Widdly Widdly Widdly Widdly Part I

I watched and very much enjoyed this rather odd documentary about the struggles of a teenage guitar nerd to master the infamous Yngwie Malmsteen descending scale lick in the late '80s. Well worth a watch if you've ever struggled to play some widdly metal solo.

The guy who made it is promising to make a run of more in depth episodes digging into the secrets of super fast metal picking if we give him some money. Go on, give him a tenner.

In fact the second, more instructional season, interests me less. I have never really been a shredder.

I was very interested in what the series had to say about the difficulties of learning to play, the mystique surrounding fast guitar playing, just how mainstream widdly guitar was, the process of transcribing and just how different learning guitar in his era was to the one today. It also gave a charming reminder of the naive and quaint attitude of rock players (at least of that time) to anything beyond Jimmy Page style pentatonic blues box playing.

Fast guitar in the 90s and 00s

To give some perspective, I started guitar in 1992. By the sounds of it, Troy started around 1986. That's only 6 years, but by that point the explosion in guitar related teaching resources - accurate tab, magazines and VHS instructional Hot Licks videos (yay!) had changed the landscape forever. Nonetheless there was still a bit of a mystique around what was fast becoming termed 'fret wank' - both from admirers and detractors.

By 93-94 (when I got my first electric) the only shredder on the pop horizon was Nuno Bettencourt (who, as Troy details, had become a pop star for reasons entirely unconnected to his mastery of right hand tapping.) There were the metallers - but metal, like mainstream rock and pop would soon reject technical guitar almost completely.

In this transitional environment, information on technique was available freely in magazines from players like Shaun Baxter who gone precisely through that tortuous process outlined in Troy's video. Thus I learned to sweep pick by studying magazine articles. I didn't even hear any Vai, Satriani or Yngwie until college in the late 90's by which point I found much of the music hilariously naff. The music was completely moot - the technique was an end in itself!

This brings us to the politics of going 'widdly widdly squee' on the electric guitar. The relationship between popular music and guitar technique in the 90's and early 00's is very loaded - and dominated for around 20 years by the image of the priapic, strutting ludicrousness of 80's hair metal and its attendant guitar soloing style. The whole thing remained more or less beyond the pale even as synth pop enjoyed it's revival.

By the late 90's poor old Steve Vai had somehow gone from being the guitar mag darling to becoming the guitar mag whipping boy, with legions of mainstream players queuing up to berate him in print. Quite what Vai, who seems like a really nice guy, had done to deserve this apart from prance around in Lycra and do unseemly things with a wang bar at a time when it was considered both Big and Clever to do so, I cannot say. His main sin seems to be to have been ever so slightly behind the fashion curve, unlike Eddie, who managed to avoid the worst of the hating.

Would it be too much to say that the say unfortunate sexual politics, and the general capitalist attitudes of the 80s were symbolised in the image of the lycra clad, cucumber down the trousers, pointy guitar wielding guitar strangler? 90's bands were very keen to distance themselves from all of this. It's strange to think that scales or arpeggios could be politicised, but I guess they were and got chucked out alongside the outfits.

Today

Perhaps most importantly, the guitar is first and foremost the tool of a songwriter, and is likely to remain so.

Rock guitar itself is terminally out of fashion. A Fender Strat excites no one apart from 12 year olds. Increasingly new guitars resemble the pretty but terrible instruments built in Italy in the 1960s or something you might dig up in a thrift shop. Retro, junky and vintage are the in things. Django is now cooler than Hendrix.

70's rock guitar is the music of blokes in their 50s and 60s. 80's rock guitar is pretty much forgotten. There's nothing 'cool' about it. Electric guitar is about the least sexy instrument you can play. It is commonplace.

I think the 90's democratised fast guitar technique too - most of the working players I know have great chops by 80's standards. A few are cutting edge technically and can play stuff no one else can. Fast guitar playing is now simply less remarkable than it was - just what you'd expect, in fact, given the explosion in guitar education materials and courses. (There is a bad side to this IMHO - more on this elsewhere. I believe Troy's struggle and hard work has value in itself)

They are many players and guitar teachers now who came up through Vai/Satriani culture and are actually much too young to remember, say, Dokken on MTV. They, like me, learned guitar at a time where the technical players existed in a parallel universe as divorced from popular culture as Morris Dancing. These players usually end up looking for playing challenges completely outside the mainstream when they realise that most bands don't want a super fast guitar solo every song. Or any song.

These seem to be the main outlets for bored guitar players:

1) In contemporary jazz. Usually technique here is a servant to the compositions and the improvisation, so players here have a different mindset, but as a rule many jazz players on the scene hail from a technical rock guitar type background. This has had a very interesting effect on jazz guitar playing in general. Sad to say, this is usually music played for other jazz musicians.

2) Instrumental rock and guitar porn fusion. Often on the clinic circuit - that is demonstrative music for those who play the same instrument. You now need to be technically astonishing or a session legend, it seems.

3) Gypsy jazz, bluegrass and other virtuoso forms of acoustic music. Shred for the craft ale crowd. Probably the most commercial option at present.

4) Classical. The least viable option for most rock players as it requires a completely different technique.

5) Tuition - passing on the disease!

There are some odd resurgences - Guthrie Govan for example toured with Dizzie Rascal a few years back, and has set a precedent for live widdly rock guitar in contemporary UK music.

Because of these factors, I think that the excesses of hair metal are starting to fade in people's minds.  I hear a lot of musicians on other instruments praising, say, Allan Holdsworth, Eddie Van Halen or Frank Gambale. People no longer react angrily to displays of instrumental prowess, but rather respond to it in the spirit of fun. That's surely a good thing?

Coming soon - Widdly Widdly Widdly Widdly Part II. FWIW - my thoughts on the gory details of playing fast!

Versatility

Here is something I've been thinking about a lot. One of the things a musician working in a city like London becomes aware of very quickly is that is they want to pay their bills, they need to be prepared to play a variety of gigs often at very short notice.

The classic advice to the new in town is 'say yes to anything.' So, that means if you are a guitar player and you get a call to play bass guitar, banjo, ukelele or mandolin, say, and it is remotely possible to do the gig, you say yes. If you normally play rock and you get a call to play jazz, you say yes. If you get called for a reading gig, you read, get called for a gig with a musician who has never read or written a chart in their life, you use your ears.

Musicians are educated with varying levels of success to prepare for these eventualities. FWIW, the graduates of jazz degrees seem to be well suited to this kind of jobbing around, probably because they had to be already technically and musically highly proficient to be able to get into the best colleges, and most of their time at college has involved hanging out and playing complicated music with similar high caliber musicians. 

Often when I talk to my fellow guitarists about playing and practice the emphasis is on developing versatility - some is based around cultivating and improving basic musical skills - reading, time, ear training - but I have noticed that the London scene seems to produce a lot of players who sound kind of similar. In many cases, after a little, while gigging around their playing will vary widely depending on what gig they are doing. For these players it can be hard to get a fix on who they are. They are BB King, Steve Cropper, Wes Montgomery or Django - whatever you need that night.

This happened to me. A fellow musician used to my electric jazz and fusion playing said that if he had heard me playing Gypsy Jazz he wouldn't have recognised my playing. He meant this as a compliment, how much I had assimilated the style, and I took at as one, but it did get me thinking. What did it mean that I was capable of playing two (possibly more) completely independent styles and languages? How was this affecting my creativity and freedom on my instrument? Shouldn't things be more joined up?

What happens to a lot of players a few years into gigging is that their playing slowly gets stereotyped by other musicians. We all do it. If you play a lot of funk gigs you will tend to only get funk gigs, for example. What had happened to me was that I had become stereotyped as a Django style player - which was odd because I hadn't played that style for long and hadn't thought of myself that way or even that I was particularly good at that style (compared to some of the monsters around in this genre!)

So in a sense in the music world it seems that the tendency is naturally to go from being more versatile to less versatile. You become a product.

However, it bothered me - what about this other stuff I like playing - the bebop language and the contemporary stuff? Obviously I could push hard to get gigs in this area but I'd still have the 'two styles' split.

The answer is really simple, and I suspect some reading this will have come to it themselves. 

Don't care. Don't ever try to play a style on a gig. 

Practice what you practice, learn the songs you need to learn for the gig. Then just play your instrument on the gig itself.

Styles are rubbish anyway, don't you think? Styles are like hats, in one year out the next. Styles of music are for record collectors and music journalists, not musicians. They are for hipsters with unfortunate face furniture.  It's for people who talk about 'the music' rather than simply 'music.'

All this by the way is about what you do 'on the gig.' In your practice room, you might well be aiming to play exactly in the style of Bleeding Gums Murphy in Paris, 1958. That's a valid practice goal. It's not a valid gigging mentality.

If people like it the way you play, you will get the gig, if they don't, they don't. If you are really getting no gigs, the chances are your playing is not there yet, or you are really annoying people around you. Or both :-P

As soon as I realised that I started enjoying gigs a 100x more. I'm not sure if I'm playing better, and in a sense I don't really care. I'm sure it makes me more fun to be around, on the other hand.

Furthermore, by doing this you are actually taking charge of your product. Your playing will get stereotyped anyway, so it's better not to fall into someone else's stereotype and end up miserable and repressed. Unless you are happy doing anything.

Lots of musicians have said this - Kenny Werner is probably the most famous. I read his book and understood it intellectually (and disagreed with some of it) but it wasn't enough to grasp what he meant in a meaningful way.

My wife's cello teacher said it best: 'f**k you, this is my sound.'

It's a very counterintuitive mindset, because many freelancers are understandably terrified of not working. What you have to do to be a free musician and not merely a badly paid craftsperson is to laugh in the face of your fears. Ultimately these fears have to do with the fear of death; either physical or psychological. They are not trivial fears. It's probably for the reason that Lennie Tristano suggested that students who were dedicated to working on their music to the highest level should get a day job. However I believe that it's possible to work in the commercial domain while still being yourself.

Ultimately, in self help/management guru terms this would be classed 'playing to your strengths.' What are often encouraged to do as musicians is to work on our weaknesses. While certain skills - reading, good time and good ear - are necessary for professional music and some - familiarity with the neck, clean, comfortable technique and a good sound - are vital for the guitar itself, many other things we think of as important - chord/scales, chord voicings, fusion 'hot licks', fancy techniques, bebop language and anything else 'stylistic', are in fact optional extras.

That's what I think versatility actually is - not the ability to pastiche different styles, but the musicianship to play a gig intuitively and well. After all, I never thought John Scofield would sound good playing 'I Will Fly Away.' But he does.

Hello World!

Rather than masquerade under a transparent veil of anonymity in the hope that it might allow me freedom to bitch offensively about all and sundry, I will come clean and say that this is the official blog of Christian Miller, not that will mean anything, and therefore be motivated to keep it comparatively clean and healthy.

I am a freelance guitar player and music educator specialising in jazz, and playing a lot of swing and gypsy jazz style gigs at the moment, like what the hipsters like, although my interests and experience in music is pretty broad like most of the musos I know.

Posts will cover, practicing, gigging, stuff that pops into my head and no doubt the odd rant.

Unlikely to interest sensible people.