The Guitar Diaries #8

Last week's lesson was a bit of a mixed bag:

1. Started off by reviewing the "Mr PC" tune and happily it was sounding better -- I was managing to get my "swing" on :-)

2. Introduced some new ideas for comping using chord shapes based on stacking intervals of diatonic fourths (instead of the thirds that comprise regular triads and seventh chords). We went through shapes involving 3 and 4 notes, all starting on the fifth string. 

One interesting thing is that when you start on minor or half-diminished tones (i.e. A, B, D, E when in the key of C Major), you get a stack of four perfect fourths. Thus, instead of a dissonant or melancoly sound, you get a more neutral, open sound.

For the major seventh tones (C,F) --- as well as the dominant seventh (G), if you include 4 tones --- you stumble on a tritone at some point in the "stack" of fourths. Of course you have to, since two perfect fourths on top of each other make a minor 7 interval -- so if you want a major seventh, one of them has to be an augmented fourth. For the dominant seventh, the tritone is the interval from minor 7 to major 3rd (8va).

These shapes seem to have quite versatile applications in comping. As an example, in the tune Mr PC (which is becoming something of a workhorse) we looked at playing the root C and D fourth stacks instead of Cm7, and the Fm7 and Gm7 stacks in place of Fm7.

3. Arpeggio shapes: introduced a bunch of root 5 and root 6 seventh arpeggio shapes. These were more-or-less familiar but I wasn't "fluent" in them, so I've been practising them during the week.

4. "Yesterday" (by The Beatles) chord melody piece. He gave me the sheet music but I haven't had a chance to start working on it. It sounds a fair bit more challenging than the "twinkle twinkle little star" one that we did a few weeks back, so it should be fun.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gripping, harrowing, moving --- and all too believable...

View all my reviews

Hung, drawn and quartered?

So I just read that we may have a hung parliament...

What's that all about? I didn't know Ron Jeremy was running as an independent... Does this mean we're in for a bout of Stag-flation???

Or does it mean we've collectively woken up and decided that the only good politician is one that's swinging from the rafters? Not something we're likely to see this far from Kandahar, but maybe it would be a fair outcome. It would be one way to introduce a bit of much-needed accountability into the political process...

Re: Another interesting read from Zero Hedge

Every once in a while, I read something on Zero Hedge that rises above the usual bearish doom-mongering that is the site's bread-and-butter and makes a convincing argument that really hits home. This is from the supposed founder of "Reagonomics" Paul Craig Roberts (original link here), on what can be done to prevent the US going completely down the gurgler:

 

Here is what can be done. The wars, which benefit no one but the military-security complex and Israel's territorial expansion, can be immediately ended. This would reduce the US budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars per year.  More hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by cutting the rest of the military budget which, in its present size, exceeds the budgets of all the serious military powers on earth combined. 

US military spending reflects the unaffordable and unattainable crazed neoconservative  goal of US Empire and world hegemony. What fool in Washington thinks that China is going to finance US hegemony over China? 

The only way that the US will again have an economy is by bringing back the offshored jobs. The loss of these jobs impoverished Americans while producing oversized gains for Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate executives. These jobs can be brought home where they belong by taxing corporations according to where value is added to their product. If value is added to their goods and services in China, corporations would have a high tax rate. If value is added to their goods and services in the US, corporations would have a low tax rate.

This change in corporate taxation would offset the cheap foreign labor that has sucked jobs out of America, and it would rebuild the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society. 

If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.

Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to America. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.

The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire. 

The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.

Without a revolution, Americans are history.

The Guitar Diaries #7

Lesson numero 7 saw us briefly reviewing the ear-training from the previous week, in the form of a quick informal test -- most of which I nailed. There was an amusing misunderstanding at one point when he played a descending interval. I was saying "major second, major second" to his increasing exasperation ("mate -- it's decreasing, listen!"), but just as my conviction was beginning to waver, he realized what I was getting at and said "what a minute: what did you just say? ... Ah yeah, okay. You're right -- but I was thinking of it as a minor seventh.". I was correct, but I should have specified that I meant it was descending, so that the first note was a major second above the second one.

We then went back to the jazz standard "Mr P.C.", and I played the melody (which I had learned during the week). Right away we encountered some "issues", the discussion of which took up the majority of the lesson. This is fairly basic stuff, but absolutely key, so I was happy to be covering it:

Two-bar count in: this is a real "band practice 101" thing. When he asked me to count us in, I just went for "1-2-3-4-", but apparently the "standard" way is a two bar count, where you count beats one and three of the first bar (saying "one, two") and then all 4 beats of the second bar ("one, two, three, four - "). This is familiar  -- for me it seems to conjure up images of fifties music like Chuck Berry (am I just thinking of Back to the Future here?) -- but it took a little bit to get comfortable with it. And of course, being put under pressure to get it right doesn't exactly help you relax into the groove! As usual, I was over-thinking it as well: at one point, I was getting hung up on the fact that in the first beat you say "two" on beat 3.

Swing feel: in my first rendition I played the tune with a bone-dry straight-eighths feel which, of course, sounded pretty lousy to the teacher's jazz-trained ears. I can't blame myself too much, because I had listened to Coltrane's original recording and it sounded pretty straight to me. However, the difference is that he is playing it at a much higher tempo. The teacher explained that there is not just straight vs. swing (i.e. triplet feel), but rather a continuum. It's a matter of feel, but in general, the faster the tempo, the less "exaggerated" the swing. So that kind of explains why the recording I listened to didn't sound like it had as much of a swing feel (but listening more carefully it isn't just straight eighth notes either).

Aside:  the teacher pointed out an interesting discussion of this in Mick Goodrick's "The Advancing Guitarist". Basically, it expresses the concept of "swing" in terms of the relative duration of the first and second note in an eighth-note pair. "Straight" eighths has 50-50, "triplet feel" has 67-33 (i.e. played like the first and third note of a triplet), and in general "swing" is somewhere in-between. He mentions 55-45 as a typical value. Less frequently, you also hear 75-25 (where the eighth note pair is played like the first and fourth note in a sixteenth note group) which has something of a latin feel. I realize this is an attempt to quantify something that most musicians do by "feel" -- and it's certainly not a substitute for that -- but I find it very helpful to be able to think of it in this way.

So, we spent a fair bit of time just counting in and playing the basic melody. I think what's required is lots of playing (along with myself, on the loop station) to get a good sense of "feel" happening. And, just as important, lots of (critical) listening.

The final thing we looked at was playing chord tones over the Mr P.C. chord progression. I know what I'm trying to do here, but I need to become more familiar with the arpeggio patterns for Cm7, Fm7, Dm7b5 and G7. As always, practice practice practice...

The Guitar Diaries #6

Last week's lesson was a slight change of pace. The primary focus was on ear training, and involved much more talking and listening, as opposed to actual playing.

For me there has always been a certain mystique about the concept of "playing by ear". I grew up in that generation of players for whom guitar tab was the default way to learn to play your favourite music. Reading the precise transcriptions of the military-precision riffs in Metallica songs just reinforced the natural feeling that trying to learn this by ear was futile. And so there'd you be, hemming and hawing over such nuances as whether this or that power chord should be played with just root and fifth or whether the root one octave higher also needs to be played (when in fact with sufficient distortion you can't tell the difference anyway!). But without the transcription you were basically helpless. The net result was that you could play some pretty cool riffs, but you didn't really develop as a musician.

Over the years I have picked up a rudimentary ability to figure things out by ear. I can tune my guitar by ear (so I'm not at the absolute lowest rung of the ear ladder -- whew!), and with a bit of trial and error I can reproduce basic melodies. I can also sing in tune (within my rather limited vocal range) -- an ability that in my case is certainly not to be confused with havnig a good singing voice!

But that's a far cry from having a well-developed musical ear: I can't reliably recognize all intervals (I seem to struggle with tritone and minor sixth and beyond), and I'm not too good at recognizing different chords (and wouldn't have a hope of distinguishing different voicings). But, hopefully, that's all going to change with a bit of practise.

The end result is certainly worth aiming for. It was rather impressive watching the teacher mention a tune, then start playing it more-or-less flawlessly (though slowly, obviously). The idea that you could just hear a tune in your head seems like a key part of what being a musician is all about. And who knows, one day I could be like Jack Butler mimicking Ralph Macchio's solo (as an aside: for my two cents, he got far too little credit for what was a extremely worthy effort on the fly!).

Anyway, back to the present: the initial goal is to become comfortable identifying intervals. To keep things simple, I'm concentrating on recognizing intervals played in ascending order from a fixed middle-C base note (3rd fret, 5th string), and staying within a one octave range. To help with recognizing musical intervals, the recommended approach is to identify examples of each interval from tunes you are very familiar with. Here are the interval - tune associations that I'm using for now (unless otherwise specified, the interval is between the first two notes of the given tune):

minor second (1 semitone): jaws theme, beethoven's fur elise.

major second (2 semitones): for this one I just think of the second note when you play an ascending major scale. "Happy Birthday" is also a good one.

minor third (3 semitones): acoustic version of layla (eric clapton unplugged); smoke on the water (deep purple).

major third (4 semitones): when the saints go marching in.

perfect fourth (5 semitones): here comes the bride.

tritone (6 semitones): the simpsons, maria (from west side story -- this was suggested by the teacher; I wasn't familiar with the tune, but this interval was proving troublesome enough that I went and listened to on youtube).

perfect fifth (7 semitones): this is probably the easiest to recognize. star wars theme is the best one for me. "flintstones" (descending order) is also good.

minor sixth (8 semitones): vangelis 1492 theme, last of the mohicans theme, piano tune from "the sting".

major sixth (9 semitones): "man in the mirror" (descending order), "my bonnie lies over the ocean".

minor seventh (10 semitones): a tough one for me... the only tune I could find was the warbly theme from the original star trek. I may try to find a couple of others.

major seventh (11 semitones): another tough one... the first and third note in "somewhere over the rainbow" is good. Another one is "moon river", when she sings "i'm crossing you in style": the interval between "i'm" and "crossing".

octave (12 semitones): the first and second note in "somewhere over the rainbow", the chorus of david bowie's "starman".

I wrote myself a little Mathematica Demonstration which has proved very handy. The great thing about ear training is that once you get switched on to it, you find yourself "practising" whenever you listen to music, or even just walking along replaying a familiar tune in your head.

So what am I complaining about?

According to a recent survey, my current and former employers are the two best places to work in the financial services industry!

I'd guess that this result is pretty much accurate as regards my current employer. But the GS result smells a lot like a fishy concoction of spin and fear of not following the party line...

Two great music sites

Jazz resources

http://www.thejazzresource.com/

Ear-training

http://www.good-ear.com

Loop station

As a kind of delayed birthday treat for myself, I recently splashed out on a Boss RC20XL loop station. This is a really cool toy that allows you to record short pieces of music and have them play back. I've been having a lot of fun laying down rhythms and playing lead over them (all the old favourites have been trotted out: Fade To Black, Stairway To Heaven, Sultans Of Swing, ...); it's also great for playing two-part sight-reading pieces. 

It's got a basic drum machine built-in and a very clever "loop quantizing" feature that truncates your riff to the nearest measure. This is handy since getting the timing right without it is a bit of an art form. There are a few other bells and whistles that I haven't yet explored fully: you can adjust the tempo of loops after recording them (which has a potentially useful application in slowing down songs to figure them out; you can record songs via the "aux in" input); there is also a "reverse" feature that allows you to play loops backward (this seems a little gimicky: apart from figuring out the opening of Metallica's "Blackened", I can't think of much other use I'd have for this for the time being).

Having previously dabbled in GarageBand and Logic Express, I was initially reluctant to fork out for a loop station since, in principle, you can get the same functionality on the computer. However, having used it for just under a week, I can attest that it's night and day: having the pedal on the floor makes it so much quicker to record and have it start playing back.

The Guitar Diaries #5

Last week's lesson was something of a reality check, in the sense that, for the first time since starting these lessons, I had the feeling of not having done enough practice since the previous lesson. Partly as a result of this -- and partly because my abilities at this stage are, frankly, pretty limited -- I foundered badly when called on to play rhythm on the "mixolydian blues" track from last week. 

This was meant to be a chance to try out the new voicings for 7th, add 9/11/13 that I had been shown. 

Instead, I froze like a deer in headlights and reached lamely for the standard root 5 7th chord voicing. To compound things, I then proceeded to strum a weak, half-hearted rhythm so tepid that it would make a beginning student of Ernie Ball's "Easy Big Guitar Chords" blush. My feel sucked, my tone sucked... enfin bref: I sucked.

I wasn't able to offer much in the melody department either: I limped through two repetitions, stuffing up in several parts and relying on the sheet music/tab in front of me. But I'm not going to beat myself up too much about that one: it is a fairly challenging piece and, IMHO, doesn't actually sound that good even when played well, i.e. by teacher (though perhaps that was just lousy my rhythm playing putting him off...).

As I say, it was a bit of a reality check: a far cry from the heady times of last week's comparatively decent rendition of "Model T Ford Blues", and a wake up call that I have a lot of practicing to do if I'm to get the kind of results I want. The good news is that I feel like my newfound self-awareness of my suckiness is in itself a step forward. I'm getting a much clearer idea of what I need to practise, and how it should sound. 

Anyway, after the demoralizing review of "mixolydian blues", we covered the harmonic minor scale and the harmonized 7th chords you get from it. This is really cool: alter that one note (minor 7th -> major 7th) and you alter the 4 chords containing it. Thus (in the key of C minor/harmonic minor):

Root Minor Harmonic Minor

I C min 7 C min/maj 7

II D min 7b5 (unchanged)

III Eb maj 7 Eb maj 7#5

IV F min 7 (unchanged)

V G min 7 G 7

VI Ab maj 7 (unchanged)

VII Bb 7 B dim 7

Note the VII chord goes from dominant seventh to diminished seventh as you move Bb up to B. The main effect, though, is that the V chord is now a dominant, rather than minor, seventh.

As an application of this, we are using the jazz standard "Mr PC" (John Coltrane), which is is a great little tune. The idea is to improvise using different scales during different parts of the chord progression. The harmonic minor scale is to be used over the II-V-I part since the chords already fit this: D min 7b5 - G 7 - C min 7 (hmmm, apart from the last one...).