There’s More Than One Way to Play A C Chord: Why I Chose Self-Publishing, PART ONE
There’s More Than One Way to Play a C Chord…
I grew up in a musical household: dad plays just about everything that makes noise, mom harmonizes like a gospel choir all wrapped up in one person, my older sister is a cello extraordinaire, two of my younger sisters have written fantastic albums; you get the picture. So, naturally, I had to try my hand at some kind of instrument, at some point.
While I started out on the bass, then quickly fell in love with the guitar (thanks to my dad for so wittily pointing out that you can’t impress girls around a campfire with a bass, something I “ew”d at out loud at the tender age of 12, but which I secretly burned for in my heart), piano is the instrument that’s really captured my heart for the past five years or so. There’s just something about the tonal range of the instrument, the various timbres that can be elicited with the right touch of a key and use of a pedal, the pureness of the sound, and so much more that has brought me back to my keyboard time and time again to see what worlds can be explored in the spaces between the (in this case, metaphorical) piano wires, in the vibrations of the music.
But it wasn’t always that way.
At heart, I’m a rocker. All I ever wanted once I started taking music seriously was to play the solo from Afterlife by Avenged Sevenfold (something I’m still working on perfecting to this day - those descending scales at the very end are as blistering for the fingers as they are impressive to the ears) When I first started playing the piano, it was only because it was accessible, was there in a way that electric guitars weren’t; of course, you can always play tennis-racket-style unplugged, but that’s not really rock and roll, baby. There were several practice rooms in the music wing of my high school and, though they were chronically out of tune and decidedly twangy, there was a rolltop piano in each that could be used freely during your practice time.
And so, when I forgot my electric at home, or when an amp wasn’t readily available, I would plunk out the songs and solos I was learning for the guitar on the piano. As fun as it was to hear and feel the songs I loved in a different way, it didn’t really click like when I had first learned them on the guitar. The notes were the same - though often more filled out as I learned chords - and the rhythms matched, but it was clear that, though the vehicle of the piano was carrying the tune, like using a golf cart to traverse a highway (or, perhaps more fittingly in this case, using a mustang to get to down the fairway), it simply wasn’t the right vessel for the tunes, and vice-versa.
I had figured that was about as far as I would go on the piano - just the basics and maybe a few of my favorite guitar tunes I could pull out at a party, were a piano present and a willing audience waiting - as I just didn’t find any real depth to my playing, until my dad taught me that there was more than one way to play a C chord.
Not to get too deep into the weeds of music theory, but a C chord is made up of three notes, the root, third, and fifth, same as any other major chord: in this case, C, E, and G. It’s clear, it’s happy-sounding, it’s simple. Even a child can (and many have) play it. It ain’t gonna capture the attention of those girls ‘round the campfire, most likely.
But one day, as I was playing a simple progression - perhaps C, G, F Am, or something, the basis of all your favorite pop tunes - my dad came up, kicked me off the piano bench, and said, “check this out.”
He proceeded to take the progression I had played and, while not changing the rhythm, tone, or basic root of any of the chords, took what I had played and made it sound like something you could find on a cool, old gospel album. How? A few simple tricks: inversions, passing chords/tones, and suspensions/added tones. Taking the C chord and throwing in a D to make it a C9 adds an open, jazzy feel; moving the G note up to a G#, making it a E7 first inversion as you pass from the G to the Am adds a beautiful tension that can resolve to a smooth Am2 with an added B, and then all you gotta do is slap an F on the bottom and drop the B for an Fmaj7 and, bam, you’ve got a spicy, jazzed-up chord progression.
All that to say, though the simplest, most straight-forward iteration of C, E, and G absolutely works (and sometimes is exactly what is needed and works best - after all, adding in extra notes can sometimes clash with the melody, which is simply no good in many cases), there’s more than one way to play a C chord, and sometimes, the song calls for shaking it up a little bit.
And so it is with the journey of publishing your book*.
Most people know about traditional publishing, even if they don’t know it by that name. Here’s an extremely simplified explanation of how traditional publishing works: an author writes a book, does research on various literary agents who they think would best represent that work, chooses and queries that agent (which involved sending a query letter and a portion of the aforementioned book), and then waits for a response. If a particular agent connects with a book and author, that agent will often request the full manuscript to read over, and if they’re still feeling it and thinking they have a good chance of selling the book, they will make an offer to represent that author. Yay! Except, the journey isn’t over yet…
Now, it’s the agent’s job to sell the the book to a publishing house, who will then, work to get the book edited, get cover art for it, get blurbs for it, market it, print it, and get it on shelves.
That, in a nutshell, is the process of traditional publishing, and, when I first finished my first novel, Sic ‘Em (as of yet unpublished), it was, in my mind, the only way to get my book out there and in front of an audience.
I have since been happily corrected, and have chosen to pursue a different route, namely, self-publishing.
TO BE CONTINUED…
*Whereas I am an author of fiction, I’ll be speaking about the process of publishing fiction, unless otherwise indicated.
