Tag: lesson

Categories
guitar Music Technique

My Favorite Rock ’n’ Roll Solo (It’s Not on Guitar)

I’ve long been obsessed with Sam “The Man” Taylor’s epic sax solo on the Chords seminal 1954 rock ’n’ roll hit, “Sh-Boom.” But I never got around to learning, transcribing, and analyzing it till now. I heard it about 100 times while making and editing this video, and it still thrills me on every listen.

If you’re like me, you know it’s wise to study performances by non-guitarists, but seldom get around to doing it systematically. For once I followed through, and — at risk of sounding like a pedantic dork — I’ve analyzed what I heard and suggested ways to incorporate the concepts in styles far removed from the original doo-wop context.

You can download my transcription (in standard notation and guitar tab) here.

The final part of the video is a rant about how segregation shaped the course of early rock and roll, in which I piss all over the Crew Cuts’ tepid cover version of “Sh-Boom.” (Spoiler alert: It blows.) This was partially inspired by recent despicable comments from musical felon Pat Boone. I’ve linked to the following videos before, but I’m posting them again because the cost of quality music is eternal vigilance against sonic shit-shovelers.

Holy crap! It’s the coolest man in the universe! This foreshadows Hendrix, Prince, and the Beatles. Even lip-synched, it’s everything badass in one minute and 50 seconds. (And it speaks volumes about segregation in midcentury America.)

And then there’s this:

Unholy crap! It’s the least cool man in the universe. And this foreshadows nothing except the worst music of the last 60 years (though it too speaks volumes about race in 20th-century America).

Why beat this dead horse? Why pick on ol’ Pat 60 years after the fact? Maybe he regrets his musical misdeeds. Maybe he’s even developed a more nuanced view of race and racism.

Naw. When self-avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African-American churchgoers on June 17th, 2015, Boone leapt into action, penning an angry editorial that condemned … politicians who dared to refer to the atrocity as “racist.”

FUPB. There’s no statute of limitations on your crimes.

Categories
Digital guitar Technique

Cue the Drummer Jokes!
Playing Drums with MIDI Guitar

strung_out_121213_small

I’m thrilled to bits about a show I’m playing Thursday eve in San Francisco featuring two guitarists of impeccable skill and taste, plus me.

Teja Gerken and I are co-hosting a monthly solo guitar night at El Rio, my groovy neighborhood dive.Our guest is the amazing Eric Skye who, among other things, plays gorgeous solo guitar versions of classic Miles Davis tunes. If you happen to be in cold, cold San Francisco this week, stop by and say hi!

I’ve been doing the digital looping thing with Mental 99 for a few years now, and man, trying to work out solo arrangements with live-looped MIDI drums has been seriously humbling. You know all those jokes we love about how drummers speed up, slow down, drool, and generally disappoint? I can do all those things and everything else a drummer does, except occasionally play a competent groove. Some of the problems have to do with MIDI tracking in general, and some are simply general suckage. Man, it sure makes me appreciate my brilliant musical partner Dawn Richardson, who never speeds up and drools only rarely.

animal_drums

But those who can’t, teach. So I whipped up a little tutorial on playing drums with MIDI guitar. The first half covers the moves, and the second half features a live improv based on my fave afrobeat pattern. (Tony Allen is my rhythm god.) It also includes some of the hybird synth/guitar sounds I’ve been exploring, like double single-not lines an octave lower, mixing trashy guitar and trashy organ, and of course, space pigeons. (I stole the organ line from my pal Robin Balliger.)

In other news: I’ve been speaking to the ultra-knowledgable Rob Hull from Tube Depot about creating a minimalist DIY amp kit inspired by our conversations here. Lots more details to come. Tube Depot has a track record of making real nice amp kits, and Rob’s documentation/build instruction are the best in the biz. I reviewed their cool tweed Champ clone kit here.

Oh — anyone score any good holiday presents yet?

Categories
Acoustic Music

An Alternate-Tuning Capo

Spider Capo

UPDATE, 03.07.13: I should have mentioned a point that several readers noted in comments: The capo only alters the tuning of open strings. Which means that while you can play many harmonies normally available only in dropped tunings, any notes above the capo appear at their usual frets. For example, all barre chords are played exactly as in standard tuning.

After all the digital guitar stuff I’ve been writing about lately, I really wanted to spend an afternoon without plugging in any frickin’ USB cables. So I finally got around to experimenting with the SpiderCapo I picked up last year on a whim.

The SpiderCapo his six independently adjustable clamps, each of which can either stop the string or let it ring freely. That means you can dial in most dropped tunings without actually detuning any strings — instead, you transpose the entire voicing up. It’s a lot of fun to play, and seems like it could be a cool composing tool if you’re the sort of musician who gets inspired by unfamiliar tunings. Plus, it looks kind of wicked when you fret the unstopped strings behind the capo.

Here’s a little video I made, noodling around in a few tunings I particularly liked:

Anyone else tried one of these? Or any other “tricky” alternate-tuning capo? How about those gadgets that (unlike the SpiderCapo) can stop strings at differing frets?

Categories
Acoustic guitar

Guitar Lessons, Great and Otherwise

This clip from the short-lived British sketch-com Snuff Box made me think about great guitar teachers — and not-so-great ones.

I was lucky — I had some truly memorable teachers, starting with my mom, who taught me her coffeehouse folk. When she decided I needed a more advanced instructor, she recruited Larry, a friend’s 16-year-old Who-fanatic son. (He grew up to become renowned classical guitarist Lawrence Ferrara.) Katherine Charleton (later Calkins) mutated me into an early music geek. And I got to take a few lessons from Ted Greene was I was 17 or so, though he wouldn’t take me as a weekly student. He’d listen to me play got a bit, then dispense pages and pages of chord progressions and melodic sequences, the material that wound up on his Solo Guitar Playing books. I paid Buckethead for a few lessons when he was 17, but it was mainly just to hang out and watch him do his amazing thing. My last great teacher was the sublime Martin Simpson — I finagled a couple of lessons from him when he lived 90 minutes from me in Santa Cruz.

How about you guys? Which teachers inspired you the most? What was the best advice you ever got from a teacher? The worst? Do you teach yourself? Does teaching affect the way you play? Like that.

Categories
Bass DIY guitar Pickups

How to Install Pickups

"I always forget — which end gets hot?"
“I always forget — which end gets hot?”

Somewhat embarrassingly, I never got around to changing one of my own pickups until I was knocking on senility’s door recently. I owe part of the inspiration to that fabulous DIY Fest known as the Maker Fair, where each year hundreds of little kids learn to solder craft projects at long picnic tables. Or maybe it was the awesome soldering tutorial by 11-year old W0JAK. Well, after a buttload of pickup installs inspired by this blog, I guess I qualify as some sort of solder “expert,” because Seymour Duncan asked me to make a video designed to walk n00bs through the pickup install process for the first time. It was a lot of fun to prepare, and I learned some important things, like the fact that it’s hard to solder, talk, and operate a camera at the same time. Check it out:

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