Climbing the Guitar Mountain
Shaan Lodhie | 1-22-2010 | Comments |

James Musser took a sheet of blank paper and drew a simple sketch of what he calls “Guitar Mountain.”

Musser said that most people think the best guitar players in the world are almost to the top. He tells them that they are actually only an inch or so off the bottom. He then put a mark about an inch higher up the mountain. “If we ever get to here in our lifetime, it’ll be a miracle.”

Musser, 49, is a professional guitar player, composer, and teacher. His students range from children and first-timers to seniors and full-blown experts.

Wearing a brown vest over his orange shirt, peace sign and “aum” symbol necklaces around his collar, he sat in his office at Peaceland Music. He founded the company—which is located on Crenshaw Boulevard in Torrance—more than ten years ago for recording songs, teaching students, and pursuing music-related business ventures.

Playing since the age of six, Musser said that he reached a skill level on the guitar about five or six years ago that allows him to play as well as his childhood guitar heroes.

But he added that, even today, the best guitarists have only discovered the tip of the iceberg.

Musser explained that this partially has to do with permutation theory. “If you have two things, there’s two ways you can do it. You can do one and two and two and one,” he said. “When you have three, there’s one-two-three, one-three-two…and the further you go, it just becomes humongous.”

Music has 12 notes, equaling almost half a billion possibilities in only one octave, Musser said. The guitar has four.

“When I tell people that, they say ‘But that [other] stuff doesn’t sound good.’” Musser said he then asks them, “How do you know? Did you try it? No. You can’t possibly have tried it, because I did the math. Just to do it one time would take 25 lifetimes.” That is, he added, if you live to be 100 years old.

Musser almost never listens to the radio. In his opinion, only a handful of musicians today are trying new things musically, and the rest are just doing what has already been done.

“A lot of the cool things that can be done in music have been usurped by the horror film industry, and turned into a negative thing,” he said. “They are not negative. It’s just that that’s what the media has done with it.”

Strumming his guitar, Musser said, “I can sit here and play some weird sounding chord, except I don’t see any blood on the floor. Nobody died. No one got hurt. We’re still smiling. It’s not the music. It’s just that it got usurped.”

“It makes me sad, because a lot of those sounds are really beautiful, but if you try to use [them] in mainstream music, it’s not very appealing to a lot of people, because they
have all these associations,” said Musser. “I think we’re going to get tired of things having to be the same way all the time in music pretty soon. In order to fix that problem, we need to have more open minds about what is okay sonically.”

Musser would like to see more bands put out music that expresses positivity. “I think a lot of the reason it doesn’t happen is that it’s kind of boring to make positive music,” he said. “It has to sound like ‘candy music’ all the time in order for it to be happy, happy, happy!”

He plans to start recording for his next CD by the end of the year, in which he will put originally-composed tracks of music that he hopes will disrupt the conventional definitions of beauty.

“Ultimately, I’d really like to see [my music] benefit other musicians so that everybody can have more fun, so we’re not just stuck playing the same three chords, and the same beats, and the same everything [that] we’ve been doing for quite a while now.”

Musser stopped for a moment to think about what the world would be like without music.

“It would be a much darker place,” he said. “It’s already challenging, and I think music really helps people get through drudgery-type of conditions in a lot of ways.”

“We could get USC to do a study. Get everyone on the 110 freeway to turn off their music for a week, and see what happens.” Musser added jokingly. “I don’t think we want to find out.”

Photos from Creative Commons.

Tags: guitar james musser peaceland music profile shaan lodhie