Nice and Smooth

Hi! Welcome to the first installment of my column "Flesh, Blood & Rockin’ Soul" online. FYI, this column used to appear in NU 107’s Nusletter as well as in EXTRA! Magazine. I’ve decided to put this up on my website so that I can write whatever I want and put it out whenever I want it without having to worry about column space, deadlines, etc… and you guys won’t have to wait as long. (I hope!)

Well, I’d like to talk about legato playing. Legato playing goes by different names (ligado, hammer-on, pull-off, slurs, etc) but of course they all sound alike (DUH!), smooth. People like Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen & Allan Holdsworth (to name a few) have taken slurs to unprecedented levels of technical proficiency. I myself gradually left my speed picking (alternate, sweep) in favor of a more fluid, legato style. But to better appreciate this kind of playing, you must first build up the strength and endurance of your left hand (or right if you’re a lefty). I’m gonna give you guys several exercises to help go on your way towards smooth heaven.

Ex. 1a is an exercise that most guitarists know. But instead of picking each note, you "hammer" them "on". Ex. 1b is the reverse, hammering-on the first note then pulling-off the rest.

The next sets of exercises are variations of ex.1. Still the same concept but this time use different fingerings. Here are a few of them and feel free to come up with your own.

1,3,2,4 2,4,1,3 3,4,1,2 4,2,3,1

1,4,2,3 2,3,1,4 3,1,2,4 4,1,2,3

1,2,4,3 2,1,3,4 3,2,4,1 4,3,1,2 ……etc…….

Practice these, slowly at first while maintaining a steady tempo, all over the fretboard. Try them going up on one string at a time or maybe across the neck or skip to every other string. Whatever works!

Admittedly, these exercises aren’t very musical at all (unless you’re from the Ornette school of harmolodic chaos). Now when you feel that your hand is strong enough, apply the concept to the scales that you already know. And then the next thing to do is to play your extended solo consisting of only hammers and pulls all over the guitar neck! (Right hand finger taps optional). HEHEHE! J

I’d like to hear from you guys so feel free to email me your comments, suggestions, queries or whatever. And I promise to try to answer them the best I can.

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THE "P" WORD

Hello guitar freaks! It’s me again with more mind-tickling insights about the instrument we all love very dearly. It took me a long time to write a follow-up to my first lesson mainly because I was lazy. Nah, just kidding! Between my band, my studies, my studio and my family, I guess you can say that I got my hands full. With all these things going on right now, they served as my inspiration for this lesson. The "P" word. (tantadadaaaam!)

Well, the "P’ word isn’t a cuss, but most people, not only guitar players, dread it. Enough suspense, the "P" word is PRACTICE. Yep, that’s right. You might be leaning back saying, "Nah, I ain’t afraid of practicing. I do it everyday." Good for you! But do you really practice everyday? Don’t you sometimes feel that you just want to bum around and watch the boob tube or surf the Net all day? Or maybe just practice some other thing like the Superstar setting of your NBA Live Playstation? Or maybe you just tell yourself that you’re too tired and busy to practice playing your beloved guitar? Or worse yet, you tell yourself that you don’t need to practice anymore because you are as bitchin’ shredmeister of the highest degree?

Well, don’t fret. We all fall into complacency at one time or another. It’s just a matter of making the conditions conducive to practice. I’d like to share with you guys some tips that have worked for me in getting my lazy butt in gear.

Always keep your guitar within reach – There is no excuse better than "I’m too tired to get my guitar out of its case!" I like to leave my guitar lying on my bed so that whenever I walk into my room, I just have to pick it up and play something. If you don’t like leaving your guitar lying around, then just keep your case open.

Keep an open mind – Boredom is the cause of most abandoned practice rituals. Keep your eyes and ears open to be able to discover new and interesting things. Tired of neo-classical shred-o-manic runs? Try delving into the minimalist poetry of the blues. Sick of your pentatonic meandering? Taste some modal jazz excursions. Tired of playing in a band? Check out some solo Classical Guitar pieces. I try to play and listen to and with a lot of people. That’s the schizophrenic in me. That way I don’t get tired of what I usually do and the added research and experience does wonders for my vocabulary. Try it.

Go for quality not quantity – A lot of guys "practice" while watching TV or something. Reality Check!!!!! That’s called "noodling". Practice needs focus because not only are you training your fingers, you’re also training your mind. Noodling only develops muscle memory, which is also a bad thing. The next time you practice, unhook your phone, turn off your beepers and concentrate on each note and technique you are practicing.

Be consistent – A 7-hour practice day is not equivalent to a 7-hour practice week. Consistency is the key to development. Don’t practice for 18 hours on Monday then bum out during the rest of the week! Try to get in at least 1 hour of fruitful practice everyday and just expand that hour whenever you can.

All the other tips are relative to these 4. The hardest part about practicing is getting started but once you do start, I don’t think you can ever stop caressing those strings and hearing your beloved gee-tar sing out some of the most emotional sounds that have ever touched your heart.

Here try practicing this exercise to loosen up your fingers before you go on and play those beautiful sounds.

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What’s in a phrase?

I’d like to thank Ernie for the email he sent me a few days back. It’s from this email that I got the topic this installment of the Lessons page. He also asked me a few more questions that I would be addressing to in the coming lesson pages. So if any of you guys wonder if I take time out to read your email, I do and I try to answer each one of them as soon as I can. Keep the mail a-comin’!

Phrasing is to music what enunciation, diction, accent, expression and sentences are to languages and speech. You can say that one musical phrase is a musical statement or sentence. Through this particular concept, we can transform the lifeless notes, scales, arpeggios, etc. into this intriguing phenomena we call music. Phrasing can be broken down to its bare essentials of rhythm, melody and harmony but I won’t be taking that approach in explaining what phrasing is. Instead, I’ll be talking in a language that everybody here can easily understand. (I hope)

Have you ever tried playing a scale over and over and over and over, with strict adherence to a consistent tempo dictated by a metronome or a drum machine? Well, how does it feel? Boring, ain’t it? Music isn’t meant to be boring (although, some music are) and what I just described above isn’t music, it’s an exercise. Phrasing changes all that. Now take the same scale, screw the metronome and play it with a varying rhythm. You can play the first 4 notes fast then keep the 5th note sustaining, then play the next 3 notes slow then pause a little bit then sustain a couple more notes before going for a double whammy divebomb on the 2nd fret harmonic of the G string. Now it sounds funny while reading it on paper but just wait till you try it on your guitar.

Now that you have the basic concept, I’ll share some of the things I keep in mind that makes me phrase my solos the way I do.

1. Try to breath in between phrases/lines

Since the guitar isn’t a wind instrument, it’s easy to get carried away playing endlessly without stopping even for a moment. Think like a sax player or a singer and pause in between lines. It makes for good phrasing and it buys some you some time to think about what to play next. And most importantly, there’s little chance of you hyperventilating due to lack of oxygen.

2. Listen to and study instruments other than guitar

This helps expand your vocabulary of licks. You don’t necessarily have to be able to play a sax or a piano; it’s enough to know how the instrument works. There are things unplayable on the guitar but the guitar can also do things unplayable on other instruments. Knowing how other instruments work can give an insight on their phrasing and the insight you get you can apply to your guitar playing. And if you’re using a guitar synth, you can pull off some pretty authentic antics when you use, say, a trumpet or a sitar or a cello sound.

3. Look around for inspiration

Rhythm is one element of music that can stand on its own. And it’s in everything around us. Frank Zappa and Steve Vai base some of their phrasing on the irregularities of human speech. Maybe that vacuum cleaner churns out a hip rhythm that you can use on your next progressive solo. Whatever catches your ear, memorize it then try to mimic it on guitar.

There are lots more ways on how to phrase your lines and I’m going to leave it up to you to discover them. Where’s the fun in learning guitar if I spell everything out for you? Just keep an open mind and an open ear and eventually you’ll stumble upon something uniquely yours. And isn’t that what we’re all after? Here‘s a group of notes (7-note MIXODORIAN-BLUES HYBRID scale for all you mode heads out there) that you can mangle in search of the ultimate way to phrase. Play ‘em, slur ‘em, slide ‘em, bend ‘em in any order whatsoever and prepare to be surprised by what you can actually do with them.

The red dot is the root of the scale.

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The Phenomena of SOUND

I’m supposing that everybody reading this right now is into Music, Guitar Music in particular. Music is defined as a "phenomenon of sound". The keyword, boys and girls is sound. A lot of people studying or playing music are too hung up on the technical aspect of it. You know the drill; theory, chords, arpeggios, tempo, harmonization and etc and etc. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the above-mentioned are valuable knowledge and essential tools for any aspiring musician. But that’s just what they are, tools. They certainly don’t make up or embody music, they’re just part of a bigger whole.

Let me take you back a few hundred years, to a time where schooled music is basically still in its adolescent years. There were no conservatories and how-to books and virtuosos were born not made. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven & Francisco Tarrega are prime examples of brilliant musical geniuses spanning from Baroque to Classical to Romantic. "What do these people have anything to do with the title of this article?" you might ask. Plenty. Well, basically everything.

There’s no doubt that these guys possessed complete mastery of the music of their era and while they do flaunt this mastery in their works, there is not a single opus they came up with that pertains solely to the techniques they used in it. Vague? Well, let me cite a few examples:

Johann Sebastian Bach is considered as the Ultimate Master of Counterpoint. His pieces, whether easy or difficult, clearly defines the title bestowed upon him. A small part of his musical legacy is "The Little Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach". This is a collection of short pieces Bach wrote for his wife, Anna Magdalena, for her to be able to play to their kids while at the same time honing her clavier skills. "Minuet in G" is probably the most popular piece in this collection and though the melody is really very simple, Bach’s polyphonic wizardry comes to the foray as the supporting lines add complexity and color. But amidst the big words I used, this Minuet was used to thrill kids, their own and of relatives, countless times. Something that is still done today every time someone sits behind the piano and plays it.

"Symphony No. 5" is probably Ludwig Van Beethoven’s "hit" among us guitar players ever since Yngwie Malmsteen incorporated its theme in his unaccompanied guitar solo in the "Trial By Fire: Live in Leningrad" album. The "tadadadaan" theme was inspired by the tax collector’s knock on Beethoven’s door every time he comes by to collect money from the broke-at-that-time Ludwig. Check the symphony out and keep this story in mind so that you can appreciate the feeling of dread the Beethoven felt when he wrote it.

We guitar players owe a great debt to Francisco Tarrega. He struggled the same way Andres Segovia did so that the guitar can be accepted as a "serious" instrument worthy of the stature of the piano and violin. He wrote many, many pieces specifically for the guitar as well as transcribing some of the works of Bach and Mozart so that they can be played on the guitar as well as on the instrument these pieces were written for. Tarrega wrote a beautiful piece called "Recuerdos del Alhambra". Throughout the piece, the tremolo technique (not to be confused with the whammy bar, tremolo is a technique wherein the melody is played with the ring, middle and index fingers respectively creating a speed picking, rrrrrrrr type of sound). Now Francisco did not write "Recuerdos" for the sole purpose of making life hard for classical guitarists. Tarrega visited Alhambra in his travels and he happened upon a beautiful waterfall. He used tremolo to represent his memories of the fading ripples in the water caused by the drops of water from the waterfall.

These stories I keep in mind whenever I compose, play, or record a guitar solo. There’s always this question of "What does this song make me feel and what should I play to help the song get its point across?" And the next question I ask myself is " What technique(s) should I use to help me realize what I have in my mind?" Technique alone does not make music but it helps you reach your goal and bring out whatever is inside you. If you ask Jeff Beck what he was aiming for when he recorded "Where Were You", I bet he wouldn’t tell you that he was aiming to prove that one can reach Floyd Rose-ish heights in whammy bar expression by using a standard Stratocaster tremolo bridge. He would probably tell you that he was aiming to make his guitar sound like a choirboy with an angelic voice singing in a church. Now where is the reference to whammy technique in the latter statement? There’s none but the "making the guitar sound like…." phrase is definitely there. Another example would be any interview with Steve Vai. He describes his songs not by the scales and tricks he uses but by how each song makes him feel. He describes "The Animal" from Passion and Warfare as his beast inside and the song certainly sounds like an animal raging. Then he goes into the detail of how he made it sound like an animal. Sound and feeling came first, technique and details came later.

Just for kicks try the following:

.. I call this chord the "What if?" chord. It’s actually an augmented chord based on the 5th string. The note on the 5th string is the root of the chord and you can use this chord in place of the V if you have to put a pause in the music somewhere. For example: I IV I V(‘What if?’ chord) pause 2. Take the scale in my previous lesson ("What's in a Phrase?"), play it in any order using a clean or slightly overdriven guitar tone using mostly hammer-ons and pull-offs as fast as you can. If you’re doing it right, you should be able to make it sound like a horde of flies swarming over something.

3.Take the same scale then play it as fast as you can ascending, palm-muted and picking every note using a heavily distorted sound and your neck pickup (humbucker preferred). This should sound like a storm brewing or a swarm of killer bees. You can also use any scale you like.

There are a lot more fun guitar tricks and techniques out there that can approximate silly things like car horns, horse whinnys, cats, elephants, dogs, farts, etc. Just find them and see how you can use them in your solos. Just keep in mind that all these things are just your means, the Music should be your end.

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The Flying Little Pinky

Here's a story that I would like to share with you guys:

"How grand it would be..." said the little pinky "if I could fly away from this hand that binds me" "Why?", you might ask "Why would he want to leave, knowing that one finger the hand would lack?"

Well, the pinky's the runt of the litter The very thought of which makes him jitter He longs to point the way But forefinger says, "Nay!' "You're too short & small..." "..why, I'm surprised anyone can see you at all!"

This angered the little pinky So he tried to flip the birdy "Tut,tut,tut!", interrupted the middle finger, "That's my job and my job alone!" he bellowed like thunder

"C'mon, face it..." chides Anular "you ain't nothin' but a cute little feller!" So the little pinky pouted & pouted But there was nothing he could about it

One day the hand's owner saw a Paul Gilbert video Then tried to play a 3-note-per-string scale legato "Apex up!" hollered Index "Ring, why don't you finish this 5 fret stretch?" "You try it!" retorts Anular "I just can't reach it, it's too far"

Then the little pinky swoops down, Grabs the last note without a frown Index, Middle and Ring stood by aghast Stunned by something that reached so far and so fast

"Bravo, Pinky!" applauded the three "Without you we couldn't have finished the harmonic minor scale's 5th degree!" "It was nothing..." replies the shy little runt of a finger "I'm glad to be finally of help to our struggling owner." From then on, Index, Middle, Ring and Little Fingers Made beautiful and wide intervallic leaps together

So, should you look at your fretting hand And see your little pinky fly while practicing your Dorian Think of this story and then practice this exercise To keep your pinky grounded, healthy and wise.

Ok so I'm a terrible storywriter but this exercise does help curb your pinky's stratospheric tendencies. After a few days of regularly playing this exercise, you'll notice a speedier and flowing feel to your scales and whatever. Enjoy!!!

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MEMORY BLOCKS

I've received a couple of emails asking me to talk about memorizing notes on the fretboard. While memorizing the neck seems like a daunting task, it's really one of the easiest things in the world, once you understand how it works.

Western musical notation has divided one octave into 12 tones. Each tone is called a semi-tone or a half-step. Here are the 12 notes of the Western chromatic scale: C C#/Db D D#/Eb E F F#/Gb G G#/Ab A A#/Bb B. Each note is one half-step away from the preceding note. The notes with the "#"(sharp) and the "b" (flat) signs are basically the same notes but they are called different names which depends on whether you're going up the scale or down the scale. (More on this later)

Two semi-tones are called whole-tones or whole-steps. This bit of info is useful in dividing the chromatic scale into the major & minor scales that we use in playing music. The major scale in the key of C has the following notes: C D E F G A B C. If you haven't noticed, we dropped all the notes with "#" and "b". That's because the major scale has the following intervals for an octave: W W H W W W H ("W" means whole-step, "H" means half-step). The natural minor scale has this interval sequence: W H W W H W W. When applied starting on C, we'll get the following notes: C D Eb F G Ab Bb C. Now you try writing out the major and minor scale notes for the other tones in the chromatic scale.

What does all this have to do with the guitar neck? Plenty.

The guitar's fretboard is set up in such a way that one fret is equivalent to one half-step. That means that if you play the noteon the first fret of the "E" string then move up one fret at a time playing each one, you're already playing the chromatic scale. This also means that if you need to know what note you're playing, all you have to do is count. Let's take this illustraton:

Try to draw this fretboard representation on a piece of paper or if you're handy with Photoshop or any other graphic editor, just copy the image then fill out the rest of the fret notes. I've spelled out the notes from the open strings up till the 3rd fret. I did not include the sharps and flats, it's understood that they're in between the "natural" notes.

Once you're done, take a look at your work. Notice that starting from the 12th fret, everything just repeats just like from the 1st fret.

The next step is to memorize every note on the fretboard. Ha-ha! But now that you know how this works, it should be a cinch. If you should forget where a particular note is located, just count "whole-step, whole-step, half-step..." or in guitar-speak, "2 frets, 2 frets, 1 fret......"

How do you know when you've memorized the neck already? Well, here's a test that I picked up from Lee Ritenour:

1. Have a friend call out a note, any note.

2. As soon as you hear what note he called out, play the note on all 6 strings, within 2 seconds.

3. If you hit every note within the given time, congratulations! If yopu didn't, work on it.

4. Now have your friend call out a different note then repeat step 2.

5. Do this until you've played all the notes in the chromatic scale.

This test not only determines your familiarity with the fretboard but it also sharpens your reflexes, which eventually will help you when you sight-read notation and tablature.

Chew on this for a while and in my next lesson, I'll be talking about memorizing scales. Think happy thawts!!

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MEMORY BLOCKS PART II

Hi all! Here’s the 2nd installment of my take on memorizing the fretboard. In the 1st installment I talked about memorizing the notes on the guitar neck and on this one, I’ll be talking about grouping those notes together into scales or at least identifiable patterns to help you navigate the uncharted territories of the fretboard while you search for that perfect, inspired solo.

I won’t be giving you any new scale fingerings since I feel that there are a lot of books and publications that tackle the subject quite well. I will, however, focus on 3-note per string scales as I feel that this particular concept unifies the guitar neck better than the traditional, Segovia-approved scale forms. It’s not that classical guitar fingerings are bad, it’s just that 3-note per string scales are easier digested and understood, especially if you’re a beginner. Once you get the hang of the 3-note per string scale, I guarantee that you’ll better understand the all other scales that you might encounter.

The basic major and minor scales as well as the modal scales follow 3 types of fingering when grouped in 3s. Figures 1, 2 & 3 illustrate the types.

Fig. 1    Fig. 2    Fig. 3 

This starts out pretty simple, doesn't it? Well, it is. The major and minor scale forms show my point.

Major Scale    Minor Scale 

The black dots indicate the root of the scale. The root is the "name" or "key" of the scale. So if you want a B minor scale, play the minor fingering scale fingering above starting on the B note on the 6th string. (In case you don't know where the "B" note is, please review the 1st installment of this topic.) And so on and so forth....

You can also follow the Eddie Van Halen School of Thought on scales and take just one of the fingerings figured above and run it across all the strings. If you used fig.1, it would look something like this:

EVH uses this scale this scale in all of his solos. It yields an interesting mix of pentatonic, Aeolian, Dorian and pentatonic-blues flavors that is very characteristic of his playing. Try it out. You can try the other two figures and experiment. This way you can find your own favorite pattern and create your own signature licks.

Figure 2 has a Spanish, almost Locrian feel to it while Figure 3 introduces you to world of whole-tone melodies.

This should hold you folks for a while. In the next installment, I'll be talking about linking these scales together to form a "super" scale that unifies the entire fretboard. Should you find any of what I've said vague or unclear, email me and I'll try to clarify my point in the next installment.

Till next, practice, have fun and be........have?! :-) *LOL*

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