songwriting in three levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced.

VIDEOS

Tobias Hurwitz – “Shred Planet” – Live from 2012 Crown of the Continent Guitar Festival

Tobias Hurwitz Discusses Phil Sudo and The Book of Six Strings

The Crown of the Continent Guitar Workshop – Life As a Student, Andre Floyd

Julian Lage Trio – “233 Butler” – LIVE FROM THE CROWN: 2012