Transcribing horn players, piano players vs guitar players

[anticosmicdawn]

Just though this would be an interesting discussion.

I've had this argument a couple of times. I personally think that some guitar players lack in their ability to play slow, melodic lines ( generalisation ), always throwing in little noodly while sax players like Stan Getz, Paul Desmond or trumpeters like Chet Baker and Kenny Dorham really shine through with their savory solos. Some people I have met strictly say you should only transcribe players that play the same instrument as you, in this case electric guitar. I peronally think you can benefit from both.

What do you think?

[christianm77]

Yes I agree. Why? Well I think it's really hard to play medium tempo convincingly in single time.

Most modern players tend to double time or play triplets because once your chops are together it's easier and almost automatic to do so.

This also counts for a lot of the modern horn players. Maybe it's the decline in playing for dancers - tempos become extreme, and no one seems to play medium bounce... If it is medium they double it so that they can burn it like Cherokee....

I know I have to really restrain myself from playing triplets all the time when the tune is 120-160 ish.... (Mind you, sounds good when Wes does it :-)) Playing only with downstrokes seems to help me.

But there are a lot of factors - beat placement etc - and this side of things is a great area of creativity for a jazz musician.

So for, it's a time feel thing. Simple playing only sounds good if it's really in time, and really rhythmic. Out of time simple playing just sounds weak. Also, fast playing without rhythm sounds like noodling, although that can be superficially impressive so there's somewhere to hide.

Furthermore - the floating effect of the great horn players such as Lester Young often comes from playing different rhythmic meters over the top of the rhythm section - the quarter triplet is a classic one.

Also, a true swinging double time is not the same feel as simply playing sixteenth runs.

Most guitarists are a bit rhythmically backward compared to horn players. It's a known thing...

[NSJ]

Biggest weakness of the guitar: lack of sustain and inability to play long tones. A horn player should kill a guitarist on any ballad in terms of single note lines that need to sustain , goes without saying.

[christianm77]

Biggest weakness of the guitar: lack of sustain and inability to play long tones. A horn player should kill a guitarist on any ballad in terms of single note lines that need to sustain , goes without saying.

Oh I don't know, I think it depends on the player. People who use classical technique, no sustaining vibrato and super clean amp are going to be in trouble :-P

Jim Mullen gets a horn like sustain for instance. Just got to play a bit sweet and bluesy.... Electric guitar gives you that provided you have your amp set for just a tiny hint of drive on the top end of the dynamic range, also a bit of lovely slow vibrato from your strong three fingers with your thumb over the top like a proper guitar player and not one of these college boys. ;-)

(I'm sorry I am such a terrible wind up merchant.)

Examples:

Man, I wish I could play like that.

EDIT: to me Jim Mullen is one of the greatest exemplars of the horn inspired guitar tradition (i.e. the tradition of Charlie Christian and Grant Green) as opposed to the piano inspired tradition...

Of course you can always go full wooly hat and stick a bit of drive on your sound, Sco/Kurt style. Actually I think Kurts appraoch - three fingered (basically) for single notes, full four fingers for chords/polyphony, is pretty idea.

[NSJ]

Dude, the classic "woolly hat" look, Love it. Here in Chicago we call that the Josh Abrams look, Who kind of pioneered it. Of course, he was wearing a woolly hat because he was most likely playing double bass in a very cold free jazz venue in which heat was a premium even in winter time.

Of course, the classic sustain without effects but with an overdriven amp was best made in a non-jazz setting by your countryman, old Bob Fripp, on David Bowie's "heroes".

"Then I'd say the next thing that really moved the track along was Fripp's contribution. We already had Carlos's beautiful lines, like the bass line that was doubled on the guitar as well as the melodic part on the pre-chorus, and when Fripp came along about a week later he added a whole other dimension. He and Eno had already enjoyed a long partnership where Fripp would plug his guitar into the EMS Synthi and Brian would just play around with it, so Fripp did exactly that and he came up with that beautiful line which everyone thinks is an E-bow sound, but which is actually just Fripp standing in the right place with his volume up at the right level and getting feedback.

"Everyone who's played the song with Bowie since then has had to use an E-bow to duplicate it, but Fripp had a technique in those days where he measured the distance between the guitar and the speaker where each note would feed back. For instance, an 'A' would feed back maybe at about four feet from the speaker, whereas a 'G' would feed back maybe three and a half feet from it. He had a strip that they would place on the floor, and when he was playing the note 'F' sharp he would stand on the strip's 'F' sharp point and 'F' sharp would feed back better. He really worked this out to a fine science, and we were playing this at a terrific level in the studio, too. It was very, very loud, and all the while he was playing these notes — that beautiful overhead line — Eno was turning the dials and creating a new envelope and just playing with the filter bank. We did three takes of that, and although one take would sound very patchy, three takes had all of these filter changes and feedback blending into that very smooth, haunting, overlaying melody which you hear."

--Tony Visconti, from More SOS articles on the way! | Sound On Sound

[matt.guitarteacher]

Biggest weakness of the guitar: lack of sustain and inability to play long tones. A horn player should kill a guitarist on any ballad in terms of single note lines that need to sustain , goes without saying.

This is what I was going to say. Beyond lack of sustain, there's a very quick percussive decay. Well worth considering phrasing of pianists vs horns in that regard. Crescendo is a big thing with vocals and horns. It's not necessarily use of more "space". A crescendo is not "space".

[yaclaus]

After having transcribed many, many guitar solos, I'd be more inclined to recommend learning non-guitar solos. Makes you focus on language instead of chops.

[PMB]

Charlie Christian is a case in point. So much of his language and phrasing comes from Lester Young yet we don't think of him as a copyist. It sounds fresh whereas if he'd picked up all that stuff from another guitarist, he'd be nothing more than a footnote in the history of jazz.

[targuit]

Jim Mullen has a beautiful voice on the guitar - very musical and sophisticated but measured. That balance between passion and restraint that just teases the melody and harmony on. Just great in my book. Not that I ever heard him before...seriously.

I think I also hear a little Bill Evans in there. I think he masterfully uses chordal harmony as the bed for the melody or as comping behind the horns. Very harmonious and rhythmically where he should be. I'm impressed.

[christianm77]

Jim Mullen has a beautiful voice on the guitar - very musical and sophisticated but measured. That balance between passion and restraint that just teases the melody and harmony on. Just great in my book. Not that I ever heard him before...seriously.

I think I also hear a little Bill Evans in there. I think he masterfully uses chordal harmony as the bed for the melody or as comping behind the horns. Very harmonious and rhythmically where he should be. I'm impressed.

Glad you like him. Jim is a legend!

[targuit]

I know I can Google, but who did or does he play with?

Edit - ok, I Googled. Cool. In fact I may have seen him with Brian Augur's Oblivion Express. I saw them in Italy in around 1972 or so if my dates are correct. Quite good.

[Hep To The Jive]

The guitar, especially archtop played with clean or semi clean tone doesn't have enough sustain to be able to do what horn players can do on slower tunes, that is a fact, indeed! On ballads, double time phrases can make it more interesting, but how about tremolos? I feel like I naturally want to go in tremolo mode on ballads sometimes, just to play a simple phrase that otherwise would be quarter notes, but with tremolo it sound much more exciting! Of course, one should be careful not to go too crazy before end up in Surf territory, or to sound like a mandolin player in disguise, haha.

But seriously, anybody else using this technique regularly in jazz at all? It's kinda something unique that guitarists can add to the music without feeling inferior to horns or piano IMO

[WillMbCdn5]

I'm a complete slut for the slurs/sustain/glides etc of horn work- I have transcribed as much of the Stanley Turrentine work on Midnight Blue as that of Kenny Burrell ( my fav guitar player and album ) . Just working through Turrentine's " Sugar" at the moment. That said I love the percussive edge to the guitar that the horn somewhat lacks. So my favorite instrument is a "saxtar" ) A while back someone posted a link to a Jim Mullen vid- I am a thumb player who was starting to think that maybe I needed to use a pick to get a "real" jazz sound/articulation and was blown away by his combination of horn like tone/percussive versatility and use of space - while it may be viewed as a limitation - I don't think a thumb player can articulate as many notes in a given space as a pick player so they tend to be a bit more conscious of when and where to use changes of note length and phrasing/breathing/space emphasis. I realized it was that use of space and breathing in phrasing I was after not more notes per measure that using a pick seemed to offer. My friend a very accomplished and long time bass player and music mentor always giggles when I show him something new I am working on because it is always interspersed with measured and apparently ) audible in breaths and out breaths as I go through my new idea.

Watching Jim Mullin play gave me the confidence to continue with my thumb centric approach believing as I do it leads to the kind on tone and articulation I wanted to express.

Will

[MarkRhodes]

I used to wish I had taken up sax as a kid instead of guitar. When I first got into jazz, few of the albums I bought even had guitars on them. I loved Miles and Monk, Mingus, Ellington and Basie. (Basie had Freddie Green but it took me a long time to appreciate Freddie's greatness. "I wanna play LEAD, man!")

But now I prefer guitar to any horn because chords. And double stops. I still enjoy hearing a horn but I just never find myself wishing I played one anymore.

Which reminds me: in that clip posted yesterday of Sonny Stitt at a Bird tribute: after the head ("Now's The Time") Sonny stands there for over six minutes not playing a note. It's not his turn. It is said of jazz guitarists, "You will spend most of your time comping." It could be said of jazz horn players, "You will spend most of your time watching someone else solo." When Coltrane would go off on one of his long, adventurous solos with Miles Davis Quintet, I wonder what Miles was thinking about----Coltrane could take a six minute solo and think nothing of it. What's it like to be on stage in a killer band and go six minutes without playing a note? And then if another horn takes the next solo, it's even longer...

[christianm77]

I know I can Google, but who did or does he play with?

Edit - ok, I Googled. Cool. In fact I may have seen him with Brian Augur's Oblivion Express. I saw them in Italy in around 1972 or so if my dates are correct. Quite good.

Jim told me that he started off on bass and got into the guitar to comp, because there were no guitarists who comped in a modern style at that time. So I think your mention of his comping is right on point.

Furthermore, Jim's feel is fantastic. I've seen him lock in dodgy rhythm sections just by comping...

[gggomez]

I think modern recording techniques, for my ears, kill off the dynamics of guitar. The snap and edge of early Benson, GGreen, Burrel does not come through any more. Post about 65, apart from some very now stuff jazz guitar I find really bland. Eg I find Kreisberg and Bernsteins CDs very middle of the road, tame and lacking dynamic but live man they are smokin. Drums the same too must gating and stuff.

We, as in guitarists, need a new Rudy that record's loud on the edge of breakup. Sorry maybe not we but me.

Anyway had a nice session last night with the horn players on Rock Salt. Only got a few bars down but man they are hot, minimalist, expressive just how I hope I can play one day.



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[eh6794]

A jazz guitarist usually can't play a single note for two bars, let alone a half of a bar. Many guitarists solved this problem by playing some moving harmony on the lower strings while holding, and occasionally re-plucking the original note

[Philco]

Jim's solo in ATTYA is killing!

[gggomez]

What are the things to get around not being able to sustain.

Benson does that double stop hammer on thing. Burrell does double stop tremolo picking.

[pants]

What are the things to get around not being able to sustain.

Benson does that double stop hammer on thing. Burrell does double stop tremolo picking.

Some good stuff in this slower track. Just happened across it earlier today.

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[WillMbCdn5]

I have been exploring Indian classical guitar ornamentation. It offers a number of sounds that for me relate to the discussion of horn like phrasing and vocal sounds.

Will

[gggomez]

Thanks Pants, yes some beautiful playing and if it was recorded in 1963 it might sound fantastic.

Compare the difference, the snap and pop, the natural sustain and dynamics of Grant Green (he does a slide and you can hear the string buzz and scratchiness as opposed to the Metheney compressed and gated sound in which for my ears the soul and dynamics is lost, the old school sound is so raw on the edge of break up and the presence of the ride symbol and snare (almost like they are playing in front of you).

Jeff Porcaro used to always complain about gating as it meant you could not hear all his nuances, the feathering of the drums etc

Sorry anticosmicdawn, will stop derailing your thread and bangin on. How to capture the horn dynamics has really been bugging me lately and the more I think about it the more I think it can be done.

[pants]

Yeah... The production is definitely a different can of worms. Mostly with the Metheny I meant to indicate some of the subtle lower string undertones and even (gasp) bends that he uses to underscore a feeling of sustain or to give a more expressive feel to the line.


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[pants]

I'd also say look to the pianists. They have basically the same problem.


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[christianm77]

A jazz guitarist usually can't play a single note for two bars, let alone a half of a bar. Many guitarists solved this problem by playing some moving harmony on the lower strings while holding, and occasionally re-plucking the original note

Just play faster tunes innit