I’m 200 years old, but I can still kick your ass, punk!
UPDATE: I’m proud to announce that my fingerstyle video lesson based on the 200-year-old etudes of Mauro Giuliani has been selected to appear in the debut issue of Pure Guitar, a new digital guitar mag whose editorial staff includes my two music journo mentors : Tom Wheeler and Jas Obrecht. Also on board: jazz ace Wayne Goins, session superhero Tim Pierce, Nashville’s leading guitar tech, Joe Glaser, and other preeminent axe experts.
You’ll find my article here — but frankly, I recommend starting at the homepage of issue #1 and reading all the way through!
Congrats, guys, on the new mag. I’m psyched to be part of it. :beer:
“Do you have a central core concept or inspiration that drives your playing? Are you squirrelled away with obscure harmony texts, or practising modes till your fingers bleed? Do you have go-to chord substitutions that define your sound? Do you have a creamy harmonic centre?”
Like most great questions, it’s really hard to answer (though some folks managed to reply in extremely articulate and compelling ways). I’ve been pondering it myself for the last few days, and the best answer I can come up with is something along the lines of what I hinted at in this recent post on chromaticism, namely a liquid sense of modality based on the notion that most of us Westerners really only perceive two modes — major and minor — but that there’s a vast amount if “wiggle room” when it comes to placing individual scale degrees.
To put it another way, most of what I play is based on simple tonic triads, major or minor, but the placement of all the other scale degrees is highly negotiable. For me, the advantage of viewing scales this way is that they remain grounded in harmony, and vice-versa. As opposed to the way many of us were taught modes: as purely mathematical sets of intervals divorced from their chordal implications — or just a bunch of diatonic scales that start on the “wrong” notes.
Hey, why is everyone nodding off, staring out the window, or checking their phones? Wake up and talk about the methods of your madness!
This photo was digitally altered to make the guitar look even dirtier than it was — but not by much.
Sometimes only the threat of public exposure can inspire a proper clean-up job. Case in point: I hadn’t groomed my battered ’63 Strat in years, and when I pupped it from the wall for my recent post on the instrument, the fact that I was about to show it to the world you guys made me finally admit how gross it had become.
Now, it’s not like I wanted it to sparkle or anything — seems to me that an old guitar should look old, and removing 100% of the grime would be a little too much like those octogenarians with preternaturally white teeth. I mainly just wanted to remove the sticky crud that had accu
Last weekend I went to a memorial service for a music pal I hadn’t seen since the ’80s. Judging by the pictures I saw and the stories I heard, Brett remained the gentle, generous music lover I’d remembered till he died in his sleep a few weeks ago.
I ran into lots of old music friends and bandmates, and we alternately smiled and winced as our old photos and concert videos flashed on the big screen. Were we really that skinny? Did we actually wear that stuff without being coerced at gunpoint?
Like we tend to do at such moments, I left brimming with resolutions: Appreciate life. Cherish friends. Remember that music is a joy as well as a job. And do something nice for my sad old Strat, the guitar in all those old photos and videos.
See, back then I only had one guitar — an all-original ’63 Strat I’d picked up in 1980, when pre-CBS Fenders were still perched on the precipice between collectible and affordable. (I paid $450, a staggering investment for me at the time.) It remained my only serious guitar for a decade. It was in near-perfect condition when I bought it, and it was a battered ruin by decade’s end. (The ’80s were a tough time for guitars, what with all those studded belts.) I was a young player with a bad attitude and little concern for collectibility, as opposed to the middle-aged player with a bad attitude and little concern for collectibility that I am today.
I’ll some thoughts about Strats then and now. But first, have a listen:
Of the dozens of videos I’ve posted at the tonefiend YouTube channel, most have dealt with gear, and a few with general technique. But this is the first one I’ve done dealing with music theory. Which is sort of odd, since I’m a terminal music theory geek.
Aside from covering a cool and underused melodic/harmonic device, this video opens a Pandora’s box of modal theory. I have some crackpot interesting theories about this, and I enjoy sharing them, especially when I’m trying to get house guests to depart after a long party.
I’d like to post more stuff along these lines if folks find it useful. Let me know!
One cool thing about going indie with tonefiend is that fact that I can finally host my own geek forum! It’s already up and running — but it’s a sad, vacant space that desperately needs to be populated by cool people and cool ideas.
How to get there? Sleazy bribes! Cool prizes!
Here’s the deal: I’ve pre-populated the forum with a few topics and threads. Just come on over, register, and chime in on any thread that interests you — or better yet, start one of your own. And on September 1st, 2012, the three forum members who have consistently contributed the liveliest content as judged by some dork me will get a bitchin’ stompbox laboriously hand-built by the same dork me. I can’t disclose exactly what the pedals will do, but I can promise they will be cool, useful, and genuinely unique — original designs, not some lame-ass Screamer clones. And if I manage not to vaporize my hand with the TechShop laser-cutter I’ve been learning to use, they’ll even have wicked laser-etched enclosures.
Naturally, I hope the tonefiend forum will also be cool and unique, and that you’ll enjoy geeking out there even when there’s no contest. But hey, I’m not above greasing the skids with free stompboxes as needed.
Last winter I tried an odd experiment: a website where players were encouraged to post their best tone secrets — the kinds of tricks and techniques that are almost too good to share. But in order to get, you had to give: The site was password-protected, and the password was only sent to those who contributed secrets.
Musicians responded, no doubt encouraged by the cool prizes awarded to the top secrets, as judged by user ratings. I also asked some cool musician friends to contribute the first round of secrets, yielding tips from the likes of composer/virtuoso Lyle Workman, metallurgist-turned jazzbo Alex Skolnick, original Chili Peppers guitarist Jack Sherman, boy genius Blake Mills, and other great players.
Once the contest ended, traffic slowed, but the site has slowly but surely grown. And now, as an experiment, I’ve removed the password protection. Now anyone can visit the Secret Room, AKA tonesecret.com, even if they haven’t coughed up a secret. So please do!
It’s a fascinating document. Naturally, the quality of secrets varies, as does the level of expertise needed to make the most of them. I exerted a light editorial hand — only silly or flat-out-wrong tips were vetoed, and I didn’t do much in the way of spelling and grammar repair. Sometimes the contents are a little repetitious — but trust me, there is much wisdom and originality throughout.
I hope you find something helpful — and I hope you’re moved to contribute some secrets yourself using the site’s submission form. And who knows? There may be more tawdry bribes fabulous prizes lurking around the corner…
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:
Can we all agree that it’s a good thing when guitarists and bassists cultivate their own style? Even a jaded old cuss experienced music journalist like me still gets a thrill upon discovering a new player with a startlingly original voice.
I am not any of these people —but I pretended to be them.
But there are times when it’s worth pursuing the opposite approach. (And not just for pragmatic reasons, such as the likelihood that you’ll get canned from your cover band gig if you mix it up too much, or the fact that the jingle client can’t afford to license that Black Keys song, but will happily pay you to record something “similar.”) Sometimes disconnecting your ego and completely immersing yourself in another player’s point of view can make you a better, and paradoxically, more original player. (I’m reminded of a Marc Ribot interview I once edited where the brilliant guitarist talked about learning Chuck Berry songs, clams and all — the “bad” notes, he suggested, were as much a part of Berry style as the “good” ones.)
I had a chance to take this idea to an extreme a few years go when writer/composer Elise Malmberg and I collaborated on a massive internet hoax: a bogus website alleging to be the 50-year history of a “legendary” indie record label. Clubbo Records is easily the most obsessive-compulsive project I’ve undertaken. The site features hundreds of pages of music, bios, photos, and memorabilia memorializing dozens of fictitious artists. Even many external links are fake — we just made a lot of little mini-hoax websites.
(Example: We licensed a photo of a beautiful ’60s blonde in a leopard-skin coat, which inspired a story about Ava & the Avalanches, the best known group of the Swiss Invasion. We wrote a story about how wearing the coat for the photo shoot horrified her, and launched her on a life path of animal activism. Where would she be now, we wondered? Running a big cat rescue charity, of course! Which inspired more than a few queries from journalists, including one from the BBC, asking to put us in touch with the non-existent Ava. And Ava’s signature “hit,” “Ski Baby Ski” has been licensed over and over, most recently for the silly Jonah Hill comedy The Babysitter.)
You don’t have to be high in Nashville to enjoy Nashville high-strung.
Nashville high-strung tuning is one of the guitar’s great magic tricks. It has a delicious, “secrets of the Guild” quality — you feel like an insider just knowing what it is.
Not that I did know what it is until embarrassingly late in life. For the sake of my fellow late-bloomers, I’ll explain: You replace your guitar’s lowest four strings with thinner strings tuned an octave higher than normal.
You can think of it as using the higher-pitched of a each pair in a 12-string string set. (Or the top two strings of a normal set, and the top four strings from another normal set, with the first string as the third string, the second string as the fourth, etc.)
I love how this tuning can work subliminal magic, or step front and center for marquee riffs. Nashville session players conceived it as a way to add stereo shimmer to doubled acoustic guitar tracks. But rock players have used it to great effect as a foreground sound, as heard on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Floyd’s “Hey You,” Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind,” and Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise.”
Here’s a quick little demonstration, both solo and in a mix:
