Displaying items by tag: Lessons

Last month, I talked about how to think like a piano player. That was all about harmony. Horns, too, are all about melody. What is melody? That is the part you can sing. BB King, even when he played guitar, was also singing. What a concept, right? Play things that can be sung. Guitar players tend to play more rhythmic while horn players are more melodic. This is somewhat of a simplification. I am also talking about soloing and not comping. One thing I have always liked is melody. I think most people do. The hook of the song that gets stuck in your head. A good solo has that kind of quality too. Improvisation is really about improving the song. That starts with the melody. Essentially you are trying to improve the melody. Most guitar players honestly just want to show off. They think that is what a solo is all about. Since music is a form of communication, what you say in your solo says a lot about you. What do you want to say with a good guitar solo? The first thing you should say is that you know how to listen. Then, possibly someone will want to listen to you play. I honestly don’t even care how much a musician knows. The question is, “Can I listen to them?” It’s that simple. Does this please my ear? I remember hearing a fast solo when I was younger, and I got a rush from that. Sometimes I still do. But when I hear something that perks up my ears now, that’s the rush. I am not saying forget about having chops on the guitar. I am saying make sure you play something worth listening to. This applies to any style of music. This even applies to comping. If you are playing behind someone, make sure you play something that is supportive. You can even put melody in there. The key is listening. If you play without listening, it shows. I had this on my mind all week this week. Next month I am going to get back to the piano idea with some sample voicings. Then the idea of tying the voicings to melodic ideas. Sound like fun? The deeper realization is how everything ties together. Melody and harmony work together. They are closely related. Listen to what you play and make it count. Peace, RR.

I started playing guitar at age eleven, but I started my first band at fifteen playing drums. The reason why I stuck with guitar is songwriting. I wanted to write songs. The guitar is a good, self-contained unit, a perfect vehicle for writing.

Singer/songwriters tend to either be piano players or guitar players. Think about this a minute. How many instruments are there that you can play and sing at the same time? How many instruments are polyphonic? You can create anything from a simple song to relatively complex arrangements on the guitar.

The form of the song is a good place to start. There are forms like the Blues that are essentially loops. It is a twelve-bar form. The same harmonic structure is repeated throughout the song. The song also usually does no form of key modulation.

The standard song form for years was thirty-two bars. This is usually an AABA form. That means an eight-bar section (A), followed by a very similar section (A again), a contrasting section (B) and returns to where it started (A once more). A lot of standards are in the AABA form. The whole form is often repeated.

There are also strophic songs which are like poems which can have several repeated verses. You can also have verse, chorus, repeat. These can also have a bridge which may be referred to as B.

None of this means that you have to stick with a basic form to write a song, there are no rules. This just gives you a jumping off point. Once bands started writing their own material more often, things started to change. A lot of those players were not educated in the same manner as songwriters of old. They wrote by feel in many ways.

Another thing to consider is a song can be sectional or in movements. That can almost be like a series of different forms. For example, you could have three different AABA sections in a row and that can be your song. In Classical music there are forms that essentially assemble smaller forms like that. ABACA is called rondo form. Each section is a small composition itself. A lot of musicians don’t pay enough attention to form.

So, break out your guitar and some paper and try writing a song. You can make it anything from a Pop song to a work involving many movements. The choice is yours. You can keep the song in your head, but writing it down makes it easier to communicate your ideas to other musicians. This can be in standard notation or simple maps to show the form. Have fun and get creative!

 

Everybody has a favorite guitar player…well, almost everyone. We have those licks we learned from our favorites. That’s how we get a vocabulary of ideas. For me, I have gone through phases. I played along with recordings of people like Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Allman Brothers Band. That gave me a good foundation in lead guitar.

The only problem with this scenario is you only end up stealing ideas from other guitar players. Since we play with our fingers, we fall into convenient patterns that fall nicely on the fingerboard of the guitar neck. You end up playing via muscle memory a lot of the time. This becomes almost like a reflex to spew your favorite licks out again and again. You end up repeating yourself.

Lately, I have been listening to a lot of Jazz. However, I have not been listening to that much in the form of Jazz guitar. What or should I say who have I been listening to? Horn players for one. They play melodies. Guitar players do too, but again we fall into patterns. A lot of these are the same ideas recycled. The other issue is most guitar players have no formal music education.

Most guitar players don’t read a note. They learn from their friends, videos and magazines. Some take lessons but even that has limitations if the teacher is essentially uneducated. Horn players know how to read for the most part. They struggle through beginning clarinet books starting sometime in grade school. Those books are written by people who understand music. Horn players learn intelligent musical phrases, so they play intelligent musical phrases.

Another instrument to listen to is piano. The average piano player has a chord vocabulary that exceeds most really good guitar players. They understand harmony. Unless, you go past the basic chords on the guitar, there are limitations. Part of this also is due to the tuning of the guitar. Some voicings are extremely difficult on the fingerboard. Having said that, you can still learn how to play hipper chords than you find in the guitar books some of us started out with.

Drummers can point you in another direction regarding rhythm. Most us can’t even count bar lines, myself included sometimes. This is important! Where is one? If you don’t know, learn!!! All playing music actually requires is the right notes at the right time. That’s it! Rhythm is 50% of that equation, and at times even more. You can actually get a lot of cool rhythmic ideas from piano players too.

Now, this sounds like I am bashing my favorite instrument and its players. I am not! I am simply stating facts here. Listening to other instruments just might help you find your voice on the guitar. Another concept to explore is actually playing another instrument. Drop me a line if you like, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Until next month, ciao.