Feel It!

Yes, I know – but as it turns out, writing about Allan Holdsworth is no easier than learning to play his material... I will get there, I promise! But in the meantime, this is a subject close to most musician's hearts.

A few lessons ago I was sitting down with one of my students who's a very talented acoustic singer songwriter, and our assignment for the lesson was to take the key of G, harmonise it to the level of 9^th chords, and work out voicings for them. Now, you might think that activity is a waste of time for a student who primarily strums and picks folk/rock type stuff which tops out at triad levels of complexity – it's going to have no direct impact on someone who is not a “muso” but predominantly a writer, and a younger (thinner, less grey, more attractive) me would probably have agreed with you. Teenage me would certainly have agreed with you. But fat old grey me has the wisdom of ages behind him.

A musician like this works on feel – that is playing something that instinctively resonates within them, something that they understand. Triad harmony is easy to get your head around – major happy, minor sad, sus4 and sus2 a bit ethereal, diminished CRAZED DEMON VILLAIN AXE MURDERER etc. If you understand them, you can use them effectively without having to think, it's as simple as an artist painting with primary colours.

But what artist do you know of who paints solely with primary colours?

So just as an artist will blend colours to create depth, highlights etc, we can blend our tonalities – major 7ths, for example, inject a sense of wistful melancholy into a major chord, whereas minor 7ths dilute the funereal nature of a minor chord without changing the underlying tonality too much. These are shades of grey, secondary colours. The 9^th chords we looked at take things further, adding in additional layers of subtlety that can add an extra dimension to an accompaniment part. In time, by taking the time to listen to and get the feel of these chogrds and the 9^th interval, I'm pretty certain these chords will wind up in my student's compositions, and they'll be there because she feels that they should be. Perhaps a C passage will become a Cadd9, or an Em bar will feature an F note weaving in and out – not because she sat down to write something with a m7b9 in it, but because she wanted the extra tension that b9 would bring.

By the way, check her out on Soundcloud – soundcloud.com/beth-hartshorne. You'll be glad you did.

This principle was rammed home to me again yesterday with a student trying to create a solo for their TUNEICEF track – we ran a few passes with G major pentatonic and got a few ideas, but it was obvious there was more to come. The style of the backing and the way my student was playing set me in mind of the anthemic solo played by Slash on “November Rain” - so we set about learning it. And as we learnt it, we kept the backing chords in mind and discovered that part of the reason it sounded so good, as well as the call/ response/ call/ conclusion patterns it revolved around, was because Slash was targeting the 3^rd of each chord, which of course is the emotional centre of the chord – it's heart, if you will.

So what did we do? We looked at his chord sequence, plotted the 3^rd of each chord and proceed to build a melody around those notes.

You could argue that we were cheating, that Slash played by feel alone, and you're probably right – he would have learned a great many solos by that point in his life, many of which will have riffed off the 3^rd of each chord, and he will have absorbed that sound instinctively. My student, however, is 15, and has nothing like that wealth of experience behind him. So we dissect what makes the solo work, we reproduce it in another context, and we use it as a start point. Before too long, what he's doing consciously will become instinctive and his feel for soloing will have improved massively as a result.

I can apply this to myself, as I'm trying to learn Holdsworth's “Hall Of Mirrors” - all chords, and his approach to chords is as alien as his approach to everything else (to the point where I've found myself cheering on the rare occasion I see a chord voicing I can understand), but it's haunting and contains changes Holdsworth makes seem effortless that I would never have even thought of trying. But that's because I never tried to understand them, until now. Perhaps in time some of his unreal genius will rub off on me through it, and some of those bizarre but breathtaking changes will work themselves into my playing and writing.

So, to summarise:

When you play by feel, you play what you understand. So try and understand everything.

See you next month.

Getting Your Nerd On - The Benefits Of A Completist Approach

Yes, I know, I promised Allan Holdsworth this month, but it's just proving too big a topic! For now, content yourself with this...

As I mentioned at the start of the year, I set myself a few challenges. So far it's going pretty well, but every now and again I find myself stumbling across patterns – be they scale ideas, arpeggios or chord voicings – that are just so out there that I find myself thinking “when would I ever use this?”

And it's true, I'm unlikely to spend much time using the Phrygian Dominant or hammering out minmaj13b5 chords. The direct impact of these patterns on my playing is minimal. But then again, it's bound to be – I've been playing guitar for 23 years. The only stuff left to learn is the crazy out there stuff. So what's the point?

Well, the point is the indirect impact. Learning new things keeps me in touch with how to learn – and if you forget how to learn, you're not going to be terribly effective as a teacher. But it also means I find the odd curious pattern that just works. For example, the riff to the classic Killers track “Mr. Brightside” is an evil-to-finger sod of an arpeggio – it's not the kind of thing you just stumble across. It's the kind of thing you find when you're experimenting with add9 chord voicings and you find something that just clicks – that just sounds right. And then you develop it by changing the bass note and hey presto – a song!

As some of you know, last year I spent quite some time wrapping my hounds around Andy McKee's masterpiece “Drifting”. It took me a fair old while, and while I was trying to come to grips with a totally alien way of playing the guitar, I found myself wondering just how the hell does something like this get written??

And then a little later, I found myself voicing a D minor chord with the F note on the 1^st fret low E, open A and D note on the 7^th fret G, tapped with the right hand. And then I slid the tapped note up to the E and down to the C (9^th and 5^th frets on the G), while plucking the A with the right hand thumb... And then I started to understand how you might develop an idea like that into a piece like “Drifting”

So there really is an incentive to going absolutely nuts and bolts guitar nerd crazy with this sort of stuff – set yourself a task like finding absolutely every possible way to play a Cmaj7, for example, and be prepared to be amazed by some of the beautiful, haunting sounds you can coax from your guitar. Yes, you'll find a lot of junk, but you might just find something that kick starts your creativity in ways you would never have expected. 

The SImpsons Theme (Guitar Cover)

Flying In A Blue Dream (guitar cover)

Festival Time

The days are getting longer, the rain is getting warmer, and that can only mean one thing – summer is here! And what does summer mean (other than bipolar weather and crushing disappointment) music festivals.

As I write this, Download had just been and gone and it's now the turn if that legendary staple of British music – Glastonbury! Founded by local farmer Michael Eavis as the Pilton Festival in 1970, every year since then (with a few exceptions) the sleepy village of Pilton, Somerset plays host to roughly 175, 000 music fans. Just think about that for a moment. 175, 000 – that's the size of two or three towns. All crammed in to a single location – Worthy Farm.

I actually attended in 2000 and it was a remarkable experience – David Bowie, Travis and the Chemical Brothers (although I think I was elsewhere for them, watching – of all people – Rolf Harris.. wow, it really was a more innocent time). There were some quite remarkable performances by bands I'd never heard of before or since, and remarkable performances by bands I had, but most of all it was just fantastic to be up close to the big boys, watching them set up and adapt under pressures of time, no proper sound checks, just plug in and go – in other words, just like the rest of us have to do!

But although that experience has a special place in my heart, I consider my first Glastonbury to have been in 1995 – eight months after I'd picked up the guitar with the sole ambition of learning the riff to “Teen Spirit”, my eyes and ears were opened to a whole world of music I'd been deaf to. I pretty much spent the entire weekend in my room with guitar, practice amp and TV, jamming and learning and absorbing every little thing I could. As a beginner guitar player, I couldn't have asked for a better learning experience.

Next month – Allan Holdsworth tribute, I promise. It's just taking a bit longer than I thought – he was VERY clever... 

Blitzkrieg - Yngwie J. Malmsteen (Guitar Cover)

In Deep With The Harmonic Minor Scale

So, back in January I laid out a practice schedule for the year that would include me investigating and studying a variety of new ideas to kick myself out of a rut, and included in that variety was the harmonic minor scale, something I've long been more or less familiar with but never really looked into. So in the spirit of self improvement, I'm presenting my findings...

First off, what is the harmonic minor scale? It's a seven note scale built from these intervals:

R – 2 – b3 – 4 – 5 – b6 -7

We can view this as a natural minor scale with a natural 7^th, and you can see the minor 3^rd gap between the b6 and 7^th gives it an eerie, “haunted house” vibe. Classical music makes heavy use of this scale – in fact, in many classical guitar syllabi, the harmonic minor is taught before the minor pentatonic (you crazy classical fools!). However, popular music tends to favour the natural minor, which is in itself a mode of the major scale.

(The difference between a scale and a mode? The modes of the major scale are all re-arrangements of the notes of the major scale, and as the strongest, most straightforward tonality, the major scale is defined as the parent scale. With the harmonic minor, there is no way to rearrange the major scale notes to form the intervals of the harmonic minor, and it is the strongest and most straightforward of it's tonalities.. the modes of the harmonic minor are wondrous and obscure!)

Let's look at the A Harmonic Minor scale (it's the simplest to wrap your head around):

R – 2 – b3 – 4 – 5 – b6 -7

A - B - C - D – E – F – G#

Now, if we look at this modally, this is what we get:

A - B - C - D – E – F – G# - A Harmonic Minor

R – b2 – b3 – 4 – b5 – 6 - b7

B - C - D - E – F – G# – A - B Locrian #6

R – 2 – 3 – 4 – #5 – 6 -7

C - D - E - F – G# – A – B - C Ionian Augmented

R – 2 – b3 – #4 – 5 – 6 - b7

D - E - F - G# – A – B – C - D Dorian #4 (aka Romanian)

R – b2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – b6 -b7

E - F - G# - A – B – C – D - E Phrygian Dominant

R – #2 – 3 – #4 – 5 – 6 - b7

F - G# - A - B – C – D – E - F Lydian #2

R – b2 – b3 – b4 – b5 – b6 -bb7

G# - A - B - C – D – E – F - G# Ultralocrian

It's also worth taking a look at the results when you harmonise this scale:

i chord – A- C – E : Am

ii chord – B – D – F : B diminished

III chord – C – E – G# : C augmented

iv chord – D – F – A : D minor

V chord – E – G# - B : E

VI chord – F – A – C : F

vii chord – G# - B – D : G# diminished

This means that when you look at a simple 12 bar, you end up with :

// Am / % / % / % / % / Dm / % /

Am / % / E / Dm / Am / E //

I-V-vi-IV gets even more interesting: Am – E – Dm – F

Jazzers may be in for a shock – take a look at the ii-V-I.. Bdim – E – Am.

And then we can extend past triads to 7ths: 

i chord – A- C – E - G# : Ammaj7

ii chord – B – D – F - A : Bm7b5

III chord – C – E – G# - B : Cmaj7#5

iv chord – D – F – A - C: D m7

V chord – E – G# - B - D: E7

VI chord – F – A – C - E: Fmaj7

vii chord – G# - B – D - F : G# diminished7

Interestingly though, these chord sequences still have a (somewhat twisted) coherency and charm about them, and this is an excellent resource for players looking to write something new and different but not sure how to break out of a rut – tackling standard chord sequences in alternate tonalities is a great place to start.

Mapping out the modes using the three octave box/ transition technique covered in Progressive Guitar Training is a terrific exercise for both fingers and brain, and then there's improvisation... and once you've figured out how to be melodic with the Ultralocrian then... the sky is the limit!

Next month – a tribute to a lost legend, the incredible Allan Holdsworth. For those of you who aren't familiar, do yourselves a favour and YouTube him- and then see how long it takes you to pick your jaw off the floor!