Leo Kottke's "Vaseline Machine Gun"

Finding this on Youtube kinda blew my fucking mind, because this footage right here is exactly how I got introduced by Kottke. The sound and picture here are so gloriously muddy and dark I honestly wonder if it wasn't rendered from the very same VHS tape that my Pops had...John Fahey and Steely Dan were on it, too, I remember, just a primitive, deck-dubbed video mixtape of old live footage that was getting re-run on the oddball Canadian stations we picked up in Vermont. And, of course, good old public television: Austin City Limits and Sessions at West 54th were a staple of my early music education. I loved my father's massive library of vinyl, to be sure, but nothing grabs the young imagination like them moving pictures.

When I was first sitting down trying to emulate what I saw here, I was playing a Silvertone with a badly replaced neck and I didn't even know how to tune the thing. I reckon all I manged to do was cultivate some early carpal tunnel and annoy the living fuck out of my poor Dad.

If you'd like to attempt the monster, here's some dubious tabulature -- a lot of accurate notes, though, so a good foundation to build on.

The Lost Legacy of Daniel Hecht

The sole reason I know about Daniel Hecht is because he was an old friend of my stepfather. Growing up, I'd been to his house for dinner and I'd seen strange black & white photographs of Daniel looking very much like a cross between a model and a rock star, and then there was that thing...

I actually spent some time playing around with the monstrous hydraulic "custom capo" system you see in that video. It had grown bigger since this video was shot. It was also no longer attached to a guitar and I had no context whatsoever -- as best I understood it, the device was a crude prototype of a robot hand. "Robot Hands" was something I could definitely get with at the time...two hand tapping routines and open chord voicings, not so much.

At his model/rockstar peak, Daniel Hecht was signed to Windham Hill records and leading the vanguard of the "New Age" movement and the steel string renaissance underway in those days. He also played a Somogyi guitar, which cost more than most houses even then. He released three albums then vanished from the scene, a disappearing act that reality could never full adjust for. Today he's basically unknown and I was stunned to find actual video evidence of his existence on The Youtubes. It made something pretty clear to me: this is history that needs to be documented. I aim to do exactly that. Expect to see an interview with the man here in the next few weeks.

Djelimady Tounkara's Sigui

It was when I first became obsessed with the music of Mali that I realized how little information is actually available online. Despite the hype, the World Wide Web remains mostly advertising copy in English, and the only places you can really see multicultural globalization at work are porn sites. If you want to seek out meaningful facts about other cultures and continents, your best bet remains the local library in 2012. Even then: Slim Pickens.

When it comes to African music, that tide has been turning slowly over the past 20 years, thanks in large part to the work of musicians like Ry Cooder, Bela Fleck, or Bill Frissel -- all of whom are white, established musicians with a spotlight to share. Music critics are so far incapable of taking in the music without reflexively comparing it to Mississippi blues (or even, bizarrely, Techno) and so the artists remain in the exotic top shelf of World Music, where CD purchases are a cultural signifier, intended to be seen not heard.

And, well, shucks. That's the ecosystem you get when your culture is less than an inch deep, and at least the money pipeline keeps Vieux Farka Toure and Tinariwen touring in the US. At the end of the day, I'm grateful that it's fashionable to simulate an appreciation for African music. There's a lot of money in Faking It.

Bill Frisell, of course, is anything but. A musician of remarkable range, he's a seamless fit here. He's also unafraid to step out and make the song his own, and the result is probably the best rendition of Sigui this cracker has ever heard. The drummer is especially insane, his dynamics and beat juggling had me rewinding at a half-dozen points when I first watched this. (There is also a lesson to be appreciated in how attentive the violin player is: tuned in like a fucking hawk. Dig it. Her responsiveness is pure Bruce Lee, you won't see it at first.)

My introduction to the unparalleled sound of Djeimady Tounkara came through this Super Rail Band track, Kongo Sigui. I was old enough to recognize he was taking full advantage of the slapback delay in that beautiful & slippery intro, but his articulation and behind-the-beat phrasing still amazed me.



At the time I was really studying the Super Rail Band catalog, because they're one of the finest examples of Mali compositional theory for a kid raised on rock to wrap his head around. These are big-band, electric-amp arrangements of traditional melodies, bridging the gap between a Saturday night hotel bar and the ritual celebration of Mande music. They also fucking rock.

I later found out that Djeimady is even more amazing on the acoustic guitar when a good friend & mentor passed me a burned CD of Big String Theory, which approximately melted my skull.



It was some of the most geometrically perfect music I'd ever heard, a sweet spot between classical and folk and the aching high notes of the Qawwali Arabic devotional jams I'd been into for a few years prior.

It was also Bajourou that first gave me a taste for the fact this is Desert music. (Side note: if you haven't already, check out this classic David Byrne lecture on Architecture in Music. There's always a stage.)

Which brings us back around to what, exactly, a "Sigui" is. The name refers to a Dogon ritual that's practiced once every 60 years, involves three months of purification and preparation, and gets conducted entirely in a secret language that remains forbidden outside of the chosen few who are charged with perpetuating this tradition. This is a pattern you will find everywhere once you dig into Mali music -- these waters run deep.

It may be an academic point, but I want to clarify that the Dogon are not "the" indigenous peoples of Mali. This is something you see repeated a great deal, especially in connection with the legends of Sirius and the Nommo. The Dogon are themselves the product of geography, with a history shaped by the incredible Bandiagara Enscarpment which kept them separate from the Mande and Songhai empires that shaped the rest of Mali.



I'll do us both a considerable favor and not even pretend to summarize or explain the mythosphere at work here. Just listen. That's Oumou Sangare in a Sigui context...and here's Oumou Sangare doing trip hop in a London studio. The next Sigui comes around in 2027. Here's a toast to both of us being around for it.



Related: Guitar Atlas: Africa, by Banning Eyre

The Nommo will be back eventually.

Wes Montgomery - "Impressions" Live in '65

For my meager money, Wes Montgomery was one of the all-time greatest artists to touch the fretboard. This live footage is a particularly tasty slice of work, and something I'd never seen until this evening.

The thumb technique is incredible. His attack is so casual and his playing is so accurate that the actual notes seem to become invisible even when the camera is directly centered on his right hand. For further reading, here's a long-form article I was obsessing over many years ago: Wes Montgomery Unedited, presented here courtesy of the Internet Archive's very awesome Wayback Machine.

"Game of Thrones" as Arrangement (& Drill)

Pretty sexy. Here's an excellent tab arrangement to get you started on your own version. Ramin Djawadi sold HBO a polished gem. The chord progression is a tight piece of work, simple and effective and fun on guitar, especially that when that G minor opens up. Trying to work out arpeggios led to mapping out the melody all over the fretboard. I've been on a "no open strings" kick lately, so here's the sequence I practice lately - this is the opening progression: C min, G min, A#, F min. These are good shapes for a pinky workout.



Now, here's that same sequence worked out as a practice drill to develop fluid fret jumping, laid out as 2 string phrases, thus it's deliberately hard to play. You'll clearly see the basic substitutions I've done to shift the notes from the D to the A string. Here's the basic concept, for that same chord progression:



Getting the Fearless Flying Pinky down takes a lot of patience. Practice the fret jumps with every finger, of course, not just the 4th one: each finger brings a different set of available positions once you've landed. Give yourself time and space to get it down right. Make sure you're visualizing the run as a single object instead of a "low section" and a separate high note you need to worry about. To make this exercise even more diabolical (and educational) you can flesh it out on every 2 string combination. Here's the C minor - this is the chord the theme opens up on, so you'll get ample opportunity to try this out:



So all in all, that's 5 versions of the same 4 note phrase. (string combos: EA, AD, DG, GB, BE) Walk that back down and you've got an even 8 bars of C minor, despite the fact your hands will be flying all over the neck the whole time.

This kind of OCD level iteration is more than just another finger strength exercise, though. Taking a full inventory of the available options a chord progression presents is an essential first step towards doing an arrangement (or composition) -- figuring out where reliable shortcuts and happy accidents give you the space to make the song yours. Although it's time-consuming and about as fun as algebra homework, I've been filling out pages of notebook like this for all kinds of songs I'm obsessed with, like Oltremare, Canon in D, or Blue in Green. This kind of detail gives me a roadmap to practice and improvise, and keeps me fluent with the theory behind everything I play. Amen.

Thoughts On Translating "Oltremare" | Part 1

Clearly it was fate: I woke up on a friends couch at 4 am and this was playing on TV. I've been listening to it every day since then.

Ludovico Einaudi was, like most of the 7 billion human beings on Earth today, unknown to me. Since this fortuitous accident, I've been enjoying his work a great deal. It's all solo piano, very much in the vein of George Winston, toeing the line between soothing and haunting. Out of everything I've heard so far, the opening five minutes of Oltremare remains my favorite.



I have been picking the piece apart slowly over the past week, working it out as an arrangement for guitar and bass. I started out attempting my favorite passages by ear, with typically mixed results. When I first tried "ear training" courses back in high school, I quickly found out I have a pronounced blind spot of sorts: my ears have difficulty distinguishing A from B. (To be precise, odds are my ears themselves work fine, and the real problem is with the cottage cheese wiring of my auditory nervous system.) It's a problem but it could be worse, and I'm betting continued training will end it this year.

The defining breakthrough, predictably enough, was being hipped to the fact there's published sheet music for all of Einaudi's albums. Since then, it's been a messy and illiterate process of translating from standard notation into that bastardized language of the fretboard, tabulature. For the most part, this has felt more like a puzzle game than a musical exercise so far, but I found an excellent visualization tool...



Or, taking a more lateral view...



I had been approaching the piece with the guitar in standard tuning, but last night I cracked open the Celtic-sounding passage that starts at around the 1:15 mark and there it was: a low sonorous D, staring me in the face. I love to play around in altered spaces, but considering the whole song is in E minor, I was pretty hesitant to give up on that ringing open note! Still, I had to. Since then I've been adjusting all my voicings and for the most part, the slight change in tuning has been more of a help than a hinderance.

This process has left me with a lot of time to think about timbre. The infamous Chief Noda version of Canon in D was one of the first classical songs that I learned and still a regular muse for me in 2012. I found early on that some of my favorite passages sounded tinny and flat, especially in the upper register, where an open pedal and even polyphony lets a piano melody hang and simmer. The piano, in fact, amounts to a huge analog chorus effect, which is definitely sold separately when it comes to guitars.

For the axe slinger, meanwhile, the Second Law of Thermodynamics manifests itself in the concept of "Inharmonicity," which is a mouthful I don't recommend even attempting to pronounce. If you play, though, you already know exactly what it means. Frets get changed, fingers get moved, and notes disappear pretty quick on this humble Yamaha acoustic. So in arranging Oltremare I am aiming chiefly for what works in a fretted strings context. Keeping track of all the harmony lines leads me to some very Allan Holdsworth, contortionist style fingerings.

As long as we're getting into psychoacoustic High Strangeness, one advantage guitar offers the expressive musician is "Formants" - the hands-on resonance and flexibility that the fretboard offers in exchange for what it lacks.

Once I get the tabulature done, I'll walk through the intro, meanwhile here's some brainfood...

[PDF] An Exploration of Real-Time Visualizations of Musical Timbre - Kai Siedenburg

My Bad Obsession with BWV 1007

I spend a lot of time working out my own versions of classical music. Whether this is hubris or insanity, I am in no position to make that call: I just know that I tend to hear things differently in my head. Getting that out through my hands can be quite a long-term process.

On a piano, everything rings out beautifully clear. While dynamics take a long time to gain fine motor control over, once players achieve that kind of competence the lyrical range of a grand piano is pretty unparalleled in the known Universe. I am of a like mind with David Rawlings about the beauty of guitar coming from the constraints and limitations of the instrument. I want a version of the Prelude that emphasizes all those broken sweet spots.

Most available transcriptions of Bach's gorgeous masterpiece are like this craptastic paint-by-numbers job: Prelude from Suite No. 1 for Cello (BWV1007). George Lin has created a great teaching piece, but my problem is the chord forms it follows are exactly the kind of brain-dead folk music voicings I am trying to flush out of my frontal lobes completely.

One of the finest renditions of this classical piece came from the late great Michael Hedges, a gentle giant and one of my all-time favorite musicians. I dig the wide fingering and high-register scream of his opening bars here, and actually seeing this performance was a welcome surprise. I inherited by admiration for Hedges from my father and thus grew up listening to this arrangement in awe, thinking it was all done on 6 strings. It turns out to be some sort of massive harp guitar contraption:



His rendition is apparently in EGDEAD -- here's a tabulature version for your perusal -- and it's safe to say that alternate tunings figure heavily into an equally impressive version of the Prelude, this one courtesy of composer Simon Nield, who really makes this motherfucker sing:



For a serious left hand workout, guitarists should definitely try out this absurdly clean transcription by Jacques Bono: Cello Suite for Bass. Here's a short, impressive performance of said marathon from Professor Bono himself:

Acoustic Fingerstyle with Rick Ruskin

This was a truly exceptional piece of work. Having gone through several hundred instructional videos in the past few years, this was a standout gem. Rick Ruskin is both an amazing player and a natural teacher, and the songs are dope, too. On the technical side, Ruskin has the whole Kottke tool kit at his disposal. He takes apart six different songs with a confident and patiently paced attention to detail. Personally, my favorite part of his approach was his non-stop compositional notes: instead of just showing you how to play passages like he does, he also demonstrates alternate fingerings and voicings.

The opening track, "6 String Conspiracy" serves as a single-lesson introduction to the advanced vocabulary of techniques here. The song begins on a simple riff anyone can learn, then fills it out into chords, then an alternating bassline, and by the 8th bar or so, you're going to be fully immersed in classical American fingerstyle ragtime apocalypse blues. Naturally, how long it takes to make that transition will depend on how much experience you've got attempting to replicate John Fahey or Mississippi John Hurt. Still, it's downright noble for a high-level lesson plan like this to make itself so accessible to the newbz.

Between all the songs, Ruskin drops a ton of gems on practice drills and how to develop your own fingerstyle compositions. This is a full 2 hours of a world class lesson and I'm going to be learning from this for years to come.

VERDICT: 10/10 This is gold standard material.

Arranging for Solo Guitar: The Queen Titles by Edgar Cruz

If you're smart enough to be a Queen fan, this is a goldmine. Cruz is a serious talent and an effortless teacher. The music is gorgeous and the arrangements will really give your chops a workout. Turns out Brian May is a big fan of this, too -- definitely a good sign.

Four tracks get featured here. Might not sound like much on paper, but of course that adds up to a huge amount of instruction because the techniques involved get so beautifully complicated. The lineup: Killer Queen, We Are the Champions, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and best of all, Bohemian Rhapsody.



As you can see, the technical toolkit here is heavily classical, skewed towards flamenco and jazz chord voicings. Those are all Very Good Things if you're into exploring the instrument. Just as a riff generator, this material has been a valuable tool even when I'm not focusing on learning whole passages.

VERDICT: 9/10 As a lesson in composition and dynamics, this is hard to beat. Cruz is masterful and this DVD is a gem.