Ooh, forgot to mention before… if you’re looking to pick up some jazz guitar skills, but have no idea where to start, my friend Matt is bloggishly documenting his own chronologically accurate journey of discovery…
What with the football, a week in the Lake District, a number of weekends away and the general stream of transcribing, guitar-magazining and bluesjamtracking, I just haven’t really done much guitar playing recently. That is to say, I always have a guitar to hand when I’m transcribing and I’ve practised stuff for the magazine CD, but that’s all very specifically focused; I’m talking about deep, intense playing.
Part of my problem is that I’m lazy. Another part of my problem is a very short attention span, especially when it comes to familiar old practice routines. The best way to make me work hard is to give me a new challenge. I’ve long intended to develop my slide playing, but was always confronted with a dilemma… whether to struggle with my clumsy technique on guitars set up with low action, or whether to tweak a guitar for slide, thus making it ineligible for “standard” duties.
Fortuitously, a solution arrived from (sweet home) Alabama, as you can see in the picture. This cheery little chap was built for me by my good friend Bill Jehle. As well as being a damn fine player, Bill has recently been investigating the fine old American tradition of the cigar box guitar. He’s already built quite a few examples and made an instructional DVD, so check out his website… BellyJelly Music.
So anyway… this is now my designated slide guitar. At the moment, I’m really just trying to build a solid, accurate technique (honestly, I’m working from a starting point of roughly 2% competence) so there won’t be any actual recordings just yet. I’m mostly working on intonation, improvising to little chord loops. Also, I have a tendency to lazily allow the bottleneck to pivot against the high E string, creating a very rattly contact with the B and G strings, so I’m working on developing a feel for angling it most effectively according to the string I’m playing. I love the way you can radically alter the tone by adjusting the way the slide connects with the string. More updates soon!
It’s my considered opinion that Bumblefoot’s album “Normal” is the finest rock album of the 21st century so far. Nick mentioned how he’s been playing the Alter Bridge album constantly, and that’s exactly how it was for me when “Normal” came out. I don’t think I listened to much else for a couple of weeks, and I still have regularly obsessive phases now, where nothing else quite hits the spot.
So… with the promise of a new album from the splendid Mr Thal this summer, I’m getting pretty excited, and the “Bumblefoot in the Studio” video diary on his Youtube channel is just SO tantalising!
I’ve been occasionally alluding to a “new project” on here for a while now, so it’s a great relief to come clean at last…
In an ideal scenario, the site would have gone live last March… that’s when we felt we’d finalised both the concept and design. However, while an e-commerce company (who weren’t really up to the job) took several months to get things up and running, we were able to add more content and polish the overall concept. Maybe these things happen for a reason…
This should have appeared sooner, but an air-conditioning failure at 34sp’s datacentre put a temporary spanner in the works. Anyway…
In the continued absence of Exciting New Musical Concepts (not that I’ve tried particularly hard) I decided to spend more time working on my improvising. Still focusing on ways to reduce the “burble”, I knocked up a backing track featuring three key (or rather mode) changes, forcing me to use “target notes” and play around the chords.
The result, via Youtube… Burble with Key Changes
(If you’re interested in the gear used, it’s just my recently acquired Tokai Love Rock plugged straight into a Cornford Harlequin, with a touch of reverb and delay applied in Logic)
Lacking any concrete musical ideas recently, I decided to try and resurrect my atrophied improvisation abilities. A recurrent trait in my playing is that, after periods of less-than-diligent practice, I tend to “burble”. The technique is there, but the mental sharpness disappears, so my fingers seek out the comfortable, well-trodden routes.
So, having recorded a bass/drums/chords backing, I set about improvising a few solos, with the aim of editing, harmonising and generally arranging them into a supposedly “written” piece of music. This is an approach I love… Frank Zappa used it on numerous occasions. However, having started all that, I then got sidetracked by a thread on uk.music.guitar where a few people were jamming over a backing track and posting the results on Youtube. This seemed an ideal opportunity to investigate using iMovie to combine high-quality audio (recorded in Logic) with video clips from my compact digicam.
The resulting solo is a bit messy, but the experiment worked well enough to convince me that it’s a useable working method for future projects. In particular, I found some tips for optimising iPhoto projects destined for Youtube… thanks to Martin Backschat for being more patient than I could ever be (tips in handy visual form on Flickr).
Video on Youtube… Slow Gilmourish Jam
So, last weekend marked the sixth annual uk.music.guitar national get-together. I’ve been to four of the six and find myself developing an almost complacent expectation that the event will be exciting, amusing, interesting and inspiring in equal measure. A number of external glitches conspired to threaten the very existence of this year’s event, but that just made the success of the whole thing seem even more important than normal.
The focus of the weekend, as ever, was the Saturday evening “Guitar Idol” (named with tongue firmly in cheek), our musically diverse marathon gig where anyone can perform a song of their choosing, backed by an ad hoc band. The only obstacle is the lack of formal rehearsal… you practise your own part and trust the rest to nods, hand signals and the adrenalin of the evening. I don’t think I played particularly well on my “spots” (insufficiently focused practice in the preceding weeks) but that’s no problem. We’re all our own worst critics, and the emphasis is on fun.
As I mentioned this time last year, it’s difficult to describe just what the National (notWigan) means to us. Plenty of online communities have their occasional meatspace manifestations, and each event is, I’m sure, similarly cherished by its loyal attendees. And look at ours… it’s a bunch of people from a Usenet newsgroup! Does anyone still use that dusty old text-only relic from the pre-Myspace days of the Internet?
The truth, of course, is that UKMG is so much more than just a newsgroup. There’s a chatroom, regular offline meet-ups, musical collaborations, a whole range of specialist services and abilities and, most importantly, a whole network of “real life” relationships. Quite simply, it’s a community. And that’s why I find the whole Web 2.0 more exciting than anything I’ve seen since I first started using the Internet back in 1997. A lot of the early excitement faded in the flood of corporate involvement and the one-way artist-fanbase (or vendor-customer) relationship, but the democratic community aspect is coming back. I know from experience what can be achieved with the right mix of online and offline, and the various Web 2.0 technologies have enormous potential for making things even more fun.
As you know, I always like to support people who Do Their Stuff independently of the corporate mainstream. And when those people are my friends, hey, they even get free advertising here!
Jon Boyes is a classical and flamenco guitarist based in south-west England, and his debut album “Haçienda” is now available from his website. It’s a great little mix of Spanish-flavoured guitar instrumentals, with some really interesting arrangements and plenty of great playing. The perfect antidote to all those generic easy-listening Spanish guitar albums.
Bill Jehle started off releasing quirky instrumental music. He then did a multimedia CD showing how he built guitars and used them to create more quirky instrumental music. He’s now taken the next step and released a DVD, “How to Build a Guitar: The String, Stick, Box Method”.
Go and support these people by buying their products! They put my own lack of productivity to shame…
I had been intending for a couple of years to make a more formal statement of my availability as a freelance transcriber. After all, the brief mention on the “Who?” page of this site wasn’t really going to drum up an awful lot of work. So when my friend Steve Cobham (a talented and experienced guitarist, teacher and transcriber himself) suggested we join forces and pool resources, it seemed an ideal opportunity to get something done.
The result is this website…
We are now officially “available”! If you’re in need of transcription, notation or guitar arrangements, please get in touch…
I was in Albrighton, Shropshire over the weekend, the occasion being the fifth annual UKMG National. As usual, a lot of people got together to play a lot of guitar, while drinking a lot of beer and generally having a lot of fun. Our traditional venue, the Mabs Cross hotel in Wigan, is no longer available for functions, so we relocated to the Lea Manor in Albrighton.
It’s difficult to describe our UKMG Nationals to “outsiders” without sounding like some kind of freaky evangelist, but they really are special. I said it all last year, but it bears repeating. It’s a fantastic opportunity to catch up with friends and play music in a warm, appreciative and encouraging environment. Now, I certainly don’t need any encouragement to overstretch… er, challenge myself musically, but there are several people who have gained their first experience of playing live at Wigan (or notWigan, as we referred to this year’s event). It’s an interesting paradox… you’re playing in front of 50+ other guitarists, which ought to be terrifying, as they probably know exactly how each song is supposed to sound, but at the same time everyone is willing each other to do well, without a hint of egotism or competitiveness.
This year, I decided to push myself a bit. I wanted to have a blast through something from the first Van Halen album, so why not go for the jugular with “I’m the One”? I can’t remember whether it was Dave Barlow or me who suggested “Big Trouble” from Steve Vai’s stint with David Lee Roth, but that one also took some dedicated practice. Two other songs were complex, but quite comfortable to play in the end… Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” (of course I just had to duplicate the classic Larry Carlton solo) and Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia”. Easier (but no less interesting) guitar parts came via Blur’s “Girls and Boys” and XTC’s “Sgt. Rock” and I even managed a bit of blues with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. I then allowed Jim Nugent to talk me into doing a couple of jazz tunes (Miles Davis’s classic “So What” and Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”) at the last minute… I really regretted my lack of preparation, but it was still bloody good fun.
It’s all over now, though. Looks like I’ll have to find something else to think about until next November. In the meantime, there’s a few pictures on Flickr…
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