Literary Soloing

From the GuitarPlayer.com post, 99 Ways to Play Better:

“Think of a guitar solo as a paragraph. You need a clear beginning, a middle, and an end. Look at musical phrases like sentences, and make sure you break them up using punctuation—or space. You pause naturally when conversing, right? If you don’t, you’ll bore the listener. The same thing will happen with your audience if your solo is one dimensional. You’ll wear them out and lose their attention.” —Tom Principato

On Kenny Burrell

“Kenny Burrell that’s the sound I’m looking for.” – Jimi Hendrix

“There is no finer guitarist than Kenny Burrell” – George Benson

“Kenny Burrell is a great musician and his music has helped to make me what I am today.” – Stevie Wonder

“Kenny Burrell is the grand master of jazz guitar.” – Dizzy Gillespie

“Kenny Burrell is overall the greatest guitarist in the world and he’s my favorite.” – B.B. King

I strongly urge you to check out this jazz guitar legend. Here is an Anywhere.fm playlist of some great Kenny Burrell tracks.

On Guitars and Nature

An acoustic guitar is made of wood–a raw material wrought by a plant after decades of patient growth. Various types of trees yield various types of wood, and each type of wood yields a different tone when incorporated into a guitar’s construction. Maple top on mahogany causes a different resonance than rosewood on swamp ash. It’s the timbre of timber.

There is also the visual nature of the timber to consider: the swooping grains and reddish golden brown variances. And a quick whiff of the “sound hole” will claim another sense to overwhelm. An acoustic guitar entirely subject to the personality of the wood used in its creation, and can be a total sensory experience.

But there is another element to the instrument as well: the metal. Metal, the kind used to create a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, is intensely man-made. The tuning knobs are chromed, the frets are hammered, and the strings, as their names suggests, are made of steel. Steel is the alloy that has enabled the construction of skyscrapers and bridges, and its prevalence is the surest indicator of economic progress. Steel is a metal forged by fire and implemented by machine.

But together, wood and steel create something sublime and entirely representative of the human experience. Metal and wood. Man and Nature. Rather than being separate elements, in the form of a guitar they both work toward the same goal of producing music. And music is nature’s sound filtered through human creativity.

Nowadays it seems that man is in constant conflict with the natural world, struggling desperately to carve out a place in it with cement and girders. I like to think that the guitar is a glimpse of what can happen when that struggle ceases…

Deep Breaths

Your breathing is either part of the music, or it interrupts the music. – Andrew Spang

Music to me is just like breathing. I have to have it. It’s part of me. – Ray Charles

Music has to breathe and sweat. – James Brown

Music has to breathe. Well, what does that mean exactly? On the surface it sounds like pretentious meaninglessness, yet music students the world over will hear this from their instructors, no matter what instrument they play.

Violinists, pianists, and guitarists hear it just as frequently as flutists, trombonists, and trumpeters… if not moreso. While the latter set of brass and woodwind players are constantly reminded of the breath required to make music, string instrument musicians are less likely to realize its importance. But a music’s breath is crucial to every musician playing any instrument.

I’ll show you what I mean. Take this first clip of John Coltrane playing the song “Naima” from his seminal album Giant Steps. Notice how frequently he takes breaths. He has to!:

Now check out Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Lenny.” When he gets to his soloing, around 1:20, notice that his bursts of notes are always followed by pauses, if only slightly. If you imagine singing the notes he’s playing, you’ll notice that his pauses fall comfortably in the places where you would want to take a breath.

Listen to the solos of your favorite artists, and see if you can pick out the “breaths.” A virtuosic flurry of notes may sound impressive, but if the music’s not breathing then it’s choking your ears. For further reading, check out this method that doctors devised to treat breath shortness in their patients.

On Guitars and Women

The hips of a guitar transfix the eyes of boys almost as completely as the hips of a woman. Even female guitarists the world over can attest to the pleasures of the physical flow of a well-made instrument. Even the piano, which most agree to be the world’s most popular instrument (guitar is usually considered 2nd) features a sensual curvature to its design. So why was the guitar designed to evoke a female figure?

Realists will explain that the curve of an acoustic guitar allows it to be cradled comfortably on the thigh of the musician. Fair enough. But it still doesn’t explain why the proportions are consistent with the human anatomy. Notice that the top pair of curves in the picture here are smaller than the lower curves, just as it is on a woman’s body. Ralph Denyer, in his book The Guitar Handbook (in a curiously titled section titled “The anatomy of the acoustic guitar”), explains that the shape of an acoustic guitar’s “soundbox” amplifies the sound of the vibrating strings. The question presses on: why is the female figure the ideal shape for this acoustic amplification?

The different parts of an acoustic guitar are even designated with names like “waist,” “back,” and “rib.” Symbolism can be drawn from this idea. The distinctly Freudian neck of the guitar is the decidedly “masculine” part of the instrument, which pairs with the female “body” to give birth to sound. Music. This could be what draws poets, adolescents, and hopeless romantics to the instrument. Not just the ease of its portability, but the subconscious sexuality and romance at work when a guitar is used to create music. The idea of instinctively using music as a metaphor for existence is not a new concept. Look no further than Pythagoras’ notion of musica universalis–the so-called “music of the spheres.”

The image of a guitar seems to get its power from its feminine form. It is a form ideally suited for the creation of both life and music.

Gibson Les Paul Robot

What you’re looking at is the Gibson Les Paul Robot, the automatic transmission of instuments: The guitar tunes itself. You can read some more about it here.

Inevitably, this will lead to a debate of the Pro Tools kind. Is autotuning killing musicianship? Perhaps. However, unlike vocal autotuning, a studio trick that uses computers to ensure that all notes are in tune, this feature simply fixes a problem that guitars themselves have always had. It’s an improvement that allows guitarists to focus on playing, letting them worry less about the mechanical shortcomings of their instrument. Of course, you’ll still need the chops to play the damn thing…

BUT, and here’s the rub, this feature also relieves you of the need to really listen. Tuning a guitar is a constant task–the strings are always in flux, ebbing and flowing in and out of tune, and you need to keep the sound in check at all times. This can be a hassle, especially if your axe drops out of tune in front of a live audience. But knowing how to tune, and knowing what out-of-tune sounds like, inevitably affects your playing on the whole. It’s like drawing a landscape as opposed to photgraphing it–drawing it requires you to see the scene better. And, by seeing better, your eye is more finely tuned to the nuances of the thing you’re looking at.

Of course, for many musicians, tuning is a hassle. It’s understandable. Why bother with getting the damn thing in tune, when all you really want to do is play?! Like automatic transmission vs manual, it becomes a question of how much you care about nuance. Do you want to “feel” the car and enjoy the subtleties of the ride, or do you want to get from point A to B?

Both are respectable preferences, and now guitarists have a similar choice: Enjoy the experience of listening to your guitar and adjusting its settings by hand, or get right to playing music?