Amplification

Amplification is a fact of life for 75-100% of gigs, depending on what type of music you play. However, as most performing musicians learn early on, live sound is a minefield. The following is what I have found from playing various gigs over the years, for what it's worth.

Why Amplify at all?

People who work with me know that I'm a massive old fogey when it comes to volume. I like it to be as low as possible.

In a folk or jazz club or other listening environment, it's possible to pay very quiet, and is often the most powerful thing you can do. With a drummer it becomes trickier, but with a sensitive drummer it is perfectly possible to play very soft.

Amplification affects the sound of the instrument. for electric guitar this is desirable. For acoustic guitar it is only ever a necessary evil.

I often play at 30-40 seater venues used to acoustic styles of music and they usually provide a sound engineer. There is still a perceived need for amplification even here - my feeling is that it's perfectly possible to play these venues with a purely acoustic line up - if you play electric you could use a small amp. A lot depends on the drummer, but most of the drummers I work with have a great sense of dynamics. An acoustic guitar solo might struggle to be heard in this situation, but you can always add a touch of volume with a small amp - an AER say - if required, without changing the sound too much. In these situations my little AER alpha spends its time around '1' on the master volume.

Actual acoustic music sounds very 'small' and 'light' compared to amplified but it has many more shades of nuance and complexity. There is a magic to acoustic sound which is completely lost even in the most hi-fi of mics and PAs and it's shame people don't have more confidence in the audience to enjoy a purely acoustic performance in venues. There's a great intimacy there, and volume does not mean more energy....

Furthermore, a good sound engineer who understands acoustic music and jazz is worth their weight in gold.

Noisy punters

Playing quieter styles of music - folk, jazz etc - for a party crowd or a noisy audience obviously raises some real problems. There's no doubt in my mind that audience level is the biggest 'game-changer' when it comes to sound. You can sound check as much as you like, but when there's a crowd in the room, all bets are off.

One thing I've noticed is that many musicians are worried about projection and performance energy. A common way to try to inject more projection and energy into a performance is to simply turn up. Needless to say it doesn't work. If you need to do this, then the battle for the audience's attention is already lost.

It's a massive temptation and I think we all do it from time to time. Often, this is led by the drums. Drums are capable of a huge dynamic range and I think most drummers are trained to 'play the room' - that is, they will play to the level of the audience. Also, on most small gigs drummers are often the only instrument not amplified through the PA, so they often need to be louder so that they balance front of house.

However this also happens with drummer less groups as well. Often you get into an arms race, and for reasons given below, what happens is usually bad sound. The audience will always win....

When it comes to functions, I think unless you are booked as a party/dance band, most clients actually don't want the band to be heard - hence the classic request for the band to turn down. Best thing to do (I think) is play unamplified as much as possible. I work with several groups who play 1920s/30s type background music purely acoustically to often quite noisy punters, and it still works. You can actually hear what you play (depending on the room's acoustic) better than you think and punters always comment on how nice it was. What's going on here I think is that clients are interested in the overall sound and the effect it creates rather than being able to hear what you play. An acoustic group creates a certain ambience even if you can't really hear it, and if punters really want to hear it they can go closer to the band.

It's an ego-bruiser, but it's what the average function client really wants, I think, 9 times out of 10.

Leaving aside the specific problems of playing acoustic swing guitar in a group (let's not go there :-)) what kind of factors do we have to deal with when we do play with a fair bit of amplification?

Welcome to a world of mud

Amplification is an important part of the sound for louder bands and styles of music.

It's particularly hard to get right when using an acoustic guitar and amp. In fact, it's basically impossible to accurately amplify the sound of an acoustic guitar for all but the quietest gigs. Anything that increases the fidelity of the sound increases the instrument's susceptibility to feedback.

For this reason most people have got used to sparkly sound of a piezo pickup through a PA (or acoustic amp.) If you actually listen, it doesn't actually really sound like an acoustic guitar, but it is an attractive sound, acceptably close and easy for overworked, underpaid sound engineers to deal with. Some players, such as Lionel Loueke, have made this artificial not-really-acoustic sound into their own. From a personal point of view, a piezo under the bridge is uber practical, and as much as I'd like the sound of my acoustic, but louder, I'd take consistency and reliability over 'perfect tone' any day.

This realisation has resulted in a hilarious device called a Godin Multiac - a professional quality, electric-only guitar that imitates the sound of a piezo doing a not particularly good job of amplifying an acoustic guitar. It's very popular and widely used by guitarists. In a way, it's the guitar equivalent of those french fries that don't actually contain any potato.

Even when playing the most practical rig for a loud gig - electric guitar into a reasonable sized amp - some complicating factors come into play. One thing that I notice is that you get a lot of low range mud when you are louder. This is not actually because of the amp - but because of your hearing. Here's a graph, just what you've always wanted:

This is a plot of how loud a sound at a certain frequency (or pitch) needs to be to sound the same volume for the listener. So for a the low A on the guitar (110Hz) needs to be at around 40db to sound at the same volume as the A on the 1st string (440Hz) at 0 dB. For those who don't know the dB sale that's a HUGE difference. As we get louder the curve flattens out, so 100 dBs is about the same for everything (much louder than this and you will hit the threshold of pain, Slayer fans.)

For those not conversant with graphs or numbers, what it says is that when the sound is quiet, it's harder to hear bass, and as sound gets louder, the ears become more and more aware of it. So your amp could be totally flat in response, and you still hear a lot more low end coming in as you turn up. This will also tend to aggravate the bass player as well, BTW. So it's generally don't be inflexible about amp settings - what works for quiet recording or practise will be different to what works on a gig - room acoustics will also effect EQ. Most experienced guitarists I have met know this well. I believe some amp makes are factoring this into their designs, although this does not appear to be the case with, for example, a Fender Twin :-) It's also a good reason to do a Brian May and use a treble booster if you want to really crank it.

This graph raises all sorts of interesting issues regarding live sound generally.

A second issue is the way in which EQ'ing works within a band. While a sound with lots of bass and treble sounds great for solo guitar, in a band these frequencies are occupied by the bass and by the drummer's cymbals. It's often said by experienced players that what you need in most bands is more midrange.

Incidentally, one reason why macceferri and archtop guitars were developed in the 1920s and 30s was to increase midrange output in particular. As a result they can sound a bit much on their own, but in a band, they cut through much better than a flat-top acoustic. It also makes them a bit troublesome to amplify, unfortunately.

Obviously with smaller amps there are often issues with 'boxiness' and too much mid range. There's not a huge amount you can do about this, apart from get a bigger amp.... You can also use a bigger cab - the 6" speaker ZT lunchbox, for example, sounds absolutely gigantic through a 4 X 12 cab. (Though if you have to move a 4X12" to the gig, you might not want to use a ZT Lunchbox, it's true)

There's also issues regarding the direction of the speaker. Place an amp behind you and at your feet (standard practice for many guitarists playing with a combo) and you will hear the amp rather more quietly than it sounds from the front. You will also hear less treble - as high frequencies diffract (go around corners) less easily than low frequencies.

You could tilt the amp towards you (some amps are wedge shaped for this reason) or put it on a table or chair if it is small enough. However, this is an issue for acoustic instruments as it can raise the likelihood of feedback. Some acoustic amps, such as the AER Alpha, seem very directional, which helps feedback if not on stage sound....

Finally, distortion is a very interesting and difficult one. I find that the louder you are, the less is required. For me any sort of heavy distortion above a certain volume becomes almost impossible to hear with a band. I'm sure there are many who have spent years working out the perfect combination of pedals and amp to get a great live overdriven sound, but I have to say for my own uses, a bluesy, slightly driven sound is great for most situations I play in. Specialists playing heavy rock guitar and shred styles I'm sure would have a lot more to say in this area.

I have to say though, perhaps the best live sound I have ever heard in this context is actually Eric Clapton's. It's almost clean.

Flexibility

I've been thinking a lot about ways to streamline my practice. This is something I think is fundamental in learning to play an instrument - at least after a certain point, there is so much to study and master, and only a certain number of days to do it in. A typical list of requirements for a musician might be the following:

1) Learn scales thoroughly
2) Learn all the chords
3) Learn to sightread
4) Learn to play in time, and develop a sense of groove
5) Develop the ability to play what you hear and hear music in detail (improvisation & transcription)

And so on. Look familiar? I think we all work on these 5 points to some extent. In our practice we tend to break down these goals into exercises and grind them over and over. For example - we might break down 1) into the following:

- Learn C Major scale
- Learn C Minor Harmonic scale
- Learn C Melodic Minor scale

And so on.

For a beginner this is a reasonable approach. However, we get to a certain point in our learning where the possibilities explode -can we play C major in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 7th chords, triads, quartals, up to the 7th down to the 3rd, with added notes and so on.

At this point, I think it's important to develop a flexibility mindset. Rather than grind through the same patterns every day, we need to learn the ability to randomly access different patterns and ideas at tempo. The good news is that it is possible to develop this ability just as much as it is possible to learn one scale by repeating it.

I was reminded of this when Barry Harris came to town last week. Attending his Improvisation class is always a challenge, especially if you haven't been to one for a few years. It's very rapid fire - Barry shows students how to put together idiomatic bebop lines from scalic material - he might say:

- Play the Bb major to the 5th
- Play the Bb major to the 5th up and down
- Play it up to the seventh and down to the third
- Start on the offbeat, go from 7 to 1 and add in a note between
- Play 1 3 5 7
- Play it in thirds going up
- Add a half step before each note in each third

It's all very fast, and not repeated. What Barry is teaching (I think) is the ability to not only master scales but the ability to master the process of accessing scalic material. This reminds me of some of the techniques used by Warne Marsh - the material is a bit different in some ways, but the idea is the same. The aim is to develop flexibility rather than trying to learn 'everything' one item at a time.

The aim is to move progressively towards more flexibility, so you can play things you haven't practiced before quickly and accurately.

By practicing the process you don't need to simply practice the material.

I'll give you some more examples. Someone asks you to improvise on a difficult set of changes. What's the best preparation you could do for having to solo on some strange set of chords in a sight reading situation?

1. Practice one set of changes a week?
2. Practice a different set of random triads or a different (unusual) progression every day for 5 minutes?

I'd say the latter! One is deep learning - nothing wrong with it - great if you want to learn a tune really thoroughly, but the flexibility training in the second example will help you more in this situation.

Another example might be, you want to be able to play on a bandstand and busk tunes that you half know. What's your strategy?

1. Aim to learn every tune
2. Develop the ability to recognise chord progressions and key changes by ear, and busk melodies with needing a chart.

In the second case it might be a more on practicing busking lots of tunes on a very basic level rather than focussing on learning one tune really well. Again, it's not wrong to really get inside one thing, but the flexibility training is important too.

It's something that I've noticed about experienced musicians - partly it comes from playing a lot of gigs, but you can practice it too! It might be hard at first, but slowly you'll find you can bend in all sorts of ways....

New Cracking the Code/Picking Biomechanics revisited

Picking part 2

Episode 1 of series 2 of Cracking the Code has appeared - well worth the wait because the info is I think right on the money, quite new, and throws a light on the last blog entry I made.

http://troygrady.com/code-s2/

I think I can guess what the next few episodes will talk about - I look forward to seeing whether I am right!

In his own inimitable style I think Troy is pushing the pedagogy of right hand plectrum technique into a mature state. By this, I mean the level we see in classical tuition. Plectrum guitarists have been left largely out in the cold due to the absence of classical plectrum guitar tradition (gypsy jazz technique has only really become mainstream among guitarists fairly recently.)

In any case - as soon as I saw the close up of Tory playing the Yngwie stuff I though - ah yes that is the Gypsy Jazz right hand, minus the rest strokes. That's not the only thing Yngwie has in common technically with Django - check out the videos for more info. There's also a short burst of Troy playing some very tasty Django style picking on a nylon string using - yes, rest strokes.

In any case there's much more to come....

Rest Stroke picking

I've started looking at some Bluegrass and country basics for a dep that I do for a friend's band. This isn't a sort of music I have much experience with but I have fallen in love with it. One of my favourite players is the wonderful Tony Rice - flat-picking wizard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE992CZQJmM

Just gorgeous music IMO, and deceptively hard guitar playing. I'd be interested to see what Troy would say about the way he seems to adjusting the pick angle into the string.

While bluegrass players don't really shred in the way that gypsy jazzers or hair metal dudes do, the flatpicking targets more or less continuously what is a big weak area for most players - cross string picking. Skilled flatpickers are able to play the sort of stuff easiest executed fingerstyle with a pick, often for more projection in ensembles.

I was pleased to discover that I could basically adapt my existing technique for this style, Tony Rice and many other players use a variant of rest stroke picking - bluegrass players seem split between rest stroke pickers and alternate pickers (happy to corrected if this is wrong info.)

My belief is that mastering the basics of rest stroke picking is an excellent way to naturally cultivate the the pick angle Troy talks about in the episode.

So we can add Bluegrass guitar and mandolin to Oud technique and Gypsy jazz guitar playing as style which uses essentially the same technique. I believe Sarod players use a similar technique - need to find out more. Watch this space...

Widdly Widdly Widdly Widdly Part II - Biomechanics

Widdly Widdly Widdly Widdly Part 2

So, after the last blog I thought I’d post some of my thoughts about actually playing fast – Troy Grady of Cracking the Code was kind enough to read the last post and offer his thoughts – one of which was that loud fast rock guitar is back in vogue again in the US – at least to the extent that Avenged Sevenfold are selling heaps of albums. We had Dragonforce in the UK a few years back….

So, what advice for guitarists working on speed? Well, bearing in mind that I am not Rusty Cooley or Stochelo Rosenberg, here are my thoughts. For my part, speed is a very real consideration for a guitar player wishing to develop their playing as a gypsy jazz lead guitarist. This is a virtuosic style, and not just because of the improvisation. Here’s an example of what an accomplished gypsy jazz guitar player might reasonably expected to cope with (as opposed to the extreme end of the envelope technically.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlxTJewuW0c

I am on my way to executing this piece at this tempo, and will post a video when I am happy with it. Working on this and other fast and fancy material has led me to this conclusion:

Speed/‘Technique’  = Good Biomechanics + Accurate Subdivision

OK into the specifics - this will get super nerdy very quick, but if you are the kind of person who wants to play super fast on the guitar I doubt this will put you off.

Good Biomechanics

Biomechanics is a fancy word to refer to the way you play the instrument – I’ll adopt it from Troys’s website as I think it is specific and clear as a term. We could use the term technique, but technique often gets confused with the result – fast, fluid playing, something I call ‘technique’ in quotes.

In fact it is possible to have great ‘technique’ in this sense and bad biomechanics – a classic example would by Yngwie Malmsteen in the ‘80s. He managed to give himself career threatening Carpal Tunnel syndrome. This points to something wrong with the way he played – gypsy jazz and flamenco guitarists, for example, can manage similar speed and articulation with acoustic instruments and play this way for years and years with no problems.

Biomechanics for pick technique can be broken down into two elements – the kind of stroke you are making and how you make it. The first (economy, alternate, cross picking etc) are much more discussed and understood than the latter so I won’t talk about them here: you can google them! IMHO all these picking patterns are all available (more or less) with the right biomechanics. If the second element is not mastered, however, the student will always struggle.

A great article on the second point can be found here. This was written by Tuck Andress and is required reading for anyone serious about developing their pick technique. However, it is also a little confusingly written and doesn’t include gypsy jazz technique, so I will add my own thoughts.

Rather than go too much into specifics, I will cover some schools of thought that 'do the work for you.' Setting aside the details of when you do an upstroke or a downstroke, there are to my knowledge four clear and well described schools of picking in common use (Andress covers more). 

Considerations

• Floating or anchored - is the wrist or hand touching the top of the guitar? If not, it is a floating technique, if it is, it's anchored.
• Pick grip - trad (pick wedged in fist against thumb), lazy (fore finger pad against the thumb), or something else?
• Wrist angle - straight wrist and arm, or bent ('broken'?)
• Where does the pick motion come from - arm, wrist or fingers? How does the wrist move? How does the arm move? What moves it?
• Position – where is the arm?
• Free strokes or rest strokes? Mose guitarists use free strokes. Rest strokes - where the pick comes into contact with the next string after plucking, offers power and positional awareness, which helps with accuracy. (Andress seems not to have considered this in this essay.)
• Teaching materials - how much information is there on the biomechanics?

1. Trad or BMG technique. Andress refers to this as standard style. This was a standard approach for guitarists learning in the 50s and 60s as it was the technique taught in ‘Banjo, Mandolin, Guitar’ or BMG magazine. As used by Steve Morse and Robert Fripp.
2. Electric pick technique. Standard style variation 2 according to Andress. for most electric players. Used by Al Di Meola, Steve Vai and Julian Lage.
3. George Benson technique. A common approach now in jazz land, largely thanks to Andress. Used by Benson (of course), Carlos Santana, Sheryl Bailey and Adam Rogers.
4. ‘Gypsy’ or Oud picking. Standard style variation 1, with rest strokes. Andress seems unaware of the magic ingredient - rest stroke picking - that made this style so reliable and accurate for Django and Joe Pass. Approach mostly associated with gypsy jazz players today. Used invariably by gypsy jazz players and many early jazz players such as Eddie Lang and George Van Eps.

Quick summary in a table:

School	Float or anchored?	Grip	Wrist	Motion	Position	Free or Rest?
1 Trad/BMG	Float	Trad	Straight	Forearm, muscular Rotation of wrist	Arm above strings	Always Free
2 Electric	Anchored (usually above bridge)	Trad or Lazy	Straight	Wrist (side-to-side), fingers	Arm above strings	Almost always Free
3 Benson	Float	Lazy	Bent	Anything, including characteristic oscillation of wrist	Arm usually quite low, arm rotated outward from guitar.	Either, usually Free
4 Gypsy	Float – some light contact with strings and top	Slightly lazy trad – thumb crosses forefinger in an ‘X’	45 degree bend (Joe Pass used a flatter wrist)	Rotation of wrist, Forearm weight for downstrokes	Arm comes in behind tailpiece – 'in the middle.' (Joe uses a variant here too)	Always rest on down strokes

All of these techniques have advantages and disadvantages, apart from the first, which seems to me to have only disadvantages:

	Advantages	Disadvantages
1) Trad or BMG picking	·      ? ·      Good for those who find music easy, and need a challenge.	·      Really difficult to master. ·      Not crazy about the sound it produces. ·      Everything that can be done this way can be more easily achieved using a different style. ·      Problems with tensing up? Possible tendonitis?
2) Electric picking	·      Control over distorted/loud guitar. ·      Palm muting easily available.	·      Many players have a tense right hand and struggle with fast playing. Poorly understood biomechanics. ·      String skipping of any kind is a problem (e.g. alternate picking arpeggios etc.) ·      Weakest style for acoustic volume and tone, so a poor choice for acoustic playing. Julian Lage gets away with it through witchcraft of some type.
3) Benson picking	·      Very flexible. ·      Good tone and projection. ·      Just listen to George Benson!	·      Few – less tone than Gypsy picking perhaps, but I do know at least one acoustic player, Martin Wheatley, who uses a variant of this approach, and he has no trouble projecting and playing fast.
4) ‘Gypsy’ or Oud picking	·      Absolute relaxation. ·      Unsurpassed power and projection on acoustic guitar. ·      Reliable positioning of hand – unlike 1) because we are using rest strokes and knuckles/fingers to sense where we are. ·      And – consequently, superchops! ·      Well understood and taught in recent years.	·      Not suitable for electric playing – e.g. see Birelli Lagrene, playing fusion here, where he modifies his approach to something more like style 2). Andreas Oberg uses a straight wrist variant on both acoustic and electric sometimes using (eek) style 1. His video is helpful and clear by the way.

You may need to master two or more styles.

Teaching wise, these are my thoughts on the styles:

1) Why do that to yourself?

2) Troy looks like one of the few to be thinking about this biomechanically. Website here, but little info on specifics just yet.

3) A fair bit of info - Andress is a good start. Here's a good video.

4) Loads of info - I can personally recommend these teaching videos, for example.

Your aim here is to play everything with as little effort as possible. My own belief is that Gypsy picking, with a little application, is the actually easiest to master of all the schools. There is a wealth of information on it, clear tutorials and there are dozens in London alone who play this way with aplomb. How hard can it be? :-) I learned the basic picking style in a matter of months, though I am continuing to refine it, and my teaching of it. My feeling is also that by learning the gypsy style you can relax into a fast and accurate type 2 picking without too much hassle. 

I might have a proper go at learning Benson picking, just to see how hard/easy it is. Interestingly, the picking patterns seem the same as those normally used for gypsy picking - i.e. heavy on the downstrokes and not alternate.

Bear in mind gypsy picking here is not referring to the whole 'start a string with a downstroke' thing - you can use gypsy right hand with any picking pattern. That said, it is really, really worth practicing the traditional style.

Part 3 will cover subdivision…. I will also post some self analysis of my own playing of when things don’t quite work and why I think this is so.