A month of bass followed by a month of guitar

No, it’s not one of Joseph’s lesser-known dreams, it’s my recent practice schedule. Last month I played bass at a couple of Casa del Funk gigs, and this month I’ll be back on guitar for an Acuphuncture gig. Switching back to bass was fun, though the rehearsals quickly reminded me how much more physical the instrument is: my left hand and wrist were aching from the extra stretching and strength required for fretting, and my right-hand fingertips were getting chewed on the strings. I quickly drafted in my usual practice tune, Dark Lady by DJ Food, which is used as the backing music in this video:

(Which is as strangely fascinating as time-lapse videos normally are.)
The line goes something like this:
   1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ---------------------------------
D -57--------------------------57--
A ---00000020305067~7------------00
E -------------------0000003500----
It’s a great semiquaver work-out for the right hand with string skipping and makes you do a bit of damping practise with your left.

Coil taps are annoying

Hey, I finally remembered my password so I can post again.  OK, that’s not the reason I was neglecting my blog, but that’s the weak excuse I’m sticking to.

I played a gig with Casa last night at the Vet’s graduation party.  We’ve done vet gigs before, and usually they are alcohol soaked and riotous.  In stark contrast to this last night was quite restrained, for the simple reason that their parents were present.  One girl came up to us before we started and said, “Do you see the lady in the white top and black hair-piece?  She’ll probably try and get on stage with you at some point; please don’t let her.  She’s my mother.”  As it turned out, Mrs Heinz is quite a step up from the usual band interloper, displaying some skill on the tambourine.  I imagine her daughter was hiding somewhere whilst her mum was up with us.

In preparation for this gig I cleaned and restrung a couple of my guitars, the strat and my Patrick Eggle Berlin.  Taking them both, I soundchecked with the strat but then had a change of mind and used the Berlin.  Tip from the top: don’t do this.  I had to fiddle about with the EQ and volume to adjust to the Berlin’s humbuckers.  At least the humbuckers have coil taps, so I could drop back to a single coil sound when I wanted, although this reminded me why I don’t like coil-taps: the volume and EQ is completely different.  You get everything set up on your amp for one pickup combo, then flick a switch on the guitar and now you need to change everything again.  I’m starting to think that versatility in guitars is a bad thing, one trick ponies are the way to go.

Five little Dragons

Recently most of my youtube usage has been dominated by nursery rhymes, rather than my usual guitar videos.  Recently, Kyla thought she’d look up “Five little frogs,” and found this video, which nicely combines guitars and nursery rhymes:

What were Dragonforce thinking of?  Surely this is deliberate.

Scale fatigue

I’ve been working on the ideas shown in a video I found on youtube:

The melodic minor use is quite interesting; playing the minor a fifth away from a dominant seven chord I’d heard of (so playing E melodic minor over A7), but the other use that’s shown, where you play the seventh mode of the melodic minor over a chord that I guess is functioning as a V, is something I’d not really got under my fingers before.  However, the thing that I really like the sound of is the (admittedly fast and showy) run he uses around 9min20 over the vi chord.  One of the comments says it’s a harmonic minor, though I’m stuck on exactly what he’s up to.  If it’s the same scale he describes at 4min20, it’s just plain weird:over a F#min7#9 he plays C# B A# G F# F E D C# (descending, obviously).  Which looks like… B harmonnic minor but with added chromatic stuff.  Lots of added stuff.  Which all sounds rubbish when I play it.  There’s a real gap between reading, “Hey, play this scale over this chord!” and being able to do something interesting with it.  I think it might be time to get a couple of lessons again.

Paring down chords

While browsing Amazon I discovered a jazz guitarist called Fareed Haque, who has a few lessons on his website.  One of them that caught my interest is about how to play jazz chords; I’m interested in voicings of chords with a reduced number of notes, firstly for ease of playing, and secondly because between me, the keys player, the bassist and couple of horns players, there are probably enough notes flying around already.  How many people really need to play the fifth anyway?  So recently I’ve been experimenting with things like this:

   Bb7  Eb7
E ----------
B ----------
G --13--12--
D --12--11--
A ----------
E ----------

This nicely ties up with my liking for moments where two chords require very few finger movements to alternate between, e.g. on For Once In My Life.  The downside of this technique is that my practice is sounding less and less like the actual song I’m playing along with: once you take out the root and fifth, things don’t sound quite right.

Excess baggage

It’s often been said by those of us in Casa that this band needs lights.  This ranges from a need for small clip-on lights so that people can read their pad of music (the horn section complains that their parts are more complicated than the rhythm section’s, because they’ve got, like, notes and stuff?  So they can’t memorise them), up to a full set of stage lights, lasers, dry ice, mirror balls, and fireworks.  The reason we haven’t bought lights yet is that they’re just one more piece of kit to lug around, and given that Dave, our drummer, already looks after our PA, and he knows full-well we’d get him to carry the lights too, he’s vetoed it.  However, for the gig we did on Saturday we were presented with a large, souless hall with two possible lighting settings: inquisition glare or moonless midnight.  Fortunately we had Derek on drums, and he has a friend who was willing to lend us 3kW of lighting rig at short notice.  For once we looked totally professional!  Err… ok, we were a bit easier to see on stage.  But, given that I carted the lights home and returned them on Sunday, I think Dave has a point: more kit is A Bad Thing.  I think that in the next life I’ll be a singer and just roll up to gigs with a microphone.

(Oh, one more thing: if you click on the photo to view the original on flickr, look closely and you’ll be able to see Derek’s ‘tache in the wild.)

Acuphuncture request your presence

I’d request your presents as well, but perhaps that’s asking a bit much.  Anyway, we’re playing a gig at B Bar this Thursday, the 21st day of August 2008.  Come down.  Buy beer.  Dance.  Or just sit stoney faced and stare at us, it’s what the crowd did last time.  We’re on from 9 and it costs nothing to see us, so it’s credit-crunch friendly too.  And as long as you avoid the Erdinger I’m sure it won’t even affect your productivity on Friday.

The desirability of age

I’m trying to work out if I like “reliced” guitars.  (For those that don’t know, that’s a guitar that has been artificially aged to look like it’s got 60s mojo.)  This ranges from slightly discoloured pickguards and hardware with a patina of rust, through to looking like a previous owner had acid sweat and sandpaper skin.

Why?  Oh, no reason.

Swing To Bop

Adrian recently linked to Swing to Bop, a weblog about developing jazz guitar technique.  I’ll be following this with some interest, because I still just do not sound jazzy enough for my tastes.  I think what Derek once described as “wallpaper be-bop” is something that I’d like to be able to do, then hopefully move past it into something more interesting.  Anyway, I quite liked this video dealing with improvising over major chords; flat 9s and sharp 5s are two notes that I rarely throw in (unless I switch with H-bomb subtlety to a half-whole diminished scale or the harmonic minor; my knowledge of scales is well beyond what I can do tastefully with them), so it has been fun trying to use them a bit more.  I also like the little legato 4th-minor 3rd-major 3rd move, and it’s yet another example of someone avoiding the fourth.  I think I’ve been using the minor pentatonic for so long now that fourths just don’t sound off to me; my new playing mantra is “stay the fuck off the fourth”.  It’s so tempting a note, though… right there, nestled between the third and the fifth… what harm can it do?

Take your pick

I read the post over on Guitritus about getting a whole bag of new plectrums (plectra? Is it Greek?) with envy.  I’ve got a problem with guitar picks: I only like one.  There it is in the photo.  It’s pink and it’s a  millimetre thick and because I’ve had it for about ten years it’s got a weird wear pattern on the end and the logo’s nearly gone so I can barely read who made it but its mine and it’s the only plectrum for me.

Every time I drop it off the back of a badly lit stage I have to spend a horrified few minutes scrabbling in the mess of dust and cabling until I’m joyfully reunited with it.  If I was to have a signature piece of guitar equipment, it would be a plectrum: I’d have my original mapped to micron precision with lasers and recreated exactly, but even then I’d not be happy with the copies and would keep using mine until its worn away to a nub.

Believe me, I’ve tried others, but they’re just not as good.  Not quite the right flexibility, or too thick, or they’ve got funny dimples to aid grip, or (and here’s the catch) they’re just not worn in enough.  I think I need to buy some more, but file the ends down slightly to match what’s happened to my pick.

Seriously, Eric Johnson might complain about the brand of his batteries, but he’s got nothing on me and plectrums.