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.

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.