Jazz "language" for guitar

[ecj]

I think princeplanet is making a very astute point here. There are a million ways to play guitar with pretty different technical skills involved in them. I feel like a lot of newer players tend to think that you can just learn anything and access it at any time. After you've been playing for a while you realize that there's a significant amount of time-commitment involved in just developing one technique and keeping the skills together. If you don't have an entire system that goes together, it's hard to maintain things.

For example, just within the straight-ahead jazz guitar tradition you have guys like:

- Charlie Christian who played with mostly big, rest-stroke downstrokes, used chord shapes to visualize the fretboard, and rarely slurred anything.
- Wes Montgomery who used his thumb, played up and down the neck a lot, played rest downstrokes with upstrokes occasionally for faster passages on single line runs but strummed through the notes without rest strokes for his octave and chordal passages.
- George Benson who kind of extended the Montgomery approach, figured out a lot of crazy stuff that sounds almost like an organ.
- Pat Martino with his ridiculously precise alternate picking and long stream-of-8th-note-lines.
- Tal Farlow who had some pretty odd chord voicings that he accessed with his big hands, played with what I believe is alternate picking, and used his pinky more than the other guys mentioned.
- Jim Hall with his light picking, dark sound, and slurry left hand.
- Joe Pass who endorsed the CAGED system, used the gypsy-style rest stroke downstrokes and downstrokes for all string changes, developed an approach to fingerpicking solo guitar that relied a lot on barres.
- Lenny Breau with his harp harmonics, classical style approach, internal voice leading, etc.
- Not even to mention Kessell, Ellis, Green, Raney, etc., etc.

Then if you get outside the straight-ahead tradition you've got:
- The entire classical tradition with all of its assorted techniques.
- The flamenco tradition.
- The electric and acoustic blues guitar traditions.
- The whole rock/metal/shred guitar thing.
- A bunch of different idosynchratic approaches to shred guitar.
- All the modern jazzers like Scofield, Metheny, etc. who do things completely differently from anyone mentioned above.

More and more I'm realizing the impossibility of getting really good at everything. Is it realistic to think that you'll be able to alternate pick like Martino, but then also have your gypsy picking chops together, and then be able to switch into crazy sweep picking patterns? Maybe if you're Bireli Lagrene or Andres Oberg.

For the rest of us mere mortals, I think you have to kind of pick and choose what's going to work for you. I think there are some players like Russell Malone who do an awesome job of absorbing a ton of influences and then quoting and using those techniques in his playing. Then you have guys like Metheny who just come up with their own system and rarely if ever play anything that anyone else has done.

I think they're both valid approaches, and it's kind of up to you which path to choose. If you want to be like Malone, I think it's okay to just pick up all the skills that you can and not worry so much about having a system or a "sound" for a while. If you're an artist like Metheny who is looking to create a unique sound (a big priority from him based on interviews, etc.), then you have to be thinking about how to create your own sonic palette.

No matter what you do, I really like Reg's advice to master the basics. If you can alternate pick well. Play all your intervals, scales, arpeggios, chords, in a manner that is not sort of "style-neutral" it'll get easier to pick up all of the other stuff as you go. Then, most importantly, can you hear that stuff? Is it important to be able to nail a weird, slurry, chromatic Metheny line? Probably not unless you want to sound like Metheny. Is it important to be able to cleanly play a C major scale? Probably for a million different things.

The best advise I've heard to is to get as good as you can at one thing before moving onto the next. Just some thoughts on what is a really cool thread.

[cosmic gumbo]

Maybe, but to be fair, they quickly caught up!

....with a dead man.

[jtizzle]

I agree with Fep, a sax player could not possibly replicate a Joe Pass chord melody, or something like it. Every instrument has it's own pros and cons. There is no perfect instrument. Think about it:

A sax can play notes in the most legato way I believe is possible, and can also work up to incredible speeds. However, they can't play chords.

Trumpets are the ideal line-playing instrument. They have three valves, so they play with the overtone series mainly. That means that they really have to think about every single note they play (which is why many trumpet players are also good singers/scatters)

Drums are rhythmic masters, and develop all sorts of rhythms and grooves that have so many intricacies that sometimes I just get confused when listening to a drum solo. But they can't play melodies (technically they can, if you're Ari Hoenig, but not really) or chords.

A bass is the rhythmic and harmonic foundation of the music, so as a bass player, you develop great ways to connect chords, and you gotta have good rhythm, but generally you're not going to be playing fast speeds, or chords.

A piano is a two handed instrument. You can play around 10 notes at a time as a maximum (maybe more), and you can divide the workload between the two hands. One hand can play bass, chords, or both, and the other can play a melody with some harmonies. They can also play at high speed. On top of that, they have the best visual layout for notes. However, everything lays completely differently depending on the key you're in. If you want to play something in two different keys, you really have to learn it in two different keys. Also, large intervals are not easy on the piano.

So you can see every instrument has it's pros and cons. When I think of the guitar, I think of it as a miniature piano. The guitar also has it's imperfections, but many of them are also helpful. The biggest complaint I hear is "how do I know where to play this, I can play this up here by the 12th fret, or down here by the 5th, or in the middle by the 8th, what do I do?" Which might lead a beginner to confusion. I see it as a blessing, that you can get the same thing in different places, and opens up territory on where to go. You can go higher in the register by playing around the lower strings by the 10th-12th fret, or if you want to go lower play in the higher strings of around the 5th fret and bring it down by strings. Guitarists also play smaller chords. Where some people prefer a piano, I like Sonny Rollins' theory of how the Piano takes up too much sonic space, whereas a guitar can play a chord with a maximum of 6 notes, and the norm is to play about 4 notes or less, so there is no way a guitarist will take up more space than a Piano. Then there's the interval thing. We can make skips of as high as 2 octaves+ without breaking a sweat. Without moving our positions, we can hit a low A on the 6th string, and then a high B on the top string, that's a skip of 2 octaves and a 2nd. A piano certainly can't do that without using both hands. The other thing, which some people see as tasteless, but I see as helpful, is how we can play nonstop without worrying about breath, as a horn player has to. I'm not saying you should play nonstop 8th notes for 2 minutes on a solo, but it helps to not have to breathe to play, since running out of breath mid phrase could be a problem. Lastly, transposition on guitar is as easy as it gets, since if you have a tune in C, and the singer wants it in E, think of the problems the piano player would have by transposing all the natural notes to sharps and moving it around the keyboard, whereas a guitar player just has to slide the same identical information a few frets up and we're good.


And when it comes to Bird lines, they don't lay as bad as you think on the guitar. It takes some getting used to, but it also gets you out of position playing, which is the best thing you could do as a guitarist.

[jster]

I had a teacher once who was a monster player. Be-bop was his thing. I don't think he really liked music much after 65. And he took the view that guitarists thought like guitarists and that was a bad thing. At least when it came to be-bop. He was a scale running freak. I think he said he spent two hours a day on scales and was cycling through them in a way that took two years. He did talk about CAGED, but I think that was more in the context of the history of jazz guitar. For his own playing I think he used the whole 12 position deal. When he played (be-bop), he moved all over the neck. More so probably than any other guitarist I've ever seen. You might think that with all that neck knowledge he could stay in one place, but that definitely wasn't the way it went down. He kind of looked at the neck as though it were puzzle. I got the sense that in order for the triplet slur to be in the right place he needed to figure out which finger to start with. I didn't realize it at the time, but in terms of straight be-bop, he's probably the best guitarist I've ever seen (outside of the greats). There are some videos of him on yt, but all have problems. Send me a PM if you want to see the best of them.

[princeplanet]

....with a dead man.

Ha! Fair call.... By assuming that C.C. was already fully developed and had no where else to go, at his young age, is perhaps a little presumptious......

[JazzinNY]

Some thoughts ...

Yeah, guitar is hard in this way. Even if you "know" the whole fretboard (realistically, up to fret 14) -- you need to be able to play a tune in 5th position, then another in 4th position -- subtly but importantly different.

So that's the deal. We deal with it (I do, by forced repetition, playing things in various keys) -- in exchange for the benefits: being able to do chord melody, being able to record your own backing track, and for having the COOLEST instrument. Being able to play silently at 2 am. Wait, don't end on that. Having the COOLEST instrument.

I myself "hear" trumpet-like lines, and indeed first played trumpet many years ago. But it's an ongoing challenge to get a more guitaristic sound into my playing, because what's the point of every guy coming up and playing a solo the same way? One thing I'm exploring is the sonic possibilities within the amp.

In transcribing, some lines have been almost impossible to play (Milt Jackson for example). Still worth doing, to expose myself to that genius language. If you want great lines that DO sit well on guitar, there's Martino.