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What’s striking about the voicings in the transcription is how commonplace they are.
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04-20-2020 11:09 AM
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Yeah. Absolutely.
Originally Posted by christianm77
As much as that, for me, it's the aspect of Time. Pairs of voicings or groupings of voicings in horizontal time can convey the same amount of information as more complexity vertically. The way Reg has always talked about harmonic rhythm has had me thinking about this for a while.
In chord melody , we are very often talking about how to voice things vertically. What I have arrived at more and more is thinking horizontally . It certainly frees up a lot of things in playing , especially by yourself. You don't need one big voicings if you can express it into smaller voicings back to back.
All of the altered extensions are implicit by the previous chord usually. You mostly hear them whether you play them or not in the moment. When you start thinking horizontally more, you realize how unessential a lot of chord tones really are.
As someone who plays a little piano myself, I always think back on the "problem" of things being "easier" on the keyboard. My gut feeling has always beenalways that it shouldn't be that way, at least not to the extent the people talk about it. Anyway, one of the big distinctives of the piano for me is that the focus is much more on horizontal use of time. When you take things up an octave on the piano, you're still evoking "fullness" by use of TIME arpeggiating and breaking things up rhythmically). That's where the real sense of "fullness" comes in my opinion: MOVEMENT... versus full, rich, thick harmony.... and always being slave to the bass.
That's the main thing I hear in Kurt's "simple" voicings.
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That sounds like Jimmy Wyble’s vibe...
You know it would have been a trip to hear Kurt and Sid Jacobs talking about and playing this type of stuff. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be happening this year, but maybe next.
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Is Kurt a Wylbe guy? Need to check him out more. That's probably at the top of my list of "things I've heard mentioned in the forum too many times to ignore ".
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not to my knowledge. But AFAIK what he is talking about is basically one of Wyble’s basic exercises. Lage Lund demo’d this once in a workshop, and he did study with Wyble. Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
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(Clearly this one works very well with drop 2 voicings.)
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The attenuation of pick attack is surely a legacy of Allan Holdsworth, one of Kurt's biggest influences. I also love pick attack and dynamics but it seems to me one of the least understood aspects of electric guitar playing, particularly in the jazz guitar world. Certain blues-rock players were masters of the art - I'm thinking Clapton on Have You Heard from the Beano Bluesbreakers album or Beck on Diamond Dust (Blow by Blow).
One modern player who really gets it is Romain Pilon. The graceful precision of his right hand as it coaxes out tones from the instrument is a treat for both eye and ear:
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mclaughlin sound here
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