Wombat Radio: Matt Scott

WR: Who is the guitarist who first made you think "I need to do that" ?

Matt Scott: Easy. Jimmy Page. From a pretty early age I'd taken great pleasure in singing - writing songs on the fly, little melodies and ideas in passing based on whatever my parents, cousins, friends were listening to. Christmas 1994 or so, I bought my Dad a 4CD Zeppelin box set that I had largely written off in leu of green day, RHCP, STP..the stuff that I saw on MTV everyday. I don't even remember the moment when I first started listening more closely....though I'm guessing it was in 8th grade and in direct correlation to an ever-expanding appreciation for pre-teen boobs and rebellion - Zeppelin felt dangerous, exhilarating and unique by comparison to anything I knew at that time. Prior to Jimmy there had been other guitarists and tones that stuck with me - tom morello from rage against the machine, jay yuenger from white zombie, kenny withrow from Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians (I blame his use of filters on the solo for "What I am" as the song that catalyst for a fascination with synths, talk boxes, heaving q'ing and throaty wah pedals that continues to this day.)

But to get back to it, what really separated Jimmy from other guitarists I knew of at that time...it was the first musician to take solos that to my ear, sounded an awful lot like a melody you might sing. I could imagine Jimmy speaking every note that came out of the guitar - sure it was sloppy on occasion, but you could tell he'd played every slurred note exactly how he had intended. To this day, I still can't listen to the guitar intro and solo of "Since I've Been Loving You" without the hair on the back of my neck pulling towards the ceiling. I guess in short - Jimmy Page was the first guitarist to make me listen less as a fan and more as a guitar player. The last thing I'll say about Pagey is that his tone is virtually unmatched, and wonderfully consistent across the breadth of his recorded work. Aside from being a man of 1000 riffs and formidable choppage, he knew the worth of finding a tone to call his own- and I think that's an art that too many guitar players have thrown by the wayside in leu of studio magic and/or laziness and apathy.

WR: Who is the guitarist who completely changed your mind about what the instrument could do?

Matt Scott: Thankfully, I have the good fortune of being able to say that for me, that guitarist changes every few months. Youtube never ceases to amazes me with its ability to introduce me to new guitarists I can't believe aren't better known, while simultaneously reminding me how infected and "dick in hand" bravado ridden the culture of guitar playing can be. That said, here are 4 guitarists who have been a guiding light for me over the years and really helped reshape the way I thought about fretboard approach, playing with space and most importantly: Tone.

Ichirou Agata (Melt Banana): There are a lot of reasons to appreciate Melt Banana. It's brazen, loud as fuck and it couldn't be more clear that the band a whole is as tight as it gets while simultaneously playing so jagged and with such immediacy that it makes you wonder if they've ever, ever practiced (the answer, btw. Is yes. And probably a lot more than you do.) Ichirou does things with a whammy wah that I can only assume are probably illegal in some areas of the far east. Proof? Check out this intro:



This guitar playing Baffles me. It stretches the conventions of the instrument to a paper thin sheet...and is so raw and unyielding it took me a dozen listens to accept the fact that someone could even produce those sounds in real time with strings, pickups and effects.

Bill Frisell: Bill has a way of playing that marries the best of a jazz musicians technical, chordal and melodic efficiencies blended with someone who exists in the realm of pure sound scape and tonal ambiguity. He is Jagged and noise making, swelling, airy, lilting, wildly original and consistently brilliant in any ensemble or solo effort. I've barely scratched the surface of his technical prowess because ever time I feel like I've gotten a grip on what makes Bill, Bill- I remember he operates at a level few can, and is truly a chameleon of the instrument paying homage to everyone and no one at once.





Djelimady Sissoko (Super Rail Band): I was introduced to the Super Rail Band my freshman year in college by a roommate that entered college at a level musically which most students would be lucky to have attained upon graduating. His taste and breadth of musical know-how was light years ahead of my own, and I still owe him a great debt of graditude for giving me free reign of his extensive cd collection which boasted more jazz and "world music" then I had even known existed at the time. Super Rail Band's album, "Mansa" for me was an incredible crash course in poly-rhythms, clean articulate picking and attention to detail. Accessible primers to a world of music you probably don't know shit about- you simply cannot go wrong starting with Mali, Djelimady and the super rail band. The title track to their 1996 album of the same name, "Mansa" is below.



Dave Fiuczynski- Screaming Headless Torsos/ KIF/ Meshell Nedecello/ Hiromi's Sonic Bloom: Eastern microtonal fretless guitar? Yeah- not too more guitarists out there doing that 18 years ago, let alone today for that matter. To the best of my knowledge, Dave is what happened when Steve Vai, John Mchlaughlin and Dimebag Darrell found themselves in a locked closet with a knife, needle and thread and instructions not to come out till they've "married the best of themselves". Spooky good. As a side note, I also have great respect for Dave's taste in band members and ensembles.....the Screaming Headless Torsos circa 1996 remains as one of the most freakish ensembles I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing.

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.

Translating "Oltremare" | Part 2

As a cue from both Boubacar Traore and John Fahey, I spend a lot of time with my left ear pressed against the body of my guitar. Especially when I'm writing. I've discussed the Chorus Effect once before, and I didn't do it justice. The physics here are integral to Oltremare, both as an abstract composition and a throbbing mammal experience. The key concept is Sympathetic Resonance, something that just happens to relate directly to the origin and nature of the Universe as you and I know it.

For now, though, just listen to this great live version of Oltremare by the composer himself...



Listen to the huge floating cloud of sympathetic resonance that reveals itself whenever Einaudi pauses. Listen to how it actually, audibly moves. You can hear those final notes spreading out in both directions and through specific, radiating intervals. It's gorgeous beyond words and it perfectly illustrates two completely different stories about the history of music theory. The first one starts in the Sahara.



The kora is considered a hybrid instrument by musicologists who should know better. The instrument is not a "world music" curiosity but a proud & unbroken cultural lineage. It exists in a generational ecosystem of luthiers, musicians and ritual context. The Mande Jali knew about counterpoint harmony, pentatonic modes, and tonal gravity a thousand years ago -- yet music history gives Africa curiously shallow treatment.

Let's begin with an important addition the ancient griots made to the fundamental recipe of wood and strings: goat flesh. While your guitar is built around a resonant chamber constructed entirely out of dead trees, the kora is built out of something more like a drum head: a taut membrane of treated goat skin stretched over a calabash frame.



When critics refer to Toumani Diabate's recorded work as "African classical music" I think that owes just about everything to the huge waves of sympathetic resonance the kora can summon. It's not so much the ornamentation and chord changes as the raw sound itself. The tonal space is unmistakeably similar to a piano, especially in the midrange counterpoint lines (umbengo, non?) -- less so on the droning bass dives. The high end has the short, stabbing attack and almost instant decay that gives the kora away as a harp instrument. It's worth noting that, connected to sufficient signal chains at sufficient amplitudes, the kora becomes something very different and probably superior to all other stringed creatures. That's not what this is about, though.



Let's bring it back to pianos. Big, booming, beautiful and expensive ass pianos. There is a remarkable amount of foot action going on in apparently simple pieces like Oltremare, but our TV generation has been trained since birth to watch hands, closely. Piano players make their art faces and caress with cultivated care, but come on, the basics of a piano trigger escape mechanism mean that there's actually not much fine control going on above waist level. In fact, even with three foot pedals the basic acoustic impedance and ASDR envelope of any given note doesn't change a whole lot. For the most part, low bass pedal tones "float" because they are usually strung with two or three strings of unusually heavy gauge which vibrate very slowly -- which means the tone spends more time transferring to the soundboard and the wooden frame of the piano itself, teasing out overtones and hidden colors that tend to stay the same no matter what you play.

Writing about music always reduces me to run-on sentences. If only soloing was as simple as talking too much.

Here's an example of how this applies to transcribing. This phrase in E minor shows up a lot and it can be played a dozen ways. Here's two, and I think they demonstrate the importance of careful phrasing and active listening when you're writing something out. Lately I try to keep phrases and runs in three or four string groups. It forces me to learn the fretboard and I really like how it keeps longs passages sounding consistent.



Play 'em both as repeating loops; savor the flavors. If you think the version on the left sounds better, you are objectively out of your mind. The switch to the timbre of the G string is jarring, plus the ringing open string is loud enough to compete with the low drone of the E tonic/pedal/root. The E thing, man, that. Keeping it on the 5th fret of the D is awesome because it makes your pinky get into the damn ring and fight like a man, and doubly so because it sounds like it's part of a distinct counterpoint phrase that supports the open, ringing low E. Blaow.

Let's bring it back to pianos again. Those low notes move through the body of the piano slower than higher register waves, and this is colored further by 1) post-Industrial conventional cross-strung pianos designed to enable mass production, 2) Aliquot stringing, which makes harmonics ring out louder and longer, and 3) Railsback Curve equal temperament tuning. The result is a very specific set of constraints.

The instrument is tuned toward the middle of the keyboard, so most melodies and classical solo pieces carve themselves through that center C line. Most of all, though, it's the ringing sustain of the piano's sheer elephant mass that dictates what chord changes "work" and which definitively do not. If you shift to something that doesn't have enough harmonics in common with what you just finished playing, it's like throwing a light bulb at a brick wall. On a nice big piano, those waters run deep and you don't win when you fight 'em.

Oltremare, front to back, is architecture. It sounds like a piece that was worked out carefully, late at night. Even the nicest in "digital piano" keyboards can't do this song much justice. Einaudi plays both with and against the washing overtones as they drift out of audible range. The stage itself seems to play a key role in giving the live version so much dirt and character. It's far from an original observation, but there's still so much to unpack from that simple insight I'm going to have a busy life.



NEXT: Finally, some guitar tabulature.

Brainfood: Guitar International Interviews

Had a great Sunday afternoon reading through the Interviews archive over at the PRS sponsored Guitar International. These were the best of the best -- enjoy.

Mike Stern talks about working with Miles Davis & Jaco Pastorius

Earl Klugh on George Benson and "Naked Guitar"

Derek Trucks on Staying Genuine and Eastern Music

Ben Verdery and Bill Coulter on New Directions in Classical Guitar

Jamie Andreas on Guitar Fundamentals and Proper Practice

Emmett Chapman on why he invented The Stick



Sample Gem from Ben Verdery:

"I feel everybody should own about four technical books that are always around. Just play something different, don’t play the same scales all the time. The most important thing that I learned about practicing is trying to improve your study habits. One thing I do tell people often and I do it in my own way is to write a little sign on your music stand that asks “Where is your mind,” because so often I’ll be practicing and my mind will be wandering. I’m playing a passage and I’m completely somewhere else.

One thing I do is I have a timer. Every 15 minutes it goes off, and it just wakes me up. It all has to do with being awake. Being goal-oriented and setting reasonable attainable goals, so when you achieve them you feel a great sense of joy.

Also one of the most valuable techniques in practicing is playing slowly. That’s where the metronome comes into play. It’s something that our bodies don’t want to do, but really slow practicing will help you learn and calm you down. Sometimes it would be really food for you to imagine that you can’t play and not taking it for granted. If you’ve ever hurt your finger you know your world falls apart. So you should approach each day like this is the last day I am going to play, I could die tomorrow. Be thankful that you have an instrument.

Maiden Voyage: Jazz; Guitar

I was entranced by Maiden Voyage years before I knew what it was. I was living in North Carolina with drummer Ryan Hare and caught this classic Hancock tune on accident, a random scrap of debris thrown in the wake of Ryan's ongoing obsession with jazz improvisation. At the time I was making the transition from rap and metal into African and bluegrass, and now, years later, I find myself on the same stretch of path, reading through Levine's Jazz Theory Book and studying up on a solid century worth of an artform I was too conditioned to appreciate until recently.

Also: Maiden Voyage just sounds really damn pretty.

The San Francisco Jazz Collective version is gorgeous and the footage is great, too, so I had to share that. My muse for this latest journal entry, though, is precise slice of history from May 17th, 1965. The legendary Rudy Van Gelder was behind the boards and Blue Note Records was running the world. Herbie Hancock was sitting at the piano with some powerful lead sheets and one of the best rhythm sections in human history behind him, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. Jazz loves the magic and mystique of improv, but in most respects "Maiden Voyage" was clinically precise intelligent design. Classic music was a foregone conclusion before the tape even started rolling.



I was raised on jazz as background music for dinner conversation: cool, calm and polite stuff that won't compete with monologues about New Yorker articles and grown-up shit like that. Maiden Voyage works on that level, and it's also a great soundtrack for sex, but the real meat is careful, active listening which reveals the fact there are hours worth of ideas somehow crammed into eight minutes of running time here. Every soloist runs a subtle clinic on melodic improv and thematic iteration, and all of it stays, note for note, in that same perfectly restrained pocket. I've read a number of critics now referring to Freddie Hubbard's solo passage as "explosive," but to my ears his dynamics are an artful fit...just like every other detail.

The always-educational Steve Khan has contributed a detailed look at George Coleman's tenor solo -- here's the Transcription and the Analysis.

Once I started digging into the theory, though, the real fun began. It turns out there's not a lot of agreement about what those hypnotic opening chords to Maiden Voyage even are. Take the very first one, for instance. So far I have seen D7sus4, D9sus, Am7sus/D, Amin/D, and the suspiciously simple Dsus. Herbie himself allegedly thought of it as a D13sus4 and notated it on lead sheets as CMA7/D. If you're on the verge of a nosebleed, so was I. Clearly, I had discovered the edge of the Universe as far as traditional music theory was concerned. Were all these people insane? How could there be so much disagreement about an arrangement of notes?



For starters, there's a lot of clarity in the Ed Byrne piece I posted a week back, "The Limitations of Jazz Theory." The fact is simply that neither classical nor jazz "music theory" actually accounts for the available tonal space that our Western chromatic scale provides. So when Herbie Hancock goes looking for exotic voicings that evoke, in his words, "the splendor of a sea-going vessel on its maiden voyage," well...Herbie might find himself wandering right off the map. I think we can all agree that's a good thing.

When it comes to guitar translation, though, it makes communication difficult. Here's an interesting approach on a classical axe -- I'm guessing the guitar is in Drop D to accommodate that low pedal tone. The bass turnaround of the vamp can be done on open strings (A D A D) and then the high end gets articulated on the fretboard. Once he has to leave this resonant position, you'll notice the voicings sound less full and less accurate, too.



Thus far, I have not solved the mystery. I do wish I had a tidy conclusion that made me look smart. I'm still fumbling with voicings and reaching around by ear. The disagreement among Authorities is beyond surreal: just take a look at the Wikipedia page for this. Note the fact there are two diagrams, both of which claim to describe the opening chord and offer completely different names and notation.



Notation in print looks so crisp and official, doesn't it? Blinded with science. So that's a Dsus, clear as day, and matches up closely to both the original recording and the classical guitar version (D2 A2 G3 C4 E4 G4 which gets implied by D3 C4 E4 G4 on guitar) -- however, as Wikipedia goes on to explain, it's also a minor eleventh chord, specifically Am7/D. The notation spells out a different recipe, too: a tightly stacked D3 A3 C4 E4 G4.



If you have better advice, or at least more accurate cheat sheets, please get in touch. No rush, though. Fortunately, it's one beautifully dense puzzle box. I'll keep listening.

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.

Debussy, Composition, and Guitar

"The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams." - Claude Debussy



It was the Albany hip hop producer Daimyo who first introduced me to this mesmerizing gem. In discussing Oltremare, I wandered into timbre, formants, and most of all, music visualization. The system that you see above was developed by Stephen Malinowski, and the color-coding and linear connects make it the most instructive and useful way to visualize a musical score I've found so far. Debussy is not a mess of notes, there is a geometric motion and internal logic to the Arabesque that this animation captures nicely.

The opening revolves around E major but colors all over those lines, bringing out some wild overtones with pentatonic riffs. It makes sense I would be drawn to this: it's the common ground between Slayer and Djelimady Tounkara. The hook, without question, is those gorgeous descending lines that come in at the 0:23 mark, a dancing counterpoint that triggers some serious synaesthesia. That's the result of syncopation at work, a brain-tickling perceptual illusion triggered by playing the descending triplets over the sweeping 8th notes of that bass arpeggio:



Debussy: "The musical arabesque, or rather the principle of ornament, is at the basis of all forms of art. The divine arabesque was used by Palestrina and Orlando. They discovered its principle in Gregorian Chant and provided support for its interlaced designs with strong counterpoint."

Throughout his career, Debussy was always quick to give credit to his predecessors and inspirations, and this rich lineage has given music critics a great deal to write about. (Here's one very intense example.) As you can imagine, though, there is little to be said about Debussy that's as interesting as the music itself.

It was the horizons that Debussy was most interested in, the inherent possibilities of music. He was fascinated by iteration and permutation, and wrote with a very long-term legacy in mind. For illustration purposes, here's a valuable comparison: "Reverie" performed by two masterful players, one behind a piano and the other gently fingering a guitar...





Both of these "Reverie" performances are compromises & interpretations. Deric Bownds brings what he wants out of the composition, and if you peruse the comments, you'll see a lot of folks chiding him for rushing the tempo and taking liberties -- but this unfaithful adaptation is precisely what makes his version work. Which brings me to the real point of this: what makes Debussy work so well in the first place?

There's a lot of myths about the Golden Ratio being encoded throughout the scores of Debussy, but evidence is mixed at best. In fact, it's the gently broken nature of his work, his willingness to push out into dissonant spaces, that keeps me so compelled by his music, so he obviously deviates from the pure harmonies of Pythagoras. Both his contemporaries and his subsequent biographers have noted that Debussy was unusually preoccupied with something that also happens to obsess me: timbre, the distinct tonality of instruments, rooms and equipment.



Consider Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, something I strongly advise taking in at high volume and on sparkly drugs. Incorporating bassoons, clarinets, flutes, oboes, harps...note the plural usage. Throughout the piece, you hear Debussy pushing the instruments to make sounds only they can make and hold notes that resonate with the physical instrument. He also takes advantage of the fact there's at least two of everything, unleashing all manner of minor key intervals that straddle the harmony/dissonance gap and, again, emphasize resonance.

Debussy's interest was artistic and philosophical, but in 2012 the principles of resonance and dissonance are fully weaponized concepts, manifested as the LRAD crowd control unit. None of this is obscure or academic.

It can be beautiful, though. Here's contemporary songwriter David Rawlings, talking about his own love of dissonance and the unique timbre of a perfectly shitty guitar...



So: back to our beautiful Arabesque. In the Malinowski animation this all began with, it's being performed on solo piano, a devilishly impressive feat considering most piano transcriptions are written for "Four Hands." Still, as the video makes clear, the layout of the song is a counterpoint conversation between the bass and treble. The raw complexity is similar to the classic crab canon, Bach's The Musical Offering, but far looser -- Debussy was writing soundtracks prior to the invention of cinema. Here's a charmingly goofy example of how the duet format opens the piece up: a classical guitar and an accordion.



As the man himself noted, "works of art make rules, but rules do not make works of art." He had a rare ear for beautiful riffs from far outside traditional music theory, and he also had a mathematician's patience, tinkering with orchestrations until he found arrangements that clicked, building without blueprints.

I have been tinkering with the first Arabesque on guitar for months now and I'm starting to view it as a mathematical object like the Mandelbrot set. There's a tremendous amount of ideas packed into an apparently breezy little exercise, and a playful self-similarity I recognize from natural fractals. There is ultimately such an abundance of math inside the Arabesque it becomes a sort of Rorschach test. Some folks see parallel chord movement and other see bitonal architecture and nobody is exactly wrong.

Meanwhile, I keep trying to find all the sweet spots.



"An examination of the harmonic techniques out of their context has all too often led to misleading terminology such as 'static' or 'non-functional' as a description of Debussy's harmonic methods. Viewed as a whole, however, the tonal coherence of his music depends upon a carefully calculated and often dramatic interaction of these various harmonic 'types' with each other and with orthodox diatonic harmony. The result is a tonal language, but one which is fundamentally different in concept from classical tonality. The detailed classifications of harmonic events is no longer possible in Debussy's music where the central tonality of a work emerges only through a constant focusing and re-focusing on harmonic types." - Jim Samson



"Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind..." - Claude Debussy, 1862-1918

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:

Effortless Classical Guitar by William Kanengiser

I learned guitar wrong. I'm still working on correcting bad habits a decade later. Over the years, one of the best explanations on "economy of motion" I've ever seen is this DVD -- which was a battered VHS tape when I first encountered it.

It's hard to appreciate the full meaning of classical training until you see what Kanengiser outlines here. What he's demonstrating is the collective knowledge of several generations of conservatory playing. This is a centuries old guild system of international competition and exchange being transmitted to you via the miracle of technology.

Both neo-classical and Hindustani slide are proof that this kind of precision training pays off...and pays off far beyond the realm of Bach recitals. No matter where you want to take you playing, the fundamentals that get explained here are The Rules you need to learn in order to break.

Easy Steps to Bossa Nova Guitar by Aaron Gilmartin

A guitar lesson is a long face to face conversation. Most of the time, that works out fine for everyone involved, but once in awhile, it's too weird to handle. This video is a prime example. I was so uncomfortable making eye contact with Aaron Gilmartin I was unable to make it very far past the ten minute mark here.

How did this happen? It doesn't help that he opened up the video by singing. Things get worse when it turns out to be a vaguely "Bossa Nova" song in English with mindlessly antiseptic Hallmark lyrics. Really, though, the biggest problem was Aaron Gilmartin's eyes. I don't know the man beyond this digital artifact, but I am convinced he is tormented by serious psychological demons which constantly scream in silence from his baby blue eyes. However, let's look past that -- even though I personally could not.

Despite what I've just said, Gilmartin is a relaxed and fast-paced teacher who makes pains to craft a lesson for beginners. He spends a lot of time taking the chord shapes new players are familiar with, thanks to their godawful power-chord radio crap taste in music, and translating those cliches into Bossa Nova concepts. He also offers a solid but inaccurate introduction to the song formats and conventions of the form. I would venture that learning it vaguely wrong is not necessarily bad as an introduction -- more advanced lessons from more experienced teachers will set you right, should you choose to pursue Bossa Nova as an artform.

You'd be insane not to.

For more advanced players -- those with exotic chord experience and familiarity with the genre of Bossa Nova -- this is not worth your time.

VERDICT: 3/10 Beginners who have never done psychedelic drugs and demonstrate no latent psychic abilities should be able to get a perfectly good guitar lesson out of this. Otherwise, abandon all hope.

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.

Learn to Play Django-Style Gypsy Jazz Guitar by Paul Mehling

Paul Mehling is a master player and this series of lessons is a bargain. This is a meticulous examination of Django's work and Mehling is careful to strick strictly to the original voicing...and even tone...based on surviving recordings of Gypsy King at work.

Mehling is a solid teacher. He exceeds at teaching you how to hear Django's work effectively. He explains the shadings and embellishments individually until all the complexities gypsy chord progressions start to make playable sense.

VERDICT: 10/10 This two volume set represents a pretty total instruction in an insanely complicated & ornate style. This is one of the best challenges you can take on.

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.

Guitar Artistry in Concert by Ana Vidovic

Musicians, by and large, are a strange species. Very few instructional videos are presented by radiantly beautiful people -- this is one of them. Of course, the fact that Ana Vidovic could make you stop breathing by walking into a room isn't relevant to her skills on guitar. Her skills are superhuman.

The material here is more of a concert than a lesson. However, the DVD is presented by Mel Bay and shot like an instructional video with a steady focus on clearly framing her hands throughout the performance.



VERDICT: 6/10 It's hard not to learn from this, and Vidovic is a stunning artist. For the record, I am keenly aware of my glaring gender bias, yes.

Guitar Atlas: Africa by Banning Eyre

Banning Eyre has been documenting and studying African guitar techniques for decades, including months of study under the Super Rail Band legend Djelimady Tounkara. My sole complaint about this book was the brevity. Considering how much there is to learn, the reader will probably feel there's far too few exercises here. There's also not a lot of background theory and history here, despite featuring some superb writing about African artists and music.

In a field with so few available works, however, Guitar Atlas: Africa is an indispensable guide, for now. It will probably remain so long into the future, thanks to Banning Eyre's infectious love for the sound and his far-ranging approach. The roadmap he provides here may be sparse but in the Youtube era, intelligent readers can flesh it out into a fuller education.



VERDICT: 8/10 - Flawed but essential, sparse but ambitious, good writing and solid teaching.