Rants

I've been spending a lot of time watching classical music videos on YouTube recently, and something I find very hard to ignore is the comments. People hate classical music, at least if it's less than 100 years old. Modernism remains deeply traumatic. It gives me hope.

I see a lot of bogus advice on the internet about learning scales and (shudder) modes. Some of it's just plain wrong: amateurs who've got a confused idea about something and seen fit to post a "lesson" to communicate their misunderstandings to others. But some of it isn't exactly wrong but it's still massively unhelpful, because it removes theory from practice.

Back when I was first learning guitar, it seemed like everyone who wanted to sell you a snake-oil method did it by using the mysterious "CAGED System". Today, it's the other way around: all the slick salesmen have a new "system", and CAGED is "harmful", "inefficient" and "incomplete". As someone who learned with CAGED and teaches it, am I doing something wrong?

Most guitar students do fine until they hit one particular topic that culls them like a dose of plague hitting a too-large population of water buffalo: modes. The word alone is enough to strike fear (or guilt) into the hearts of many players, even some who've been playing a long while.