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.

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.

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!

I’ve been away, hence the slight hiatus in posts. Acuphuncture played at Jazz at John’s on March 2nd, which was a nice bit of repeat business, though with all the same presentational issues of the last time: why do they hire a big PA and sound guy set up, yet insist on keeping all the house lights up? Hire some lights, guys, it’s supposed to be a party! Regarding the sound, I’m starting to wonder about Mulletboy’s style; I remember Derek commenting on the recording from last year’s gig that his kit sounded like a huge rock monster, and the same effect was achieved with Seb’s kit this time (Seb kindly standing in for Derek whilst the latter was off doing a big band gig.)  Still, disregarding this stylistic difference, it’s difficult to fault the quality of the sound, so I shouldn’t split hairs.

Support was provided by a random student band that apparently was going to be the house band for a play later in the term… though they didn’t play anything from their show, instead doing a bunch of Commitments style covers.  It was passable enough, though a little difficult to explain what the hell they were doing at a jazz gig until the chap who organised the evening turned out to be in the band.  Ah ha.

Unusually everything ran pretty much according to schedule, so we played 10.30 ’til midnight, with a setlist that only included one new cover, Jamiroquai’s High Times.  (I’m particularly pleased to be covering this because it contains one of my favourite guitar solos - it’s not tricky, it’s just right.)  Because of the busy-ness that I’ve mentioned previously I hadn’t done much practice, so I opted to substitute volume for skill and took my big amp.  This actually turned out to be fortuitous, because our on-stage levels were up in the ear-buggering zone; generally I’ll run the amp in half power (20W), but I had to take it up to full power to maintain a reasonable clean tone.  However the foldback was able to cope nicely, so despite the volume we were all able to hear what was going on.  All told, not a bad gig; I’ll have to start doing my bit and see if I can land some others, because I think Tom’s sorted them all out so far…

It’s been quiet here because life’s been very busy recently, so I haven’t had the time to do much playing (plus I knackered my thumb in a bike + beer accident, so playing has actually been painful).  So let’s point the finger of publicity at someone else’s hard work: Adrian’s new venture, bluesjamtracks.com.  I particularly enjoyed watching the videos of Guthrie Govan in the VIP Suite section; his name was familiar to me, but I’m not sure I’d ever heard him play.  I think the phrase “Jesus Fucking Christ” sprung to mind after watching them; he’s as talented as he is hairy.  I particularly like the “Suhrphisticated” one, probably because just before the busy-ness invaded my life, I’d been working my way through Robben Ford - The Blues and Beyond, and I think I hear some of the same scale use.  Actually the main thing I’m trying to integrate into my playing at the moment came from that DVD: using the half-whole diminished scale as a linker between the I and IV chord of a blues progression.

Before we get into this post, I’d like to say that most discussions about the technical side of guitar playing are liable to set off the Finbarr Saunders within you. If you find yourself unable to read the phrase “right hand technique” without sniggering, I suggest you skip this article.

I read this post about alternate picking with interest; I use economy picking a lot, particularly if the passage is too fast for me to play “properly” (whatever that means). I noticed that I also do a similar thing when playing bass, for example using the standard guitarist’s warm-up exercise:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G -8765-------------
D -----8765---------
A ---------8765-----
E -------------8765-
...imimmimiimimmimi
Rather than strictly alternating index and middle fingers, I’m raking the notes when changing string. The advantage of this is speed, but I have found that this is at the expense of accuracy, because I’ll usually slightly rush the second note if it’s played by the same finger. I decided to experiment and forced myself to play with strict alternation, even to the extent that if a groove started on an “ee” or “ah” I’d begin with my middle finger, effectively never breaking the alternating pattern. For example, in “Reuben’s In”, an instrumental tune taken from the Ocean’s 11 soundtrack that Casa play:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G ------------------
D ------------------
A -----5--7-5-5-5---
E -0--7------7----70
...i..mi..m.mim.m.mi
I find that I’m a lot more accurate on the semi-quavers using this pattern than if I begin each group of notes with my index finger. (Don’t even ask why I’ve chosen to finger it this way; I found it a stretch to play in first position, so accepted the string skip in the third beat in favour of rent tendons.) I guess it’s all about generating some sort of internal metronome, and if I imagine my fingers are constantly playing semi-quavers even if they aren’t, it helps to keep my timing more even. The first really tricky thing I’ve found while using this technique is skipping strings, e.g. a pattern from the bassline of “There’s Only So Much Oil In The Ground”:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G ---55--55--55--55-
D ------------------
A -3~--3~--3~--3~---
E ------------------
...i.imi.imi.imi.im.
For some reason my fingers just don’t like playing this, though I think it might simply be a matter of practice. However, after this experimenting with my technique, I checked out this video of Simon Merrick playing Space Cowboy. I think I can see rakes and on-beat notes played with his middle finger, so the kind of rigid pattern I’ve been using isn’t the be-all and end-all (not that I thought it would be).

I’m considering doing a similar exercise on guitar, forcing myself into relearning a few pieces adhering to strict alternate picking; potentially it’ll clean up my often sloppy timing. At the very least it’ll make me think about what I’m playing again, which is always a good thing!

I finally got around to putting my telecaster on eBay. Now bid! Bid, my pretties! You must do my bidding.  And I bid you farwell, for I have other bidness to attend to.