Displaying items by tag: Guitar

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.

“Hey man, I’m a guitar player…why would I want to think like a piano player?” Good question. It’s all about being more MUSICAL. What I am talking about is harmony. You can do a lot with different voicings.

When someone tells your average guitar player “play a G Chord”, you get something similar 90% of the time. You either get an open chord or “Cowboy Chord” as I call them, or you get a barre chord. Yes, they do pit the requirements of a G Chord. What they don’t do is provide anything new. Actually, there really isn’t much new much new out there, so going back to basic harmony works every time.

You don’t need to be a genius at music theory either. Knowing the notes up and down the neck is all that is required. Take the G Chord, one of the first chords you ever learn on the guitar. Look at the notes in that chord. I will jump to the chase for you, the notes are G, B and D. Anywhere you put these three notes on the neck of the guitar is a G Chord. This also means you can have any one of the three notes as the highest note of the chord. The highest note usually is the easiest to hear, so in effect you make a melody of the top voices of chords as they change.

Another thing to consider is that you only need three notes to make a chord. Your basic “Cowboy” or barre chord G has six notes, so obviously some notes are doubled. Yet another thing to consider is the two bottom strings are right in the frequency territory of the bass guitar. When you put emphasis on those strings it gets pretty heavy, which is the basis of most early Heavy guitar playing…...think Black Sabbath...the “Power Chord”. I can remember trying to figure out some of those songs like that and scratching my head. “Am I learning the bass or the guitar part?” It was hard to tell. I am not saying that sound is bad, but it can be very one dimensional.

The guitar is actually a small choir of sorts. Each string is not actually a string, it is a voice. You can arrange notes on the strings like a composer would arrange voices. Piano players do this too. You can think of the guitar as the right hand of the piano, the bass as the left hand. So, if you have one note on the bass and three on the guitar, you have four-part harmony. Interesting, huh?

I personally use the D, G and B strings on the guitar for a huge part of my chord voicings. Those three strings fall right about where the right hand naturally falls on the piano. Middle C is on all three strings. Also if you look, D, G and B are G, B and D rearranged so they are actually a G Chord…in case you didn’t already know that. Two of my favorite guitar players of all time used those three strings for a huge part of their harmonic vocabulary. The first one is Joe Walsh, the second one was the late Terry Kath. They never got in the bass player’s way. The result is very musical to my ears.

You can do so much with three notes. Try find the same notes to a chord in different places on the neck and pay attention to the note on top of the chord. What if the chord has more than three different notes? Well, for one the bass is covering one note. Also, you don’t always need to play every note to imply a harmony. This kinda gets into theory after a while, but the more you do things like this, the more you understand the theory behind harmony.

If you have any questions, drop me a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., I am glad to help. Enjoy this concept and I am working on learning how to use some software so I can show you visually some of these concepts. Peace and Love, RR.  

The more I play, the less I play. I think when you are a young player, it is natural to want to make a statement. The way many players do this is by playing a bunch of notes. “Look what I can do”, right? You run all over the neck showing off your skills. This is common practice for all musicians. It is not just guitar players that fall into this line of thinking. We just seem to reach maturity a bit later than others.

There are good reasons to play a lot of notes. It is good for rhythmic development. Your ear develops the ability to listen faster too hopefully. That is the idea anyway. If you are ever playing without listening, you are just exercising your fingers. Working your brain is much more satisfying.

You start by applying what you have learned by studying and by listening. Even if you are not formally educated in music, you still study patterns. This is often done subconsciously. Your mind chases these patterns around in your head in relation to how you find them on the fingerboard of the guitar. The idea is to know what something sounds like BEFORE you play it. The occasional accident is great. Sometimes you need to wake up your ear with new ideas.

I think after all this the ear searches for melody. Nothing satisfies your ear more. The shape of the sounds you produce should make you satisfied. You know when you nail the right lick. You just know it. You also know when you don’t. This is where the editing process kicks in. You also may remember what you didn’t like initially and decide to come back to it later.

You remember that game we played as kids. You have the cards face down and the idea is to match two cards. That is kinda how it works. You remember the sound you want and then you remember where to find it. Your memory gets better with age. Part of the reason you end up playing less is that you don’t keep picking up the wrong cards until you find the right one. Your memory serves you well in improvisation. Improvisation is not the same as ad lib. I have had an argument over the actual definition of the word improvisation. It is clear to me that the word “improve” is right in there. Often the improvement comes from playing less.

Chances are there are not many solos that you remember unless you can sing at least a portion of the melody. Even if you can’t sing, you can hear it in your head. Think of those classic solos that perk up your ear. The ones that actually resemble the phrasing of a voice and not an instrument. Those are the ones that you don’t even need to be a musician to appreciate. Try to do that. Make what you play speak to the listener. After a while of listening to someone ramble on, the mind tunes out and stops paying attention. You can captivate with much less information. Simple statements hit harder. Try it. Less is truly more.

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!

 

When I heard the Charlie Hunter Trio was playing Chicago’s City Winery over this past weekend, I expected something quite different. I was thinking I’d hear the usual fare of guitar, bass and drums – standard trio stuff. Meanwhile, I was sitting with someone that told me to expect guitar, sax and drums. Okay, sounds good. But what we got was guitar, VOCALS and drums. Interesting. I was also expecting something more in the Jazz vein, but I was wrong on that, too. I know what you’re thinking...Jazz has many forms. The Charlie Hunter Trio was a bit more like R&B - and heavily Blues flavored at times.

Hunter does a good job of making you not missing the fact there is no bass player. The first thing I noticed was he had bass notes coming out the guitar. It was a seven-string, but it seemed to get notes lower than that, so perhaps the bass string was tuned down a bit. Then I noticed he was running through two amps. One is a bass amp and one is for guitar. This made me look up his rig rundown today and I discovered that the bottom three strings on his guitar are bass strings, and the top four are guitar strings. There are two pickups on the instrument that allow splitting the bass and guitar strings into separate amps.

This allows a player to do different things. The first and most obvious is playing bass and guitar at the same time. The second is it allows someone to think like a piano player on the guitar. I have had the notion for quite some time that guitar represents the right hand of the piano and the bass the left. This allows a guitar player to do both. You don’t just pick a guitar like this up and start strumming chords on it. This is a bit of a hybrid machine and requires the technical facility to pull the whole thing off. Hunter did an amazing job in doing this. I can imagine at times he wished he had more fingers.

Dara Tucker was the vocalist and she really brought a lot of life to the show. In many ways, Hunter was her support act. Her voice was nothing less than amazing and was a perfect fit with the trio. I later found out she has music available on her own. Damon Grant was Hunter’s rhythmic accomplice on percussion. A very unconventional drummer. He used all different types of percussion to keep the beat alive.

This was not the band I was expecting to see, which taught me a few things. First, keep an open mind about how bands are constructed. Second, that the guitar can be more than just a guitar. In the hands of Hunter, it was much more. I was not disappointed last night one bit. Great show, and it is one I highly recommend, and should they come back – no better place to check them out than City Winery Chicago.

 

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.  

One of the first things we learn as guitar players are chords. You know…..here is a G…..here is a C and so on. But what are chords? Chords are harmonies. The notes in the chord come from the scale they are derived from. If we take the C chord, it comes from the C major scale. You spell that scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C…...easy, no sharps or flats. If we take the first, third and fifth notes of that scale, that is how we come up with the notes in a C major chord. Major is the “default” setting for chords. If it just has a letter in the chord description, it is a major. You can have a sharp or flat added but unless it is designated something else it is major.

So how does this information help you? Well, unless you like only playing the same chords over and over again, knowing this is freedom. The chains are lifted. Once again, chords are harmonies. The guitar is like a choir in many ways. Each string represents a voice. Six strings, six potential voices. I say potential because you don’t need to play six note chords all that often. You only need three notes to make a chord. We have six string, but you can do so much with the D, G and B strings alone. These keep you much in the same are that the right hand of the piano would occupy. The bass guitar represents the left hand of the piano. This is not the only approach, but it is so versatile to use this ideology.

A good mental exercise is to take three adjacent strings and find all the major voicings on those strings. Three note chords are called triads. Let’s start on the bottom three strings, E. A and D. Find the lowest voicing you can find on the neck with the three notes of a C chord. The notes are the 1, 3 and 5 of the C major scale or C, E and G. Try this. The first voicing you should find is G on the third fret of the E, C on the third fret of the A and E on the second fret of the D. That is a C major chord.

One thing you may have noticed is that C is not the lowest voice in the chord. So far most of the chords you have learned have the root on the bottom of the chord. The root is the note the chord and/or chord are built from. There are three versions of a triad. Root position is the root on the bottom, in this case it is C. First inversion is the third on the bottom, in this case it is E. Second inversion has G on the bottom, which is the fifth. Find all three version on the bottom three strings.

That was not too hard, right? Now you want to take the fifth note of the scale and do the same. This means you take G and do the same thing with a G major triad. The same rule applies. You use the 1, 3 and 5 of the G major scale. How do you know what those notes are? Scales are just notes going up a ladder. You “scale” a ladder. It is imply climbing one note at a time, letter by letter. There are only seven notes in the musical alphabet, and when you get to G you start over back at A. the trick is that you need to know what scales have sharps or flats. I mentioned the circle of fifths in my last article. There are many images on line you can look at. Do a search for “circle of fifths image” and voila.

My next article will address the circle more directly, in the meantime, try this exercise on all four adjacent groups of three strings on the guitar. That is learning twelve voicings, after the twelfth fret everything repeats. Next article I will give you the key to unlock twelve times that since there are twelve keys. If you have any questions, drop me a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I will help you understand. Peace, and I am going to try to get off my butt and start a YouTube channel giving more visual displays of what I mention. If you wanna drop a line to say hello, please do. Until next time, ciao, RR.  

Music Theory is often a touchy subject in the guitar world. A high percentage of players will tell you it isn’t necessary. I am one of those who clearly disagree with this philosophy. The more you know about music, the better. If all you do is learn a song, you mic the analytical process which helps you digest the music a whole lot better.

The first thing to understand is harmony. Some people will say scales. They are really both the same actually. Scales are merely the link of notes that are related harmonically. A scale is just a harmony. That’s where studying the circle of fifths comes in really handy. There are twelve notes which gives you twelve keys. That means there are twelve points that can be considered the root of the harmonic structure. Key and scale are almost interchangeable. Think of key as a set of notes that can be called upon within a certain harmonic framework. The scale just puts them in ascending and descending order.

Harmony is what explains how scales and chords are connected. The note that the key is named for is the center of activity. The whole thing is based on a pattern discovered by Pythagoras. It is all mathematics. The way frequencies are related. Frequency is the speed at which the air is moved through vibration. That is why some notes sound better than others when played together. Actually, that is subjective but there are harmonies that are considered more pleasant than others. When Pythagoras figured this out the notes were not equally spaced. Some keys were more dissonant than others. Later musicians developed the idea of equal temperament. That means that all twelve tones are the same distance apart. There is not hierarchy. This comes together clearly when you study the circle of fifth’s.

This may be a bit of a difficult concept to understand. Having said that, a little bit of knowledge goes along way. You don’t really need to understand the exact math to understand music. Knowing how keys relate is, in my opinion a must know piece of the musical puzzle. The nice thing is that theory applies to all instruments, not just the guitar. This helps with arranging songs for your band, writing, learning new material, etc. If you have any questions about this or have any other topics for future episodes of For the Guitarist drop me a line. My e-mail is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Thanks for reading and don’t be afraid to think while you play.

In my estimation somewhere around 90% of all musicians can read music to one extent or the other. I would also venture to guess that 90% of all guitarist read very little or not at all. This is why a lot of serious musicians look guitar players as some sort of lower life form in many ways. Should we even care? If you wish to communicate ideas via a piece of paper, you just might want to be able to do that. If not, carry on without it.

I want back to school almost three years ago to obtain a degree in music. I was forty-eight years old and thought…piece of cake, right? The only problem is even though I have a very good knowledge of theory and how to apply it to the guitar, I am still a rudimentary reader. I need to commit everything I know to memory. In the end, you should do that anyway, depending on the musical style. When you are learning a song, it is much easier if you can read. If you write a song, it is much easier to hand a piece of paper to someone than explain the whole thing.

I had a conversation with Jazz guitarist Pat Martino a year ago. He said once he started writing, he needed to learn how to read and write music. This accelerates the learning process. A high percentage of Rock musicians never do this. This is especially common with guitar players. Some of us almost wear this as a badge of honor. A lot of music has been passed down through aural traditions. Most of the folk music of the world was passed down from generation to generation. This follows story-telling patterns that existed before books were not just for the elite social classes. Nowadays, most of us can read a newspaper or a book or just about anything…...but…...there are still are guitar players out there…including myself...that struggle at reading music.

Is this really important? Some of my favorite musicians never read a note. Does that make it right? Some of my favorites read very well. It is a common thought that the paper gets in the way…somehow limiting your expression. If that were true, every Classical piece would sound exactly the same. I have recently listened to the same overture played by two different orchestras with different conductors. They were almost like two distant cousins with only very little family resemblance. Musicians are still going to add their own interpretations. The paper gives you notes, and dynamics, etc. There is a lot more. The way the dynamic marking “forte” has many variations and levels.

The paper serves only as a guideline. It is like a road map, another good thing to be able to read. For the same reason too…not getting lost. I am not a fan of being lost playing something. I like to know where I am at all the time. I am pretty good at improvising but that doesn’t always work.

Lead sheets are an effective compromise between the reader and the non-reader. I am getting pretty comfortable with that as long as I don’t need to read the melody. Me personally, I want to do better. The next few episodes of “For The Guitarist” will be addressing this. Since, I myself am at a student level in this capacity, my attention will be well focused on how to make this work. This doesn’t need to be as hard as it seems to be. I appreciate your thoughts and drop me a line if you like at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. anytime. Peace, RR.

Welcome to “For the Guitarist.” I am Ron Reis. I have been playing guitar for around forty years, studying theory for over thirty and teaching on and off for over twenty. This column/blog is aimed at all things related to our six-string friend. My guitars have been the best therapists I have ever had. When I need to calm my “monkey brain,” the best thing I can do is pick up my guitar.

Many people underestimate the meditative power of music. As a performer, you get lost in the music. As a listener, you are drawn into someone else’s thoughts and ideas. If you combine the two, you enter a state of nirvana. Music is one of the highest forms of communication. Real musicians do not play together. They carry on a conversation. They bounce ideas off each other’s heads. The audience gets to listen in on this exchange of sonic imaginations. I have even witnessed the two forces interact.

I saw The Grateful Dead in 1988. The last song they played in the second set was a Buddy Holly song, Not Fade Away. The beat was stolen from Bo Diddley. Bop, Bop, Bop...Bop-Bop. The crowd assumed the rhythm of the song. The band left the stage…the crowd kept the beat going for what seemed like five minutes…singing the chorus over and over. I was absolutely amazed. This was communication…real…honest…communication.

Not every musical situation gets this accomplished at that high a level. There should always be a mutual exchange. Both entities give the other what they need. How does this relate to playing the guitar? Well, it seems to me that should be the ultimate goal. Becoming successful on a financial level playing music is a wonderful idea. Having said that, most of the people that actually do are “performers” and not always “musicians.” There is a huge difference.

My goal with “For The Guitarist” is to help point the way. I do not claim to know everything on the subject. The idea is to assist in a somewhat guiding way, while learning for myself as well. I will discuss topics from theory to equipment and everything in between. I am also open to suggestions on topics for future articles. Anyone who likes can contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to drop me a line or two. I am serious about this, but let’s have a little fun too…the more fun the better!