60 Year Old E-guitars Still Rule

[Rudi]

Although obvious for all to see, when researching guitars at the end of 2014 and this year, I was struck by the sheer scale of design copies out there. I knew there were a lot, but I had underestimated how dominant those designs really are.

 

It’s sobering to realise that the overwhelming majority of guitars are copies of a handful of models designed in the 40s & 50s by Gibson & Fender.

 

At first I was bemused and idly wondered ‘why don’t they make anything a bit different?’ I now see that I was being naïve. The truth seems to be that these are what sell.

 

Who makes all these copies? Everybody does. The only notable exception I can bring to mind is Rickenbacker. This is probably because they are old, iconic and were in there at the first. But then so were Gretsch and they make a lot of Les Paul lookalikes.  

 

Ok, there is a small difference between a ‘copy’ and a design style. A copy just tries to look as much like the original as possible, whereas with design style, the maker tries to put his own stamp on the product. The point is they are all derivative

.

We can all find exceptions. This minimalist design looks like a roof aerial. http://gittlerinstruments.com/

 

The main two style icons are obvious: the Fender Strat & Gibson Les Paul

 

After that, just as predictable are

Fender Tele & Gibson SG

 

These are then followed by the various Gibson semis, from the 335 on down.  

 

But it’s those main handful that are being endlessly perpetuated, and it’s been going on for 60 years now.

 

Not all Gibson/Fender original designs caught on of course. Nor have later ones. I cant recall if Fender had any other than the Stacaster. Gibson’s tried several;  Explorer, Thunderbird etc. but they were only intermittently in production.

Those too have been copied, but the copies fared no better than the originals.

 

Rickenbacker: There are some copies but the company takes a dim view of this.  

http://pages.videotron.com/guitbey/fakenbackers.html

Maybe if they had a more relaxed attitude, Rick copies might actually be good publicity for the company and create more demand for the real thing?

 

I suppose this ultimately reflects on us. No matter what we as individuals like, this is what the collective us have decided upon.

[TapperMike]

Dammit I had a long reply, got distracted and it got wiped.

[Rudi]

That happened to me last month. Its a cruel and demoralising thing to happen

[Danidog]

My reply will be short, ergo, not as intelligent nor detailed and may not even be factual. I've always believed that the replicated models were taken from the 'cream that rose to the top'. If they were popular, they were popular for a reason, like playability, dependability, sound, etc. 

 

I don't know much about the electrics, although I did almost buy a  real Les Paul many years ago. We are seeing the same recurring theme of replications in acoustics that you mention for the E's, Rudi. Some are from the parent companies of the originals. THAT, I find strange...,

[TapperMike]

I'm on the fence with that one.  Some designs are extremely comfortable and playable yet for one reason or another they have never caught on with the public. 

 

Take away the midi and this is one heck of an Les Paul type sounding guitar...

No one ever produced a copy and Ibanez never released a non midi version. It had balls to the walls sustain and just a few pounds less then an lp.

That was my first midi-guitar.

 

The Ovation Breadwinner was expensive when it came out. As far as the playability it was amazing.  As far as the tone..not so much

They weren't big sellers mostly due to the oddball shape. Still I think they were the impetus for Klein's which were custom shop only through the roof pricing and never caught the eye of mass marketers.

 

 

Klen and later others extended the top and made the basic shape into what is considered "ergo"

 

 

Kay's are an interesting story. I really hate 50's through 70's Kay Guitars especially the Barney Kessel model. They were like Rondo's only worse.

Couldn't stay in tune lots of problems everywhere more trouble then they were worth. Kay solid bodies were usually partial board. I never had the patience or money to fix them up for playability.  A buddy of mine who owns a guitar store would buy them for around $10 each try to sell them and then just add em to his endless collection of unsold guitars. As he's a guitar tech he would spend his free time fixing them up.  He had about 50 Kay's through the years and sold the set for 50K at "The guitar show" which is an annual local guitar swap meet. It was funny to see them go because I'd occasionally make an offer for one or two but as soon as Tim fixed em up he couldn't part with them.  I did have one Kay in my collection for several years It was an SG type body. I bought it in 83

 

 

Mosrites were just visually embarrassing to me and  they couldn't be tuned properly to save ones life.  The reissues were of better build quality but I just could not buy one.

 

Crestwoods.

I had a 335 profile Crestwood with a bigsby/fender type headstock. It had extremely cheap single coil pickups.  I bought it used in 79.  The prior owner installed a Dimarzio humbucker in the middle position and hardwired it to it's own volume and tone pot. That guitar was a salvation of sorts to me. It sounded nothing like my 335. It had a pristine quality to the tone. The neck itself was extremely narrow and thin,.  After playing that guitar for a year it was hard as hell for me to go back up to thicker necks.  Back then I used to wash dishes for a living. Eight hours of hot soapy water makes one's fingers very soft. Hard as hell to develop callouses.  Every night after work I'd come home and play that guitar as my therapy.  I'd gotten completely off of drugs and wanted to stay that way so I poured myself into playing guitar and...Quite honestly I sucked between the soft fingers and the damage done.

[TapperMike]

Harmony/Airline..

They were junk to me.  Catalog guitars that I'd see scattered around small resell shops across the US growing up, Base PX and Boy's Life magazine. While I didn't play guitar in the 60's I'd still see em everywhere.  When I finally started trying them out as potential guitars to buy during the 70's egad. Egad they were bad.  crappy Everything (everything, tuners, the nut, frets, pickups, wiring, bridge. the neck) What's more is I really didn't like the tone.  The Eastwood reissues are an entirely different story.  Better construction better hardware...Same tone.  I've mellowed a bit through the years and I can see where they might interest someone looking for "their own sound" as opposed to guitars that sound and look like everyone else.  The bad things I remember may have been the noise and crappy amps they were played through.

 

Trust me I've got so many stories to go about less common guitars... I've had more then I can remember.

Edited February 16, 2015 by TapperMike

[TapperMike]

So some more lesser brands that you can get for dirt cheap or may be returning or maybe I think they are crap....

 

 

JB Player

These were originally manufactured not far from me. Originally being the operant word. I got one of the first ever produced. Shortly thereafter the brand name was sold. The buyer did complete redesigns and they became generic strat, tele, LP copies. Now I think all they market is acoustics. But back then..Love is not a strong enough word for how I felt about this guitar. 

 

The original JB's had a strat not charvel headstock. It was an hss configuration with kahler trem, locking nut and neck thru design. Super super thin neck with a very small width at the nut. Ungodly low action. Amazing harmonics. My first guitar with a tremolo system. It was a dream for shredding to me. Relatively uninteresting pickups with only moderate output. Still when I got that thing for the first month my head was spinning.  My roommate at the time was a guitar player too.  Every night we would trade the guitar off between us trying to figure out new ideas.  Even though...We both had other guitars to play.  

[TapperMike]

All those crazy cool guitars of the 80's (Charvel, Jackson, Kramer, ESP, etc, etc) well all of them went out of business and then Fender and Gibson bought the names and manufacturing rights out in liquidation.

 

There are only so many electric guitar sounds in the universe. Past a point if you are in mass production you have to deliver a "me too" instrument. One that looks auspiciously close to and sounds fairly close to the popular named instruments. There is a large section of the guitar buying market who want the big name guitars but can't afford them.  And there is a sector of the public onlookers who also have the expectation of .seeing the guitar of their musical hero's dream.  Kind of like the whole died in the wool no taylor guitars bluegrass types though non violent. I could tell many a story regarding both the jazz and the blues circuits but that's another day.

 

I had a few Peavey guitars for awhile back in the 80's  They were cheap and different. They did survive sitting in a trunk for days on end in hot muggy florida summer weather. They were for lack of a better word very generic sounding (bland) which was fine for me because many times when practicing scales I didn't want to get seduced/distracted by tone. But to be honest I could never practice as loud as I do today.  Living on a tropical island has it's setbacks. Most notably old retired bored people who love to call the police and..Lots of water to reflect sound. These guitars I purchased ...because I could. I was making good money playing guitar for a living and a hobby as well as cooking because I didn't frust a career as a working musician. Peavey had a bad wrap from me for other reasons. Most notably crappy amps and terrible mixing consoles. God I hated those consoles. If one channel strip goes bad they all do. And due to poor workmanship it happened more then once being on stage and having the whole PA stop functioning mid show.

 

Yammy's.

I have no experience with any yamaha built in the last 10 years. Though I did own a single cut pacifica for a time.

 

Though many call this a tele copy aside from the flat top and 6 inline tuners it didn't have any tele tone as far as I was concerned.  I wrote a lot of songs on this guitar but when it came down to laying down tracks I'd always opt for my strat or les paul. It was extremely light as I recall with fast comfortable action but it didn't inspire me to play fast on it. This used to be my after work hand around guitar. Even though I was still gigging about two nights a week it never saw the stage even as a backup guitar.  In the restaurant business up until y2k there were always an endless stream of musicians.  Guitarists, bassists, singers, keyboard players vocalists. Cooks, Dishwashers, Busboy's preps servers and even managers. Between shifts or after close there would be regularly unscheduled sit ins.  I'd always bring an extra guitar and sometimes a bass. I'd almost never bring a higher end guitar as the hand around one.

 

 It was cheap and was my "experimental guitar" in as far as GK setup. I'd regularly swap out GK(1)'s GK2's GK2a's and GK3's testing overall response. It was a good little guitar but not a great one. The thing about swapping and fidgeting around with various GK setups is the finish went to hell. I used to use double stick tabs to hold the gk in place and it required ruining the finish to take off.

 

Once I finally decided on the perfect setup (forget the specs they are useless) It was awesome on this guitar more then any other guitars I owned.

It quickly became my go to guitar for midi.  So much so that whenever I picked up the guitar I'd simply plug into a roland GR and forget about playing it as a guitar.  Eventually I sold it and the GR33 I had when roland came out with the GR09 (dumb move) Although I got more for the whole setup then I paid for it.

 

Reverend Guitars

I've met Joe Naylor a few times back when he was just making boutique amps. The first time was at "The Guitar Show" low and behold Bob Seger was checking out his early amp. Seger was quite impressed and the only reason he didn't bite was because "It does too much" Seger thought it would be too much of a distraction carving out tones rather then plugging in and playing.  So anyway Naylor sells off his brand name of amplifiers and starts producing custom handbuilt american made guitars for dirt cheap. $600.  The first ones sounded and played amazingly well. But that build scared a lot of people away. I always thought these were partical boards with formica laminate tops and backs.. Apparently not

 

 models were constructed using a core of solid mahogany surrounded by acoustic chambers. A strip of molded plastic provided the frame while the front and back of the guitar was constructed of phenolic laminate sheets in a variety of colors and finishes.

 

It was either love or hate with those guitars at first site.

 

Naylor screwed the pooch on this one (I think) The newer korean models aren't constructed in the same way they don't look the same and they don't sound the same.  The Korean ones do have a certain mass appeal but honestly the differences are quite striking. Early Reverends had a more rockabilly vibe. Very punchy tones.  I used to play the american versions quite often in guitar stores. but I never bit. As a really different guitar sound with a really different sound look,,,it was tempting. But I was also trying to temper my guitar buying habit at the time...And the top edge digs into your ribs / side after extended playing standing up it hurts.

Edited February 17, 2015 by TapperMike

[Rudi]

Curious about the Rowland guitar synths.

 

I've just finished dong some research on them as I was seriously considering going for the Godin LGX-SA. Godin were claiming these worked on the Rowland synths 'such as the GR55'.

 

Then I read a review on Amazon about from a fellow who had issues with the Godin XTSA trem, so upgraded to the LGX-SA only to find it didnt track with the GR55. He said he had to buy a component from a Californian electronics co. & fit it the GR55 in order to correct the tracking issue. This meant opening the GR55 and invalidating the Rowland warranty by installing a 3rd party component. By now he had spent a fortune and was pretty peed off.

 

When I directed the attention of a Godin retailer to this, he blew a gasket and rubbished the reviewer and everything he had claimed (I only gave you the highlights here).

 

I tried to contact both Rowland and Godin about this. Rowland provide no straightforward access to speak to them but Godin do. In a week a Godin customer relations chief confirmed the tracking issue with the GR55 and the 3rd party solution.

 

He went on to say that the VG99 and new Boss GP10 did work ok with the LGX-SA.

 

However, I had previously tried the VG99 and its latency issues put me off it for good. As for the Boss GP10, its just another box of the same old COSM type sounds with a 13 pin outlet.

 

All this disillusioned me about the whole thing. Also my family had inadvertently done the same thing, but that's a different story.

[TapperMike]

Been there done that with Godin 13 pin guitars on my freeway and nylon string. Drove me nuts. 

 

Godin has abandoned the 13pin approach for it's SA (synth access) models. Now it uses fishman triple play.  Triple Play has many of the same issues that the roland stuff has.  Stiff playing required. Ghost notes / missed notes.  Ghost notes generally occur if the sensitivity is set to high where it picks up resonance that shouldn't be there in the first place. Missed notes occur when the sensitivity is two low and it can't get a read on the note.  They are always a pain in the arse and almost always present in the system. IHMO while the triple play 'may be better" then the roland 13 pin system neither are worth it and all the reverse engineering to make them work as they should may indeed be more then a few decades ahead.

 

Pitch to voltage is just a dumb system.

 

If you really want to go midi three possible routes

1. Learn keys (I can't)

2. Get a ztar. My babyz cost me 1200 new (first one ever built) now they go for $600 plus shipping direct from star labs.  Yes there is some adaption required. To me it was near automatic. I picked it up and played it.  To others they felt it wasn't "organic" When you play a ztar just like playing synth weighted keys you are the organism that makes it sound / feel organic.

3. Save a few more pennies and get a linnstrument.  That too will take an investment in time to maximize results. When you lay down a linnstrument in front of you. Everything feels reversed. Just as an experiment lay a guitar on your lap like a dobro and try to play it then you'll get a partial idea of what you are up against. 

 

 

 

So anyway back to oddball guitars.....

[TapperMike]

The Parker Fly is not only unique in construction but in sound.  I love my parker. It's fast, it's way fast, it's way, way fast. it's also a radial neck with a flat fretboard that makes sweep picking a breeze. Not to mention bending especially in the upper register.  I don't find anything about the guitar to be "heavy metalish" It's got a very sophisticated sweet tone that is mesmerizing.  I love my Parker P44. Not as impressed with the new dragonfly range.

 

They sound different, they are made different and they play different and they look different. There is a sophisticated sweetness to the tone and yet that sweetness leads me away from playing it often because it's too enjoyable and less familiar.  Most of the time I like a guitar that sounds at least reminiscent of familiar guitar tones.  When ever I pick it up I want to play smooth jazz / melodic metal type instrumental stuff. It does that stuff well but it's not where I want to go musically in this part of my life. I want to do more trad jazz based chord melody stuff.  Sure I could do that on the Parker but it's more about the guitar deciding where I want to go then me controlling the sound.

[Rudi]

I only was really interested in the LGX-SA as a guitar that met my spec requirements. But as it was SA ready I thought I should check that out too.

Now I have crossed it off the list, I wont return to it. I would still be interested in the older non-SA versions but not now.

 

Two guitars in two months is quite enough.

 

I have undertaken to go to Devon to try out a Godin A6 Ultra, but as things stand now, its just for future reference.

 

The Parker Fly is not only unique in construction but in sound.  I love my parker. It's fast, it's way fast, it's way, way fast. it's also a radial neck with a flat fretboard that makes sweep picking a breeze. Not to mention bending especially in the upper register.  I don't find anything about the guitar to be "heavy metalish" It's got a very sophisticated sweet tone that is mesmerizing.

 

 

The Jackson Soloist is pretty much like this. I will never get rid of it.

The later Elite is also a soloist and plays just as good, but it has active Seymour Duncan PUs, that are good for recording but otherwise not so great.

 

They must be overwound because they are too bass biased. I can coach good sounds out of it, but its hard going. I may try to sell it this year. Its one of a ltd run so it will either sell quickly to someone who wants one (they cant be had anywhere now), or go unnoticed.

 

If I cant make a reasonable return on it I will do something I would prefer not to, and get rid of the Seymour Duncans and put some passive single coils in there. That at least would increase its versatility to me.

 

These are fast, but the fastest action I have ever known was achieved by Steve Perrett who fret dressed his Les Paul copy and set the action lower than I thought possible. I found it too low, and the tension too light. Playing that gave me nothing to fight against. I never even realised I needed that until I played his guitar. Steve was a long time regular on here on Songstuff for years. I'll meet up with him when I go to Devon.

 

Steve enjoys fast playing. I no longer have that fascination for speed. There are many areas I wish to improve. Speed is not even on the list.

[TapperMike]

With me it was one of those "A funny thing happened on the way to the Circus"  

 

When I first started sitting in on jazz gigs. Everything was way way too fast for me. I was dumbfounded as to how men 40+ years my senior could spin circles around me.  I practiced my arse off to catch up to them.  I wanted to take a solo out that was both fast and "jazz correct" I finally started getting there.  It was work on top of work and hell for me emotionally. Those cats had no sympathy.  Eventually I started to hold my own.

 

 

When I had a chance to play blues gigs there was no way I was going to be outplayed / outclassed. I practiced and practiced at being as fast as humanly possible. I got really really good at playing fast. Then I'd go out and play only to discover that my speed training was useless in real life blues situations.I had to slow down to keep the feel alive.

 

These days I've fallen back on bad habits. I trip over the same mistakes again and again because I'm too much in a hurry to get through the song. And I'm too busy playing only the parts most familiar that I don't settle down and complete learning the song.

 

In as far as fast action guitars... I love em. I'm inspired by them more then medium or higher action and I'm certainly more comfortable scaling on a 24.75 thin flat neck then a 25.5 standard C or thicker neck.

[Rudi]

I was seduced by the low action and thin necks also, and Its taken me some years to put it into perspective.

 

I’m not at all fast with mainstream Jazz because it gives me too much to think about. Just thinking of the changes & passing tones makes my mind race. It’s a criticism I used to lay on certain players of the past when I would say ‘they are playing faster than they can think’.

 

If playing something modal, I can play fast enough to satisfy me. I have seen some of the really fast players that are quite amazing, but I don’t feel compelled to try to compete with them. Here’s why:

It’s possible to go too fast. At which point you are adding nothing to the music.

 

The aforementioned Steve Perrett once introduced me to a version he found of ‘Country Boy’, the Heads,Hand&Feet song by Albert Lee (I searched for it online but found zilch). He seemed very excited about this cover version and wanted me to hear it.

It was being played too fast. It sounded ridiculous. You couldn’t hear most of the notes.

 

Mark, the Alto Sax player in Blown Out, plays a fill in one song that is completely out of tune. One note he should play is outside the range of his sax, so he plays one a semitone down from it (which should sound terrible) but you cant hear it. Not once in 15 years have I noticed this bum note. I only know about it because he told me.

 

When I used to teach fingerpicking, I would make the same point to a student who wanted to blitz through everything he learned. I would play a passage at the correct speed and then increase the tempo until it became laughably incomprehensible. This is not as difficult as it may sound. It’s much easier to fingerpick fast than it is to solo fast. But the same principle applies to all music.

 

Sometimes Simon, our drummer will have a ‘fast’ night. He raises the tempo of virtually all the songs in our set. It ruins the groove completely. Sometimes he needs reminding of this.

 

That is why, so far as regular soloing is concerned, I deem myself to be ‘fast enough’. I’m not as fast as some of these youngsters, but they are competing with each other on a technical level. They have already left the aesthetics of the music behind them.

 

 

It’s what separates gymnastics from ballet, diagrams from fine art and nutritionists from epicures.  

 

If you have reservations about what I say, then try this: Find a piece of computer music or a keyboard demo. Increase the tempo gradually and spot the point at which the music becomes spoilt. It won’t take very long.

 

Having made my point, I have to admit to getting swept along by the speed pixie on too many occasions. It’s usually when I am running short of inspiration, I then fall back on technique.

I regard such instances as personal failures and use them to impel my practice time to be more productive.  

 

This is why I am less concerned these days with super fast low action sets up, thin necks and low string tension. I enjoy the sound of the Camps Spanish guitar. It has a high action but once the strings are brought to fret level with a finger bar, it’s easy to play (until moving to another neck position).

 

The Hofner Archtop still has those larger gauge strings on which makes string tension too high. I have to use more hand pressure, and it can be tiring, but I can still play it fast enough. So what am I missing really?

 

Any guitar that has playability issues like this will take time to adjust to. But you can adjust to them and it wont take all that long either. A few hours at most. Two or three practice sessions tops.

 

Rudi

[TapperMike]

You can play low action thin necks fast or slow...The option is yours.  And yes I've played low action thin necks with light strings thinking to myself this is overkill not having to work as hard. Though with a little time on the instrument I've adapted.

 

When I first got my tele's I thought I'd never adapt back to a full C shape having so many thin C shapes.

 

One day while bored I stumbled upon Cracking the Code

 

Season One is more about this guys personal journey to understanding fast playing.  Season 2 is when he starts breaking it all down. I stated watching the show as I've been really frustrated with my chord melody style development. It seems to be a lot of work with little reward so I took a break.  In little time of following along with "Cracking The Code" my speed picking latched on and I was playing like no one's business. It reminded me of things I'd tried but forgotten. There is a lot of really good information on technique in the video series.

 

Many years back when I was just learning notation I picked up any book I could to sight read better.  One was Berklee Press Melodic Rhythms for Guitar

 

 

I ignored the pick direction stuff and fumbled my way through. It helped me a lot but...The examples were extremely cheesy sounding. I didn't study it for the intended purpose..Picking patterns.  It went on the shelf of broken dreams..  15 years later someone had posted the book examples in BIAB format.  Curious I downloaded the zip file and listened to the example.  Yes as corny as I remembered.  After a few run throughs without attention to the specified picking approach again those files went into a folder of no return that I never went back to.

12 years had passed between the time I bought the book and the time I got it in biab format. and another 15 years has passed now.  I started thinking about the song examples again recently. Opened the book and started looking for a common thread... Scalar Patterns (sequenced) not modes kind of like Yngwie Malmsteen's approach to constructing l long phrases.  The whole premise of the book is really on alternate picking patterns but the crux of melodic writing has to do with not trying to justify every chord change just stay in the same key and utilize one or more scalar motives.

Play a pattern or motif as an example:

CDE

Repeat or sequence.

The original term sequence means to play the same pattern but step either forward or backward.

|CDE-|BCD-|ABC-| The dots all seem to connect so long as you start on a primary chord tone and cap it with a primary chord tone (Even if you have to jump a note to get there)

 

So I finally started reading the whole alternate picking patterns before the exercises as they are pretty much "Rhythmic Modes"

http://bbamusic.wikispaces.com/file/view/Melodic+Rhythms+for+Guitar+-William+Leavitt.pdf

 

It "fits" works well with little thought process and sounds ,,,Well...err umm cheesy/trite as all get up. But my lines are for lack of a better term. More melodic, less riff based.it's like they connect through the chords on autopilot.

 

[Rudi]

It helped you. That's great. But that cracking the code thing would annoy me I'm afraid. I dare say its the presentation, but it looks like the very same misguided fixation that I was talking about in my last post.

[TapperMike]

Well it did and then... Once again I remembered that high speed picking is not my end goal.  So it was entertainment away from my current direction.

 

But the one thing I did take away and bring back to jazz is the sense of pattern playing for deriving melody.  If you are all about chasing the mode to support the chord you are playing over... You can do it in time with lots of practice.  However improvising solos are not seamless. Not just you or me even the greats do this. They play a line have to think about how they are going to go to the next chord and then play another short fast idea then think and move again. It's almost like but not quite blues phrasing. clusters of notes that try to connect chords with gaps between them.

 

Which is fine but those who haven't heard or played a lot in this way kick themselves for not getting the smooth connect the dots type soloing. Understanding that the greats did this too, the only thing they did better was to keep on pushing through.  

 

If you want a smoother approach to improvisation were you are connecting the dots seamlessly over chord changes ..Thats work and lots of it. Doesn't happen over night.  The first part is removing all the clutter about thinking of what you could do and focusing on the changes as simply as possible... Guide tones.

 

I had a teacher who beat guide tones into me every lesson for a year. The lesson really didn't start until I completed a guide tone assignment that was dropped in front of me. No matter how well I showed that I could handle guide tones the drilling never stopped. We'd cover other things as well in the lessons but only afterwards. It was tedious. I hated it but overtime it was ingrained in me.

PracticeSheet1.pdf

 

The ritual worked like this.  First play the chord progression and record it.  Next notate the guide tones on the sheet. One guide tone per chord. Then go back to the recording and play along only using the guide tones.  It's freaking maddening Boring as hell and you're always thinking about what you could play over the chords. It's easy to let your mind wander. That's the point. Don't let your mind wander. Be on guide tone when the chord comes along. Clear the clutter.

 

Songs like "Autumn Leaves" are specifically taught because it's all about connecting to the guide tone. The last note in each phrase ends on a guide tone.  Most are just to happy to learn the song and leave it at that. Some acknowledge the principle of guide tones and leave it at that. But to have the concept fully internalized you have to go a step further and incorporate the concept in your playing so it is automatic. Disregard modes, disregard where you are playing in the moment focus always on where you will be when the next chord comes along.  Target guide tones.

 

it's tedious. It's boring as hell. You are sitting there thinking of all the other notes you could be playing because you have the ability to play faster and more interesting stuff. But as you keep on knocking down different progressions connecting the dots chord tone to chord tone becomes easier in time till it's second nature.  It also requires that you come back to the same tedious drills over time.

 

That's the path I've been on most of my life playing jazz solos.  Which as good as it sounds to me, former teachers, listeners and jazz devotees.  It's not the only marker I use in my playing but it is a cornerstone.  I'm bored with myself because I've beat that thing to death over the years. Sure I can still use it but I'm looking for something to augment that now.  Which is why my focus is on chord melody on the one hand for arrangement and pattern based soloing for improvisation.

 

Pattern based is nothing new. It's extremely common. From Bach, Beethoven, Bartok to Malmsteen, Metheny and more.  For all Malmsteen's talk of modes it's pattern playing. He plays a pattern in mode X then he repeats the same pattern in mode z.  The pattern is just repeated transposed. He doesn't actually have to go through working out each mode separately he simply repeats the same pattern on a different starting note. 

 

While pattern based (rhythmic motif) can be used to justify the outlying harmony and or reach outside scale tones it doesn't have to. The focus is all about the pattern and it's displacement.  Miles Davis is worlds apart from other beboppers. He hated hearing big chords behind him and having to justify his lines to accommodate them. He also disliked the idea of falling back on overused licks/phrases common to the jazz experience. Instead he operated with motives. He'd hand his fellow musicians a scrap of paper with a simple grouping of notes. No notation on rhythmic value.  Here play this. It was just a grouping of notes. sometimes one couldn't even determine the key from the notes they were handed. Broken off scales, or chromatic lines. It would seem like counterpoint or two / three part inventions then anything else IF...If he allowed them to see what he'd written out for each others.  A very bold frontier.  transcribers always get Miles Davis wrong. Because they put in chords and chord changes. Miles Davis's bebop era was not about chord progressions at all and trying to justify the lines after the fact with harmonies defeats what he was trying to achieve. Lines derived from pattern groupings not harmony.

 

That isn't to say one can't use pattern based motif's in jazz in a conventional sense. My niece used to play clarinet in middle school, high school and later in college. I'd often go over while visiting my sister and browse through her course studies. In the early years it was all pattern based. Play the scale, Play the scale in intervals (3rds, 4ths etc) Play ascending and descending patterns. Scale and rhythm patterns.  It was all route and I was concerned that if there were a true musician in her it would have died waiting to come out wading through all those lame studies. I rarely saw my niece back then. Maybe four times a year.  

 

Anyway in High School when she was in the marching band and I'd pretty much thrown in the towel that she'd ever do anything except read sheet music. I came over to my sister and her, brought my guitar. Was hoping to coax some soloing out of here. I started playing a few jazz standards and encouraged her to join in.  I gave her a key and a starting note.  What came out was very coltrane-esque.  Why?  Most of her musical development was on playing patterns, not simply going up and down the scale. Coltrane although he does use chord tones to start each "line" uses scale patterns as motif's Granted she didn't insert chromaticism the way coltrane does via altered scale tones. Nonetheless it was all very credible highly fluid improvising.  

 

Coltrane patterns can be perceived as based on modes. What they really are is...Scalar patterns based on the chord

http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/jazz-exercise-countdown-1

 

Playing rhythm guitar it's see the chord>Play the chord.with Coltrane patterns its see the chord, play the pattern that supports the chord.  Starting off there are several four note patterns that one memorizes. The trick is learn one pattern, play the pattern according to the chord then when the chord changes the pattern doesn't change it just transposes to fit the chord. As you get used to playing these simple scale patterns you mix and match them against the chord changes.  It's not about trying to connect thru the chords and modes. It's not about thinking your way through. The thinking has been done for you because you are working from route pattern recognition. See the chord>play the chord is replaced with See the chord play the pattern. See next chord play next chords pattern.  All easy talk but it does require some route pattern practice connecting the dots before it becomes a reality.

 

 

[TapperMike]

In many ways now I wished I'd learned Coltrane patterns instead of Guide tones.  Coltrane patterns are still tedious at first but are a lot more palatable and easier to get a handle on for connecting the dots then simply following guide tones and hoping to connect the dots.

[Rudi]

Thats given me a lot to do.

It's too late now. I will look up your links tomorrow Mike.

 

I went to Devon yesterday, met up with Steve Perrett. We had lunch, played guitars and caught up. I did a lot of driving (for me). About 6 hours.