The Tone Journey

I was and remain a blues cat. The guy at the store saw me coming and recommended a plastic case full of Boss pedals, It made a little sorta sense, cuz I had a good guitar, but a pretty bad Peavey amp. (or maybe not bad, but wrong for the sound I wanted) The only one of those pedals that stuck was an orange DS1. I couldn’t get a sound I liked out of the yellow OD1, and the CS2 compressor completely wrecked my dynamics and put this weird ‘pop’ on the front of all my notes, but it got worse; I asked if they could modify my axe with a coil-splitting switch, and they told me I didn’t want that, what I WANTED was a phase switch (for the y’know, Peter Green thing, which not for nothing was ALSO wrong; Peter’s neck humbucker WAS inadvertently wired out-of-phase from the factory, but it had also been re-installed upside-down or backwards, if you prefer, after a later repair) Wrong, I really DID want the two humbuckers split in the middle position. But I was never really happy with my tone, ’til I got my ’69 Super Reverb and leveled up to a wine/gold all mahogany/ebony fretboard Les Paul Custom with the crank-handle, fold-out tuners. It was built like a brick boat, but it had some TONE!

I ended up trading it at a HUGE loss for a shitty Japanese three-bolt Stratocaster. It was beat, it was ugly; it was unsuccessfully refinished, even. It was stained all over with nicotine and it STANK. It had stickers on it from Gilley’s AND Billy Bob’s. But with the primitive 3-way blade in the precarious bridge-middle position, it had a voice like a horny angel. So I added a set of Texas Specials, some big-ass frets and a five-way switch and GLORY BE! I could SRV my rotten little heart out. Only I’d learned a hard lesson during that tone journey. See, I’d locked myself in a woodshed for about a year, with that first Aria Pro ZZII Explorer, the DS1, a Gorilla amp (the one with the hilarious “Tube Stack” switch) and a copy of “Johnny Winter And, Live!”. I played along with that damned thing nearly all day, every day and once I’d come out of yon woodshed, I got real damned tired of hearing, “Dang, you sound JUST LIKE Johnny Winter!”. Only it turned out, THAT job was taken, so I got a gig with a country band playing a lot of George Jones and Buck Owens. Them old cats made me sing all the Randy Travis. Thirty years later, I was in a way better country band. THEY made me sing all the Travis Tritt. I reckon if I have a point, it’s that tone is a trip.

Embrace The Suck

Perfect Pitch is one of the milder forms of autism; it can actually be detrimental to the development of musical skills, particularly those of the ensemble variety. If you have decent relative pitch, you can hone it and improve it; perfect pitch you have to learn to ignore, for the sake of playing in tune with others. Don Henley’s relative pitch sense is famous; his Eagles bandmates called him “Guano”, by which they meant “ears of the bat”, the literal translation being, “batshit”. By some accounts, including mine, perfect pitch is a nigh useless parlour trick, unless you tune pianos for a profession, but even there, I see troubles ahead, because of ‘stretch tuning’. Perfect pitch is helpful for singers and violinists; guitarists should steer clear and embrace the suck of frets and uncertainty.

Troubador

I love that word, ‘troubador’. I had some romantic notions about it when I was young. I thought it meant you took your instrument with you everywhere, and if anybody asked you to play, you did. I did just that for more than ten years. Through most of that, I didn’t have a car. Or a home. And I only occasionally had a job, so playing and singing kept me fed. I played anything I knew, and if I didn’t know it, I’d fake it. The funniest thing is the number of people who’d ask, “Can you play that thing?” I mean I took a lot of crap, just for being that weirdo who took a guitar everywhere he went. Did they think it was just for decoration?

It wasn’t my only musical training, but it was some of the best. I interfaced daily with the musical needs of people on the street; both people I knew and people I didn’t. I don’t think that’s even possible, today. I started before there was a a Walkman, when personal, portable music meant a tinny little handheld AM radio. Give the Beatles and the Monkees credit for figuring out how to sound great on those little buggers. But campfires, barbecues, picnics, bar mitzvahs, reunions, any kind of party, there was virtually no sort of human gathering I couldn’t ruin with my songs, my stories and my guitar.

Singers

There are singers, there are Karaoke singers and then there are vocalists. Most singers can sing pretty well, if the tune is comfortably within their range and wheelhouse. Karaoke singers have between two and ten tunes that they can really wail on, but otherwise, they’re lost, and especially if they’re not singing to the original track, or a close facsimile. A vocalist can sing harmonies (plural) and stay on pitch when someone else sings harmony; they can cover not just a range of songs, but a range of styles and they know exactly what their range is, give or take a few half-steps, because they’re musicians. You can be a singer and NOT be a musician; the classic joke goes, “How do you know a singer is on your porch? They can’t find the key and they don’t know when to come in.” I’d take a good vocalist over a good singer, six ways from Sunday, but a really great singer? They might have crap for range or a bad voice; they may only have one style, but they own that one. They might lack power, control and even breath support, but they can emote, they have charisma and they can command your attention without demanding it. A great singer is a blessing from the Almighty. A few quick examples: Elvis and Sinatra had pipes and amazing control, but Sinatra was notoriously pitchy. I’d give Sinatra the edge, because his phrasing just kept getting better, his whole career. And then, there’s Jagger, Bono and Dylan; people who weren’t naturally blessed, but did a lot with a little, thereby proving that you don’t have to be Prince or Stevie Wonder. You can just be Tom Petty or John Fogerty. And that’s enough. Just as long as your mom knows it’s you, when your song comes on the radio.

Vibrato

Vibrato is a deep subject; deep, and sometimes wide. There are a number of vibrato types and approaches; the easiest is ye olde wiggle stick, AKA the misnamed tremolo arm, but that’s cheating, so let’s ignore it in favor of the two main finger vibrato techniques. Wide vibrato is just a series of bends; you can push up, pull down or alternate, but the trick is to keep them even and consistent, regardless of the speed. You may notice that this vibrato is up-only and tends to raise the pitch center above the target note, so if your vibrato bend is a half-step in width, start the bend from a half-step below the target note and try to wobble evenly above and below the target note, the way a singer does. If your wiggle only goes from below the note to the target note, that’s called a Judy Garland. (hat tip to the late, great Jeff Beck, who first noticed this) It’s how most guitarists do it, and it’s not necessarily wrong. The other approach is known as the BB King Butterfly Bee Sting; it’s easier to see than to describe, but basically, the vibrato finger (you can use any fret hand finger except maybe the pinky) is perpendicular to the fretboard and the wrist rotates rapidly. Some folks anchor the thumb behind the neck; others don’t, but go find some Youtube clips and all will soon become clear. BB’s specific vibrato is about the only thing he did differently than T-bone Walker and he snagged it from Django Reinhardt. Now, go make it sing!

How Not To Rock

If you want to be strict about it, straight blues is nothing but I, IV and V dominant 7ths; there are three progressions: 12 bar, 12 bar ‘quick change’ and 8 bar, all with a dotted-eighth shuffle rhythm. (ant, dead ant, dead ant, etc.) But if I think real hard, it’s only a very few blues artists that did just that and nothing else, playing shuffles all night long; Jimmy Reed comes immediately to mind; everybody else mixed in a little something different. Maybe there’d be some funk, latin, R&B or even disco, but most were very careful not to play any rock’n’roll.

As a young blues artist, I had to work out how NOT to do any rock; it seemed important, at the time; there are STILL purists who reject Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix as blues musicians. I believe it was Howlin’ Wolf that said, “Rock’n’roll is nothing but the blues, played too loud and too fast”. He was onto something. There are some hallmarks that differentiate rock from blues, and I’ve compiled an incomplete list.

• Ground Zero is straight eighth notes played against swung sixteenths; this was the innovation Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson were known for, though they didn’t make it up from whole cloth-others had the pieces. “Shuffles are old-fashioned, man!”
• Rock’n’roll was influenced by country music, and vice-versa; Chuck Berry (that guy, again) and Carl Perkins were at either end of the teeter-totter, Chuck injecting country melody and storytelling in his blues in an effort to broaden his appeal to, let’s say a paler audience, and Carl Perkins infusing his hot hillbilly licks with blues rhythms to get the kids at the sock hop jumpin’.
• Rock tempi tend to speed up, creating a sense of anticipation; good rock drummers pull back the reins at the turnaround or the end of a verse/chorus. In the blues, you got to be a steady rollin’ man. Or gal.
• Rock drums are mixed louder, and vocals are mixed like the other instruments. The first half of the technique was pioneered by Bo Diddley and the latter part brought to fruition by The Rolling Stones, who were trying to play blues, but from an English perspective. Unlike blues, country, jazz or pop, or really any music that came before, rock music is mixed from the drums upward, rather than around the vocal. In the Stones’ case, there was a side benefit that Mick Jagger’s lyrics were basically unintelligible over AM radios, and listeners would call the station to request the song, to try to figure out what Mick was singing.
• I’ll probably add to the list.

Sustain

I’ve said this for years and years and years, so I’ll say it again, I could give a fig for sustain; how often am I even gonna play a whole note? (for the civilians, that’s a note that’s held for a full measure, which is usually four beats and that’s not very long, even at crazy slow tempi) The thing I’m after is resonance, which is sort of the opposite of sustain. This is why “tonewoods” are in fact, important; they’re for getting the right balance. The neck, strings and body are a feedback loop; frets (and the nut, in the case of open strings) transfer string energy into the neck as the bridge transfers it into the body. (and unless you damp the pickups, the body vibrates those)

The TONE (all caps) of a guitar is all about what resonates and what sustains; in synthesis, we break a note down into its components, so there’s a pluck for the initial transient and it has basically all the frequencies from the fundamental pitch all the way up to infinity or the limit of your hearing loss, whichever comes first. We hear it as a click, it goes by so fast. Then you hear a series of partials or harmonics (multiples of the fundamental frequency, cf. Pythagoras) as the note dies away, and it’s the ORDER (all caps) in which they die off that constitutes TONE. But here’s all you really need to know: Pick it up strum it, don’t even plug it in; if it rings, it sings. You’re welcome.

Scales Out Of School

I got this from Scott Henderson, “Don’t use more than four consecutive notes from the same scale; you don’t wanna sound like you went to school.” He was talking about the diminished scale, but it’s true for all of them. It’s not a hard and fast rule, you could choose three or five, depending on the rhythm, but the key is the word ‘consecutive’ which means contiguous or adjacent. Say you’re ascending, when you you get to four, skip a note, slide into a note, go back downwards, repeat a note, bend it or wiggle it; better yet, throw in a rest, wait for the chord to change, maybe wait ’til after the downbeat to start the next phrase, cuz stepwise motion bores you and the audience, and don’t you tune out when someone talks in a monotone, without ever pausing for breath?

 

The late B.B. King got a lot of mileage out of this strategy, so much so, there’s a piece of the pentatonic minor scale named after him; the BB King Box. It starts three frets above the root note of the key on the high E string and includes the note two frets above it and the corresponding adjacent notes on the B string, a three fret span fingered with the index and middle finger of your fret hand. That’s it; just four notes with four corners, so we call it a box. It’s possible to solo over an entire blues progression using only these notes, plus some bends, vibrato and ingenuity. In fact, it’s a terrific exercise in phrasing and economy; you almost can’t help but come up with cool new phrases, just so as not to die from boredom, and it teaches us how limits can drive creativity.

 

Here’s the kicker; this isn’t just a soloing strategy; it’s also great for building riffs. The first seven notes in Derek & The Dominoes’ Layla is played in a similar ‘box’ on the A and D strings at the third and fifth frets. Note that after the fourth ascending stepwise note, the riff descends to the second note, turns again and nails the third note. The galloping riff for Whole Lotta Love adds a slide, but utilizes this same fretboard shape, as do many other classic riffs. Now you know how to box, go find the boxes that are three frets apart. Hint: Layla’s lead riff is one, and it’s on the B and high E strings.

Rocket Surgery

The amount of training, manual dexterity and left-right brain integration required to become a brain surgeon or a musician is actually very similar. The only major differences are that someone has to sign off on a brain surgeon’s qualifications and the brain surgeon needn’t own (nor purchase) his own tools. Well, that and if I inadvertently hit a Bb in the middle of a C major scale, nobody gets paralyzed. (also, you can be a perfectly average brain surgeon and still make really good money) I also take issue when people refer to the music biz as a lottery; the music industry has nothing in common with a lottery other than the occasional unexpectedly large payouts, because anyone with a dollar can be eligible for a lottery jackpot, while it takes years and years to grow a good musician, and even longer to grow a good songwriter. (see brain surgeon comments above)

The idea that making music is easy and fun is complete horsesh*t, but we sell it to the public because that’s what they’re buying. It’s actually as agonizing as giving birth, and then somebody comes along and steals your baby and claims it for their own OR they tell you it’s too ugly to feed and should be put out to sea on an ice floe. On some of my darker days, I begin to believe that there are people in this world that don’t deserve music, and that we should at the very least have a single day out of the year, International Music Day, when no music of any kind is allowed to be played anywhere on the planet, and all y’all can have a great time listening to nothing but the sound of the wind, some ducks and geese and a few million cheerful car horns. Of course music is a gift, but musicianship is not, it has to be earned.

The End Of Digital Music, Or Can We Save Spotify?

 

Recently I’ve seen posts decrying the end of the digital music era.  For evidence, they present basically the fact that digital downloads are toast and music streaming services are going bankrupt/losing money, some of them for years on end. Here’s my take: Amazon has had years of losses, as well. If Spotify wants to win this game, they should be hemorrhaging money even faster. Subscription rates are low because the price is too high.Think about how much a teen pays for a data plan, then your ask is ten bucks on top of that, when they can (for now) hear everything on Youtube for free?   I hear many artists screaming that their streaming royalties are too low, but I don’t hear record companies.

 

Some independents of my acquaintance are doing just dandy on their Spotify royalties, thankyouverymuch.  in my opinion, Spotify needs to take a page from the Republiicans and lower the tariff to let more goods flow, then a page from the Democrats to let the most successful artists subsidize the lesser ones so they can develop. That is essentially how the old industry worked, back when it did and wasn’t having it’s books buggered by either the Mob or Wall Street. But this can only happen with the utmost transparency, so that everybody knows that nobody is gaming the play counts; until we put a stop to that, artists will never get fairly paid.