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I met Vicki Genfan at the Guitar Cloud Symposium, the brainchild of guitarist Jennifer Batten. I was the Zoom moderator for the weekend, and had the pleasure of sitting through the instructional courses of Vicki, Gretchen Menn, and Nili Brosh. (Later Symposiums would include Angela Petrilli and Tay Hoyle as well.) As a drummer and not a guitarist, the seminar was still fascinating. Any conversation about the creative process is always enlivening to me, and I learned so much.

When it came time for Vicki’s teaching module, I was struck by her deep insight into rhythm, and her excitement and delight for it. As a singer-songwriter, Vicki plays the acoustic guitar, and uses the guitar as both a guitar and a drum. This technique came intuitively to her, and enhances her performances as a solo guitarist. Vicki has investigated rhythm in her playing and then as a healer, and I couldn’t wait to talk more with her about her deep understanding of rhythm, and the magic that connects us all.

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You can find the full Zoom conversation here: xxx

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You’re such an incredible teacher of guitar playing, but also of rhythm. At the Symposium, you did a lot of talking about rhythm. Your music has been in my ears for quite a while now, listening through all of your albums. Your playing is like crystal, it’s just so perfect and so beautiful. Sometimes I’m amazed at what you’re doing, and I’m not a guitarist, but I can tell incredible technique, and you have your own voice on the guitar. I know that you started playing guitar when you were three or four.

Well, I was five. I started piano at three. At five, I got my first guitar and my dad gave me some lessons, showed me some chords.

 

I also know that you started playing your guitar more percussively when you got tired of wrangling a band together, and started performing as a solo acoustic artist, songwriter, and singer. Can you tell me how that started?

I’ve been playing guitar all my life. It always felt like it was a gift, like I could more easily play than a lot of people I knew. So I felt like it was a gift for me, and I never studied it formally. I studied the piano formerly. I studied trombone in high school and I was in marching band and all that. Then I thought, okay, college, why don’t I study guitar? My dad taught at Ithaca college in upstate New York. I could get tuition free. That was perfect, because we couldn’t afford college otherwise. I wanted to go to Berkeley, but it wasn’t going to happen.

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So oddly enough, I studied jazz and classical, because that was what you had to do as a guitar major there. They were great teachers. My classical teacher I liked as a teacher, although I was not excited about classical repertoire. My jazz guitar teacher, he was turning me on to bebop, which was his world and his favorite. It didn’t inspire me at all. I just didn’t have my heart in it.

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Meanwhile, I had heard Joni Mitchell stuff as a teenager. My friend Karen from high school reminds me, she said, even when you and me were sitting around playing James Taylor, you were starting to do this weird stuff on your guitar. I just kept telling you, come on, let’s just do James Taylor. And you were like, wow, but look!

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So I must’ve started playing around, because I have this proclivity towards rhythm. I have a feeling in my hands that makes me want to (drums with her hands). Somebody did a reading on me once. A woman had a being who she could communicate with and give readings to people. One of the things they told me about were past lives, and one of my past lives was in India, in a formal sacred ensemble where I was doing some kind of drumming, So many times I think about that. I just want to be in that life right now. I would be so happy if my life was all about that. If I could just be that and learn.

I think there’s some of that in me somehow, however it came about. Everything I developed on guitar just came out of an exploration, and an excitement about what my hands wanted to do, and the sounds that I was able to get with the open tunings, the chords, the voicings. The way that you can take a simple sixth and fifth string base idea and move it up and down the neck in different places, on different notes and just have open strings ringing. Suddenly you have harmony possibilities and chord voicing possibilities that you never had. Because the strings are open, you can now employ the harmonics.

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So there are those sounds, how can you have a wooden thing and not hit on it? To me that didn’t make any sense. All of it came out of just sitting around and being inspired, following the next thing that was exciting to me. That may seem like an undisciplined approach, but in a way, it got me to find a voice on the instrument that felt gratifying. That felt really authentic to me, to how I feel inside.

Tunings are one aspect of it, and I have 36, 37 different tunings. Sometimes I say that it’s like some of us females with our shoe collection. There are some women who have hundreds of pairs of shoes. A man in their life might say, why on earth would you need that many shoes? And it’s like, well, because sometimes I feel like wearing this outfit, and other days I want to look like that. There’s a reason for everyone of those. It’s that way for me with the tunings. Why on earth would you need to have 37 different ways to tune your guitar? Well, because there are things that can only happen when this tuning is happening.

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When you play particular tunings, do particular kinds of rhythm come out? Do tunings inspire rhythm?

I think in some cases, yes. I, like most human beings, have my preferred rhythmic patterns that I tend to repeat over and over, and I can use them in any tuning. But I do think there are times where some tunings inspire their own rhythms.

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There’s a percussionist, Glen Velez. He plays the frame drum. He put out an album that was intriguing to me many years ago. He might’ve called it rhythm of the chakras. He came up with it through meditation, different rhythmic patterns for each of the energy centers in our body.

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I was intrigued by that, because I’m really interested in energy work and chakras and sound healing. You have the five elements, which are based on the chakras. So I thought, I know that elements have different qualities, but I didn’t think about elements in terms of rhythms. Glen’s work led me to a project with that, which I have been holding as partly finished for over 25 years. It has to do with working with those chakras and creating a musical soundscape, like maybe like a 10 to 15 minute long piece for each of the chakras, that would incorporate rhythmic motifs that I took from Glen’s work. So I would take those motifs, and then I would find tunings that also related to the chakras mathematically and in their intervals. That was really a cool project and I’ve yet to finish it. I hope I finish it before I die.

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I love that because, I’m really interested too in the way sound vibration is healing. I just did an interview with a woman who uses the drum for sound healing. She said it really well when she said, light stops at the door, and sound moves through us. Of course each center of our body has a different frequency, different vibration. I think all of that is fascinating and, combining rhythm with sound in that way, it can’t help but be healing for us.

I think so. There are archetypical rhythms. In the case of what I was working with, I was working with archetypal intervals that relate to the energy of each chakra. I was using the Sanskrit Bija mantras, which are also archetypical sounds that resonate with different components of our humanness.

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 You turned me onto this book (The Forgotten Power of Rhythm, Reinhard Flatischler, https://powerofrhythm.com/). I know he talks about archetypes of rhythm.

If I’ve read the book a hundred times, I still don’t feel like I’ve read it.

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It’s really deep. It’s an incredible book about rhythm, starting from our heartbeat, to the way that we move, to our environment. I wanted to read something that turned on a little light bulb for me.

The silent pulse is the foundation for the rhythmic structure. When we sense that pulse, we can establish a relationship with any kind of music, no matter how unfamiliar it may be. Even though we may not perceive every rhythmic quality, the sensing of a silent pulse creates a bodily relationship and initial link to new worlds of still unknown music.

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I just thought, the silent pulse, how important that is. As musicians, we’re so interested in what we’re putting on the beat, between the beat, what we’re sticking on there, what we’re exporting on there, but to actually understand first that silent pulse, I think is where real magic happens.

I feel like that might be that missing ingredient of players whom we just think are magic, and we can’t really say why. When we say all of these things about, say, John Bonham as a great drummer, maybe the magic is something about that silent groove that’s going on, that we feel physically in our bodies, no matter what we’re hearing in our ears.

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In one of your songs, “Blow Out That Flame,” which is a kind of a slower song, more spacious song, but you really feel that pulse. It’s propelling the song in this very settled and swingy kind of way underneath it. You open up space for that.

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What I’m thinking of is there’s an exercise in the book, and I’ve done it many times in classes, it’s so profound. First you establish a tempo. So let’s say one, two, three, four, and we’re going to clap on one, and everybody can do that. It’s fairly easy. One, two, three. We’re not saying it. Then you double it, double the space. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Then you double that and you see how much space you all can contain, and how long before some of us drop out of that silent pulse. While we’re in it, we’re all sitting in a silent space, literally feeling the same pulse.

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It’s creating a container.

It is such a container and it’s an amazing experience. You know, with some groups, it works better than others, because it’s easier for some people to feel that. In general, we are afraid of silence and of space. Stillness.

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And yet it’s the people we’re most drawn to, those charismatic people in the world, who seem to be able to hold space in a way that is so intoxicating, whether it’s space seeming to be mysterious, or just being so settled in their power, that there isn’t that pushing out of energy, but we’re drawn in.

When you’re writing songs, is the rhythm an essential part of the process? Do you ever write from rhythm up?

I usually find a groove. Setting the stage for writing something, I’ll think about tuning. Do I have a tuning that I’m drawn to right now? Do I have an itchiness to create a new tuning? Sometimes I do. So one of the first things that I’ll assess is, what do I want my pallet to be? If I’m a painter and I have a blank canvas, I think about, what colors am I bringing to the canvas? What colors am I going to work with today? So that for me becomes a tuning. And when I have a tuning, I then tend to just allow my hands to tell me what they want to do.

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That invariably will lead to a particular percussive technique. It might lead to a rhythmic pattern. It might lead to a chord progression. And in that there will be a groove. So then a groove comes, and that groove has to wash through me.

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It’s so funny the process, because it’s really like this back and forth thing. You ask yourself, what’s in here? You kind of express it outside, then you experience it and then you go, what else do I feel? And what does that make me feel like, now that I’ve experienced it as art, or as music or sound or vibration or rhythm now, what do I want to say?

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So it’s this ongoing ping-pong game, or conversation. One thing tends to inspire the other. I oftentimes get stuck on lyrics, and I have to go into that world on its own. But even with words, sounds, and maybe partial words, or maybe meaningless sentences or phrases, tend to come out as rhythms coming out of the groove. From there, you refine and you can say, okay, well, that doesn’t make any sense logically, but the rhythm of that works.

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I would say as an answer to your question about rhythm, I tend to lead with rhythm a lot as a composer and a writer. I tend to be driven kinesthetically as opposed to by audio. I don’t necessarily hear things. I feel things in my body, and I go to the guitar.

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When write something in your studio and then bring it in front of an audience, will the rhythm change much? How does it change to perform it?

Some things are really what they are. Primarily I play most things the way I wrote them, when I’m performing live. However, since I play so much as a solo artist, I have the freedom to really change things as I want to. My only concern is to honor the song and make it musical. I don’t want to change rhythm patterns or change chord progressions just to do it. But as I’m thinking about it, I’m now thinking how much fun it would be to challenge myself and do something really different. It’s a cool way to bring something new to something old. Rearrange the rhythmic components and see how that affects the lyric, the melody.

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Dylan does that a lot. They always say that he never plays a song the same way twice, but when I saw him, I was really struck by how his interpretation for that night seemed to depend on the rhythm, like a rhythmic change, and how amazed I was that his band could hang with him on those.

I think it’s really daring and challenging. As with anything we settle into comfort, it’s something that we know, and if all of a sudden we change it up, it puts us in an edgy place. It puts us in a place where maybe something really different and exciting can happen. I’m kind of a fan of doing cover songs of your own songs.

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I know before the pandemic, you were playing in Europe quite frequently, and I’m sure that you have a really devoted audience who’ve seen you many times. To change stuff up a little bit, I think it brings them along on the ride.

And it’s a cool thing to say, I’m just going to do this differently tonight. Is that okay?

 

And then some people get really ticked off by it. People can’t handle change.

No doubt you have to dole it out in very careful amounts.

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So tell me a little bit about the sound healing that you’ve studied.

The work was put together by John Beaulieu, Ph.D. John’s a really amazing guy. He was my teacher for Polarity Therapy, which is a blend of Eastern and Western healing modalities. The gentleman who created it, Dr. Randolph Stone, inadvertently didn’t set out to create anything like that. He started out as an auto mechanic, and he knew how to get cars working. Then he became a chiropractor and an osteopath, and started working with his patients.

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He realized that people were not really changing. He tell them to do something and soon they would go back to their old ways. He started being a kind of a talk therapist as he was working on people’s bodies. Eventually he got really frustrated, and he wanted to find out what they did in other countries for healing. He went to China, he went to India, and he got really taken by the Indian culture and by the Indian Vedic healing, and the sacredness of life there in a different way. He learned about the Ayurvedic system and about energy, and about how energy moves around the body and within the body, according to this system.

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Eventually he set up a clinic there where people would come to see him who were at death’s door. They had done everything, been everywhere, tried everything, and they were still not healing and not getting well. He began to have amazing results with people. He was simply using all the things he knew from how to line the body up, how to get everything working in the physical realm, and how to attend to the energetic system.

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It’s a really interesting body of work. The basis of it is energy, understanding energy movement, understanding energy qualities, using that system of the chakras to look at different qualities of energy: fire, water, air, earth, what are those qualities? What do they feel like? What do they look like? How do they manifest in our body? How do they manifest in our diet, in what we eat? How do they manifest in conversation and relationships?

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We studied all those things under the umbrella of, how are the five elements playing out here? John founded the Polarity school and it was a very successful school in New York city. I went through the training. John is a musician, and he’s more of an avant-garde musician than anything, big lover of John Cage and extremely sensitive to sound and vibration. He had a friend working at NYU in an anechoic chamber. This friend was doing research and he needed a silent chamber. So anechoic chambers are completely soundproof, no sound can come in, not at all. So all you’re left with, when you’re sitting in a chamber, is you.

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John began to go into the chamber and meditate. He was a devout meditator. One time, he started to hear two tones. He figured one of them was probably his nervous system. He wasn’t sure about what the other one was. He brought a tuning fork. The typical tuning fork we use to tune instruments is an A440. So he brought one, quietly meditated, heard those two sounds, took the tuning fork, tapped it, put it up to his ear. What happened was the tone inside of his head tuned itself to the fork.

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Oh my gosh. That means so much for the way that we are in the world, that we’re tuning to our surroundings.

We are vibrating beings. We are 99.9% vibrating beings. Now we can now prove that through quantum physics. We are vibrating matter, we just think we’re solid. We’re not solid. So we are profoundly affected by vibrations around us all the time. We know we know it, but we just don’t think of it in that context of healing.

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We walk into a room and we talk about the vibe, what are we even saying? We’re saying that vibration is really awesome in there. I’m going to go hang out in that room. Or the vibe in there is deathly, people are all depressed. Well, and it’s no joke. It’s no accident. We literally are vibrating beings, absolutely affected all the time by what and who is around us.

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You know, it’s funny. I mean, more people accept the fact that electromagnetic fields affect us more than we affect each other. We affect each other. Our thoughts create vibrations. Those vibrations have impact. They all are like stones with ripples, when you throw them into a pond. So John thought, if my body will align to this, what should I tune it to? What would be the best tuning for my body, for a human body? So he went out to research and study and dig, and he came up with Pythagoras.

 

Pythagoras was a mathematician, a musician, a healer, an astronomer, this amazing person. What Pythagoras found was that all throughout nature, there were common ratios. So for instance, the Leonardo da Vinci picture of the ratios of our bodies. Not just our bodies, but Pythagoras looked at flowers and saw the ratios are similar. The distances between planets and stars, the ratios will repeat over and over again, these same ratios. Pythagoras built a major scale out of those ratios. That’s the Pythagorian scale. It’s pre-tempered. We came and tempered the scale. We altered some of the frequencies so we could play songs in any key. Once the piano was developed, which was not the piano at first, it was whatever the precursor to that was.

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So John took the Pythagorian scale and he created a set of tuning forks and tuned to those intervals. That’s the basis for the sound therapy that I work with. The idea is that for each element, there is an interval that will be stimulating to that element, and there is a different interval that will be sedating to that element. It makes it really straightforward. If I want to give myself a tune-up, I assess my elements. Where am I with my Earth element? Am I stuck in the mud? Do I feel really heavy and dragged down? Maybe I need to stimulate the earth then. So I will use an appropriate interval. The way John works is he likes to hold the two tones, one on each side of the head and the body. So what we’re dealing with is the interval. We’re dealing with the space between those two notes. Let’s say it’s a fourth. I can use any two notes that create a fourth, because the space, the interval of a fourth has a certain quality. So the intervals from his scale are our healing medicine. Do you need this vibration right now? We get those through different intervals.

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Fascinating, because it’s so similar to the Flatischler book. He writes of the power of intervals in rhythm, and archetypes. This is like finding the healing silent pulse for our bodies. I feel like there are all of these different healing modalities bringing us to the same thing, about our vibration and how we relate to the things around us. The vibration around us is what creates our reality here.

And don’t you find this very similar thing with color, with light? I mean there are very specific, I’ll say it’s a thirst for a color. That just feels so obvious. Like, I need this kind of color right now.

 

I had a cat once, and she loved teal. She had to get on the things I had that were that color, and she made them her own. She was an orange cat. I used to say, she loves that frequency. What she’s hearing is the frequency of color. Again, color is sound in a way, the vibration of the frequency.

I’ve got to mention this. There was this incredible TED talk about a man who was colorblind. They created a cap he could wear on his head that would feed him the frequencies for color to create a library. He could “see” the gradations of color that we cannot see with our eyes.

 

I hope that he was a painter.

Well, I don’t know if he was a painter, but he comes out dressed all in these wild colored clothes, and he’s like, “I don’t know what I look like, but I can tell you, I sound really good.”

 

Another thing too, about those forks, is that frequency has a rhythm. The frequency has a pulse, just like what we were talking about before. So it is sound and rhythm moving together. Whether we’re that aware of it or not, within our bodies. That’s just all so fascinating. When you are creating songs, how does your knowledge of all this inform you? I bet you’re very tuned into to how pattern and tones affect you physically.

Sometimes playing the guitar for me is a lot more about self-soothing than it is about writing. I’m not one of those prolific songwriters who writes hundreds of songs a year. I wish I was, but a lot of my time, especially as a kid, the guitar would be where I would go to get kind of a confirmation of what was going on with me. It was coming into resonance with me. I’m feeling this way, let me find it on the guitar. It became very self healing in that way.

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I’m lucky in that I work really intuitively. I’m lucky in that I’m not depending on writing pop music for my living. I mean, it would be great if I would be doing that because I’d probably make more money. But in that case, you’re writing formulaically and you’re not so much writing or creating music out of that organic place. You’re thinking about things more like: the rhythm section needs to be doing this. I need this kind of chord progression. I need this kind of feel. I need that kind of melody. It’s gotta be three minutes long. It needs to have a bridge that takes it to a different key. That’s very different than picking up the instrument and going, what do I feel right now? What do I need? What do I want, how do I get the guitar to match what I’m feeling?

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I’m a tuning fork. I want the guitar to resonate with me. That may mean I have to change the tuning of the guitar, or I have to play a certain kind of strum or a certain kind of pattern rhythmically.

 

I felt so much lately how the fact that we’re not able to stand in large groups of people and have sound vibrate us all together, how that is affecting our community, our culture.

That’s a great thing to think about. It’s real.

 

I think about the music that I play. People from every walk of life, every political side, every ideology, they come to see Led Zeppelin music being played and they’re standing side by side. Because we’re not solid, some of my cooties are getting into you, and we’re all just kind of like vibrating together. That’s what’s so beautiful. When you’re in a venue and everybody in the room is pulsing to that invisible pulse, it’s the most unifying thing. We’re seeing what happens in a society when we don’t have the ability to do that.

Music is a unifier and that is an experience you cannot get virtually. You can get other experiences virtually, and that’s great, and thank God, but you can’t get that, or at least not yet. You can’t get the actual experience of being in resonance with a group of people together through a musical experience.

 

Those sound waves are coming into you and then they’re coming into me. It’s some kind of connection.

How do you feel the loss or the lack of that, do you think it’s aggravating some of the division already there?

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For me, being in the public flow for so long, I’ve been playing many shows every month for years, and, seeing many people, all month long. Then to have it cut off and just see, one guy and a dog for months on end, and everybody else behind masks, what I found myself doing is closing in more and more. Now I’m at a point where I really don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to do anything, because I’ve gotten in this little comfortable thing. That’s not a good thing. We’re not meant to be these solitary beings. Yet once that pattern develops, we’re creatures of habit.

 

Even somebody who has traveled so much in her life like me, say I have three weeks off before a show, when it’s time to leave, I feel like I’ve grown roots. The longer I’m home, the harder it is to pull up the roots. Then once I’m like going, I’m like, why did I think it was so hard? Why didn’t I say that I was going to take this vacation for two weeks, not one, what do I have to get back to?  Once you’re on the move, you’re on the move.

I think you’re right. I think there’s a really interesting healing aspect of having to be in one place and not moving around. There’s a chance to get inside and do some inner work, and we’re growing roots.

 

Separation aggravates fear of the other. That really is humanity’s issue, is that we think that we’re separate beings from everybody else. The lockdown is aggravating that.

 I think about the kind of rhythm circles that Reinhard Flatischler talks about in the book. I teach a week-long class, every year, usually at Swannanoa Gathering, which is a great music camp in North Carolina. We meet an hour and 15 minutes every day for five days in a row. We move together, and we make rhythm together, and we find our way so we’re pulsing together. Those kinds of events, it’s like going to a concert. It’s the same idea. When you’re in a live venue and you’re with all the people in the room, and you’re receiving that kind of music, you’re pulsing together, and it feeds connection. It feeds the sense of belonging. It feeds the sense of community. Those are things that are at risk right now.

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We find our natural rhythm. Another thing that Reinhard says in the book is that there’s a rhythm we’re all communicating at all times. Somebody doesn’t have to play a drum in order to tap into the rhythm of the planet, and the world.

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I knew that our conversation was going to go there today. Of course it did. But I’m really happy for it. I just think rhythm is so important. I think it’s important for drummers to realize that when they sit down at a drum kit, that they’re not just learning patterns, and playing along to songs, but that they’re actually tapping into something that is bigger.

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Drums were the first language. I mean, the frame drum resonance is the same frequency as the center of the earth. We’re tapping into something bigger. I feel that as a drummer at a drum kit, as a guitarist standing up on stage and playing songs, the more that we can be grounded in that fundamental knowledge of the power of this, I think it is just better for the world, better for our playing, better for everything.

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Vicki, I know you have some really popular lessons on TrueFire.

I have seven different video courses out on various levels. One of them is 30 Strumming Patterns You Must Know. That’s all based on rhythm. It was a really fun course to create. I sat up all night and I created this course, and it was just so much fun, thirty different patterns. How do you change it up thirty times?

 

There’s open tuning stuff, and how to spice up your guitar chords and just add new dimensions to your playing, from the advanced beginner through intermediate level stuff. All different kinds of stuff on there. There’s one course called Rhythm Makeover. We took simple chord progressions with bass and drums playing, and then I created two completely different rhythmic patterns over those chords. So the first one might be using bar chords or something like that. And moving up the neck, the other one might be using all open strings and a very spacious sound. So I created these two completely different complimentary rhythm approaches to the same groove. That’s a really fun course in terms of how differently you can use rhythm.

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I do private lessons as well, and I’m starting more and more to use some of Reinhard’s work in my traditional guitar student work. I find oftentimes students have a hard time with rhythm, so I’ve got people feeling their pulse, which I think they think I’m kind of crazy. Really? I just want to play guitar. It’s like, well, you know what, we’re going to feel your pulse and get used to that and really be able to kind of call it up and feel it and move with it. And now you can pick up the guitar. It’ll be a different story.

 

Find Vicki Here:

www.facebook.com/vickigenfan

www.instagram.com/vickigenfan

www.bandcamp.com/vickigenfan

Reinhard Flatischler: https://powerofrhythm.com/

John Beaulieu, Ph.D.: https://biosonics.com/

Glen Velez: http://www.glenvelez.com

TrueFire: https://truefire.com/acoustic-guitar-lessons/30-strumming-patterns/c3

Swannanoa Gathering: https://www.swangathering.com/