Vocabulary is an important aspect of communication. The better your vocabulary, the more able you become to get your point across.

In musical terms, vocabulary can mean either of two things: a) the number of licks, tricks and runs you know how to play - chops, and their accompanying variations and/or, b) the content of your lyrical expression in words.

Good song writers have a fair amount of one or the other; great song writers have a wealth of both chops and words available to them in their writing.

But how do you get there? How do you develop your musical and lyrical vocabularies? It is both easy and not so easy to answer these questions. But both answers involve the same basic approach: you have to work at it.

The problem for many people is that they don't understand what that actually means, how you go about it, and what kinds of materials you should be looking at to increase your literacy in both chops and wordsmithing.

It takes time and effort. It takes willingness to sacrifice trivialities like television and 'hanging out' with the guys all the time (but you gotta take a break once in a while, so don't throw them off completely). And you gotta shut off the computer and walk away from those social networks and all the video games and all the other distractions.

It takes dedication and a motivated heart. If you don't put in the time on the tool, you won't reap the benefits that come with that time well spent.

A wordsmith, for those who don't already know, is a person who loves words, loves how they sound, loves language (and sometimes more than one). A wordsmith is not content with a vocabulary of 3000 to 5000 words. They want a vocabulary that extends to 10,000 or more words - even if they only rarely use a fair portion of them. Having them available is the point here, being able to use the very word that best describes a situation.

You may not like Simon & Garfunkel. But I encourage you to listen to "Homeward Bound", or any of the songs in their short career. In these four albums are contained an amazing gift of telling a story, and not always with ten dollar words; but not eschewing them because they might sound too intellectual, too high brow.

If you are a lyricist, the lyric writer, in your musical situation, whether as a song writer/performer or part of a band, you should never think you cannot use a word because of what people might think when they hear the song. If the words you use best describe the situation, and they happen to be bigger words than you might typically hear in a song of that genre, so what? The only question you have to ask is if use of that word is appropriate and the best one that conveys the feeling or emotion or belief in the context of the tale being told.

In seminars, I tell people who are aspiring song writers to read Shakespeare, Homer, Keats, Shelley, Hugo, Dickens, all those people. Why? Because they understood language and how to use it.

So you read... a lot. You read material by authors who know how to write, storytellers who use a vast vocabulary of words, who are drunk with the use of language. You read so you also learn how to spell by virtue of reading words spelled correctly (are you listening editors? spell checkers?). And you invest in a good Dictionary and a Thesaurus. You don't need an Oxford's Comprehensive, but a good Websters Collegiate edition should do nicely. That has most words you'll ever need.

Of equal importance, you have to write. You write because you have to, you write because it is the only way you will improve your skill in telling the tales. It is the only way you will learn to 'turn a phrase', to string words together in a way that is fun, amusing, serious, emotional, exuberant and, more importantly, says a thing precisely the way you need it to be said; no settling for 'good enough' or 'that will do'. And you have to do so without worrying about what people might think.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard songs and cringed at the horrible lyric that didn't fit with the flow of the verse. I even sometimes yell at the radio what the lyric should have been. Yeah, sometimes it is that obvious how badly they lyric writer blew it.

I have had boxes of lyrics lying around over the years. Occasionally I would go through them and sift out the good lines - a line here and a line there - and make notes of these lines. They might be found in a full page of lyrics, that one line that stands out. The rest is trash, but that line, oh, that line says so much.

Remember, Edison experimented with 10,000 different elements to light his electric light bulb before perfecting the one filament that worked best and would burn the longest. And it took him a very long time.

This is called process, and it can take years. It has taken me years to learn how to write well, both editorially and lyrically. And my vocabulary is huge. It may not seem like it when you read here in these articles, but over time you will see the application of my vocabulary to its full capacity. And I make no apologies.

Musical vocabulary shares many traits with written and spoken vocabulary. You have to listen to a lot of different kinds of music, and like it enough to learn from it. You have to learn to play these different styles of music so you understand the vocabulary, the dialect, of that style. Faking it doesn't work. Learning it does.

Taking lessons to do this is not shameful thing. Kirk Hammett, even after becoming a famous person, still took lessons. Many successful musicians take lessons. Why? Because they understand that you cannot know it all, but you can learn a whole lot more beyond your chosen style or styles you play the most. A good teacher will expose you to different styles of music, even if you haven't asked for it. My students get exposed to a good number of styles. And I explain to them that they will grow to appreciate the 'side bar' lessons once they understand how they apply to what they really want to learn. And they always do. No exceptions.

For example, if you're into Blues, you can learn a lot from Folk, Jazz, Bebop, Classical, almost any other style. And you can bring elements of those styles into your interpretation of the Blues. And because you explore these different styles, you just might begin doing something 'new', something nobody else is doing. This gives you a distinct identity.

So, yes, you have to practice... a lot. How else are you going to improve?

I had a bass player who was actually pretty good. But he never practiced. He talked of taking lessons - and I offered to teach him - but he never took me up on the offer or ever went out to find someone else to learn from. So he stopped growing. Any new stuff he learned, I made him learn because the song required it. Otherwise, he learned nothing new. What he knew how to play, he played well enough. But after I let him go, I rewrote virtually all the bass parts to the songs and made them more what they needed to be. And sometimes they became far more complex than he was able to play, than what he had been playing. His loss.

Practice leads to time spent exploring. Time spent exploring leads to discoveries. Discoveries lead to new ideas (new to you, anyway), and maybe truly new ideas (unique to you). New ideas lead to new approaches. New approaches lead to what can be called the Undiscovered Country - that place few find in their lifetime, and even fewer discover before anyone else.

Musically, the Undiscovered Country is virgin territory, and hopefully virgin territory to which you are the first to venture and find, and so use in your music as the first to explore this new concept, approach and idea in expressing the style of music you play.

And that perhaps gets you noticed. It definitely gets you someplace special. And hopefully, you help initiate and create a whole new dialect in the language of music others will want to emulate.

How cool would that be?

But you gotta pick up your instrument and really learn everything it can do, and learn as many styles as is reasonable to learn; then begin to explore all the possibilities that could help you achieve that unknown plateau, one you don't even yet know exists.

You gotta read a lot, write even more. And one day, words will begin pouring out of you, the likes of which you could have only imagined and may have never thought possible.

Yes, vocabulary is that important. And it is a lot of work. But it is all well worth the sweat, time, sacrifice and effort if it yields the desired results.

Speaking as one who has done - is still doing - this, trust me. You won't regret it once you get that first benefit from the effort to expand beyond your horizons, to breathe 'fresh air' and see new vistas for the first time.

It awaits you, wanting, hoping to be discovered.