I actually received two guitars a while ago, both used Yamahas that my grandfather used to play in the 70’s and 80’s. One is a classical guitar, a Yamaha G-80 and the other is a Yamaha FG-300. The latter has a really pretty pick-guard, and I know it’s the “better” guitar, but I like playing the classical more.
I’ve taken a beginner guitar course, but I just wish I had some books to give more structure to my practicing. Anyone have any recommendations for books that feature finger-picking for a beginner? I’m talking like, basic Travis picking, and stuff like that. Remember, beginner, way beginner stuff.
My first guitar was a Yamaha G-55 which I bought from my school for $50. in Grade 8. I still have it, despite the fact that it’s a tank.
Would you be interested in some actual classical repertoire? Mel Bay now publishes the first three books of Julio Sagreras in one volume. Book one is probably was too elementary for you, but books two and three have some lovely pieces that are not too challenging.
Another thing you can do is check through either the Royal Conservatory of Music series of guitar repertoire for the grade level appropriate for you, or leaf through the Guitar Syllabus, find some pieces that you’ve already worked on and then search for other repertoire that’s at your current level.
Thanks to everybody who helped with my purchase upthread–I’ve been playing my new Tele (Big Red) for a few months now, and I’m in love.
Now I really want to improve my playing. I’m a pretty good rhythm player, but I’ve played very little lead. I’ve tried to learn in bits and pieces, but I feel like I don’t have a good foundation for lead playing, and I feel like I need a more formal course of practice before I can move much further.
I’d love to take some IRL lessons, but it’s really not practical due to my isolated location and my schedule. Does anyone have any particular resources they can recommend? Online, books, DVDs, whatever.
(I apologize if this has been discussed upthread.)
Clockwork Jackal - congrats on the great guitars to learn on. Not sure if you prefer the classical because of the much easier playability vs. a steel string if you are starting are, or if you prefer classical music. If the latter - **Le Ministre’s **guidance doesn’t get any better. If the former, then it may be smart to see how other Dopers respond to **DoctorJ’s **post.
As for your post, **DoctorJ **- I am not really your guy. I was pretty much entirely self-taught and now, 30+ years in, am not very close to specific beginner materials. I can say that I have gotten onto Youtube a bunch of times and typed in specific songs “How to play Tumblin Dice by the Rolling Stones” or “How to Play Smoke on the Water” and there have always been clips of some person laying out the basics…
I wasn’t sure where to put this since at the momentthis thread on jazz might also be relevant. Driving home last night I heard a track on the radio (Cole Porter’s I Love You) done on solo guitar. It wasn’t my cup of tea; kind of bland.
A few minutes later a recording featuring Joey DeFranesco, a stellar Hammond player got me thinking. One of the great things about the Hammond organ is that a player has a massive number of tones available. Two manuals, each with its own set of drawbars, chorus, percussion, leslie . . . any player worth his/her salt is going to take advantage of that versitility to make music.
But . . . it seems that all of the jazz guitar I ever hear uses just one tone, typically a warm, round, clean sound. Why is that? And, more to the point, I’m sure there are players who don’t limit themselves that way. Who are they?
Rock players seem to be very comfortable using changes in tone as part of their music. As I’ve been contemplating this, what came to mind is Stevie Ray Vaughn’s version of Little Wing. He does with the guitar in that track what an organ player would do (heh, I never thought about it that way before, but it’s true), alternating between soft and clean(ish) tones in some verses, and driving his amp in the higher register for other verses. Where are the jazzers who do similar things, who treat tone sculpting as a dynamic part of making music? Electric guitar seems like such an obvious and easy instrument for tone experimentation, yet it seems to the casual listener to be completely absent from the jazz oeuvre.
Just saw this post as I was adding my link; will comment in a separate post.
Okay, here’s what I’ve got: strictly IMHO, but I think jazz guitar players do NOT think of their instruments as electric guitars; rather, they are amplified acoustic instruments. Using anything other than your hands and the guitar to affect the sound runs the risk of “getting between you and your voice.”
I can kinda relate to this - I don’t use any guitar effects except maybe a fuzzbox and really try to keep it guitar>cord>amp. Why? The more I add other stuff to my chain the more they get into my head - why aren’t I more creative and add more flanger there? Why don’t I use the wah with my leads? I tend to overplay, overplay, overplay - because I should be using all that stuff, right?
For me, keeping my rig as simple as possible keeps my impulse to overplay a bit more under control.
Based on that personal experience, I think they’d rather get their tone out of their hands and guitar and dig in. Players who want to stretch out with various tonalities and effects probably end up in prog or some other genre that values tech complexity AND cool electric sounds…
Update: My amp didn’t buzz at the gig we played this weekend, though in retrospect, that’s pretty much the only thing that kept things from slipping into full-on Spinal Tap mode.
[ul]
[li]Drummer hurts his leg three days before the show and couldn’t play; our sound guy filled in.[/li][li]Both the bassist and myself came down with nasty colds the day before the show.[/li][li]Keyboard player showed up 5 minutes after we were due to go on.[/li][li]The audience consisted of 100 people, 90 of them over the age of 65.[/li][li]After we chased out the blue hairs our audience consisted of about 20 people: 6 people playing pool; four girls dancing; our crew; and a bunch of drunks. Actually our crew accounted for most of the drunks.[/li][li]And … since our sound-man was drumming, our tardy keyboard player handled the board and I ended up pretty much completely out of the mix for our third set.[/li][/ul]
But … we did have fun. You know when you don’t really have anything to lose, the stage show tends to get a little raucous.
Hey, that’s the first Steve Vai piece I ever figured out …wonder if can still play the solo?
It’s not my cup of tea but there are some jazz players who are definitely electric players, Allan Holdsworth for one (if his stuff qualifies as jazz, it’s certainly freaking complicated enough) and there’s all those guys who’ve played with Steely Dan, some of that’s jazzy enough surely?
You know this phrase means nothing** some of us?
** Context helps of course, I figured Buffalo appoximately translates to Croydon
Just the *sound *of “Ladies Night in Buffalo” conjurs up a decrepit bar - not a cool, old, wood bar, but truly bad, with linoleum on the bartop - and skeevy women with bad hair and spandex checking out the selection…::shiver::
Wow, worse than I thought, I was thinking more like tumbleweeds blowing through Croydon nightclubs on a Tuesday night sort of thing. But Buffalo == Croydon yes?
And I think for extra cheesyness Dave Lee Roth spelt it “Nite”, but that’s not important now.
Currently typing up a post on my thoughts on failing to learn to play jazz, don’t hold your breath.
Some random thoughts on actually playing jazz, specifically on guitar. I really like Charlie Parker era Bop and would love to improvise over those types of changes but I think I’ve taken the wrong approach and left it a bit late to develop an ear for it now. This is what I think I got wrong (warning includes a chess analogy).
I have the chord chart for Ornithology, I’ve learned the head, now all I have to do is blow over the changes OK? Trouble is those sods play so fracking fast, there’s about four changes a second. My background in rock mostly you can play entire songs without following any changes. I’ve got enough theory knowledge to know what scales go with what chords but there simply isn’t time to go “right, flat ninth, harmonic minor fits that, seventh, um mixolydian…” Of course jazz guys aren’t thinking like that at all. The best description I’ve read is that their approach is to play “decorated chords”. There was a poster whose sig was “Down with modal thinking” which I guess suggests something like that approach. Most rock music is either blues based or modal. Blues changes (such as they are) really don’t prepare you for Be-Bop style warfare, and modal means you’re thinking in terms of scales all the time.
Here’s the chess bit. When I set out to learn chess I simply sat down and tried to beat the computer. It didn’t occur to me that you don’t do this from first principles. That is, simply knowing the rules. That’s like trying to play a Bop solo by figuring out what scale to play change by change, four times a frigging second. What you do for starters is learn a bunch of standard openings and some end game techniques for forcing mate or a draw. You don’t just sit down at a board and play. So to play Bop you need pre-constructed approaches to playing over standard sequences of chords (cycle of forths, VI-II-V-I and so on). Then you approach a set of changes in much larger chunks which you already have tools for.
An unrelated booby trap is that jazz scores aren’t written the way they’re supposed to be played. They don’t notate the swing (not even with the |-| = |3| sort of thingy they put on rock scores. So Whenever I tried reading a jazz piece it just sounded wrong (it didn’t help that my reading really sucked for ages (it’s merely pretty bad now)).
The upshot is that while in principle I know how play chess and Be-Bop, in fact I am a non-starter at both. I am trying though, Current project is Steely Dan’s Parker’s Band which would be a start. Maybe not today, I may have to have a crack a Ladies Nite in Buffalo tonight, got to keep that rock shredding plate spinning.
If Croyden is a cold, wet Rust-Belt industrial town that suffered from huge job loss as Industry fled, leaving a lot of blue-collar workers with nowhere to turn, then yes.
As for your other thread - well, I can’t play jazz and don’t see myself trying - so all I can say is that I see your point: you need to have solid technical chops and a broad repetoire of “pieces of playing” which you can puzzle together superfast over the chord changes being played.
Ah, Sheffield.
While I’m still here, a followup on the “decorated chord” as opposed to the modal thinking er, thing. I think the way it goes is “I know what the notes are in a flattened ninth so I can either play a bunch of those, or a chromatic approach to one of those notes, or a trill over’n’under one of those notes”. I think a lot of the sound of Bop come from anticipating an upcoming chord so the note(s) are wrong against the current harmony but resolve pretty quickly to a chord tone.
I don’t know why I put playing jazz specifically on guitar, all this applies even if you’re using a comb and paper.
Yeah, but Sheffield gave us Judas Priest and Def Leppard; Buffalo gave us the GooGoo Dolls, Billy Sheehan (bassist of Roth’s band and the source of the reference) and Lou Gramm (the singer from Foreigner).
Your industrial towns suffer better than ours, apparently.
I remember from some of my seventies stomp boxes that anything other than major chords with the roots on the bottom were too distorted to sort out. Years later, we have better boxes and different ears…
:Personal opinion warning: It wasn’t until fusion, where the guitar started becoming a melody instrument rather than just part of the rhythm section, that the effects really started getting used.
In fact, Joe Pass didn’t tour with his amp, choosing to go DI through the PA system. In the seventies, that totally put him at the mercy of whoever was the head of sound in any given venue. Some of them got it, some of them figured it out and some of them didn’t give a shit. A quick troll through some of his albums confirms - some sessions, the timbre of the instrument sounds like he just picked it up at the pawnshop and didn’t even bother to restring it.
For players like Ed Bickert and Lenny Breau, their jazz sound isn’t that far off the sound they used for country. (Breau may have been the first jazz guitarist to use feedback - ‘Velvet Touch’ was recorded in 1969, around when Miles’ ‘Bitches Brew’ was being recorded, but ‘Bitches Brew’ wouldn’t be released until 1970.)
There’s something about that chime sound that blends well with an acoustic bass - too electronic a sound, and the bassist is not only at a disadvantage in terms of volume, but in terms of timbre. There’s a way bigger difference in playing between doghouse and electric than there is between acoustic and electric guitars.
Organ trios, interestingly enough, seemed to get guitarists into a more aggressively treble driven sort of sound.
Later, you’ll hear John Abercrombie, John Scofield and Pat Metheny obsessed at least as much with the timbre as with the harmonic/rhythmic/melodic aspects of their playing.
