tbone's record corner

Beautifully played and beautifully recorded Tbone, sounding excellent!

Jeez Mick got a new amp, Joachim got a new guitar, Rich got a new guitar AND a new amp...I guess I'll console myself by putting a new set of strings on my guitar   

Great Jazz tone, T-Bone. Where did you find the backing track?

T-Bone,

You can make your guitar sound like a pretty decent bass guitar with the stock plug-ins that come with Reaper - a pitch shifter and EQ. With the pitch thing you lower your sound by 1 octave and with the EQ you cut back on the high frequencies.

Listen to my recordings of "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Drivin' Blues" I did the bass using the above technique. Oh, I also played with my thumb to give it a fuller more bassy sound.

I don't have a bass amp as such but I do have various ways of plugging in my bass to my digital recorder, in fact I can plug my bass direct into the recorder (Boss BR800) and generate tones and effects within the unit. I also have used my pod, yamaha THRC and Digitech BP355 to record my bass into the boss recorder. These units also have computer recording capability via usb as well and even have software packaged with them such as Cubase LE but I have not ventured into trying this yet.

Sorry, I didn't realize that you had an actual bass guitar. If I had a bass I'd use it. that's far superior to emulating a bass with my guitar. Look into the free bass amp modeling software first. I'm sure there's something out there. The free version of Amplitube might even have something. If not try going through the NI stuff that you already have and see what happens.

T that was excellent listening, I gave it a heart.

I thought that maybe you were experimenting with some sort of far eastern alternate tuning.

T-Bone, here's an overly long response to your post regarding licks vs playing scales. I decided to put it here because the other thread is getting long.

I think you may have a misunderstanding of my position on licks verses noodling around on scales. I'm simply saying that I, me personally, have to be careful that I don't end up noodling around for hours on end, never accomplishing anything, and call it practice. During the past year I've made more progress than I have in my life by staying focused on one course of instruction and having a structured practice schedule. However, what you are doing does have value, especially trying to improvise over backing tracks. Improvising over backing tracks (which is something I have never done) is an excellent way to train your ear to hear the chord changes and to use the appropriate notes over the chords. This is actually something that I need to start doing, but I need to allot a specific amount of time to it after I've done more structured practice. I know that Jack has mentioned that he does it quite often. So, I just want to make it clear that I'm not against doing it. In fact I now see that it is an important thing to do. It just can't be the only thing you do.

Here's my take on learning licks. IMO I think there is a real misconception of what improvisation is. Skilled improvisors don't just pull notes out of their asses. Look at it this way - when you have a conversation with someone you are improvising, as opposed to making a speech that you spent hours composing. In a converstion you put words together on the fly. You may put them together in a certain way at just the right moment and say something witty or profound. You might whisper or shout. You might emphasize a word or slur others together. You might put together a beautiful complete sentence or short choppy fragments. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you already know the words and you know the grammatical structure to place them into.

You put words together in a way that is coherent and makes sense. What you do not do is noodle around the alphabet, make up words, and just string them together willy-nilly. If you did you wouldn't make sense and you wouldn't be understood. So, IMHO, I think that skilled improvisors play things they already know and have practiced. However, they are putting these things together on the fly, in the appropriate place and at the right time so that they make a coherent and sensible musical statement.

When I talk about the importance of learning licks I guess I should first give my definition of what a lick is to me. To me a lick doesn't have to be a 2, 3, or 4 bar complete musical sentence. It could be a just 3 notes played a certain way. For example, the 'bend-release-pull off' that appears so frequently throughout BYCU is a lick to me. Bending the 4th scale degree to the 5th and playing the 5th again on the next higher string is also a lick. These are the little words that you put together into interesting sounding phrases and the phrases into sentences.

Licks have to be practiced to have them at your finger tips when needed. If all you practice is scales, then all you are going to be able to play is scales when you try to improvise or even when you try to compose something of your own. Just go to any Blues forum where people upload examples of themselves playing their own stuff over a backing track. Most of them are just running up, down and around the pentatonic minor scale. There is no hook. There is no musical meaning. They are not being coherent. The ones who sound good and professional are the ones who play well thought out phrases or licks.

Regarding the 2 choruses I added to "Jumpin' Blues" - if you compare the 2 choruses you'll see that they are very very much the same. In fact, they both consist just a couple of licks repeated in different octaves or with slight variations. I didn't do that intentionally, but it's the way it turned out. In fact, I didn't even realize I was using the same things over and over until I finished. Also, for the 1st time ever, I pretty much had everything worked out in my head and then worked it out on the guitar. I actually came up with some ideas that I couldn't even play and had to simplify things. By simplifying things I probably also improved them and the made the whole thing less cluttered. I was really concerned that it would come out sounding very amateurish, but I was pretty happy with the result of this 1st attempt at coming up with something of my own. This is something I'm going to try to do more often. Like anything else, I think the more you do it the better you'll get.

So, to sum it up - I think that noodling around over a backing track is an important part of the learning process, especially in training your ear. It is definitely something I need to start doing. However, I also firmly believe that licks (according to my definition) are the vocabulary that we need to make interesting and coherent musical statements.

I hope you are still awake.

Phil

That was pretty good tony I added a heart.