RI Guitar Club

[Wombaticus Rex]

Wooten, yes, hell yes. I have gone to see him many, many times, always entertaining, especially when he brings his older brother Reggie along. Reggie does a heavy metal solo medley with hand percussion drums, power chord rhythm and fully articulated leads -- it's f'ing terrifying to watch. He switches it up a lot, too. Seeing the family experience onstage is pretty rad, as a live musician.

Bass, yes, hell yes. I was chased off guitar by more proficient friends in middle school bands so I shifted to bass. (Then I taught a friend who rapidly became more proficient than me so I became a singer instead.) Always stuck with bass, though, and wound up playing in a few bluegrass ensembles and a few metal cover bands. Out in Springfield, I picked up a 5 string and started to explore that as a solo instrument -- that was the first time I learned Canon in D, and figuring that out on the 5 opened my head up to how much more chordal/harmonic options that extra string opened up. Not to mention the sheer visceral value of hitting a low B in a highly intoxicated, 2500 watt, Saturday night type environment! But, I was mostly sitting around with a Line 6 amp and learning Mars Volta and Ali Farke Toure stuff, and according to my sources that's not exactly the intended use for a bass guitar. I do hope to find an excuse to play now that I'm in music city, Vermont.

A gem:



Ali Farka Toure, at the close of his career, made a few albums with the kora player Toumani Diabate (who is like a 12th generation player!) which I can put on repeat for days on end. This is a short 15 minute and performance filled documentary about the process. The first album was cut in 2 hours, which definitely enhanced my appreciation of it. I found that out after weeks of practicing and notebooking with it and I'd assumed it to be a meticulously calculated composition. Not so.

I was also pleasantly surprised by a minor detail - a 700 year old riff, "Debe" - because it healed a mostly forgotten trauma where I mentioned another equally old riff from Mali in a music conservatory student party environment and was treated for it. They tricked me into "showing them" stuff on guitar, but I was too naive to realize what music was to these reptiles. As a pathological know-it-all, I was doubly humiliated by the cutting confidence of two young ladies who informed me that was simply impossible. I made some lame protestations about the soku and then this ethnomusicologist weighed in and...well, the less said the better.

Especially since I turned out to be right after all. My inner 8 year old gloats from his throne atop Everest, demanding pancakes and crayons.

[dada]

I don't listen to much guitar playing nowadays, I just play. I do like Eugene Chadbourne. I saw him play with Jimmy Carl Black a few years ago at John Zorn's "The Stone" place. I'm not a John Zorn fan at all, at all. During the intermission my brother and I asked Chad and JCB to play country songs, to piss off all the hipsters that were there. They happily obliged for the rest of the show. I can't find a good example that says everything about Dr. Chadbourne, you'll have to look him up. Another good one is Debashish Bhattacharya, Classical Indian slide guitar player. Look him up too if you get a chance.

In my current band, we all sing, but the drummer does most of the singing. He's just on a roll with lyrics and energy right now. I think in my twenties when I did a lot of ecstasy and acid, it gave me the bug to sing more. But now as the glow has worn off a bit, I find I'm embarrassed with most of my lyrics. Between the drugs and girlfriends always pushing me to be the "frontman," I feel like I've spent too much time going in directions that may have not been the exact fit for me. But it's all a learning process, getting out of your comfort zone and all that. And I do like singing, it's fun. There's still a few of my songs I like, but they don't fit the style of the band so much, so they're on the back burner for now. I still sing a few covers, and maybe one or two originals with the band. My favorite is just improvising, jamming. It never gets old for me. I like to play off a pedal tone, e a or d usually (of course) and just go go go. I'll post some stuff, prime cuts from the old jam band at some point. I keep saying I'm going to make some video collages to put with the old jams for uploading to youtube. I figure when I link them to boards like I'll do here, that more people will actually check them out if they have video to go with them. But I may not get to it, and I'll just be linking boring old mp3s once again.

I have a synthesizer from the early 80s, an Akai AX-60, that is my favorite noise maker in the whole world. After band practice, I sit for hours listening to it, barely touching the faders sometimes. I've been learning to coax sounds out of it for around fifteen years now. It's got these great random functions, you set a few parameters and just let it go. I think of it as my apophenia machine. I was going to post some samples here at one point, but I never got around to it. Maybe this time around I'll get to it. It can sound like it's playing jazz, or birdcalls, or water dripping like Mtume in the Miles Davis band. It's great to jam with.

At one point I charted out all these scales, different permutations of seven notes. Similar to the 72 Melakartas of Carnatic Indian music. I always thought I'd practice a scale per week or something, put some flesh on the bare bones of the scale skeletons, learn where to bend a note, where to accent for each scale, like ragas. But life has had other plans. Maybe someday.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I recently acquired a book I'd been hearing about for a decade: The Guitar Grimoire, which is surely about as RI as musical instructional material can get, no?

I was quite disappointed by it, however, because it was compiled and organized by someone who clearly had not attained mastery nor understanding of the demons he's writing about. I was hoping for The Big Picture, the Grand Unified Theory, but it's basically a big index...which is fine: nothing wrong with having new horizons unexplored. As a young Metallica fan just discovering LSD, The Mysticism of Sound and Music was a powerful peek at that Big Picture, but there's little to translate to the curious geometric logic of the fretboard and the strict limit of 6 voice polyphony.

I remember reading an McLaughlin interview -- just spent awhile searching for the precise text but I reckon that was back when a young Wombat was subscribing to Guitar Player and earnestly poring over it all. He discussed his childhood in Scotland, the isolation and the central importance of BBC radio to bring the world to him. He sat in his room for months and worked out every chord, filling up a notebook on how they related, and most interesting, how they made him feel, what they evoked. I do reckon the visceral nature of early training is what made him such a beast of a session player.

The 72 Melakartas and the Bhattacharya phenomenon are both new to me and will probably take up the bulk of my afternoon: thank you for the introduction.

[marycarnival]

I saw Eugene Chadbourne a few years ago...amazing. A solo show. Highlights included him busting out some very complex-looking sheet music (Bach, I think it was) and playing whatever piece it was absolutely perfectly, a cover of 'I Love A Rainy Night' by Eddie Rabbit, and about 10-15 minutes of him just turning his amp up real hot and laying his guitar (a Bo Diddley-style that I think he said he built himself) and tapping/banging on the body with various metal items...he also brought out the electric rake! I met the man, and he was very sweet...he autographed my copy of Camper Van Chadbourne! Love the man...

[Belligerent Savant]

.

[Lefty Guitarist here]

Ah yes, no better way to flow into a meditational fugue state than twiddling away on a guitar for a spell.. Although I don't practice nearly as often anymore, I started out back when i was 12/13 yrs old -- lanky mullet-haired aspiring Metal Head.. back then I'd dream of mastering something along the lines of:



Now I aspire more towards [and fail miserably in the process]:

[Hammer of Los]

...

Can I hang with the cool musicians?

Shakes a tambourine hopefully

I can't play a note on nuthin'.

I can kinda dance and sing a bit. Or chant.

Youtube is kinda tempting.

...

[Joe Hillshoist]

Eugene Chadbourne is great. You saw him live marycarnival?

Unreal.

I don't play guitar myself, I can strum a few chords and make ugly noises (seagulls even with a delay and a couple of other pedals), but my daughter, who is 8 months old loves this toy ukelele we ended up with somehow. She can strum and pick with her right hand, and even finger pick a little, which ain't bad for a young child. She hasn't developed the strength or co ordination to use her other hand on the fretboard yet, but its clear she wants to and knows the theory behind it. She was always into music and one day while playing some songs from youtube to her I started messing around with it(the uke) to show her how sounds could be made. She grabbed it straight away and got into it.

She has even learned to recognise guitar and banjo when she hears music.

And she twangs stuff, particularly wood carvings and metal things with prongs or tines (if she gets them when we aren't looking.)

Its pretty cool.

Reminds me of this:

[Joe Hillshoist]

At one point I charted out all these scales, different permutations of seven notes. Similar to the 72 Melakartas of Carnatic Indian music. I always thought I'd practice a scale per week or something, put some flesh on the bare bones of the scale skeletons, learn where to bend a note, where to accent for each scale, like ragas. But life has had other plans. Maybe someday.

The 72 Melakartas and the Bhattacharya phenomenon are both new to me and will probably take up the bulk of my afternoon: thank you for the introduction.

A mate of good mine recently converted his pool room into a temporary studio and this last week we've done a bit of recording and messing around in it with an old mate of his - a former street kid from Sydney i think - who spends half his life at particular ashrams in India trying to find ways to convert the mentality into music, especially reggae. He was going on about the melakartas actually and some controversy about them but I couldn't follow it. lots of awesome discussions on the music itself tho. i had a look at wikipedia to see if I could follow up but no luck making sense of that either.

But as we're on RI it makes sense that I've been attempting to butcher Carnatic violin this last week, before I read this thread. This stuff is fascinating and takes years of work before someone is qualified in it. So naturally we did recordings after about half an hour of piss farting around. Naturally also they'll not see the light of day.

Sorry to drag your guitar thread off topic with other instruments, but check this out:

[beeline]

[IanEye]

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[IanEye]

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[dada]

The best guitar book in my opinion is one called The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick. It has all the scales chords and theory, but more importantly it has ideas, ways of thinking and approaching the guitar that get the brain-gears turning. Instead of giving you exercises, it makes some suggestions that get you thinking about making up your own. I would open it up every once in a while, skip around, not go through it linearly, just to get some fresh perspective. It was good for that, much better than any dry theory book, of which there are plenty.

I was a twelve year old metalhead once upon a time, as well. Metallica and Anthrax led to Yngwie, Paul Gilbert/Racer X and all of the neoclassical stuff that was all the rage with the kids at the time, plenty of sweepy minor arpeggios, you know the drill. My friend and I would sit across from each other and take turns playing the Steve Vai and Ry Cooder stuff from the end of the crossroads movie, and throw pillows at each other when we messed up. After that it was all the fusion guys. Of course McLaughlin. And Zappa, especially Mothers era. Now I've gone off the deep end. Barely listen to any guitar. Lots of chiptune style video game music mostly.

In my early twenties I decided to really learn to play competently in the DADGAD tuning. I learned patterns for the basics- pentatonic scales, the regular modes, harmonic minor- and can play in that tuning just as well as in standard. When listening to it, it sounds like standard tuning, but with just enough difference (because it's not) that it stands out a bit. My main guitars are two strats, one for each tuning. One is a '77 black strat that weighs a ton and has a fat neck, just a fantastic instrument. The other is a cheap cream colored Mexican strat body with an American neck. The black one stays in standard tuning.

My drummer is an interesting fellow. He's just about to turn 60. Big Keith Moon and Ginger Baker type, but he can play jazz and punk too. He studied tabla in India for a while, and he really knows his beats. He writes these songs with all these odd time parts, but not in the usual disjointed math rock style, he swings and grooves. When we write songs, I usually come up with my parts by following his vocal line. The bass player is a solid rock guy from Philly. He doesn't count the odd times, for him it's all feel. It's a good combination I think.

I've been working on the Spoony Bard's melody from Final Fantasy II (IV). Fun little piece I fingerpick and play with lots of open strings. There's youtube videos of other spoony bards playing it, but I haven't seen anyone do it the way I do.

Not sure what the Carnatic controversy is, but you've piqued my curiosity. If you find out Joe, let us know.

Thanks for the RI guitar confessional, it's all just pouring out. Fun.

[Belligerent Savant]

[Joe Hillshoist]

Not sure what the Carnatic controversy is, but you've piqued my curiosity. If you find out Joe, let us know.

Thanks for the RI guitar confessional, it's all just pouring out. Fun.

I bumped into that guy again today and I am none the wiser. He gave me a long winding story about the rules for certain ragas and names and dates and what song to play when that left me none the wiser, then he said "Thats all northern Indian stuff - down south they play whatever stuff all the time."

He did go on about rules for scales and how they Carnatic stuff doesn't follow rules it "should" but by then I'd lost the plot.

A guitarist mate of mine told me a joke once.

How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb?

[vanlose kid]

kerrang!?

go awol for a while and come back to this! cool.

are we allowed to talk gear? got my hands on my first guitar when i was 10. played since.

first acoustic was a yamaha f-310. my first loved electric was a Gibson ES-325. played anything from dylan to free jazz. now it's all folk, blues, reggae.

my second loved electric was an MIK Fender Nocaster with birds eye maple. loved it to bits. sold not too long ago (the last bit of gear i had) because i figured i'd grown out of it. wooed my wife on it, unplugged at that she wasn't happy the day it disappeared (i hadn't told her).

mixed bag of inspiration: charlie sexton, nick drake, mark eitzel, tom verlaine, sonny sharrock, mike stern, foley, chris cornell, blixa bargeld, alexander hacke, david mccomb, chuck prophet, mark hollis... dylan! [oh yeah, jimi, joni and jaco.] (though i find that mostly i'm inspired by horns, voice and guitar-wise. Miles is king.)

now i'm refashioning my calluses on a Martin D-15. hurts but i love it.

was looking through guitar lessons online for a friend (beginner) recently and found these:







really good stuff.

anyway, glad you all are well.

hey, c2w? this is for you.





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