Online guitar lessons are brilliant. They are convenient. Oftentimes they are great value. But never underestimate the influence of a good guitar teacher. They can change your life.
If you ever find yourself on the guitar internet watching wackadoodle Quebecois math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine wondering how they got like this – y’know, how they got so weird – then maybe one brilliant, eccentric, maverick guitar teacher is to blame.
In a new interview with Guitar World, wielder of the guitar/bass doubleneck Khn de Poitrine described what it was like to learn from a true oddball who was a stickler for musical commitment, a lover of blues guitar, and a Frank Zappa superfan.
Latest Videos FromMusicRadar
From day one, this man made an impression.
“This short and highly strung man in cowboy boots lit a hand-rolled smoke in a little room, asking me to play something,” recalls Khn. “He stopped me after 15 seconds, visibly irritated and disgusted by my shit, before grabbing my hand and filing down my nails to a good angle.”
This physical incursion into the young Khn de Poitrine’s personal space was not the last. His teacher wasn’t through with him yet.
“He then proceeded to install an old taped-up metal ring to keep my right hand’s pinky close to its neighbour,” says Khn. “He made me play a variety of finger-picking patterns on open strings while heavy-handedly correcting my posture and bombarding me with information.”
So much for strumming through a Green Day tune or playing the riff to Smoke On The Water. This teacher was setting a bar. Throwing down the gauntlet. In the Angine de Poitrine origin story, this is where Khn worked up an appetite for the discipline that microtonal instrumental rock needs to sound listenable. He left that first lesson chastened – and for the better.
“I came out of that class with a strong feeling of mediocrity, which pushed me to practice a lot,” he says. “Eventually, we had a very pleasant relationship. Those kinds of teachers will kick the living crap out of your ego if they feel like you don’t push yourself, because they feel strongly about music. But when it becomes obvious that you’re putting in the work and applying the principles being taught, they become the most generous teachers ever.”
This teacher also had the personality and the musical sensibility to shape Khn’s aesthetic appetites.
He made us improvise noisy, chaotic, atonal transitions between the songs, directing with hand signals
We’re not saying that these guitar lessons are why Agine de Poitrine would choose to mummify themselves in polka-dotted papier mâché, but Khn would definitely graduate with an appreciation of just how outré the electric guitar could sound. His teacher brought Zappa’s wild imagination into the classroom.
“He made simple arrangements of songs like King Kong, Son of Mr. Green Genes and My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama and had us form bands to play those songs live in front of our parents,” says Khn. “He made us improvise noisy, chaotic, atonal transitions between the songs, directing with hand signals.”
This teacher had connections, too. He’d open the classroom up for masterclasses (where is this guy, what’s his name and is he still teaching?) from touring musicians. And he got Khn de Poitrine onto the stage, booking the students’ band to play Zappa covers in restaurants in downtown Quebec – taking St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast to the pancake house – and getting them used to playing under stage lights.
“He told us stories about life on the road in the ‘70s,” says Khn. “Outside of his school duties, he pushed us into our first gigs where we were getting paid to play to a real audience. It made us feel proud, but also self-conscious, opening for 50-year-old fellas with experience. I keep strong memories of those years.”
There are all kinds of guitar heroes in this world. Some tear apart their fireplace and make their own guitar with the wood. Others invent an entirely new way of playing the guitar. For Khn it was that highly strung teacher in cowboy boots with rolling tobacco in his pocket.
“Someone passing down knowledge and sharing a passion with such generosity would be my definition of a guitar hero,” says Khn.
For a generation of a math-rock heads with a taste for the theatrical, Khn de Poitrine might well have invented a new kind – the player who made microtonal guitar mainstream?
Agnine de Poitrine have described their sound as a ‘mantra-rock dada Pythago-cubist orchestra’, some have called it alien, but MusicRadar has broken down the musicology behind Fabienk, from their Vol. II EP, and what it is is “pure maths”. That teacher sure taught Khn how to count.
You can buy the latest issue of Guitar World here – better still you can subscribe and save a heap of money.
