Web Review: Zen Guitar

• Published in: Issue No.1

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The homepage of zenguitar.com reads:

The Zen Guitar Dojo is the living vision of musician, author, composer and teacher Philip Toshio Sudo. The Zen Guitar Dojo is a place to be.
Based on the spirit and principles of the Japanese dojo, it is a participatory community that seeks to elevate the human spirit through music. The Zen Guitar Dojo is a gathering place for artists who want to explore the possibilities of cyberspace under the umbrella of the Zen Guitar philosophy. Join in!

What brought me to zenguitar.com was a websearch about "First Guitar Lessons." In researching an article for next week's issue of Guitar Pedagogy, I wanted to see what other sites proposed for the first session with a guitar student. I stumbled the highlight of The Zen Guitar Dojo: the "Lessons" page.

From Tiny Guitar Flea to Zen Guitar Master

Clearly, zenguitar.com was conceived as an open forum in which contributors would offer suggestions for how to reach guitar enlightenment. Each article would be catalogued according to difficulty, and after enough articles arrived, they could be organized and compiled into a Zen Guitar method that would start at beginner level and advance all the way to Zen Guitar master.

The Reality of Zen in Cyberspace

Unfortunately, the contributions are not always up to speed. Each entry is still marked according to its difficulty, but this entry appears to be arbitrary (apparently selected by the contributor). Worse than that is the fact that the "lessons" are often unfocused and even, in some cases, out of place (like "Four Steps to Improvisation," by Louis Greene, which just instructs the reader to learn scales and arpeggios; what's so Zen about that?). A few seem to be honest attempts at teaching the guitar in a relaxed, vaguely "zen" kind of way. "Including the Other Hand," by Velma The Fischwire, is actually a nice article about hand coordination and practicing (although it's clearly cut and pasted from another source, as she talks about "last month" and "this month"). Unfortunately, most of the other articles fall in the range of the sappy jam-band guitarist who just wants to "get really out there, man." There are occasionally some interesting suggestions, but they are never really followed through.

Ah! Master has hidden the stone elsewhere!

Perhaps the most valuable thing about the "Lessons" page is that it makes a great link site to other useful guitar articles. Some authors, like Justin Sandercoe, pitch their own sites, while others give tips about things they've seen elsewhere. It beats going to a link site and sifting through the "500 Best Guitar Solo Sites on the Web."

The Really Good Stuff is in Our DVD...

In addition to "lessons" about playing the guitar, the site explores other "possibilities of cyberspace." Like, uh...marketing, for example. Indeed, I was disappointed to see how much of the website is nothing more than an advertisement for the publications and recordings of recently deceased guitar guru Philip Toshio Sudo.

The Bach of Zen Guitar Mastery

Apparently, Sudo's major contribution to the music world is a composition called "One Sound One Song," a piece which

"consists of 12 basic themes that can be woven together organically, depending on [the] mood of the player and the moment, and played for any length of time."

The piece is also apparently a learning tool, a new-age "Well-Tempered Clavier" for the guitar, if you will, since each of the 12 twelve themes focuses on a different aspect of guitar playing.

Don't Sweat the Content, Young Pupil

On reading this, I'm intrigued; if nothing else, it could be a really interesting improv piece. Unfortunately, The Zen Guitar Dojo doesn't seem to have much more to offer - the link to hear a sample brings me to the page for one of Sudo's recordings, but there's no audio sample there. Another link brings me back where I was...Hmm.

It's Only Hypothetical...

Then I notice some troubling grammatical formations: the article on "One Sound One Song" keeps saying Zen Guitar could do this and could do that. It's starting to look more like a grant proposal than a finished product.

The End is at the Beginning

After all this I return to the "Lessons" page, which greets me like a breath of fresh air. After wading through a couple of duds like "In Tune With Yourself" and "How to Play Sexy," I find a link to Steve Vai's website, and find true happiness.