Geezer asks :

> How can you break the rules and break out of the chains
> if you don't know what they are?

I think rules are what is in the way of expressing what
you've got inside. For example, if you're "well behaved"
you don't throw tantrums. Why ? because there's this
rule that says that you don't, and if you do everyone
is going to hate you. A rule is what stops you from doing
what you feel like doing, or prevents you from repeating
something you just did by accident, or prevents you from
even attempting something out of curiosity.

I don't think you have to know what the rules are, though
it might help in getting rid of them if you did. In the
case of music, if you've had any more-or-less traditional
musical education you've go a whole pile of easily identifiable
rules you can free yourself from.

Take the classic tritone for a simple example. At one point
in history you weren't allowed to use it because it wasn't nice
to, so you didn't. If someone since then hadn't been free, and
courageous, enough to use it anyway we wouldn't have most of
modern music to listen to.

I ended up buying the book "The Rest is Noise" which is a history
of 20th century classical music. The number one thing that took
place was the wholesale throwing out of all the rules that had
applied till then. Of course the greater composers had broken a
rule here and there to become great, each in their own way, but
nothing like what happened in the 20th century.

Rules aren't necessarily things that you shouldn't do. For
learning guitar, I think the problem is probably more rules about
what you should do. "Play in this box and you'll be ok". It
won't be original, it won't have anything to do with what you've
got inside, but it probably won't annoy anyone. It may sound to
others vaguely like you know what you're doing but it won't
excite anyone.

Scales and modes are just more of the same thing. What is a
scale if not a rule saying to stay within it ? If you're free to
move outside it then where's the point of the scale in the first
place ?

The tone of your guitar is also the same thing. Some guitar
tones today would sound completely awful to a musician from the
sixties. Someone was free enough to go with a sound that they
liked, even if no one else did, and eventually it affected enough
people that it became widespread and popular.

Paul P