Composer, author, lecturer, guitar teacher

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Making do on guitar

The other night I was talking to a guitar student about my experience of trying to get certain sounds on the guitar without the right technology, and how useful things came out of this lack. I thought this would make a useful post here.

Several examples came to mind. One was trying to play both parts of a twin lead guitar line. For anyone who doesn’t know what this means, ‘twin lead guitar’ is where two guitarists take a note each and play parallel melodic phrases, usually based on thirds and sixths. With each holding only one note these are generally easy to play and the notes can be subject to typical techniques of bending and vibrato. This arrangement style was characteristic of British bands such as Thin Lizzy and Wishbone Ash, and there are elements of it in Queen’s studio records (where Brian May would overdub such lines himself) and The Darkness. Providing the lines are not too quick, it can be possible to play both at once. This effort taught me some things about how thirds and sixths work on the guitar. To make the lines sound a little different from each other I discovered that playing the lower note with a pick and the higher note with a finger helped. And trying to do a double-trill was certainly a challenge.

Another example occurred when I tried to emulate Mark Knopfler’s playing on some of the early Dire Straits tracks. The crucial technology for his sound was a Fender Strat, often with the single-coil pick-ups in positions 2 and 4, and played with thumb and fingers. I only had a guitar with double-coil pickups, which wasn’t ideal. I found that by winding the tone down a bit, using thumb and fingers and being careful with the touch,  and also playing nearer the fingerboard helped get a little closer to the sound.

A third example arouse when I wanted to emulate the sound of a 12-string on a 6-string. In some accompaniment figures which are based on simple chords it is possible to look for octaves above the notes which are in reach. That goes a little way to imitating the sound of a picked 12-string.

None of these things could replace the original thing. But they all helped my technique in terms of extending what I could get out of the guitar I had and learning more about the fingerboard and how much guitar technique is in the sense of touch.

I recently mentioned Vaughan Williams’ Symphony 8 as great music for this time of year. I could add to it Ravel’s Mother Goose suite (Ma Mere l’Oye), Prokoviev’s Lieutenant Kije (with the famous Troika that featured in Woody Allen’s Love and Death film), Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, Arnold Bax’s Christmas Eve, Peter Warlock’s ‘Bethlehem Down’, Steeleye Span’s ‘Gaudete’, and Kate Bush’s ‘December Will Be Magic Again’.

Posted by  |  December 16, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Free audio track

In appreciation of your interest all current subscribers to my blog will receive a free audio track by Christmas. This will also extend to anyone who subscribes to the blog by the end of December 19th.

I have plans to make more of my songs and music available in the future, time permitting.

Posted by  |  December 5, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: | 2 Comments

Beatle echoes, Simon and Garfunkel, and a festive English symphony

I recently saw some of the new documentary film about George Harrison, Living in the Material World, which was interesting and enjoyable. Coincidentally, I was reminded of the fact that all four Beatles had memorable solo records in 1970-71: George with singles such as ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘What Is Life’, John and Yoko with ‘Power to the People’ and ‘Instant Karma’, Paul with ‘Another Day’, and Ringo with ‘It Don’t Come Easy’. I thought I would mention some songs by the group Badfinger who were signed to the Apple label. Few bands had such a tragic history, as a read of their Wikipedia page will make plain. If Badfinger are unknown to you, Beatles fans should try to listen to the songs ‘Come and Get It’ (their first hit, written by McCartney), ‘No Matter What’ and ‘Day After Day’, the latter two songs being superb variations on the late 60s Beatle sound. The vocal on ‘Day After Day’ (sung by Pete Ham?) is very McCartney and the slide guitar is very much in the Harrison mould (maybe it was Harrison?).

Badfinger’s other claim to songwriting fame is that they wrote ‘Without You’ which Harry Nilsson had a huge hit with. I know of few more revealing comparisons between an original and a cover version, in terms of changed harmony and arrangement and feel. The Badfinger version seems a bit ramshackle and would never have been as bit a hit, but has its charm and may appeal to those who think Harry’s version is over-dramatic and slick.

I also watched an interesting documentary on Simon and Garfunkel. Readers of my book Inside Classic Rock Tracks will know that I hold the heretical view that ‘Bridge Over Trouble Water’ is not as great a song as ‘America’. But the song that stood out in the film was ‘Only Living Boy In New York’. This is one of those songs which has a strange power which seems unaccountable given the relative simplicity and undramatic nature of its materials. Partly it is a classic example of the poetry of reverb – something which has been undervalued for a long while in popular music because there has been a fashion for in-your-face dry productions (a trend Fleet Foxes bucked to great success with their debut album). The other aspect is that it is a touching song about friendship rather than romantic love. Unlike ‘You Got A Friend’ (or ‘Bridge OTW’), there is no sense that the speaker is congratulating themselves for being A Friend You Can Depend On, which lends those songs a slight whiff of egoistic self-approval. Instead, it is almost as if the singer of ‘Only Living Boy’ seems touched and startled to discover how much this friendship meant and its value.

Meanwhile, in the world of orchestral sample libraries, the chaps over at Vienna Symphonic Library continue to perform wonders in the world of computer sample music for composers such as myself, having just released an upgraded version of their software Vienna Instruments Pro with its nifty ‘auto-humanize feature’ whereby you can deliberately add a hint of mis-tuning and mis-timing to make your sampled string quartet or orchestra sound more realistic. Fantastic stuff. If you visit their website they have music examples you can listen to, including an astonishing rendition of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring using only orchestral samples.

Christmas is fast approaching. One of the pieces of music I save for December is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony no.8. written when he was in his early 80s in about 1956. He added a number of bells, etc to his orchestra for this piece, making it great for winter, though it has no actual winter programme. It has many of the beauties of his music with a slightly unworldly twist here and there which is typical of his last two symphonies. I’m delighted to learn that a DVD of a performance of it from 1972 has just been released. Sir Adrian Boult was the conductor. I don’t know what the sound quality will be like but it should be worth a watch.

Posted by  |  November 29, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Play Great Guitar

I have just heard that there is a Kindle edition of my book Play Great Guitar published by Infinite Ideas. There is a discount on it at the moment. It is suitable for beginners and people who have a couple of years’ experience on guitar. Their website is http://www.infideas.com.

Since I last blogged I’ve had tentative discussions about another book in my Backbeat songwriting series, which would appear in 2013. I’ve been working on another writing project not to do with songwriting and making good progress with that.

I have a short article in the Music You Might Like series in the new edition of the journal of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.

Talking of books I can recommend record producer Tony Visconti’s biography Bolan, Bowie and the Brooklyn Boy.

On the creative front I’ve revised two scores for string orchestra – ‘From Cornish Springs’ and ‘The High Oaks’ – and have worked on generating new audio for them. I’m now ready to write the strings for Kate Bush’s next album … should she need me. 😉

I was also writing some acoustic guitar instrumentals, but that project has got pushed out for lack of time.

Since I last wrote the acoustic player Bert Jansch has died. I interviewed him back in the 1990s around the time of the release of Crimson Moon. I always found his music a little on the dour side; much preferring the brighter, more mercurial John Renbourn for folk-baroque British guitar.

I was intrigued to discover recently that the unfinished second symphony of E. J. Moeran has been completed and recorded on the Dutton Epoch label. First listens suggest it was a worthwhile thing to do. Unfinished symphonies are an interesting topic. Moeran’s first symphony (Symphony in G) from the late 1930s (I think) is a very enjoyable piece. There’s a good recording on Naxos. It owes something to Sibelius, who was dominating the world of the symphony in the 1930s and 1940s, but not to the point of it spoiling Moeran’s music.

Posted by  |  November 2, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

Argent

I’ve recently been playing a couple of songs by the early 70s prog-rock band Argent who were formed out of the remnants of 60s group The Zombies who are remembered for the hit single ‘She’s Not There’ and have garnered some critical acclaim recently for their concept album Odyssey and Oracle. Argent had two hit singles – ‘Hold Your Head Up’ and ‘Tragedy’ and both feature some tasty guitar playing by Russ Ballard. Ballard cut a striking figure on TV at the time with black specs and a silver Fender Strat with many holes cut out of the body (I haven’t looked but maybe there are pictures of this guitar on the web by now). ‘Hold Your Head Up’ has a distinctive guitar riff/verse made out of triad shapes on the top 3 strings. Nothing so unusual about that, but it is the tone and the way he plays it – with what in classical music would be called tenuto – a kind of leant-on weight – that makes it sound great. Perhaps the guitar was recorded with compression also. The bridge of the song has an interesting instrumental passage with quite daring harmony where the guitar repeatedly hits a D chord as the organ cycles through a number of chords some of which (like Bb and F) create quite dissonant sounds. The other hit ‘Tragedy’ has some very funky guitar playing on a fifth fret A minor riff, again very well recorded, and not what you would expect from a prog-rock band.

Posted by  |  September 23, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Guitar teaching

In addition to writing the guitar / songwriting books I work as a guitar teacher, helping people with basic technique in most styles, acoustic and electric, bass guitar, all aspects of songwriting, theory and musical appreciation. If you live in the UK and would like to arrange a lesson drop me a message via the website. If you don’t live near Oxford but would like to visit and have a few hours tuition in one go I can also arrange that.

Posted by  |  September 23, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: | Leave a comment

Latest Zep magazine out

Part two of my long feature on ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is published in Dave Lewis’ long-running Zeppelin magazine Tight But Loose. You can order it from the tbl website. Dave has recently published a very detailed colour account of the band’s final tour in Europe in 1980 as the book Feather In The Wind. He is currently planning a revised second edition of his book Then As It Was on the band’s two gigs at Knebworth in August 1979. If you’re interested in Zeppelin’s music and career his books are essential.

Posted by  |  September 23, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Four chord songs

Several people have mentioned a youtube clip to me recently involving a comedy act who run through scores of songs which allegedly use the same four chords. As the author of How To Write Songs On Guitar I had to look this up.

The comedy act is the Axis of Awesome. The chords in question are the progression I-V-VI-IV, which in the clip they play in the key of E major: E B C#m A. The joke is the audience’s recognition of the songs being similar, as though they are laughing at discovering the resemblance and the evidence of the proposition at the outset that these are the four chords you need to have a hit. The performance does have a slight cheat element to it, firstly because it puts all the songs in the same key, whereas they would be in a number of different keys; secondly, because it doesn’t distinguish between songs that use those four chords without repeat in a progression, with repeats in a chorus (what I call a turnaround), or possibly for the entire song.

What does this performance demonstrate? Certainly, that this is a very commercial progression and many hits songs have used it (and no doubt more will). It also says something about the formulaic nature of harmony in popular music and its limited grammar (i.e. how the chords are used, not which chords). And underneath this is an interesting unfaced question for popular music’s audience: how many songs do you need or want that have the same harmony? Wouldn’t you rather hear something different? Why did you buy all these songs if you’re laughing at the fact that they sound the same?

Posted by  |  September 23, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , | 2 Comments

Loss of Rapid Eye Movement

Two days ago it was announced that R.E.M. had split up. R.E.M. will go down in rock history as an important band for a number of reasons, not just because of their success.Although it is some years since I paid them much attention, I have fond memories of some of their earlier music. The first R.E.M. track I ever heard was probably in 1984-85 and it was the haunting ‘South Central Rain’, a single from their second album Reckoning. There was something about the plaintive wash of A minor on the chorus coupled with the slightly distant vocal saying ‘I’m sorry’ that sounded as though it had come from a different world. This led me to buy that album and I loved it. The bright Rickenbacker guitar tone and the idiosyncratic and melancholy lyrics reminded me a little of The Smiths who were also on the rise at that time. In many ways R.E.M. were a kind of U.S. version of The Smiths. Both bands showed that rock music could speak about the real and the everyday and the small triumphs and tragedies of life and somehow transform these things into the beauty of song – in marked contrast to the often absurd pumped-up testosterone-fuelled pantomime of many rock bands – fun, no doubt, but a pantomime nevertheless. Peter Buck and Johnny Marr both showed that the arpeggiated guitar style which had been central to mid-60s folk-rock could still speak.

In the summer of 1985 I saw R.E.M. pretty much unknown in the U.K. play a short set at the Milton Keynes Bowl supporting U2. It rained and after awhile they retired, somewhat dispirited. I enjoyed them.

A year or so later I was in a record shop and heard Life’s Rich Pageant over the speakers. I bought it and it became one of my favourite rock albums, a delightful balance between the rough eccentricities and introversions of their first three albums and the slicker communicativeness of the later. From that I bought the first album Murmur and the third album Fables of the Reconstruction, then Document, Green, Out of Time, Automatic For The People, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and Up, as they appeared. I also got Reveal and found that rather thin. The others I don’t know.

The decision to split didn’t surprise me because I think the band had taken their sound as far as they could and were now caught in the dilemma which so often afflicts rock bands who stay together long enough: either break your mould and do something very different (in which case you get criticized for not being you) or attempt to self-consciously recapture a sound you best executed unselfconsciously many years before (in which case it is said to be not really a return to form). For me, the quintessential R.E.M. is that of the albums they made with IRS (nos 1-5) and if you want an introduction to it try either Life’s Rich Pageant or the Collected Singles CD (20 tracks). Although they made some good, occasionally great music when they went to Warner for Green and gained a much bigger audience, it doesn’t quite have the same character. The departure of Bill Berry was obviously a critical blow also. None of the Warner albums engage me as albums, though I like some tracks on each. I think ‘I Remember California’ is an astonishing track – a doom-laden slice of Pacific apocalypse all the more striking because in it R.E.M. seemed to step beyond their own emotional range so powerfully. ‘Electrolyte’ is very touching – that line about ‘C20th go to sleep’ gets me every time.

I don’t agree with the frequently-expressed rock critic view that Automatic For The People is their best album; I think that’s over-rated, as are songs like ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’. Given the choice between those two and ‘Perfect Circle’ and ‘South Central Rain’, I’ll take the latter. In some ways Automatic occupies a similar position in their career as Born In The USA does in Springsteen’s (the R.E.M. album is better, mind).

A two-disc greatest hits is apparently on the way in November.

Posted by  |  September 23, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Sibelius in Finland

First, welcome to those of you who recently signed up to this blog; I hope you’ll find these notes on music interesting. Apologies to all for the absence from writing. This has been due to several weeks getting to grips with a new computer and new software (for music-making) plus a much-delayed summer holiday in Finland.

The holiday included attending all the concerts at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, about 100km north of Helsinki. This is an annual festival dedicated to the music of Finland’s most famous composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) who for awhile at the beginning of the C20th played an important symbolic role in the struggle for Finnish national identity. He composed quite a bit of music in most genres, but it is his tone-poems and seven symphonies on which his reputation probably most rests. The symphonies in particular are held in high regard – so much so that at his funeral seven white candles were used during the ceremony, each standing for one of the symphonies. That gives an idea of the reverence in which they were/are held. They are all quite different from each other, as became apparent at the festival this year, because over the course of three nights we heard them all in chronological sequence. The first lasts about 40 minutes, the last only about 22 and is essentially in one movement instead of the usual four.

If you haven’t sampled Sibelius before try some of the tone-poems such as ‘Night-ride and Sunrise’ or ‘The Bard’ or the spooky ‘Tapiola’, or a short piece such as ‘Spring Song’, or the ever-popular ‘Karelia Suite’. Among the symphonies no.2 and no.5 are probably the most accessible to begin with, the former being a late-C19th romantic work, the latter being more compact, optimistic and with the beautiful ‘swan hymn’ theme in the last movement (also featuring one of the greatest key-changes in all orchestral music as Sibelius swings from G flat to C major just as the swan hymn is launched).

The Sibelius Festival is held in the first week or so of September Thurs-Sun. It is good to fit in a visit to his home which is now a museum about 60 km from Lahti. The capital Helsinki is also good to visit and walk round. There is an excellent DVD by Christopher Nupen about Sibelius’ life and music if you can’t get to Finland and also a 2004 Finnish biopic called Sibelius which I haven’t seen yet.

More shortly.

Posted by  |  September 14, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment