Reading

DRAFT

Allan Holdsworth (Beat Instrumental 1979)

"Like most people I went out and got a few chord books, Ivor Mairantz’ ‘Exercise A Day’ and things like that, but I could never get on with them because I always found myself disatisfied (sic) with my progress. In the end I just used to follow my own nose."

Allan Holdsworth (Guitar magazine 1974)

Why do you want to learn to read?

Well, it helps in a work situation to be able to read. And also, I compose quite a lot, but I can’t write it down. I have to remember everything and tell people, "You play this and you play that . . . It would be a lot easier to give them bits of paper with things written on. I’d really like to write more and arrange things - like I’d love to write something for a string quartet or something like that, which at the moment is totally impossible. I can hear the things in my head, but I can’t get them down.

Any Key In The U.K. (Unknown publication 1978)

When and why did you start to play guitar?

I started when I was about 16 or 17 after I left school because I ‘d always been interested in music. My father was a pianist so I was exposed to a lot of music at home. He was like an inspiration to me really in that he often presented me with things I wouldn’t normally get to hear. He helped me a lot in that way but I never actually sat and down and learned to read music.

On The Level (IM&RW 1991)

IM - So, just going back to what you said about your writing things down, can you read music?

"No."

IM - So, do you have your own system of notating things,

"Yes, I do. Basically I have a way of breaking down chords into scales and I usually take them to the nearest relative minor and I work on it from there. I have my own symbols which symbolise what scales are. I don’t use the names for the scales that other people use for them. They are exactly the same it’s just that I name them differently. So what I do is, when I use my own symbols to represent scales or chords or whatever, the letter is only a way of indicating what it is, the letter doesn’t indicate a route or anything. So it’s like one of my symbols - like an AX or something - doesn’t mean that A is the route, it’s just a way of letting me know what that scale is and I think of it from end to end. I think of it more as a colour, like a linear thing and as the chords change then all of the notes change. Like when I look at the guitar neck as the chord change I see all the dots changing under my fingers and then all I have to do is improvise with them. Obviously you make mistakes like you’re gonna do wh en you’re improvising."