To continue with the fingerpicking theme of the last week’s posts here`s a great video of Doc Watson playing Deep River Blues in `91. If you enjoy fingerpicking and Piedmont styles of guitar there are some great close angle camera shots here that might help you with both right and left hands. Look out for some of the string damping, the bass runs and how Doc here uses his left hand pinkie (little) finger to hammer on and pull off (around 1.25 to 1.30). It goes to show that seomtimes simplicity is the key to great playing.
Author Archives: Jamorama
Bill Frisell – glacial effects
In a recent post featuring Adrian Legg I slyly suggested that Bill Frisell was definitely another idiosycratic guitarist to look for in your listening research. Bill has always been an exponent of an healthy array of effects – most notably delay, reverb, chorus and more rarely pitch shifters to create unique tones and sounds; a uniquity exaggerated by his jazz leanings combined with clean sustain and an emotionally oblique sense of melody.
He does however ensure that his use of processing, or effects, don`t colour his sound in a way that might obscure the emotional intent or message. and seems incapable of descending into gratuitous, meaningless affectation. Bill often sounds as if his notes are shards of ice slowly melting as they descend through warmer water and the overall impression is of a glacial and ambivalently jazz-blues fusion. It`s a novel approach to sound, feel and melody that conjures up a sense of constant ideation. Use it…
Tesla Birdfish & Niwa
The tesla birdfish sounds like the the country cousin of God`s oddest mix up the Duck Billed Platypus. The egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it but there is no reason to be baffled by either the birdfish, the niwa, the tesla or the prodigy for these are a series of guitars hand built by Ulrich Teuffel and they are beautiful machines where form and function precisely and naturally intertwine.
The Handle and Adrian Legg – Modern guitar
If you listen to most of the guitar players from the last 50 years you`ll agree that there`s nothing quite like the sound of a strat’ bridge pick up with the tone rolled off through some burning vacuum tubes. Ask Eric.
Can there be any more?
Well, in a world that’s ultimately soaked and aged in the sinlge malt, tried and trusted, eulogised traditions and techniques of the cannon of popular guitar music, recording and performance then the answer must be a resounding “No!”.
Some artists (Jack White) go to great lengths to take their modern song writing performance and bathe it in the holy waters of yesteryear with a penchant for vintage valve amplifiers, 2 and a quarter inch tape, leslie cabinets, and even rusty old strings. Wouldn`t you want to play with some of Hubert’s rusty old castaways from the Wolf Days?
Anyway if you’re not neck deep in the sand and you fancy embracing something a little more modern than maybe designer Peter Solomon’s cutting edge Handle might grab ya. With a single body of carbon fibre “its mono-chassis construction favors direct transmission of acoustic vibrations without sound dampening nor loss. The entire guitar is hollow sectioned, creating a resonance chamber similar to that of a semi-acoustic guitar”.
17th Century Schizoid Man II – updated
In the previous post I took a rather circuitous journey from the lute through to the Chapman stick – a lute-like modern fret based instrument that occupies a unique space in between the guitar , the lute and the piano. If you have ever wondered why the mathematical complexities of a 6 string guitar account for the 3rd string anomaly then here’s Bob Chapman’s illumination upon the matter – it`s all about playing in keys…
17th Century Schizoid Man I
The lute’s strings are arranged in courses of two strings each with the highest-pitched course usually consists of only a single string. An 8-course Renaissance lute will usually have 15 strings, and a 13-course Baroque lute will have 24.
If you listen carefully to the lesser known songs on albums by Cream you will hear the classical training of maestro Jack Bruce evident in passages redolent of the Bream Consort above.
Nile Rodgers, Hip Hop, Electro
Aggregators, connectors , samplers, grooves, licks and threads! What does it all mean. Well, here at last its the post we`ve all been waiting for. It`s the behemoth of influential guitar-production genius that is Nile Rodgers!
I`ve previously mentioned the sheer genius of the Sesame Street Band! Well NIle started off there when he was a teenager, moving to the house band at the Apollo theatre – he was always destined for great things. IN the mid 70`s being black meant Nile struggled to get a deal playing rock but in 1977 he put together the band Chic. The songs “Everybody Dance,” “Le Freak,” and “Good Times” are some of the most sampled records EVER and have formed the scratching backbone of a limitless number of electro, breakdance and hip-hop records. If you`re hearing a DJ scratching and the hook sounds familiar it`s most likely something from Nile`s band Chic.
Yeah! The original Hip Hop opus “Rapper’s Delight” by Grand Master Flash and “Another One Bites the Dust” by rock megalith Queen are built on samples lifted from Nile`s Good Times. To say that Rodger’s guitar prowess & playing was understatedly, groovy, tight, and precise would be down playing it somewhat and to say that his production skills were`nt astronomical would be madness.
Girls Guitars
Being a lazy, good for nothing, low down, dirty, blagger will never get you anywhere on the guitar Lee. But it does get you first prize in the creative letter writing competition and free access to the chord book.
Sound like Clapton- updated
What I really wanted to focus upon today was the great offering of idiosyncratic guitars over at DiPinto`s Vintage Inventory, and boy have they got some sure-fire stuff for your guitar playing delectation, as well as some fantastic amplification and keyboards from the days of yore. What`s especially great amongst this set of old gems […]
Never Trust a Man with Egg on His Face -updated
Are Radiohead the new Bob Dylan…what? Is Banksy the New Dali? Are there Space Invaders in my cereal? How can this happen? If you were born after about 1975 bad luck. You really have missed out on alot. But good luck too – we live in a almost completely free world. So keep rockin’ in […]