Funny how one day and a bit of rest can make a difference in how well you perform... After posting the item below, I went to bed and enjoyed a good nights sleep - surprising since usually when frustrated or disappointed I have trouble getting to sleep. Next morning woke with the sun, let the puppies out to relieve themselves and served the oatmeal my wife cooked overnight in the crock pot. Did some chores and watched the Seahawks almost lose the game to the Broncos, completed my chores, and finally almost as an oversight got to my office to review emails and maybe try to do some solo work on the tune. Id been trying to emulate some Steve Howeisms on the solo in the intro, and tonight I went through about 6 takes - chose to use take 5 and 6 and splice the two half way, using take 5s first 2/3rd and then take 6s final 1/3 to create a nice solo. Its very difficult to go from the skip string flatted 6ths that Steve does (its one of his signature things) to other fingerings and then the diatonic single note leads - switching finger positions necessitates swapping hand position and fingers swiftly and smoothly but each time I hear a break in the sustain that I dont like, and so I go back to redo it again. This night though I think the synaptic connections had been healed in the prior nights sleep and it was a far easier thing to do and achieve what I wanted. Oh happy day! Moving onward to the next solo I discovered that I had another challenge - Im not nearly as swift fingered as I used to be. That solo is surprisingly fast - and I can play it very well (if not better than the original) as long as it is 12-15 bps slower than the tempo in the song. I changed guitars several times in the hope that maybe its the scale length or string height that affects me badly, but no, its me just being slow. So Ill be working on reclaiming my speed now going forward. Doesnt mean I quit for the night yet - I get to solo #3 in the following dueling 12 string section. This time I pull out my Howard Roberts Fusion III and surprise myself profoundly with a very jazz influenced and melodic solo - three improvised takes with a minimal structure starting on an old Guitar Player lesson by Joe Satriani based in add 9s (the exercise was intended to improve finger reach and strength doing finger hammer ons across four frets horizontally, six strings vertically one finger per string). That start with the add 9 sounding (8ve D# to the root C#) set up some Holdsworth like phrasing to follow, and even though I ended up cutting the early set of bars from the solo the remaining stuff was awesome! Im going to change the timbre of the keyboard solo to a more jazz oriented patch that isnt so thick and complex now. Funny how such a change can influence decisions like this going forward. I get to guitar solo #4 - which is the ending solo playing thru fade out of the end of the song, a melodramatic thing originally intended to be faintly reminiscent of Gilmours solo in Comfortably Numb. I still had the HRIII in my hands so I tried running through some ideas, but was finding that I couldnt really get the level of drama I wanted and kept playing very circumspect lines in a jazzy style. Wondering if the guitar itself might be influencing my playing, I pulled out the ESP singlecut and tried to hit it again - this time I was very consciously trying to play heavier, and it started to sound pretentious with a lot of overplaying happening. At this point it was getting late and I was hitting a mental roadblock, not feeling like I was making progress anymore, so I shut it down and went to bed. It leaves me to wonder how much an instrument infuses its own characteristics onto the playing - for me Im definitely feeling that its a strong influence on my own playing. From a practical perspective, I didnt think this would be such the case, but this experience shows differently. I guess to try to prove or disprove this Ill pull out the Svilpacaster and my Black Strat and try to run through two takes and see if this indeed is the case. If true, then what should result is a solo reminiscent of my original one on the Svilpacaster, and one that would be more like a Gilmour solo with the Black Strat. It might be a stretch to say this will happen, since theres so many variables at play, but it would definitely help me going forward to choose the appropriate weapon for the purpose intended. Certainly food for thought for both all the work on past projects, but also the new projects to come.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 05:09:12 +0000
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