General Music Chat

Hmm... interesting.....

With that kind of practice regimine both of you guys should be awsome by now... I don't have that much discipline anymore.... 2 or 3 times a week for about 2 hours, scales, picking etc... then I play something usually recording it to use later....

Kudos to you guys...

X!

You need to check out some of Crips videos, he is awesome

awww... shucks, John I wish I had a video of me now! Those vids are soo freakin old. I've learned sooo much since those vids and I'm a helluv lot less sloppier. Maybe I'll get a vid from my wife's B/day bash at the end of June...

Yea bro that would be cool. You can tell by mi spellin thet i like the pictures!

Crip... can you play on my CD....

OK IF YOU GUYS ARE GONNA BE SO SERIOUS, F, SERIOUS,
You have to be able to be able to to develope the physical abuilities as well as the abuility to over come the bond with six strings ,patterns ,scales ,position,and even looking at the fretboard.
I work hard at playing "CLEAN" Every mourning. IT varies greatly as to how much time I can spend, I look at this as the physical side.Trying not to get locked into any mindset. SINGLE STRING Xs DOUBLE STRING XsETC. I allways try to write something new.
IN the evening its all IMPROVE. Jimmy Smith,Coltrane,Allmans,Joe Walsh,
MY own jams , WHATEVER......... Maybe I'm tryin to push it but I dont look at music as only having 12 notes IN an octave...More like 112. JUST ASK DUANE!
[just gotta make them fit].

giongi2

I have been impressed with the way you play. I like to hear the way you string the notes together. Makes me think, yea, thats what I should be working toward.

I read back thru this and all this practice is cool I guess, but in the end you need to learn to put your emotional self into the music.

Last night my drummer and bassist got together to practice which we dont do enough. It was funny cause we started just jamming to stuff like Brickhouse, Roller Coaster, Fire old dance sh*t. But I finally crossed a threshold and just let myself go playing. Ive had theory out the ass for years and know my way aroudn the fretboard. The key to me is to disconnect from all the theory and just let some emotional vibe flow thru me to the listner. I find just all out fretboard shredding to be boring at times. I appreciate the effort, but sometimes I would rather hear BB KIng or Billy Gibbons just hold a note for days and wring every ounce of sweat out of it that there is. After we got done practicing I felt good, i mean I can play as fast as anyone I know and to some extent I can shredd like hell, but give me the emotion.

I just thought I would thro this in here for thought. Try to bring emotion forward whenever you are playng in front of an audience. They will feel it if you feel it.

EVERY ONE has to find their own way.....GOD is only gonna show you the door,,,, YOU GOTTA OPEN IT...

The only time I pick up an electric these days is when I'm ready to record a part. I just strum an acoustic, or a classical guitar occasionally.

I love the sound of the Spanish guitar.

I know, nothing to do with this subject.

DAJAX, you do that very well . Thanx for sharing you recordings.

i mean I can play as fast as anyone I know and to some extent I can shredd like hell, but give me the emotion.

BINGO!

I'll take something with FEELING any time. I can play fast, and JW will probably confirm that, but I go for feel every time. I paid a lot of attention to something I read in an article a while back. Stevie Ray Vaughn played in a blues festival with BB King and wanted to sit in so BB said ok. Vaughn told him he'd need a couple of minutes to get warmed up, so BB turned him loose and he played every lick he could think of, jamming his butt off.

Then BB King took over...and blew Vaughn right off the stage...

Vaughn knew it and asked him later, how did you do that? ONE NOTE and you blew me right out of the water...ONE NOTE...

BB told him "put everything you got into every note." Every ounce of soul you have into every note you play, that's what makes Clapton great, BB King, David Gilmour, Jimmy Page, Duanne Allman, Billy Gibbons and so on. Gibbons can drag enough soul to fill a Mac truck out of one note.

Who cares if you can play 138 notes in 4 seconds if not one of them actually SAYS anything?

I've never practiced a scale in my life, except on sax in high school...hated every minute of it. Took music theory too, forgot all of it before the next year was over. When I practiced, I would work on my parts for a few minutes then doodle on jazz solo style stuff for twice as long. Then back to work on the actual parts.

Band director walked by the practice room one day and heard me, looked in the small window to see who it was, I thought 'oh crap, I'm busted'...he walked in, asked me if I could do the same in another key. (I was doodling in D on a baritone sax, he wanted concert Bflat, or G on the bari). I tried it, he told me to take the solo in a specific song that Friday night at a concert when trombone usually did it. From then on I was playing baritone sax solos in the jazz band...

Did scales help? Or theory? Nope...being able to hear something in my head and make the horn do it was all that ever helped, same on guitar. Right now I would have to sit there and peck my way through any scales, I don't know them and don't care to. I play what goes through my head, I'm actually best under pressure and ad libbing it, and I try to - probably not very successfully - put all the soul I can into every note. The only thing scales did was train my fingers to know where the notes were. Could have done that doodling just as well...

As far as actual practice goes, I'm horrible at it. I mostly just doodle, see what interesting licks come out. When I have to learn specific songs, then I do work on them, but usually any other time I just doodle around, play through songs I've written or am in the process of working up, play old songs or parts of them I've known for 30 years...anything but scales...

Oh, almost always on acoustic, I rarely practice on an electric at all. Working to find the notes on an acoustic will make it almost effortless when you switch to electric, and when I practice electric it's almost always clean, no effects. But you do have to get accustomed to the different neck for a few minutes, so if you're about to go onstage, always warm up on an electric, the one you intend to use, just before going onstage. You don't want to start off the night fumbling around trying to get accustomed to a different guitar neck...been there, done that...it ain't pretty...

Who cares if you can play 138 notes in 4 seconds if not one of them actually SAYS anything?

It may not say anything to YOU - it might say everything to someone else.

The thing that we should never forget, as musicians, is that music appreciation is subjective.

Who cares if you can play 138 notes in 4 seconds if not one of them actually SAYS anything?

It may not say anything to YOU - it might say everything to someone else.

The thing that we should never forget, as musicians, is that music appreciation is subjective.

Im kinda with Pete, if you have no emotion in your playing all the notes in the world just do nothing.

Shredding is great for other guitarist to get their yuck yucks over, believe me I played in metal shredding clubs for years where everyone in the audience was as good or better than me. After shows I would have guys come up and say you went a little flat in the middle of the crazy train solo, or what happened in YYZ?

I do think that you need soem kinda theory to get thru music with other musicians. And whether Bill thinks in theory terms Ive heard him play and he has a lot of theory in there, he may have aquired it differently than you or I, but its there in his playing.

I think from an audience standpoint and this is from experience more people will respond to emotion that to technical skills. Kurt Cobain touched more folks with his solos than Malmsteen ever will and i love and appreciate them both. But Cobain was conected into some human feelings that Malmsteen can only dream of.

Most of the players I meet that go gah gah over how many notes you can play, dont have much live experience interacting with an audience. Once you get some real experience entertaining people you will se what some of us are talking about.