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Post by Phil on Jun 8, 2020 9:28:03 GMT -6
I've found playing a lick with slides then with bends and alternating back and forth is my primary tool. Would love to hear what y'all do to get your pitches on the money. Mine aren't on the money in general, but they are hugely better than they were 1-2 years ago. There's two ways I've approached them.
First is the traditional "reminding" yourself of the target tone, like bending the G-string up a whole step from fret X and comparing to the unbent B-string on fret X-2, or playing the target note on the string you're bending before and after the bend. Eventually I could sorta hear when I got near the right spot, but getting there precisely, especially under fire, was somewhat hit/miss. Things really didn't take off until I started combining this with the second approach, however.
The second is using a software app to slow down audio while preserving the pitch and playing along with examples and trying to imitate everything about the articulation. If you do that with bends one of the things you'll discover, especially in blues context, is that the idea of bends occurring in precise increments of 1/4-tone, 1/2-tone, full tone, 1.5 tone, etc., is somewhat of a coarse approximation for the sake of notational convenience. Through a lot of repetition and really listening to what I'm trying to imitate I sort of learned what sounds "right". Working with 1/2- and 1/4-step bends were the toughest and most beneficial. They force you to hear the blueness, which is really a continuum, not an interval; and it applies to notes other than the third.
And a chunk of it is just developing finger strength and more importantly, confidence in the strength. Imitating drastically slowed-down bends of "real" players helped a lot with that. I used to just push the string up to what I thought it should be in a single "large" motion, really a flinch because I was dreading whatever vomitous sour note I would land on. Moving much, much slower seemed to help with developing more control to continue if there was some distance to go and to stop the motion wherever it needed stopping. I guess you could call that having control of the motion throughout the bend, rather than bend-and-hope.
You hit the nail on the head with this observation. There's a microtonal area especially between the flat 3rd and the major 3 and even slightly above the flat 7th where the "real" blue notes live. It's that little "tweek" on the b3rd and b7th that all the great Blues players do, but nobody tells you about that when you're starting out. It's, "You always have to bend to a specific note." |
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Post by grampalerxst on Jun 8, 2020 11:06:38 GMT -6
You hit the nail on the head with this observation. There's a microtonal area especially between the flat 3rd and the major 3 and even slightly above the flat 7th where the "real" blue notes live. It's that little "tweek" on the b3rd and b7th that all the great Blues players do, but nobody tells you about that when you're starting out. It's, "You always have to bend to a specific note." Actually there's a zone between the second and flat third through the major third, and arguably up through the flat fifth to the perfect fifth where you can do a lot of those tweaks. The only place I'm not real sure about is between the major third and perfect fourth. I'll have to try to fool around with that tonight later. Some of those little tweaks, especially on the minor third right at the end of the note, I am yet unable to replicate precisely. "Tweak" is actually a good word for them. My microtonal stuff is more of a smear. |
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Post by joachim on Jun 8, 2020 11:54:31 GMT -6
Thanks for taking your time to listen to me mimicking Freddie. Phil, I also think he recorded more Blues instrumentals than any other Blues guitarist before or after him, for whatever reason. I think in the beginning those were just meant to be B-sides but soon became hugely popular (remember, Surf music was also on the rise, so Freddie's LP "Let's Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King" even was re-issued with wave sounds and seagull cries added to the mix  ). For me, he's the most accessible of the three Kings, so I plan to transcribe more of his stuffs in the future to come. And since I'm not much of a singer, I'll go for the instrumentals... I recently revisited "Hideaway" (which was nice to play again) and tried my hands at "Sidetracked", so let's see how that goes. as it is, I don't have anybody to jam with these days and time is short, so how better to spend it than playing along with Freddie and his tight crew - maybe I even learn something along the way. Other than that, I still work on exercisy stuff and try to progress in different areas like all of you, but to be honest, sometimes I don't really see the point of it. It's not like somewhere there's someone waiting for me, and most of the players I really admire just used three chords and what is known to be the Blues box anyway, so what else is there to learn but songs? I am starting to come to the same conclusion - learning songs you like should be on the top of your practice list... I think the licks I remember best and are able to pull out of the bag are the ones I transcribed myself... |
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Post by cunningr on Jun 8, 2020 13:54:50 GMT -6
Thanks for all the poisitive comments everyone - glad you all enjoyed it!  I pulled out the Les Paul this week with normal 10's. I realized how hard it is to bend with a wound G. I was focusing on bending too... Would love to hear what y'all do to get your pitches on the money. I only play with 10s. As your hand develops the strength, it just becomes comfortable to bend. I don't think much about it these days - but I vaguely remember it being tough when I started on 10s. With regard to method - I've always done it the good 'ol fashioned way, play the note 2 frets up, then bend to it using your ear - and do it in time to a metronome at a slow speed (60bpm-ish perhaps). Beat 1 is play the note 2 frets up, beat 2 is a rest, beat 3 is bend the note, beat 4 is rest. Rinse-and-repeat. One final note - ensure you kill the note before releasing the bend. Your picking-palm can be helpful here. WPB has the same technique I use play tone first then bend to it. I only use 10s now also got tired of breaking high E strings. I think it helps with holding chords too. |
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Post by blackcountrymick on Jun 8, 2020 16:00:15 GMT -6
Nice Work T, fingerpicking style worked great with that piece.
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Post by grampalerxst on Jun 9, 2020 5:08:24 GMT -6
I think the main thing for me at this stage is working through fully-formed musical ideas. An example being the cobbling together of a chorus every other week from the seed of one of the BLYCU phrases. Transcribing an entire song is another example, just on a larger, more ambitious scale. I agree that time slips away and we might as well do what brings us joy and contentment with the instrument.
Thinking about it, I probably average 15 minutes a week, much less since the Challenge, doing what we traditionally think of as exercises. Almost all my technique-building efforts come from transcribing/imitating something I think is cool, sometimes from a player's artistic output, sometimes from a player's instructional output. Not to dwell too much on the Challenge, but once I work up one of those choruses, I can pretty much call up the licks, even the homemade ones, on demand from my fingers. Reapplying them in a different musical setting is a huge challenge for the space between my ears.
Nevertheless, adding an end-to-end transcription to the hopper would be a beneficial effort, I just hate to disrupt a routine I'm feeling pretty good about.
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Post by grampalerxst on Jun 9, 2020 7:09:34 GMT -6
tbone, understand. I didn't intend to set anything in opposition, rather just sharing that although I'm operating at a more narrowly focused level, we're fundamentally pursuing the same thing--making music. I guess you could say by wading right in and grabbing the bull by the horns instead of cramming head knowledge, pattern memorization, and rote fretboard calisthenics with the intend of someday trying to disentangle it all to apply it musically. Playing music is hard for me and I figured out that once I could mostly play in time, all those drills and exercise weren't going to be an effective substitute for getting in there and doing it. In other words, you can't learn to swim until after you get into the water.  |
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Post by joachim on Jun 10, 2020 1:13:27 GMT -6
tbone, understand. I didn't intend to set anything in opposition, rather just sharing that although I'm operating at a more narrowly focused level, we're fundamentally pursuing the same thing--making music. I guess you could say by wading right in and grabbing the bull by the horns instead of cramming head knowledge, pattern memorization, and rote fretboard calisthenics with the intend of someday trying to disentangle it all to apply it musically. Playing music is hard for me and I figured out that once I could mostly play in time, all those drills and exercise weren't going to be an effective substitute for getting in there and doing it. In other words, you can't learn to swim until after you get into the water. I've talked about this many times during lessons with John, wondering if I practiced the right way. He would always reply something like "remember that whatever you play makes you a better player, but it's important to you *do* play every day". Personally, I am inclined to focus on exercises if I don't have much time, or don't feel motivated, but I think there is a lot of truth in T-Bone's comments - all the theory and scales in the world won't teach you to pick up the guitar on the porch and play something cool. On the other hand, both learning songs and improvising becomes a lot easier when you know at least some theory, your chords and arpeggios, etc. |
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Post by jack1982 on Jun 10, 2020 5:56:14 GMT -6
As far as applying theory, I think it's kind of a mental progression thing. For the longest time I was perfectly happy to play the pentatonic scale over everything - it sounded just fine to me and there's certainly a lot to be said for taking something you know well and trying to create music with it. But then I got into mixing major and minor pentatonic together and even though that's not really my "thing" (I'm from more of a rock background), the notes of the major scale did correspond better to the dominant 7 I chord of the progression and my ear started to be drawn to that sort of thing. So now I'm writing a solo to go along with a backing track and I get bored with the sound of a single scale pretty quickly, so I'm adding in arpeggios and various other things. I think writing is a great way to apply theory - of course you can do it while improvising, but that goes by in real time. Spending an hour trying to write one bar of music that you really like, well you can try all sorts of things. You have a lot of time to think about what chord you're playing over, try virtually every note and every combination of notes over that chord, try various scales, etc. etc. etc. You finally come up with something you're pleased with and, well, maybe I should memorize where that arpeggio I like is located so I can use it more often without having to re-invent it every time Anyhow, just my thoughts. |
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Post by grampalerxst on Jun 10, 2020 6:27:06 GMT -6
Hey Joachim,
One of my semi-mantras that I picked up from a guitar book some time back is, "Practicing one thing is practicing everything," which lines up with John's wisdom. It's true there's no substitute for time on the instrument and the more knowledge you have about what you're doing, the better.
I'm certainly not against knowledge, I've done a ton of studying and a fair amount of exercises over the years. I still have quite a few gaps in knowing how to exploit different areas of the fretboard (relative to a given key). I've never learned arpeggio patterns all over the neck even though I could spell most any out and find the notes easy enough, just not on the fly. The list goes on.
I sometimes run through traditional exercises for warm up, and really the way I am approaching these blues licks makes them each a de facto exercise. What I like about this (Challenge de Bruce)is that the "exercises" at the end can be dropped right into a musical context and integrated with a few other bits to become a fully formed musical idea. Much harder for me to do starting with just knowing the scale/chord voicing options (although some of the homemade portions in the choruses probably derive from that path). I've probably had BLYCU 15 years. Kind of kicking myself I didn't see this potential more clearly sooner. Also for me maintaining the discipline to get a chorus worked up to a shareable level and recorded means I'm putting in an extra 10% or something beyond where I'd normally conclude I'd gotten everything out of the "exercise" I was going to get.
Anyway, I guess what I am getting at is that I hope I don't come across as an "anti-knowledge/just-play" ideologue. Or simply as an argumentative curmudgeon. I see most things as multifaceted and viewable from multiple perspectives, and while learning from others sharing a perspective, I impulsively share my own. My view is both/and versus either/or. In this case I'm likely a tad overexuberant about the Challenge--mostly because it's a case of right activity/right place/right time for my pilgrimage.
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Post by grampalerxst on Jun 11, 2020 5:49:01 GMT -6
At best you'll get a 1/2 step out of a wound string no matter how far you bend it and even that is difficult and hardly worth the effort. I'm sure somebody will prove me wrong, but that's been my experience. That's probably the main reason people went to an unwound G string. With .010s I can get a full step on my D-string without too much trouble, but I bend it in the opposite direction, pulling towards the floor by curling my fingers rather than extending them to push the string up. A full step covers a lot of distance so it might not be feasible to do that with a wound G without pulling strings over the edge of the neck. I don't have a wound G on any of my guitars to test. If you're playing with jazz guy wires on your guitar, then yeah, probably a non-starter.  |
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). For me, he's the most accessible of the three Kings, so I plan to transcribe more of his stuffs in the future to come. And since I'm not much of a singer, I'll go for the instrumentals... I recently revisited "Hideaway" (which was nice to play again) and tried my hands at "Sidetracked", so let's see how that goes. as it is, I don't have anybody to jam with these days and time is short, so how better to spend it than playing along with Freddie and his tight crew - maybe I even learn something along the way. Other than that, I still work on exercisy stuff and try to progress in different areas like all of you, but to be honest, sometimes I don't really see the point of it. It's not like somewhere there's someone waiting for me, and most of the players I really admire just used three chords and what is known to be the Blues box anyway, so what else is there to learn but songs? 
