A Unified Approach To Jazz Guitar

[christianm77]

I’m going to break my silence and chip in here and say that I have personally made an aesthetic decision only to play with a pick, something that might seem like a questionable decision given the amount of freedom that you are throwing away by doing it. I find it an interesting musical problem.

(from a practical point of view I figure the more clever stuff I can come up with the more I can slot it into a basic but functional approach that I can do right now on like gigs I’ve been booked to play.)

i do not believe that solo guitar playing is fundamentally about polyphony, although it certainly can be if you choose that route. Actually, it’s about sleight of hand and above all rhythm - if you get the rhythm together you will sound much more cohesive with simple choices than if you play involved counterpoint with no groove. You can certainly here this in Joe Pass’s approach of course.

a cheap and cheerful way of making this limited approach sound more polyphonic is contrary motion in the bass and treble. Pete Bernstein is a master of this.

The technical demands of solo guitar playing can be pretty great, and just getting the fingers to move in time is no small feat.

It’s also notable that several well known solo guitar players rely on arrangements for this type of playing and improvise much more around single note lines with chord stabs, as I do (only better lol) - I won’t name names- and the type of apparently improvised counterpoint we see in Ted Greene is pretty rare. I would be interested to hear thoughts from his students, and Jimmy Wyble’s...

ultimately I figure if someone wants a lounge piano player they’ll get one, so the aim of solo guitar playing is to do something that sounds guitaristic. Which of course is not to say that excludes fingerpicking....

[christianm77]

Btw I don’t mean to knock the practice of working on arrangements, I think it’s a totally valid route. I love Martin Taylor for instance, and he’s known to be an arrangement driven player. The same has been said about Oscar Peterson on piano and I bloody love him too.

also arranging a lot might lead to a more improvisational approach overtime as you develop more options.

but for me it never interested me as a route. I suppose with a less compositional approach one ends up arranging stuff anyway, just more gradually.... the same is true of working with a band of course. Different bands work different ways.

[matt.guitarteacher]

I’m going to break my silence and chip in here and say that I have personally made an aesthetic decision only to play with a pick, something that might seem like a questionable decision given the amount of freedom that you are throwing away by doing it. I find it an interesting musical problem.

(from a practical point of view I figure the more clever stuff I can come up with the more I can slot it into a basic but functional approach that I can do right now on like gigs I’ve been booked to play.)

i do not believe that solo guitar playing is fundamentally about polyphony, although it certainly can be if you choose that route. Actually, it’s about sleight of hand and above all rhythm - if you get the rhythm together you will sound much more cohesive with simple choices than if you play involved counterpoint with no groove. You can certainly here this in Joe Pass’s approach of course.

a cheap and cheerful way of making this limited approach sound more polyphonic is contrary motion in the bass and treble. Pete Bernstein is a master of this.

The technical demands of solo guitar playing can be pretty great, and just getting the fingers to move in time is no small feat.

It’s also notable that several well known solo guitar players rely on arrangements for this type of playing and improvise much more around single note lines with chord stabs, as I do (only better lol) - I won’t name names- and the type of apparently improvised counterpoint we see in Ted Greene is pretty rare. I would be interested to hear thoughts from his students, and Jimmy Wyble’s...

ultimately I figure if someone wants a lounge piano player they’ll get one, so the aim of solo guitar playing is to do something that sounds guitaristic. Which of course is not to say that excludes fingerpicking....

I have a weird thing about phases with these kind of things I guess. I played almost exclusively with fingers for a couple of years and then one day just started using the pick with the same type of thing. It's probably been a couple of years of almost exclusive pick-only.

Anyway, each was really a beneficial experiment of its own. Finger style is really good for the aspect of kind of separating things out into separate "voices". I just realized one day, while playing with the pick, that I basically could emulate 90% of that effect with the pick - mainly because my right hand taught my ears to hear the separate voice thing that way. So, I'd just point out that I find that each technique informs the other in unique ways regardless of which way you "choose".

Hybrid is the technique I've neglected really. I suppose eventually I'll get around to it, out of this boredom/wanderlust aspect of my personality more than anything. I look forward to it, but it's not here yet.

[christianm77]

Yeah - this might seem an insane thing to say for many people, but I don’t actually want to sound like Ted Greene even if 1) it be possible and 2) I was willing to put aside the time to study it. I admire it, but it’s not what I want to spend my time on.

that’s not to poo poo the choices of anyone who wants to go in that direction. Studying music is about making negative choices as much as positive. You can’t do it all.

One guy I really like is Peter Bernstein, partly because his solo stuff has a kind of ugly beauty to it. Ted sounds beautiful and elegant, but I don’t think that’s my thing. I like the sound of the pick on the strings, the dynamic contrasts, the rawness and grit that to me makes Pete’s playing striking. A lot of people frankly don’t like it. But one thing I like about it is that it is possible to dislike and I feel many jazz guitarists are content to make pretty music.

Btw one reason I disengaged from this forum is because threads tend to evolve into people (including me most definitely) sort of justifying their take or approach on things for some reason, or talking about this or that online course or concept by some big name; while once you have a few ideas to work on it’s really it’s much better (at least for me) to just do it and let people take or leave your music as per their tastes .... i mean you can work twenty years on one simple concept... in fact it’s better one does that than dabble.

but for me I find it distracting, but someone might get a lot out of that Ted Greene course, as you did.

the other thing is once you get to a certain point in life the practice hours are precious and there’s gigs to play. The choices you have made - often unwittingly - earlier in your playing life come together to give you a style and personality whether you like it or not...

[lawson-stone]

I’m going to break my silence and chip in here and say that I have personally made an aesthetic decision only to play with a pick, something that might seem like a questionable decision given the amount of freedom that you are throwing away by doing it. I find it an interesting musical problem.

(from a practical point of view I figure the more clever stuff I can come up with the more I can slot it into a basic but functional approach that I can do right now on like gigs I’ve been booked to play.)

i do not believe that solo guitar playing is fundamentally about polyphony, although it certainly can be if you choose that route. Actually, it’s about sleight of hand and above all rhythm - if you get the rhythm together you will sound much more cohesive with simple choices than if you play involved counterpoint with no groove. You can certainly here this in Joe Pass’s approach of course.

a cheap and cheerful way of making this limited approach sound more polyphonic is contrary motion in the bass and treble. Pete Bernstein is a master of this.

The technical demands of solo guitar playing can be pretty great, and just getting the fingers to move in time is no small feat.

It’s also notable that several well known solo guitar players rely on arrangements for this type of playing and improvise much more around single note lines with chord stabs, as I do (only better lol) - I won’t name names- and the type of apparently improvised counterpoint we see in Ted Greene is pretty rare. I would be interested to hear thoughts from his students, and Jimmy Wyble’s...

ultimately I figure if someone wants a lounge piano player they’ll get one, so the aim of solo guitar playing is to do something that sounds guitaristic. Which of course is not to say that excludes fingerpicking....

Wow someone finally said out loud something I have been pondering. I started out totally a finger-style player back in the Folk Music Scare of the 70's (when it almost caught on). A John Denver/Peter-Paul&Mary sort of player. Then when I jumped into jazz I mainly did solo guitar, fingerstyle. But I realized I could play tunes but did not know the chords and couldn't play the melody! As I started trying to go back and learn the charts properly--chords, melody, etc. I found more and more I needed the pick, which was always for me only on loud-fast folk or sing-a-long.

More and more I am staying with the pick even in solo guitar playing. I can't articulate just why I prefer it, but it has been growing. You've said this very well and I feel a lot better about, at least for this season of my musical journey, staying with the pick.

[lawson-stone]

Yeah - this might seem an insane thing to say for many people, but I don’t actually want to sound like Ted Greene even if 1) it be possible and 2) I was willing to put aside the time to study it. I admire it, but it’s not what I want to spend my time on.

that’s not to poo poo the choices of anyone who wants to go in that direction. Studying music is about making negative choices as much as positive. You can’t do it all.

One guy I really like is Peter Bernstein, partly because his solo stuff has a kind of ugly beauty to it. Ted sounds beautiful and elegant, but I don’t think that’s my thing. I like the sound of the pick on the strings, the dynamic contrasts, the rawness and grit that to me makes Pete’s playing striking. A lot of people frankly don’t like it. But one thing I like about it is that it is possible to dislike and I feel many jazz guitarists are content to make pretty music.

Btw one reason I disengaged from this forum is because threads tend to evolve into people (including me most definitely) sort of justifying their take or approach on things for some reason, or talking about this or that online course or concept by some big name; while once you have a few ideas to work on it’s really it’s much better (at least for me) to just do it and let people take or leave your music as per their tastes .... i mean you can work twenty years on one simple concept... in fact it’s better one does that than dabble.

but for me I find it distracting, but someone might get a lot out of that Ted Greene course, as you did.

the other thing is once you get to a certain point in life the practice hours are precious and there’s gigs to play. The choices you have made - often unwittingly - earlier in your playing life come together to give you a style and personality whether you like it or not...

Boom. We can admire and respect a lot of approaches that we simply don't find compelling for our own playing. When i hear solo guitar arrangements of standards with all kinds of moving voices and long stretchy chords, I really admire it, enjoy listening to it, but have no desire to play that way. I want to improve, but not necessarily toward that kind of playing.

Christian you are a good and helpful voice on this forum. Thanks for stepping into this conversation. You've lifted a bit of a burden off of me (staying with the pick for which I actually felt ... a little GUILTY??? crazy but true).

[lawson-stone]

I think I didn't post my first post #26 in the right topic. What Tal_75 was talking about is not the same as me. My apologies if I provoked misunderstanding or quiproquo

We all make that mistake sometimes. No worries.

[cosmic gumbo]

ultimately I figure if someone wants a lounge piano player they’ll get one, so the aim of solo guitar playing is to do something that sounds guitaristic. Which of course is not to say that excludes fingerpicking....

My observation is that folks who hire solo guitar are so cheap that lounge piano is never an option for them. They would never spare the seating they might lose by wedging a piano into the environment. Hire a guitar to sit in a chair and make some noise for little$$$.

[christianm77]

bring me sunshine, Cosmic :-)