The Donington Method: How to Teach Yourself by Imitating the Greats
I taught myself guitar when I was eight years old by wearing out the rewind button on my family’s DVD player, analyzing—then imitating—the hands of Angus Young, lead guitar player for AC/DC, from the Live at Donington concert recording. Crammed into that DVD is a cornucopia of decipherable wisdoms, tricks, and tools of the trade—a complete beginner’s guide to modern rock guitar playing.
Open chords with an aggressive, gnarled tone. Airy yet crisp, biting. Easy, in the pocket rhythms. A sampler of basic riff building. The mixing of major and minor pentatonic scales, lightening quick vibrato, tasteful additions of the blue note, stitching licks together with space to let the song breathe while soloing. There’s also Angus Young’s attitude, face in a perpetual snarl. His livewire energy and confidence (all while donned, somewhat notoriously, in a schoolboy uniform, though he was thirty-six at the time)—a masterclass on performance and stage presence.
For years, I tapped that DVD for all it would offer me, learning by imitation, until there wasn’t a drop of Angus I was unfamiliar with (he does happen to enact a striptease routine during one of the numbers, but let’s not go there). When I want to learn something, really learn something, I tend to fixate a bit. I don’t know if the visual aspect was a fast track, or if I was just a quick learner, but all the studying/imitating paid off. By twelve years old, I was a pretty admirable guitar player, so naturally, I wanted to start a band, sights set on becoming a professional musician. The only problem was, when I eventually sat down and tried to write my own music, you’ll never guess who I sounded like. And I mean exactly like.
If the end goal was to play in AC/DC cover bands at county fairs and dive bars for the rest of my life, I was well on my way. But considering I didn’t want to be caught dead in a schoolboy uniform, let alone wear one on stage for every show, that was not in the cards. I wanted my own tunes, my own sound (and look). I wanted to be one of those guitar players you could recognize by name after a single note. At the moment, I was just a budget Angus Young impersonator, with a budget Gibson SG Special in budget satin cherry fade, playing through a budget Marshall solid state half stack budget speaker cabinet budget budget budget.
In short, I was not Angus Young, nor could I truly pretend to be. I did not grow up with my brother, Malcolm, in Australia, doing whatever one does… in Australia, but instead in the Midwestern suburbs of the United States in a home with two older sisters and divorcing parents. I had a different lived experience, different hands. I had my own developing biases, tastes, intuitions, my own messages that I wanted to convey with the guitar, messages that were limited by AC/DC’s fine but narrow (to me) vocabulary. In love with the thrill and risk associated with entertainment, always the first to rattle off a humorous quip in class or shred a little guitar for my best buds, I was simultaneously dealing with complex body image problems and insecurity due to bullying and a home environment that was in flux. Mixing and matching the same three chords and five or so notes did not have enough depth of character, did not go to the moody, questioning places I wanted to go.
Angus no longer seemed like enough. What I needed was to broaden my horizons, obtain a deeper reservoir of knowledge. I needed more theory, more techniques, more sounds, more touchstones of imitation to further develop me.
I needed more, different, Live at Doningtons. That’s when I discovered the miracle that is YouTube, with its seemingly infinite amount of guitar learning resources, no DVD required.
I Live at Donington’ed my way through just about every classic rock guitar player there was: Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Robby Krieger, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi, Jimi Hendrix, you name it. More recently, I’ve become interested in jazzy “outside” playing, with artists such as Grant Green, Robben Ford, and Greg Koch. Brick by Donington brick, I built a foundation of influences, going through the process of imitating each to learn their tendencies, phrasings, and then applied those new skills to my own playing. Equipped with a more robust lexicon of those who had come before, and an understanding of their lineage on the great family tree of rock, I was able to pull from each in my own unique combination and create something undeniably new.
What are we if not an amalgamation of our influences—all mashed together and then squeezed out and presented in a coherent braid by the arcane integration machine that is our own idiosyncratic minds?
This is where writing comes into the fold. When talks of college began, I wanted to go to music school for guitar performance. Maybe I could be a studio musician, fairy dusting layers of guitar onto famous people’s generic pop music with a cigarette tucked behind the strings on the headstock until I was discovered and could tour with my own band. My mom, the purveyor of reality with all the right intentions, recommended I go into dentistry. Somehow, we met in the middle with English, and off I went to a local liberal arts university courtesy of both federal and private student loans.
The idea of writing did not just come out of nowhere. In high school, I had (enjoyably) written over three hundred poems after reading (and then imitating) the poetry of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors (don’t judge me too harshly, I wanted to be a musician, remember). People seemed to like my poems, and a few went on to get published in literary magazines. Later, in college, I applied my same Donington method to write short stories in the style of George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Etger Keret, and Amelia Gray, immediately gravitating toward the speculative, the fabulist, the darkly funny, the absurd, because that was how I experienced the world. I’ve been told I have a strong, well-developed voice, and I think my time spent in the pages of these authors lends itself partly to that.
I liked playing with words almost as much as playing the guitar. The divide is closer now, though I still sometimes think I would have made a better musician. Lucky for me, both mediums have a way of organizing, converting, and then articulating some inexplicable part of you in an efficient way that would be difficult to reproduce by other, non-artistic means. A soul on a platter—take it if you please. The greatest achievement is when others are emotionally moved by the result. That’s magic. That’s the peak I strive for.
To those who are just starting out writing, those who want to experiment in a new genre, or those who simply feel like they’re stuck in a rut, I can’t recommend the Donington method enough. Sit down with a short piece you admire from one of your literary heroes and pick it apart one line at a time. Diagram it, analyze it. Figure out what makes it sing to you.
Instead of arpeggios, modes, and chord inversions, keep a close eye on how they incorporate place, navigate time, characterize through word choice. Look out for varying sentence length, use of tense, point of view, how they strategically deploy descriptive language. Then, in a Word doc or on a piece of paper, attempt to reconstruct it in your own image, using your own lived experience and messages, imitating, but once again incorporating your own biases, tastes, and intuitions. If you end up veering off into a totally different direction, great! Leave room for that. Try to encourage that.
Read, write, repeat.
I often find the greatest gift of imitation is the time spent intimately close reading a piece. I love the little detective work leading up to the epiphany. Because there is work involved. Imitation is not a cheat code. It does not just hand over the answers to the test willy nilly. It is an exercise. It is developing your writerly ear. It is practice.
The amount of care we give to understand how a piece of writing works down to the studs in turn reveals just how much care the author originally put into the writing themselves. Every micro-decision matters—subconscious or otherwise—and with good imitation, it all gets absorbed.
I’ve used this method to tremendous effect, the new piece oftentimes not even remotely resembling the original. Which brings me to this very important point: always be mindful not to cross the line into plagiarism. This method is intended to teach via other’s tendencies—to influence and inspire “in the style of,” so to speak. Never explicitly copy another writer’s work word for word. Like learning a guitar solo note for note, it may be good practice for the hands (fretting, typing), but eventually, you’ll need to be able to improvise on your own.
And if you’re lucky, who knows, maybe someday, someone will want to imitate you. Just, please, whatever you do, no more schoolboy uniforms.
