I’ve been working on the ideas shown in a video I found on youtube:

The melodic minor use is quite interesting; playing the minor a fifth away from a dominant seven chord I’d heard of (so playing E melodic minor over A7), but the other use that’s shown, where you play the seventh mode of the melodic minor over a chord that I guess is functioning as a V, is something I’d not really got under my fingers before.  However, the thing that I really like the sound of is the (admittedly fast and showy) run he uses around 9min20 over the vi chord.  One of the comments says it’s a harmonic minor, though I’m stuck on exactly what he’s up to.  If it’s the same scale he describes at 4min20, it’s just plain weird:over a F#min7#9 he plays C# B A# G F# F E D C# (descending, obviously).  Which looks like… B harmonnic minor but with added chromatic stuff.  Lots of added stuff.  Which all sounds rubbish when I play it.  There’s a real gap between reading, “Hey, play this scale over this chord!” and being able to do something interesting with it.  I think it might be time to get a couple of lessons again.

While browsing Amazon I discovered a jazz guitarist called Fareed Haque, who has a few lessons on his website.  One of them that caught my interest is about how to play jazz chords; I’m interested in voicings of chords with a reduced number of notes, firstly for ease of playing, and secondly because between me, the keys player, the bassist and couple of horns players, there are probably enough notes flying around already.  How many people really need to play the fifth anyway?  So recently I’ve been experimenting with things like this:

   Bb7  Eb7
E ----------
B ----------
G --13--12--
D --12--11--
A ----------
E ----------

This nicely ties up with my liking for moments where two chords require very few finger movements to alternate between, e.g. on For Once In My Life.  The downside of this technique is that my practice is sounding less and less like the actual song I’m playing along with: once you take out the root and fifth, things don’t sound quite right.

It’s often been said by those of us in Casa that this band needs lights.  This ranges from a need for small clip-on lights so that people can read their pad of music (the horn section complains that their parts are more complicated than the rhythm section’s, because they’ve got, like, notes and stuff?  So they can’t memorise them), up to a full set of stage lights, lasers, dry ice, mirror balls, and fireworks.  The reason we haven’t bought lights yet is that they’re just one more piece of kit to lug around, and given that Dave, our drummer, already looks after our PA, and he knows full-well we’d get him to carry the lights too, he’s vetoed it.  However, for the gig we did on Saturday we were presented with a large, souless hall with two possible lighting settings: inquisition glare or moonless midnight.  Fortunately we had Derek on drums, and he has a friend who was willing to lend us 3kW of lighting rig at short notice.  For once we looked totally professional!  Err… ok, we were a bit easier to see on stage.  But, given that I carted the lights home and returned them on Sunday, I think Dave has a point: more kit is A Bad Thing.  I think that in the next life I’ll be a singer and just roll up to gigs with a microphone.

(Oh, one more thing: if you click on the photo to view the original on flickr, look closely and you’ll be able to see Derek’s ‘tache in the wild.)

I’d request your presents as well, but perhaps that’s asking a bit much.  Anyway, we’re playing a gig at B Bar this Thursday, the 21st day of August 2008.  Come down.  Buy beer.  Dance.  Or just sit stoney faced and stare at us, it’s what the crowd did last time.  We’re on from 9 and it costs nothing to see us, so it’s credit-crunch friendly too.  And as long as you avoid the Erdinger I’m sure it won’t even affect your productivity on Friday.

I’m trying to work out if I like “reliced” guitars.  (For those that don’t know, that’s a guitar that has been artificially aged to look like it’s got 60s mojo.)  This ranges from slightly discoloured pickguards and hardware with a patina of rust, through to looking like a previous owner had acid sweat and sandpaper skin.

Why?  Oh, no reason.

Adrian recently linked to Swing to Bop, a weblog about developing jazz guitar technique.  I’ll be following this with some interest, because I still just do not sound jazzy enough for my tastes.  I think what Derek once described as “wallpaper be-bop” is something that I’d like to be able to do, then hopefully move past it into something more interesting.  Anyway, I quite liked this video dealing with improvising over major chords; flat 9s and sharp 5s are two notes that I rarely throw in (unless I switch with H-bomb subtlety to a half-whole diminished scale or the harmonic minor; my knowledge of scales is well beyond what I can do tastefully with them), so it has been fun trying to use them a bit more.  I also like the little legato 4th-minor 3rd-major 3rd move, and it’s yet another example of someone avoiding the fourth.  I think I’ve been using the minor pentatonic for so long now that fourths just don’t sound off to me; my new playing mantra is “stay the fuck off the fourth”.  It’s so tempting a note, though… right there, nestled between the third and the fifth… what harm can it do?

I read the post over on Guitritus about getting a whole bag of new plectrums (plectra? Is it Greek?) with envy.  I’ve got a problem with guitar picks: I only like one.  There it is in the photo.  It’s pink and it’s a  millimetre thick and because I’ve had it for about ten years it’s got a weird wear pattern on the end and the logo’s nearly gone so I can barely read who made it but its mine and it’s the only plectrum for me.

Every time I drop it off the back of a badly lit stage I have to spend a horrified few minutes scrabbling in the mess of dust and cabling until I’m joyfully reunited with it.  If I was to have a signature piece of guitar equipment, it would be a plectrum: I’d have my original mapped to micron precision with lasers and recreated exactly, but even then I’d not be happy with the copies and would keep using mine until its worn away to a nub.

Believe me, I’ve tried others, but they’re just not as good.  Not quite the right flexibility, or too thick, or they’ve got funny dimples to aid grip, or (and here’s the catch) they’re just not worn in enough.  I think I need to buy some more, but file the ends down slightly to match what’s happened to my pick.

Seriously, Eric Johnson might complain about the brand of his batteries, but he’s got nothing on me and plectrums.

Acuphuncture played the opening set at Clare Ball on Monday night, at the work-friendly time of 9 til 10.30PM.  This of course meant that we played to an empty tent, because most punters arrive at a ball and immediately head for the food and booze; the biggest crowd we had was mainly thanks to the band who were on after us, The Anomalies.  Incredibly we even managed a soundcheck, thanks to the Anomalies finishing their check on time, however due to the usual fucked communications at a May Ball, the tech sheet we had submitted hadn’t been passed on to the sound guy.  This meant that Myke (our intrepid multi-instrumentalist and backing vocals chap) had to channel all of his musical output through the single remaining SM58 that the soundman had brought.  Irritating.  Our set up on stage was made even more complicated by the headline act, The Delays, refusing to allow any of their kit to be moved after it had been set up, resulting in us being perched in a long line across the front of an already less than generously sized stage.  The Delays are obviously cunts.  Still, the gig went ok, though our linear set-up meant that we had a few communication issues.

Casa kicked off this year’s May Week festivities with a gig at Hughes on Saturday night/ Sunday morning.  (Is it wrong to make a Phil Collins reference in a post?)  Booked from 1AM to 3AM, that was actually pretty much the times we played.  We were preceded by a pair of guys doing rock covers; both played guitar and sang, and used backing tracks to fill in for the rest of the band.  They were quite good, and I felt sure that if I’d challenged them with any guitar-based number from the 50s onwards they’d have been able to play it.  I bet they go down a treat at weddings.  They also had the gear issue totally sorted; both used a pair of mic’ed up 1×10″ combos combined with Boss multi FX units, and the tones they got were frankly ROCKING.  Size isn’t everything, kids.

The gig itself was good, though I was severely flagging towards the end of the second set.  In fact of all the things that happened on Saturday, by far the most remarkable was walking out of the underpass next to Hyde Park and being passed by the of the World Naked Bike Ride.  The word peloton is apparently derived from the French for ball.  It was never more appropriate.

Don’t wipe the sweat off your instrument.

Wise words.

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned: it has been over a year since I changed the strings on my guitars…

I used to change strings almost religiously after every third gig or so. I just didn’t want the hassle of suddenly having one let go, particularly because my main guitar has a floating trem, so if one does go ping! all the others are pulled sharp by the balance springs.  Actually it was worse than that: I used to carefully wipe the strings after playing in order to make them last longer.  Then somehow I grew less and less bothered… I blame playing bass, with strings as thick as bridge cables there’s relatively little chance of one letting go, and if it did it would probably take a finger off with it at the same time, which would be of more immediate concern.  I’ve been meaning to change my strings all week, then suddenly it came to this evening and time to pack my stuff up and head out to the gig, and no string-changing had happened.  Also since I changed to using 10s (guitar speak for a pack of strings that have a high E string with a diameter of 10 thousandths of an inch) I simply don’t break strings as often as when I used 9s.  I can’t imagine how prone to breaking a set of 8s are, I assume they’re like some mysterious high energy sub-atomic particle that only exists for fractions of a second before vapourising.

Of course, the longer I go without breaking a string, the less likely I am to change them (it ain’t broke…)

So, being back on guitar in Casa has a few surprises in store for me, namely the tunes that I’d learnt the bass part for but hadn’t had to play “up the octave.”  Stevie’s version of For Once In My Life gave me a headache trying to play Jamerson’s bass part (which frankly I never managed to get under my fingers), and now the chords are giving me some problems, though they are also quite an interesting piece of harmonisation.  Stevie plays the song in F, but we prefer C, so for us it goes C, C+, C6, C#dim, Dm, Dm(maj 7), Dm7, Dm6.  This looks like a jazz road accident but is just harmonies around a chromatically ascending then descending line: G, G#, A, A#, D, C#, C, B.  It became particularly obvious when I played the chords:

E -0-0-0---5-5-5-5--
B -1-1-1-5-6-6-6-6--
G -0-1-2-3-7-6-5-4--
D -2-2-2-5-7-7-7-7--
A -3-3-3-4-5-5-5-5--
E ------------------

Nice.  I don’t play it down there normally, I came up with that while messing around on an acoustic guitar post-rehearsal  I really like it when you get this kind of pattern where there are stable notes in a chord contrasting with other mobile notes; an example from the busker’s real book is Oasis’ Wonderwall.  Another example I’ve seen is a I7-iim7b5 change, something like:

E ------
B -5-5--
G -3-4--
D -5-5--
A -3-4--
E ------

Never having had any formal musical education, the thing I have no experience with is coming up with a melody and harmonising it in different ways.  If I sit around trying to come up with song ideas I usually start from the chords and see what melody fits over them, rather than the other way around.  It’s certainly another thing to work on!