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This is just some stuff I've amassed over the years and believe
in.
Melody, Attitude, Emotion, and
Chops
I find one way that I succeed as a guitar player is by being
very analytical. I've always been interested in knowing why
I like what I like. It's one thing to say: that's a great
song or guitar solo. It's another to dig a bit deeper
and understand why. If you read any of the Music
Appreciation reviews, you'll see how I break down a piece
of music and identify how the stylistic elements are interacting
and how they are constructed. What I try to do — be it
a solo or a whole song — is to identify the elements
that turn me on, and learn from that. What I found
was that it's pretty much the same basic formula turning me
on, over and over again. And by going through that process,
I been able to boil things down to a mantra and philosophy
that I preach and live by: Melody, Attitude, Emotion, and
Chops. For me, these are the essential elements.
Get any three of those four elements into a guitar solo and
you'll probably succeed (in my estimation). Get all four and
you've smacked it out of the park. I use this knowledge to
my advantage. I only have intermediate-level chops, but I
have a real good sense of melody. So while I continually work
on improving my chops, I make sure that I inject plenty of
melody and attitude into my playing rather than just trying
to blaze away. That way, when I actually play some faster
stuff, it has more impact.
Rather than constantly trying to learn new things, I'm more
just trying to master these elements that I want in my playing.
Note also, that I am not trying to reinvent the wheel. I think
wheels should be round, — not triangles, octagons, or
rectangles. Similarly with fine art, I like guys who paint
recognizable pictures, rather than the abstract artists. But
that's just me. What turns YOU on might be completely
different elements. That doesn't mean you can't benefit from
going through the analytical process. Once you understand
why you like what you like, you can rule out a lot
of extraneous crap. It's like learning to whack off —
once you've found your favorite way, it works every time.
So try working with general elements rather than specific
techniques. Then employ these elements over and over. Top
Tone is in the Fingers
Oh please! I really hate this whole tone is in the hands/fingers
mantra you hear from guitarists — particularly on web
forums. It's invariably a cop-out answer to some gear-related
question that spawned it. Enough already! 99.99999% of the
time when someone is asking a question about tone,
they are talking about what the gear produces. You
don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that duplicating
a player's gear won't give us that player's skill, touch,
or the other subtle nuances. But if you like a player's tone
and you get very similar gear, you can get a similar
tone — at least by the dictionary definition —
a book us guitarists seem largely unfamiliar with.
The word tone has been used incorrectly by guitarists
for ages (including me). Nowhere in the dictionary definition
of the word is there a distinction made between the sound
the gear makes and the additional individuality the player
adds to that sound. What I see most frequently are these definitions:
Tone: The quality or character of sound. The characteristic
quality or timbre of a particular instrument or voice.
Hmmmm. That suggests that tone isn't in the fingers after
all.
Contrast that with the dictionary definition of
Sound: Music. A distinctive style, as of an orchestra
or a singer.
So if we go by those dictionary definitions and extrapolate
for guitarists:
Tone = sound produced by the gear
Sound = sound produced by the artist (hands/fingers)
+ the instrument (gear)
I've frequently heard guitarists make this very distinction
exactly ass-backwards. i.e. sound is what the gear
produces.
Personally, I believe that the hands and fingers bring the
individuality to the equation. The tone already exists.
Don't believe me? Try creating your tone with your hands and
no gear.
Jeff Beck will still play like Jeff Beck through a
Hondo Strat through a Pignose. You'll hear his individuality,
his touch, and he can play brilliantly and distinctively.
But his tone will be crap.
Or put another way: I own Wolf Hoffmann's guitar and amp.
I certainly don't play as well as Hoffmann, but I play well
enough so that if I play an Accept song with that rig, you
can bet your ass I have Hoffmann's tone. If he plays an open
A chord with that rig, and then I play an open A chord with
the same rig, any difference in tone will be infinitesimal.
Top
Composing Guitar Solos
Almost everything you hear on a recording — even on
a live recording, has been worked out to some degree. The
player may not have spent hours on composing it — it
may be the best of several takes. But unless that first spontaneous
take ends up as the final version, it's sort of a knock on
that approach anyway, because doing several takes constitutes
a form of work too. And in the live context, when a band is
out on tour, most guys will play roughly the same solo every
night, working within the framework of what they played on
the album. The days of long extended improvisational sections
is largely over. Even the best players in the world —
very few of them are spontaneously brilliant improvisers.
How many of the millions of no-name players (like me) are?
I like worked-out compositional solos that are a song within
a song and contain the same kinds of dynamics good song have.
My view is that they should contain a beginning, a middle,
and an end. Like the song itself, a solo should create tension,
than release it. In many cases, they should build to a crescendo.
I often find the best and most memorable solos are the ones
you can hum along to. A terrific example of this approach
was Randy Rhoads. Every solo Randy played on those Ozzy albums
is a hum-able melodic journey. I can sit here in my office
without having heard those albums in ages, recall and hum
any of those solos from memory. I Don't Know, Crazy train,
Mr. Crowley, Goodbye to Romance, Over the Mountain. That
is a testament to how well those solos were constructed. Those
solos ARE mini-songs. Anyone who thinks they were improvised
on the spur of the moment is kidding themselves. The bottom
line is this: If I compose my solos, I CAN sound like a far
better player than I may actually be. Spontaneity is fine
at a jam (that's what jamming is about) and even in some gigging
situations, but as long as there is time to prepare something
in advance, I don't know why anyone wouldn't want to ENGAGE
THEIR BRAIN on a deeper level. I'm talking primarily about
solos that are going to be recorded and listened to over and
over again. With my stuff, I don't want to look back and think:
why the @#$% did I play that? every time I hear it. When
I compose the solo, I find I can inject more attitude and
feeling into my playing. I can come up with great melodies,
draw on EVERYTHING I know, and weed out ideas that don't work.
And I won't, for example, be left thinking, Gee, I could have
gone to major scale there and it would have sounded brilliant.
Too bad I didn't think of that. I can avoid the pitfalls of
just noodling and/or playing just licks and actually take
the solo somewhere. If you all can do this on-the-fly, hat's
off to you. Top
Alex Lifeson's Disease (ALD)
Lifeson begat this atrocity. Back in 1984, he contracted
the disease that now bears his name. Alex Lifeson's disease
afflicts the great guitarists. It shrinks their testicles
from the size of grapefruits down to BBs, or smaller. (Other
notable sufferers of Alex Lifeson's Disease include Eric Clapton,
Gary Moore, and Vivian Campbell). Mr. Lifeson went from wearing
long hair and clogs and playing in front of several Marshall
stacks, to wearing borderline flock-of-seagulls haircuts and
ballet slippers and playing in front of tiny solid state combos.
Guitarists:
DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU! |
| Before ALD |
After ALD |
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| (Note:
Amp size in pictures is proportional to ball
size) |
He went from being a natural progression of Jimmy Page meets
Steve Hackett to Andy Summers meets the Edge. His last vestiges
of guitar hero-style lead guitar work were on 1983's Signals.
Since then, Lifeson became an accompanist. It's not like he
doesn't have chops anymore — he simply chooses not
to use them. That's the definition of ALD. If you see
Rush live doing old material, he can still cut ripping solos
on stuff like Freewill. He just chooses not to play
that way on new music. He's a big pussy. My prescribed treatment
for ALD sufferers is call them a bunch of denigrating names
like "big pussy" in hopes that they'd snap out of it someday.
Unfortunately no one has yet. Top
Les Pauls
I love Les Pauls, but they are notoriously hit-or-miss guitars.
When my buddy used to work in a music store, he said that
even the Gibson Rep who supplied the shop with guitars confirmed
that only a small percentage Les Pauls are truly good-sounding
guitars. The rest are "highly varying" quality (to be polite)
and are sold off the name and the looks more than tone. If
you want to read the whole story, check out our interview
with Mr. X. If you find a really good Les Paul, hang on
to it forever, and don't be afraid to put a little money into
it if you have to. Top
An issue that's common but widely unknown on guitars is one
of bad fretscale.
The Problem
The tolerances in the fret slotting machine slip, or are otherwise
off. So the fret slots get cut in the wrong place on the fingerboard.
Generally, if the slot is off by more than about 5/1000ths
of an inch, you may start to hear problems — depending
on how good your ears are. (A Strobe tuner can confirm it
too.)
The Symptom
The guitar is set up and intonated as well as it can be,
and yet you can't get the guitar to play in tune all over
the neck, and you can't figure out why. If it's above the
12th fret where you typically only play lead, the nature of
lead playing and you're own sense of pitch during bends may
compensate for areas that are out of tune. If it's in the
area of the neck where you voice chords, you may hear that
you aren't in tune when you fret the chords. If this is the
case, you have a bigger problem. There's really no way to
compensate for that.
The Diagnosis
The real proof is that the even temperament fretscale formula
is simply math — precise math, but just math. A luthier
who build guitars from scratch should have an accurate fretscale
template — a clear plastic, ruler-like device that shows
precisely where the frets should be. He can place
that template on a fingerboard board and see if the frets
are where they're supposed to be. Better still, is to check
the empty fret slots when the guitar is in for a
refret. My guy has shown me fingerboards where you can see
the slots are just plain off from the lines on the
template. In some cases as much a 15/1000ths or more which
is quite visible without a loop.
The Solution
In most cases, obviously, it doesn't bother people. Your
frets may be fine, or not far enough off to cause any problems
you hear. IF YOU DON'T HEAR OR PERCEIVE A PROBLEM, YOU DON'T
HAVE A PROBLEM. But if the frets are off enough that you hear
it, you must decide if you can live with it. If you can, end
of story. If you cannot live with it, there are really only
two choices: sell the guitar, or replace the fingerboard.
Note that replacing a fingerboard is expensive.
Often, the job could be more expensive than the guitar is
worth. So unless your really attached to the specific guitar,
you're probably better off selling it and finding a guitar
you can live with.
Replacing a board involves making/crafting the new board,
cutting the fret slot correctly, redoing the nut, redoing
all the inlays (dot inlay guitars are going to be easier and
cheaper than something like a LP with trapezoids or blocks).
And redoing all the frets. On my LP in 1987, this cost me
about $800. The same job by the same guy today would probably
be at least twice that. That's why, unless you have a tonal
or emotional investment in the guitar, it's not worth doing.
And if it's a vintage "collector" guitar, replacing
the board will actually de-value it. Since my LP was already
a Frankenstein in other ways, I went ahead with it. Had the
guitar been a stock 1954 in great condition, I probably wouldn't
have.
So how do I know about this? My guitar tech is a little
old luthier who's a Jedi master at everything about
guitars from woodworking to finishes, to electronics and PUPs,
to metallurgy in a ridiculous level of detail and precision.
This is a man who speaks in 1000ths of an inch. He's been
studying the fretscale thing in detail for ages. He's got
written documentation on the fingerboard of every guitar he's
refretted in the last 20 years. I've seen the evidence, it's
TRUE.
Gibson is notorious for bad fretscales but they are certainly
not the only culprit. Fender had the problem for a while too,
though my luthier tells me they've cleaned up their act in
the last few years while never actually admitting there was
a problem. Back in the 80s, I bought a Carvin electric. It
was off so much I sent it back. They told me: It can't be
wrong — it was cut by a $100K machine. Great reasoning!
And when I bought a neck from Musikraft for my Blackmocaster,
we found that all the way up the neck, the even frets were
a tad sharp, the odd frets a tad flat. I had him replace the
fingerboard. He says the Warmouth scales have been off at
times too.
The bottom line issue with fretscale is: can you live with
it. In most cases you certainly can. This luthier will tell
you when the slots are within acceptable tolerances. My friend
(Mr. X.) has a 55 Les Paul Custom, and the original frets
weren't as off as mine were and left his alone. He doesn't
hear a problem, and he's got better ears than I do. My problem
now is that I am completely spoiled by this guy's fingerboards!
When I consider buying a new guitar, the fretscale is always
on my mind. It's a powerful dissuader.
Testimonial
My forum brother, John "Mayor McCheese" Walker,
a terrific player with over 25 years of experience visited
me in Spring of 2007 and finally got to play my guitars after
years of hearing me grip about this. He said:
"You know that fretscale stuff that Dave preaches? I'll
admit it - I thought it was overkill. Until I played Dave's
guitars, that is. Once you tune them up, they sound much sweeter
all over the neck, than any of my guitars do. For example,
one of my Pauls just will not play in tune. It always sounds
a hair out, sour is probably the best term. Even
after you strobe it, it's still off. I've had it professionally
setup several times, and the last time I had it done it's
the best it's been, but still, it's there.
Dave's guitars are dead on no matter where you play
them. I thought I sounded better on his than I do on any of
mine. Bends seemed more in tune, and I didn't feel that fingernails
on the blackboard thing that I often experience - that nagging
little something ain't quite right here that you
may have experienced as well."
Top
Pots
Quality control is piss poor with pots. Pots VERY often
vary up to 150K +/- from their advertised spec. It is quite
common to buy a 500K pot stick an ohm meter on it and find
it's true value is 375K or 435K or 580K. So if having the
correct ohmage is really important to you, test them before
you install them. Also, if you're seeking to preserve/duplicate
what's already in there, you should test the one's you're
replacing. You might think you're replacing a 500K with a
500K, but you might not be. Second: Usually pots are not tapered
well throughout the whole sweep range. You don't often get
a gradual volume increase/decrease throughout the range. Often,
you get nothing until the knob hits like 7 and then you get
it all between 7-10. To fix this, you can add resistors and
capacitors to the circuit. It's a very cheap mod and very
easy, you just have to know what to do and how to do it. Most
guitar techs know how to do this, and some repair/maintenance
books describe the procedure too. Top
Home Recording Advice
You're thinking about getting into home recording, but you
don't even know where to begin. Join the club. Many of us
have been there. Below is information I wish someone would
have given me. Maybe you can benefit from the things I learned.
Start by thinking about what your goal is. What do you want
to create? Do you just want to record a few songs now and
then for fun? Do you just need a rough demo to help get you
gigs? Do you want to create a whole CD and do the best job
you can? How good do you want the final output to be? What
is required to get that output. Digital or Tape? Your answers
to these questions may drive your decisions.
Once you know what your project is, start thinking specifically
about how you want to work. This is the kind of thing
no one can teach you because there is no right or wrong answer.
However your decisions will impact the kind of home
recording equipment you need — or worse, it'll be the
other way around — what you buy will dictate and possibly
limit what you can do. So start thinking about stuff like
this:
What kind of music will you record? Instrumental? Will it
have vocals? How many instruments will you need to be able
to record simultaneously, and how will you achieve that? This
is absolutely a key decision. And it leads directly
to: Are you gonna work with a drummer or a machine? Micing
a real drum kit can take up as few as two tracks (stereo)
or ten or more if you mic each piece of the kit. And even
in a professional studio, getting a good drum sound is difficult
and time-consuming. Conversely, it's ridiculously simple to
get great drum sounds from today's drum machines: you take
the left and right outputs and plug them straight into your
board and hit record. You get great drum sound, perfectly
in-tempo, all in ONE TAKE. The tradeoff? Time spent upfront
programming the drum machine and your interpretation of how
much value is lost by not having a live drummer. For me, the
drum machine is the obvious choice. Here's
how I get the most out of it.
How many guitar tracks do you need? For me, this usually means
at least a doubled rhythm track, a melody track, and a lead
track. You might be happy with the down-and-dirty approach
of one rhythm track, and one lead track — ala Van
Halen I. But if it's the former, you'll be doing a lot
of bouncing on 8 track machines (even those with virtual tracks).
And with tape, you get a lot of sound degradation when you
bounce.
So let's say you buy a PC based system or a Digital Audio
Workstation. Where are the hidden expenses? Everywhere at
first! What kind of effects will you need? Many DAWs have
built-in effects. Figure on reverb and delay as a bare minimum.
You'll need a good compressor if you want to approach pro-quality
sound. If you're initially strapped for cash, you can get
by with the cheap Roland powered monitors for $90 for playbacks
during the recording process. But when you start to do your
real mixing, you will need good monitors ($300-$400
minimum) and a power amp to run them ($150). If budget isn't
a problem, get yourself the good monitors immediately and
skip the cheapies. You'll need studio quality headphones ($100).
An SM57 ($90) if you want to mic an amp, a mic chord ($25),
a good mic stand ($40), patch chords. You'll need a POD (or
similar) if you don't want to mic your amp. If you're working
in a true band context, you'll need many more mics, stands
and cables. If you're "going solo," drum machines
typically range from $200-$400. Do you need a bass? FYI —
the bass emulators that let you play bass with your guitar
sound like crap. I highly recommend getting a ZIP drive or
similar backup system. Hard drives fail frequently enough;
and when they do, you don't want to lose your hours of hard
work, or that one great take that you'll never recreate.
Back up your work. You'll hate yourself later if you don't!
If you have a Roland DAW like mine, the SCSI adapter was $150,
and a backup zip drive was another $150. You'll need some
device for making quick submixes that you can hear on stereos,
boomboxes or in your car. That means (preferably) a CD burner,
DAT. A regular analog cassette deck ($150) will do the job,
but you can be fooled by a nice warm analog tape compression
that won't be there later on your CDs. Figure a couple of
power strips ($20). For practicality, comfort and necessity,
I needed a good desk and a chair ($300) and a few more guitars
stands ($40). It adds up fast. But don't be discouraged. You
don't need to get everything all at once, and many of these
purchases are one-time-only types for a spare bedroom studio
setup. It's all worth it if you enjoy the process and the
music you create.
Once you know the answers to these questions, you can rule
out a lot of stuff and zero in on what is right for you. Finally,
while it's easy to get something cheap and just jump in, if
you make the wrong choices in the beginning, you'll eat your
initial savings when you find you need to upgrade. Unless
you just wanna fool around, my advice is to really think
it through. Don't buy something that's gonna handcuff
you, or something you're gonna outgrow in six months. That's
not money well-spent. If you really get bit by the
home recording bug and find you're enjoying it, you may want
to do more than you had originally planned. Get something
you can grow into. For example, my set up is just fine for
now, but if I had to do it over, I'd have spent the extra
$500 and bought the next model up. That $500 seemed like a
lot at the time, but spread over the three years I've had
the DAW — it's really nothing. If spending a bit more
money up front gets you more mileage out of the gear in the
long run, it's money well spent. And I highly recommend holding
out until you can afford digital recording gear. The benefits
to the home recorder are tremendous. So do your homework well.
Seriously! There are some good book recommendations and downloads
for the beginner on the Dinosaur
Rock Guitar Bookshelf. Check 'em out.
Top
Getting the Most Out of a Drum Machine
People always claim drum machines don't sound like real drummers.
While that is less true than ever, there are huge benefits
to be had from the drum machine if you're willing to adjust
your perspective slightly.
I like programming the drum machine more than programming
a living drummer.
With a drum machine, I don't have to go to the machine's
mom's or girlfriend's house, wake the machine up, load its
kit into my car, pour coffee into the machine cause it's hungover,
drive the machine to the studio, spend two hours tuning the
machine's drum kit — cause they've never been tuned —
and four more hours getting a good drum sound while the machine
takes a nap in the control room. Wake the machine again, buy
it lunch, set it on it's drumstool, re-teach it the song it
knew the day before but can't remember now. Spend another
20 minutes hooking up a click track because the machine can't
keep good time. Then spend the rest of the day trying to get
the machine to play one good take so I can cart it's ass out
of there that night and not have to repeat the process again.
Instead, I spend a half hour cursing at a small box. Once
it's done, it's done forever. I run two chords from the machine
into the board and lay perfect drum tracks in one take. And
the machines have gotten so damned good, even my cheap $200
one is producing awesome drum sounds. I'd say my drum tracks
sound less like a machine than all the drums on Gary Moore's
Wild Frontier album. I've found, if I need it to sound
more like a live drummer, all I have to do is manually overdub
some strategically placed cymbal crashes. Presto, you have
more of a "live drummer feel" cause the drums appear
to be following your chord changes.
The approach I take is to work with the machine and
its limitations rather than fight it. Let it do what it does
best rather than forcing it to do what it doesn't do well.
What do I mean by that?
First off, I don't try especially hard to make the machine
sound like a live drummer. Why bother? I'm creating riff-based
instrumental music. I stay away from complicated compositional
changes and Rush-like interplay. What I need most is a strong,
steady, groove, and that's what the machine does best.
Conversely, sometimes I'll emphasize that the drums are
a machine by changing the type of drum kit that's playing
the beat. Going from a big-sounding power kit, to a quieter
analog kit, or a latin kit, or a hip hop kit (over the same
beat) is a great way to change the song's dynamic with very
little effort. You can also hear this approach all over Tony
Iommi's solo album, Iommi.
Second: when possible, I used the machine's canned drum patterns
to start with. And there are plenty of them. I have programmed
a few of my own patterns, but it's harder that way. It's far
easier to to string together existing patterns as a song than
to program your own pattern. Further, the way I write, most
of my song inspiration comes drum grooves. If I hear a hot
groove, and I can write a good guitar part. I've found that
if I've come up with the guitar riff first, my drums for those
riffs often end up being straight beats. Frankly I prefer
syncopated rhythms that really move.
Third: Again, I'm creating riff-based instrumental music.
My most complicated song has only three different beats in
it. Most of them have only two, and a few have the same beat
throughout the song. When it's a strong, syncopated rhythm,
one beat throughout can work just fine. This approach is working
well for me. Believe me, I don't have the patience to fight
the machine. Top
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