A guitar’s tuning is rather strange.  The strings are separated in pitch by inconsistent intervals that were designed to make a few chords and patterns easier for your fingers to form.  Listen to folk music with an untrained ear and you’ll hear familiar changes and progressions.  They are pleasant and time-tested, but hardly represent the possible combinations of sounds that can be made with six strings worth of tone.

New Photoshop users proudly produce images with fat drop shadows, big linear gradients, lots of glowing and fuzz, mostly because they are easily accessible options — simply double click on a layer and check the effects you want.  Though Adobe produces a very powerful piece of graphic editing software, a large chunk of its users develop their taste and skill around these early-learned features.

And so, the tools built to enhance a skill have been around long enough that they begin to define it.  We have more than enough 4-chord pop music, glossy billboards, and clip-art flyers.

How different would mainstream music sound if guitarists spent their growing years learning minor 9th chords? …or learning a mandocello instead?

Blake Ross, a local artist and good friend, tells gallery viewers that the varied methods and tools with which he manipulates paint is very important to the final value of his art.

Perhaps a certain creativity can be found in simply varying the starting point.