Good evening to all the rebetes and rebetisses; may your strings ring with beautiful picks. With all due courtesy and camaraderie, I’m addressing the self-taught bouzouki players among you to ask for your brief advice on what you consider the most effective method for teaching oneself to play the bouzouki without a teacher, solfège, etc. A few words about your own experience might help me progress more quickly and effectively. Many thanks in advance to everyone who contributes their advice.
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You have to learn to “play” rather than put yourself under pressure. Start with a light touch in your hands, even if you don’t sound as loud, so that you can gradually build up your strength. I think it’s easier than doing it the other way round. Finger positioning and the plectrum are the basics, and you need to watch players up close, watch lots of videos and listen to loads of bouzouki! Start by playing easy little pieces all the way through, from beginning to middle to end, and find someone to teach you the dromoi. Talk to musicians and ask them so that you learn why, not just how. The most important thing of all is constant contact—whether for practice or for the love of it. The two are different, although proper practice does require passion! If you play every day, it won’t be long before you see serious results. At first, progress always feels greater. Just keep at it.
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First of all, to understand how the instrument works, you need to know how to tune it. Tuning needs to be done constantly (during a performance, each musician corrects minor tuning issues at least every half hour, if not much more often). But this is difficult if you haven’t already understood how the instrument works, so here we find ourselves in a vicious circle.
Let’s say that you’ve somehow solved that problem (perhaps other forum members might have some suggestions), and the instrument is in tune. Think of a simple song that you know how to sing properly. (Various songs by Batis are good choices.) Try to find the notes one by one. In general, you work mostly with the first string (the highest-pitched one), so that’s mainly where you’ll look for them. Press each fret in turn until you recognise that you’ve found the right note. Try to commit it to memory and move on to the next note. It may take you a long time to complete the melody, but don’t give up.
Gradually, you’ll start building up a collection of melodies that you can sort of play. That’s when the geography of the fretboard will start to reveal itself to you, little by little. There are songs that use the 2nd and 3rd frets but never the 4th, and others that use the 2nd and 4th but never the 3rd. Slowly, the sounds you’re trying to produce will begin to connect with the image of the fretboard, which means you’ll find each subsequent note more and more easily, without having to try as many frets each time as you did at the beginning.
Watch bouzouki players in videos whenever you can. As you start to understand the instrument, you’ll also start to understand what they’re doing with their hands. He’s playing the same three notes that I play in such-and-such a song, but look at which fingers he’s using! I do it differently and it hasn’t worked well for me; let me try his way too. Oh, look at the pick — he doesn’t strike it the way I do. What exactly is he doing?
You also need to work on your rhythm. All the notes in a song (to begin with, at least!) are either equal in length, half the length of one another, twice the length, and so on; they don’t have random durations. So you need to aim to make each pick stroke fall at exactly the right moment — not earlier because you got nervous, and not later because it was difficult and you got stuck.
What if it’s difficult and I don’t have time to find it?
Take the whole piece more slowly. Let it be absurdly slow, funeral-paced. It doesn’t matter; you’re not playing to an audience (there’ll be time for that too). Take it slowly enough that you can get to everything in time. Isolate the part that’s giving you trouble and study it note by note: suppose you’ve worked out which the notes are, but you haven’t managed to play them in the right time? Then you need to sit down and solve the problem in that section, not in the rest of the piece, where there’s nothing for you to solve.
Do you spend any time with musicians? It helps a great deal. I don’t know your situation, but let’s suppose there are, say, three friends, two of whom play guitar, and every so often they get lost in conversations that the third person doesn’t understand a word of. Then, at some point, the third decides to learn bouzouki. At first, they may feel like a novice in front of the others and not open up in musical conversations. But once that barrier is broken, and you gradually become able to understand something the experienced player tells you — even if it’s about a completely different instrument and a completely different genre of music — all the other person’s knowledge will be at your disposal.
Good luck on your journey!
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Oh, and of course you may not want sheet music, but knowing how to name your notes is essential.
The two outer strings, when open (you aren’t pressing anything), play D. One is the low D and the other the middle D. The second string plays A. If you play the middle string at the third fret, it is C.
So, you can start from this C, go to the D on the open high string, and then look for the next notes one fret at a time on the high string, singing to yourself “Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do”, which you obviously know how to sing.
You’ll notice that some notes are on the fret immediately after the previous one, while others are on the one after that (in other words, you skip a fret). The frets you didn’t use for C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C are the flats and sharps. For example, on the third fret of the D string you have F, and on the fifth fret you have G. You skipped the fourth fret. If, in a song, the next fret has to be played instead of F, then it’s F sharp. Sharp means one semitone (one fret) higher. If F is played normally on the third fret, but instead of G we use the fourth fret, then it’s G flat. Flat means one fret (one semitone) lower. So the same fret is sometimes called F# and sometimes Gb.
When two consecutive notes are one fret apart, we call it a semitone interval. Two frets make a whole-tone interval.
You’ll gradually figure it all out. There are websites, books and little videos about everything. (And forums, of course!) The point is to look everywhere, both on the instrument and in terms of information. In general, the information one can understand is proportionate to one’s level, and the questions one may have reach a little beyond one’s level. As soon as they solve those questions and move up one step, they may have questions at a level one step higher, and can gradually look for answers to those too. And so on.
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My dear Petros, before we say anything: do you know anything about music? Are you able to hear a melodic phrase and sing it straight back, without mistakes, so that a third party who demonstrably knows about music would not say to you: “You’re out of tune!”? If not, then you need a teacher; otherwise you’ll be wasting your time.
But if you do know about music, then, if it is not possible for you to seek a teacher’s services (which would, of course, be the best way forward), pick up your instrument and start strumming, while always listening carefully to the sounds your strumming produces, evaluating them and trying to make them as pleasant to your ear as possible, correcting them, of course, whenever you think you should. By doing this, I, who had not the slightest musical education, managed to learn to play and sing to a standard that meets the conditions I myself had set.
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@anestakos, @nikos_politis and @pepe, first of all, I would like to thank you warmly for your moving response to my request for guidance on learning by myself. I will certainly follow your advice, though this is more or less how I have already been making my initial approach to the three-string bouzouki over the past few days. At least I’m not doing anything wrong, I suppose. For the past two years, with a few breaks, I have been teaching myself to play blues on the electric guitar, and I did make some modest progress there. I have been singing bass in two excellent classical choirs for the past seven or eight years—with no formal musical education—where pitch accuracy is of paramount importance. I will proceed with what I understand and whatever I discover while working on the instrument. Thank you very much!
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You won’t have any problems with playing out of tune, I mean. What will challenge you is the melodic part on the bouzouki, but as they said, don’t give up. Ten little songs later, you’ll be on another level.
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Thank you very much. I’m not giving up on it—I’ll get there eventually. It was the same with the guitar: at some point, the instrument “unlocked”, at least initially, and I felt that little by little I could express myself with it and through it. I imagine the same will gradually happen with the little three-stringed instrument too, if I keep at it for two or three hours in total every day, at least.
Perhaps it would be nice, at some point, to meet some of you from the rebetiko crowd if you’re planning to go and play for yourselves at a taverna sometime soon. I saw that this forum’s members get together once a month, but it could also be done through simple, informal meet-ups. I’d love to hear you play so skilfully, learn from you and sing together.
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Of course. That’s always how it happens, and you put it nicely: the instrument unlocks.
Come on now, you don’t need to set yourself goals like that and then feel guilty or whatever if you don’t stick to them. If the instrument tickles our fancy, we keep fiddling with it and learn it more quickly that way. If it doesn’t tickle our fancy, we certainly don’t need to apologise: if someone enjoys picking it up once a week or every once in a while, that’s perfectly fine. Of course, you don’t learn that way—but if you want to learn, you’ll do it often enough of your own accord, not because you “have to practise often”!
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The three-string bouzouki is such good company, the rascal; it asks for nothing, only that you love it. And I think it gives you a little nod when you play it right. When the sound, the manner, the tone, the melody come together more successfully, even at my own beginner’s stage, the little instrument sounds different—at home in its element, as though it were resonating more proudly.