For The Love Of God (Steve Vai Guitar Cover)

Wrapping Up 2018

The dust has settled on Christmas, and as I write this straining to see the laptop screen over a belly filled to bursting with turkey, chocolate and Bailey's, it's time to say goodbye to 2018 with a look back at a very busy year..

First off, mega thank yous to everyone involved with and who supported this years' TUNEICEF effort – Phil Matthews, Beth Hartshorne, Guilty Pleasures and Dave The Rock Band, along with 13 year old whizkid Daniel Pook who showed us that the future of guitar is in very safe hands, as well of course all my students who worked so hard writing and recording their tracks, and not forgetting Ian and Sharon for letting us use The Beacon again, and of course Matt Chubb for not just contributing his peerless vocals but lending us his PA – without which the whole thing would not have been possible!

So time to look back over a busy year – I posted my planned practice/ recording schedule in January, and have stuck to it as faithfully as possible, covering a variety of themes – chords, arpeggios, pentatonic and diatonic scales and have delved into some weird and wonderful tonalities – the diminished, whole tone, Kumoi and Hirajoshi scales have come under the spotlight, along with inversions and arpeggios stretching all the way to 13^th chords – next year, I'll start altering them (sharpening 5ths, flattening 9ths etc)... that should get spicy.

In terms of repertoire, the big piece has been Paul Gilbert's take on Bach's Prelude & Fugue No. 5 in D Major:

This was a BIG undertaking – without any discernable repetitive structure, this was a case of learn two bars, practice, learn the next two bars, practice, add together, practice... rinse and repeat, for eight months or so. This really stretched my cognitive, let alone technical facility about as far as anything has – so alongside it, I ran the blues classic “Hideaway”, as well as some Satriani and the beautiful SRV ballad “Lenny” as almost light relief. But, I DID manage it!

So next year – Paganini. Caprice No. 24. Oh yes, I'm coming for you.... just as soon as I finish digesting the hundredweight of mince pies I've consumed over the last few days....

In the meantime, what have you been working on this year? And any specific goals for 2019?

And let me leave you with the TUNEICEF album itself – remember, all proceeds straight to UNICEF themselves, so treat yourself!

https://tuneicef.bandcamp.com/album/tuneicef-2018

Useful Stuff No One Tells You #1 - Backing Vocals

Howdy. As some of you know, I usually try and theme my posts in some way to relate in some way to what's currently going on in the world at large.

This is not one of those posts. In fact, this cropped into my head pretty much fully formed the other day when out with the dog and wondering just what the hell I was going to write about this month, and is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series of articles on skills I've had to acquire over the course of my career as a professional musician and teacher - but specifically, skills no one warned me I would need.

The biggest and most glaring of these is singing. Now, an awful lot of people make the assumption that if you can play in instrument, you can automatically sing, too - at least to a halfway presentable standard. After all, music is music, right?

Nuh-uh. Step forward Slash, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Angus Young....... and, um, me. For some people, music is something they love to create and play despite the fact that the most natural, instinctive instrument of all, the one that we are all born with is just a bit on the wonky side. Or in my case, almost entirely defective - I started with almost no range, ability to project, pitch or sustain a note. Some people are born natural singers - I was born with the natural ability to clear a room. Seriously, I have demos from the mid 90s on cassette that are under lock and key because they could be used as blackmail.

Now, this is not a post on how to turn yourself into a great singer - because although I'm a hell of a lot better now, I am not and will never be one - but it is about how to get yourself started as a pretty useful backing vocalist. We often have misconceptions about backing singers, that they're just "singing along" with the lead vocal, but there's a bit more too it than that. Truth is, well arranged vocal harmonies can really lift a band or an arrangement head and shoulders above the competition.

There are plenty of great tutorial books, videos and YouTube channels on vocal technique and I'm not going to delve into that stuff here - breathing exercises, projection, vocal resonance and so on are best explained by proper vocal coaches. What we're going to look at here is the additional theoretical understanding needed to generate the harmonies that can lift a chorus and make it soar.

The first thing to understand are the basic principles of harmony. I'm going to skip through with just the bare bones today for the purposes of time, but we'll start with the chromatic scale (all 12 notes, each one a semitone apart):

A - A#/Bb - B - C - C#/Db - D - D#/Eb - E - F - F#/Gb - G - G#/Ab

Now, as comprehensive as that is, it sounds godawful. Too many notes, too close together. So the next step is the major scale:

Root - tone - 2nd - tone - 3rd - semitone - 4th - tone - 5th - tone - 6th - tone - 7th - semitone - Root

   A                 B                 C#                      D               E                 F#              G#


In Western music, harmony comes from stacking notes separated by 3rd intervals on each other:

A -   4 semitone/ 2 tone (major 3rd) - C# - 3 semitone (minor 3rd) - E

So in this example, if A was the melody note being sung by the lead singer, one backing singer might hit the C# above it, one the E above that (although if the lead singer is female and the backing singers are male, it's probably more feasible to move both the harmony notes down by an octave).

So now you've worked out what you should be singing, the next trick is learning how to actually do it. Pitching a backing vocal, for the uninitiated, can be infuriatingly difficult. The best thing to do, to begin with, is to play your note and then sing it. When you can do that, play the chord and sing your note over it, and when you can mange that, play the melody note and sing your harmony against it. You can also familiarise yourself with the various intervals by playing your chord and singing the root, 3rd and 5th notes separately, this will help train your ear. Be patient - time and practice will get you there.

Hopefully that's got some of you started working on your vocals - backing vocals are an incredibly useful and marketable skill for any musician to have, so get to practising and see you next time!

Jeff's Boogie - Jeff Beck Guitar Cover

In Deep With.. The Whole Tone Scale (+ TUNEICEF plug & update)

Ploughing through the new tasks I'veset myself for this year, September has brought me to the whole tone scale – this is arguably one of the core tonalities, alongside major, minor and chromatic. As it's name suggests, this is a symmetrical scale with each note a whole tone away from the next.

Viewed as a series of intervals, this gives us:

R – tone – 2 – tone – 3 – tone - #4/b5 – b6 – b7

This is a hexatonic (six note) scale combining elements of both major and minor tonalities, and the resulting sound is eerie – very cinematic. Examining it, it's possible to see that this scale has no modes – it's symmetrical nature, with each note a tone apart from every other note, means that no matter where you start it from, you will always have the whole tone structure.

Another curiosity is that there are in fact only two whole tone scales: the E, F#, G#, Bb, C and D whole tones are all exactly the same as each other, as are the F, G, A, B, C# and Eb:

E – tone – F# - tone - G# - tone - Bb – tone – C – tone – D

F# – tone - G# – tone - Bb – tone - C – tone - D – tone – E

G# – tone - Bb – tone - C – tone - D – tone - E – tone – F#

.. and so on.

Viewed from a chordal perspective, there's only one type of chord that really lends itself to the whole tone scale – the augmented. No matter where you start from, you wind up with the pattern:

Root – two tones – 3 – two tones - #5

E – G# - C E augmented

F# - A# - D F# augmented

G# - C – E G# augmented

A# - D – F# A# augmented

C – E – G# C augmented

D- A# - F# D augmented

The symmetrical nature of this scale makes it very easy to map it across the fretboard using a simple movable pattern:

Here using a speedy legato six note pattern:

Played in 3rds:

Sequenced in 3s:

Sequenced in 4s:

This scale is a nice gear to change to when you want something flat out weird, containing major and minor elements, with the unsettling symmetrical elements jarring the listener out of their comfort zone.

TUNEICEF 2018

It's that time of year again – leaves are falling from the trees, the temperatures are beginning to fall.. and my students and I are embarking on the annual charity album! So far we've had a track donated by the fantastic singer/songwriter Phil Matthews (aka The Village: https://www.thevillage.me.uk/ ) and the first student track by Paul Blount is up on our Bandcamp page with a good few more hot on it's heels!

If you want to get involved and help raise funds for UNICEF (not to mention get your hands on a rather tasty little album), check out our Bandcamp page: https://tuneicef.bandcamp.com/album/tuneicef-2018

and our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TUNEICEF/ - like, share, subscribe, and if you've got a track you'd like to contribute then welcome aboard, the more the merrier!

In Deep With.. The Kumoi Pentatonic Scale

Pentatonic scales are hugely versatile creatures, often lending themselves very easily to the fretboard. The minor pentatonic is pretty much every guitarist's first scale for improvising, and it's not normally long before he or she learns the “3 frets back” rule and is able to access the sound of the major pentatonic.

However, that's usually where they leave things – the next step tends to be onto the major scale and modes, learning three note per string ideas, before introducing arpeggios and so on. By this point, pentatonics are usually overlooked and dismissed as “novice stuff”. This is a shame because there are a great many pentatonic scales, particularly those that originate from Oriental cultures, that can access wildly exotic sounds and still be relatively straightforward to play, and this month's Kumoi pentatonic is one of them.

Firstly, it's necessary to pin down exactly what this scale is, as there seems to be some confusion on the internet! The Kumoi, or to give it it's full name, the Hon Kumoi Shiouzhi scale , has an exotic, quintessentially Japanese sound, and is built from the following intervals:

R b2 4 5 b6

In the key of E, that gives the notes of E F A B C (contrast to E G A B D from a regular minor pentatonic scale) – notice the lack of 3^rd, the sinister quality of the sound is down to the b2 and b6 intervals

As always when learning a new scale, a great way to work it in to your regular playing is to take a basic minor pentatonic lick and “Kumoi-ify” it – as I've done here:

Then try it with the “2 bars on, 2 bars off” approach (two bars rhythm, two bars of improvisation, not stopping for mistakes, keeping the rhythm going) – I've found that it suits darker, heavier blues/ rock and metal tunes, and works very well in something like “Voodoo Child” for an off-the-wall psychedelic feel!

Normally, discussions of an exotic scale would end there. But as my readers and students will be aware, I have something of an obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to learning scales – I want to know EVERYTHING this scale can do! So let's begin by looking at it from a modal perspective:

Kumoi:

R b2 4 5 b6

E F A B C

Starting from the F, this gives us:

R 3 #4 5 7

F A B C E – this strongly implies the Lydian mode of the major scale ( R 2 3 #4 5 6 7)

R 2 b3 5 b6

A B C E F – this points to the Aeolian mode (or natural minor scale) – R 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7

R b2 4 b5 b7

B C E F A – this outlines the Locrian mode – R b2 b3 4 b5 b6 b7

R 3 4 6 7

C E F A B – this implies the Ionian mode, or major scale – R 2 3 4 5 6 7

So, play the E Kumoi over an F and you've got yourself a pretty solid Lydian sound, play it over an Am and you'll get an interesting take on A Aelian, and so on.

This brings me to my next topic – chords. We can derive some pretty interesting and idiomatic chord sequences by harmonising this scale in 3rds (or as close as we can to 3rds).

Basic triads contained within the scale:

E A B – Esus4

F A C – F

A C E – Am

B E A – B7sus4 (implied – no 5th)

C E A – C6 (implied – no 5th )

Changing this up to 4 note chords gets us even more fun stuff to play with:

F A C E – Fmaj 7

A B C E – Amadd9

C E B A – C maj 13 (implied – no 5^th)

and my personal favourite:

F B C E – Fmaj7sus#4! Now that's a spicy meatball...

So my next challenge to myself is to write something using this scale... stay tuned!

See you next month for a progress report on this year's #TUNEICEF project, and more!

Lenny - Stevie Ray Vaughan Guitar Cover

Bach Prelude

Taking it up to 11...

Last month was chord month for me, and this time I've been looking at 11^th chord voicings.

A quick recap for those unfamiliar with extended chord voicings – chords are made from notes stacked in intervals of thirds, that is play the root, miss the 2nd, play the 3rd, miss the 4th play the 5th. That gives us a basic three note chord or triad. These chords can be extended using the 7^th, 9^th, 11^th and 13^th intervals (the 9^th is the 2^nd up an octave, similarly, the 11^th is the 4^th and the 13^th is the 6^th, each bumped up an octave).

As always with extended chords, there are many different variations but the three most important are the major, minor and dominant voicings – major will always contain a 3^rd and a 7^th, minor will always contain a b3 and b7, dominant will always contain a 3 and a b7. It's important to bear these rules in mind as we look at the practicalities of voicing these chords on the guitar.

So this gives us three chords to look at:

Maj11 – R 3 5 7 9 11

Min11 – R b3 5 b7 9 11

11 (for dominant chords, we just use the number of the highest chord extension) – R 3 5 b7 9 11

This starts to cause a few problems, as we're now needing six notes in the chord, making for some very unwieldy voicings. Time to trim the fat!

We need a root to base the chord off, so that stays..

We need a 3^rd to define whether the chord is major or minor, so that stays..

The 5^th, however, is the same for major, minor, or dominant, so that can go.

The 7^th stays as it defines whether the chord is major or dominant

The 9^th is the same for major, minor, or dominant, so that can go.

The 11^th is our highest extension, so that stays.

Now we can voice our chord simply R 3 7 11 (major) R b3 b7 11 (minor) R 3 b7 11 (dominant)

Voicing the chord as four note chord means it can be inverted – built from the R, 3, 7, or 11. For example, C11 – R 3 b7 11, C E Bb F can be started from any of its four component notes.

Along the top four strings (D G B E) this will give us voicings of:

E Bb C F

F C E Bb

Bb E F C

C F Bb E

Notice that we've dispensed with the traditional rules of chord inversions – that stuff is for keyboard players who only have one place to play each note and two hands to grab their chords with. We're grabbing clusters of notes that fall under the fingers.

Getting to grips with chord voicings this way is an extremely cool way of mapping out the fretboard and learning which note is where, and for that very reason I'm not going to put fret boxes up here, I want you guys to do the homework! Once you've mapped your chord out on the D-E strings, try it on the middle (A D G B) and low (E A D G) string groups. Then try the minor and major voicings. Then change the key and do it again. Do that for a month, and you'll be hooked on the shimmery, sci fi, haunting ethereal sound of these chords, you'll almost certainly have discovered a few new riff ideas and you'll know the fretboard far more comprehensively than trying to memorise any fretboard map will ever get you!

Have fun – see you next month for the Kumoi Pentatonic...

Beachcomber (Gordon Giltrap Guitar Cover)

#Motivation!

Well, I was hoping to be writing this month's entry basking in the glory if a fairytale victory for a much maligned England squad.. alas it was not to be. But this latest “oh so near” did get me thinking about motivation, and how it relates to our development as musicians.

Right now, the England squad have two ways to view their situation. They can either a) rue a potential victory lost, one that could have propelled them to being only the second England team in history to reach the world cup finals.. what if they'd stayed more on the offensive after the first goal, maybe been able to score a second or at least keep the Croatians too busy defending to equalise? Or b) reflect on the fact that a squad nobody expected much of, which had no “celebrities” of the likes of Beckham and Rooney, was able to pull off their best result in 28 years – longer than most of them have been alive.

How does this relate to us jobbing musicians? Well, a few years ago, I was having a conversation with a drummer friend of mine who was at least a sheet and a half to the wind and bemoaning his lack of commercial success.

“I've been doing this for twenty years and where's it got me?”

Now, this seemed to me to be missing the point somewhat.

“Don't you enjoy it any more?” I asked.

“Yeah, 'course I do, I love it.” he answered.

“So – isn't that the point?”

He shut up after that, I'm pleased to say.

So what connects these two situations? Well, neither the England team or my drummer mate had achieved everything they wanted – winning the World Cup/ fame, fortune, hot and cold running groupies – but both have still managed to accomplish something impressive, 4^th place in the World Cup and a pastime that has given twenty plus years of fulfilment, led to friendships and adventures with people you'd never otherwise have met, not to mention the simple satisfaction of getting good at something (don't tell him, but he is a spectacularly good drummer).

So next time your motivation drops and you wonder why you're bothering – remember, you're not playing music for fame, fortune and glory (and if you are, you're a moron) – you're doing it for yourself. We do what we do while other people sit in front of the TV.

Think about it this way – if you spend an hour practicing and you're 0.001% better at the end of that hour, that's still an improvement. If you spend an hour watching The Kardashians – well, you've spent an hour watching the Kardashians. Compare and contrast.

It's Just One Thing After Another

This month's post comes from a question I was asked after a Dave The Rock Band gig back in 2015 (yep, quick off the mark as always) – I got chatting with one of the security guys after the gig and he revealed that The Final Countdown had always been one of his favourite songs.

“So how long would it take me to learn the solo?” he asked.

Hmm.

You see, the thing is, there are a big list of things you need to know before you can start learning a solo like that. A BIG list.

The solo starts with a flurry of arpeggios tracing the chord sequence of Bm, C# dim (implying A7) and G before moving to a scalic idea around Bm and B blues scale, and a melody slid along the G string following the B natural minor scale. So in order to play this properly, you're going to need to..

Understand what an arpeggio is

Develop the dexterity to play one, and quickly – and the ability to morph the shape to cover major, minor, and diminished chords

Understand and learn both the B natural minor and B Blues scales. You'll also need to map the B natural minor long the G string and master sequencing and legato ideas to very high level for the faster bits

Develop robust and efficient string bending (including harmony bends) and legato techniques (ver fast and accurate hammer ons and pull offs, as well as vibrato and picking.

If you've got ALL THOSE THINGS – then actually, it won't take you that long. When I first learnt it in 2006, it took me about half an hour.

If you haven't got those things though, you're in for a world of pain. It probably is just about possible to learn it note for note from the tab, practicing nothing else, going slowly and building up step by step, but it's going to be an incredibly difficult and frustrating journey, and even if you make it to the end you've learned one guitar solo, with no understanding of the concepts used in it and no ability to connect them up in different ways to do anything else (like, for instance, play a different solo... or the non-solo parts of the song...)

A good teacher puts these pieces in order and lays them out before the student in the right way, so that each piece connects to the next in a logical, clear and understandable manner, so that the learning curve is as shallow as possible and the frustration level is minimised. And so that by the time you have cracked this solo, you understand completely what you're doing and have also learned a great many other songs as well as the skills to teach yourself many, many more.

In truth, there is very little original material I teach my students that isn't available in places like YouTube, Ultimate Guitar, magazines such as Guitar Techniques and so on. The problem the student has is working out how to interpret the information, apply it and figure out how you can use it.

Another example – a few years back, a students signed up for guitar lessons at school at the start of September, wanting to learn to play “Eruption” for the school talent show.

In two months.

With no previous experience.

Riiiiiiight.

In the end I was able to compromise with him – Van Halen has frequently named Eric Clapton as one of his biggest influences. Eric Clapto, in his turn, named BB King as one of his. Now, for all his stunning deftness of touch and phrasing, BB was not a technical player. With hard work and application of major and minor pentatonics, you can get close to a passable BB-style solo in a couple of months and gradually build your technique from there.

Moral of the story – with the right skillset, you can learn anything you want. But it takes time and guidance to get that skillset. I accomplished quite a lot in my first couple of years teaching myself, but it wasn't until I did my Access To Music course and met my guitar Yoda (Brian Thomson, hallowed be his name) that I really started to understand what I was doing. The fog receded, I wasn't groping blindly in the dark any more, and everything started to make sense. Suddenly, I was in control

Summer Song (Joe Satriani Guitar Cover)

In Deep With - The Diminished Scale (s)

So we're well into 2018 now and that means following my practice plan as laid out in my New Year's Resolution post back in January.. and that has led me to the diminished scale!

Now, there are two types of diminished scale, and for most of this blog post we'll be focusing on the half step/ whole step diminished – this is exacty as it sounds, a scale put together from a repeating pattern of semitone and tone intervals. Looking at it from the A root note, we wind up with this:

A – semitone – Bb – tone -C – semitone – Db – tone – Eb semitone – E – tone – F# - semitone – G – tone – A

Viewed from the traditional perspective of root, 2^nd, 3^rd etc., we get this:

R – b2 – b3 – b4 – b5 – 5 – 6 – b7.

Now, this actually makes for a very usable set of notes. For blues players, you have the b7, b5 and 5, as well as the b3, aaaand... the b4. Now the b4 is effectively the major 3^rd, so that gives the interplay between minor and major 3^rd which is so crucial for blues, jazz, rock, country etc. This makes it really a quite effective substitute for the blues scale (R-b3-4-b5-5-b7), and the minor pentatonic (R-b3-4-5-b7).

Not only that, but the presence of the 6^th and b7 gives you shades of the Dorian mode, the b2 and b3 gives you elements of the Phrygian, and the b5 can imply Locrian.

Moving to a chordal perspective, this scale yields up a hell of a lot of triads:

A C Eb – A diminished

A C E – A minor

Bb Db E – Bb diminished

C Eb Gb – C diminished

C Eb G – C minor

Db E G - Db diminished

Eb Gb A – Eb diminished

Eb Gb Bb – Eb minor

Eb G Bb – Eb

E G Bb – E diminished

F# A C – F# diminished

F# Bb Db – F#

G Bb Db - G diminished

And when we extend out to 7ths, the palette gets even bigger:

A C Eb Gb – A diminished 7

A C Eb G – Am7b5

A C E G – Am7

Bb Db E G – Bb diminished 7

C Eb Gb A – C diminished 7

C Eb Gb Bb – Cm7b5

C Eb G Bb – Cm7

Db E G Bb – Db diminished 7

Eb Gb A C – Eb diminished 7

Eb Gb A Db - Ebm7b5

Eb Gb Bb Db – Ebm7

Eb G Bb Db – Eb7

E G Bb Db – E diminished 7

F# A C Eb – F# diminished 7

F# A C E – F#m7b5

F# A C# E – F#m7

F# A# C# E – F#7

G Bb Db E – G diminished 7

In terms of modes, the symmetrical nature of the diminished scale means there are only two – the half/ whole and the whole/ half, and each contains the other – for example, Bb whole/ half is contained within A half/ whole. But this symmetry also means something else – A half/ whole also contains C, Eb and Gb half/ whole scales and Bb, Db, E and G whole/ half.

A half / whole: A Bb C Db Eb E Gb G

C half / whole: C Db Eb E Gb G A Bb

Eb half / whole: Eb E Gb G A Bb C Db

Gb half / whole: Gb G A Bb C Db Eb E

So A diminished can therefore be a good fit over C Blues, Eb Dorian and Gb minor pentatonic!

Obviously it's not as simple as slapping a diminished scale over the top and hoping for the best, so in the meantime here are some practice exercises to familiarise yourself with this scale and listen to Robben Ford, Allan Holdsworth and Larry Carlton (among others) to hear how these players get the best out of what at first seems a dauntingly complex scale. But remember, like everything in music – it's simpler than you think!

Dynamics - The Missing Piece

So you're watching your fingers fly all around the fretboard, hammering and pulling and trilling and bending like there's no tomorrow.. but something's missing. Something intangible, something hard to define. You know it's there but you can't quite put your finger on it...

Go back and read that first paragraph again. First, read it with a flat monotonous voice, like a text-to-speech machine. All the words are there but it's dreary as hell to listen to and a great deal of the meaning is lost, simply because it's much more difficult for the brain to process the information when every syllable of every word is given equal weight. It's harder to group sentences and phrases and therefore harder to establish meaning and empathy.

Now read it again, this time in the manner of Alan Rickman playing a villain:

“Something..... intangible... something – hard to define”

Which one has the most impact? Well, every listener is different, but for the vast majority.. well, put it this way, there's a reason Alan Rickman made it big.

Now, let's consider how we can apply this lesson to guitar playing. Any piece of music, a melody, a solo, a chord sequence – they all tell a story. That story should not be told in a monotone. Consider the story you're trying to tell – the ascending sequence pattern, should that build in volume, climaxing with a soaring bend picked hard and given all the vibrato you can give it? How about that delicate introductory phrase, shouldn't you try and pick lightly, give yourself somewhere to go?

A great example of this is the classic B.B. King track, “Need Your Love So Bad”. The famous versions of this are (ironically) covers by Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, and a cover 30 years later by the late great Gary Moore. Listen to both – although the notes are the same, Peter Green's delicate articulation expresses a vulnerability.. as if his notes have turned up to the party and said quietly “Does anyone mind if I sit here? I won't be any trouble..” . By contrast, Gary Moore's much more confident articulation strides up next to the prettiest girl in the room and says “Get yer coat love, you've pulled”.

The notes themselves are the same. On a tablature page, they would be displayed identically. And yet, the difference when you hear it is huge.

Standard music notation provides some hints, with phrases graded in f (forte – loud), p (piano – queiet), multiples thereof, and mp (mezzo piano – medium quiet) and mf (mezzo forte – medium loud), as well as indications for crescendo (get louder) and diminuendo (get quieter). Studying classical guitar gave me an unparalleled insight into these aspects if reading music, but the component that is absolutely essential is the ear – listening critically to what you're doing and asking yourself, does it match my intent?

So for this month, consider the difference that dynamics can makes and practice your phrases as a whisper, a shout, and everything in between – you'll be amazed the difference this can make!

Hide Away - Eric Clapton/ John Mayall's Bluesbreakers Guitar Cover

Your Friendly Local Music Store

Let's be honest, we're always looking for a bargain when we're out shopping. And this is especially true when we're put shopping for musical instruments. There seems to be some primal impulse preprogrammed into us that because music is fun, it should somehow be free...

Anyway, the cutthroat business of capitalism is nowhere more apparent than in the music retail business, with online stores, Ebay outlets, Amazon etc all getting in on the act. With all this, it can be hard for a local bricks and mortar outfit to compete – especially given that many smaller businesses tend to be run by people who are musicians first and businessmen a distant fifth.

They can be awkward to get too – especially given parking restrictions in towns and cities. They can rarely match the prices of the online only sellers (because business rates, running costs, employees salaries). They may not have the product you're looking for. They can and will (occasionally) mess stuff up.

And yet...

I've lost count of the number of times I've had students come to me with instruments bought unseen online with bent necks, appallingly unplayable actions, intonation out of whack past the fifth fret. I even made the mistake myself in my early days, buying a secondhand guitar from the Free Ads section of the papers (the 90s...) with a Floyd Rose tremolo system, which for those of you not au fait with this piece of design is a complicated and technical design 100% NOT for beginner guitarists like I was.

The problem is, with any specialist purchase, it's essential to know what questions to ask. If you don't know about guitars, why would you ask about “action”, “intonation” - you would just assume it works, the same as if you were buying a laptop. But guitars aren't like that. They are dynamic systems, working in balance, with a lot that can go wrong if they've been poorly made.

This is where your Friendly Local Music Shop steps in. These guys are musos through and through, experienced and well versed in what to look for. They don't stock crap, because all that generates is dissatisfied customers who know where to come if they have an axe to grind. So right away, that's one level of protection.

Secondly (and this is a big one), you try an instrument, you like it – you walk out of the shop with that same instrument. That is a BIG plus – not one like it, not one similar but in a different finish, you walk out with that very instrument. That is a big, big deal, even in these days of CNC computer controlled mass production.

Lastly – when you need that last minute pick/ battery/ set of strings/ reed/ replacement part... where are you going to go? Who you gonna call? The internet, where it takes three or four days to get something out to you, and even then it may be the wrong thing (because they made a mistake, or you made a mistake, didn't quite know the term for what you wanted...).. Without your support, these places will fold. And they won't be there when you need them. Something to thing about.

By the way, our FLMS is Just Music, located on 42 Leicester Road, telephone number 01509 234 881. You're welcome.

Hide Away

No Fear

How does Bob Marley like his doughnuts? With jammin'.

Right, having thus established the baseline for this month's post, things can only improve...

I've been pushing improvisation as big deal with by late-beginner early-intermediate students a lot so far this year, and there's a strong reason why. Thinking back to the early stages of my journey as a guitarist, it really was at first a case of following the tab (bought from a guitar magazine – no internets back in the 90's) and trying to get it to sound vaguely like the song. If I didn't know the song, it was a case of searching for it on cassette (and for those of you young enough to think cassettes are retro-cool, I was there and they were NOT, awful things) or just guessing. At this stage I wasn't really a musician because I had no understanding of what I was doing, I was just following what the book or magazine said.

However, curiosity would periodically get the better of me, and I would take a chord sequence and try putting them in a different order, take a riff I 'd learned (or thought I'd learned) and change the rhythm, fiddle with the chords and find suspensions (not that I knew what they were at that point) – change things around a little to come up with something that was at least partly original.

Motivated by the fact that I found stuff I liked the sound of, I started noticing patterns in the tabs I was trying to pick out – things like the faithful minor pentatonic, and how it would move around the fretboard to match the key of the song (not that I really understood what that was at this point). And I started to try learning the solos – the first one I really got stuck into was “Live Forever” by Oasis, Noel Gallagher's soaring major pentatonic phrases seemed enticingly close but frustratingly out of reach. So I would try and play his solo, and I'd fail. So I'd make a rough stab at making one up using similar notes (which I would later come to realise was the G major pentatonic, although at that point I hadn't really grasped how E minor and G major pentatonic were the same thing seen from different angles).

Here's the thing though – by making up my own solo, I started getting better. MUCH better. Jamming along to first Oasis and Nirvana, then discovering the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin the Eagles Hendrix, Guns 'n' Roses – I began to get a feel for how to use the simple minor and major pentatonic patterns. I discovered the three-frets-back hack (and subsequently had it confirmed by a guitar magazine article). I discovered that even if I couldn't match a Slash solo note for note (and I couldn't), I could still fill the space with something that sounded OK. I developed an intuitive feel for rhythm. I got good enough, in fact, to be accepted for the Access To Music course within 18 months of getting started – and from there, things would never be the same again.

But what got me started? Jamming along. Making mistakes and gradually figuring out ways not to make them again. Taking the riffs and licks of my heroes and bastardising them to match my ability level. What is heartbreaking and frustrating for me as a teacher now is to see students who can't or won't make the leap to just playing, who forget that the process of an instrument is a learning curve- which by definition involves making mistakes because those mistakes themselves are an essential part of the learning process.

So if you're sitting there listening to a song and thinking “I'd love to be able to play that”, then just try – there are only twelve notes, pick a start note that sounds about right and slap a pentatonic pattern across it. You may have to tweak some notes, avoid some others, but it gets you started and that's what's so crucial.

So till next month, good luck and happy jamming!

2018 Resolutions!

Season's greetings one and all, hope you all had a fantastic couple of weeks break from the real world, lying on the sofa eating and drinking anything and everything that came within range - certainly that's my action plan for the festive season.

So, now we've made it through a whole year of Trump without World War 3 breaking out it's time to start thinking ahead for 2018 and a whole new set of New Year's resolutions. Regular readers of this blog may recall this time last year I laid out a practice plan to cover the whole of 2017 - and staying true to my word, I stuck to it.

The plan covered four key areas - pentatonic scales, diatonic scales, chords and arpeggios - and whilst I'm not sure my technique and fretboard knowledge has been revolutionised, it's been fun making new connections and mapping out new patterns. I've even followed through on my "find something you think you could ever play and learn it" idea - I certainly never thought I'd be able to play anything by the otherworldly talent of Allan Holdsworth, but there we go.

So for 2018? Let's try this:

January – Major scale and modes. 3 octaves, played in 3rds, sequenced in 3s and 4s. Pieces - Freddie King "Hideaway", Bach 

February – Arpeggios (triads). 3 octaves, played in 3rds, sequenced etc. Piece – Bach continued, Satriani, “Summer Song”

March – Chords (triads and inversions, closed and open voicings). Piece – TBC

April – Minor Pentatonic & Modes. Piece TBC

May – Half step /Whole step diminished scale. Piece TBC

June – Arpeggios – 11ths. Piece TBC

July – Chords (11ths and inversions, closed and open voicings). Piece TBC

August – Pentatonics (Kumoi R b2 4 5 b6). Piece TBC

September – Whole Tone scale. Piece TBC

October – Arpeggios – 13ths. Piece TBC

November - Chords (13ths and inversions, closed and open voicings). Piece TBC

December – Pentatonics (Hirajoshi R 2 b3 5 6). Piece TBC.

So as you can see, this plan contains a nice mix of the regular core skills - triads, major scale, minor pentatonic - with a good chunk of yummy new things to try out. As a firm believer in the maxim that "if you want to teach, you have to do", this plan should help keep me fresh and find a whole host of new and interesting treats to give to/ inflict upon (delete as appropriate) my students!