We know that Mr. Zappa’s forte was staging amazing tours. In this excerpt from a recorded interview, he stresses the importance of holding your bandmates to high standards.
In Memoriam: Jeff Hanneman (1964-2013)
Today the world says goodbye to Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman.
Slayer are, as I mentioned in my History of Metal, the one group in thrash’s “Big Four” that seem to have maintained the highest level of credibility among listeners throughout the decades since their emergence. Their raw sound, disturbing lyrics, frantic tempos, and chaotic solos might keep all but the pathologically curious at bay, and I must admit my own appreciation for Slayer came rather late; but I for one eventually learned their sound is not raw as much as it is genuine, their lyrics are not disturbing as much as they are revealing, their tempos not frantic but exhilarating, and their solos…well, I can’t tell how calculated they are, but I cannot imagine that anything more polished sounding would seem appropriate in the context of their songs.
I was first exposed to Slayer when the bassist in my high school band suggested we learn “Skeletons of Society.” We rehearsed it, but never got to perform it. Many years later, I would suggest to the members of Avengers Assemble! that we prepare “Seasons in the Abyss” as a set-opener. Could there be any better song to open a club show? Hardly.
We must all rock considerably harder to fill the void left by Hanneman’s departure.
Practice Journal: Descending 16ths, 4-Note Groups
I just completed a marathon practice session, wherein I focused mainly on alternate picking. Here’s one of several patterns I worked on which combines slurs with outside picking:
Here is what it sounds like at a decent speed. (Play 16th-note pattern)
I’ll elaborate on this exercise more next time. Meanwhile, if you’re up for a greater challenge, try the pattern with no slurs, beginning with an upstroke.
Practice Journal: C7 Arpeggios with Easy Picking
The problem with arpeggios on the guitar is they generally require sweeping or awkward string skips. If you keep two notes per string, you can set up patterns like this, which are generally pretty easy on the right hand:
Try it with your preferred picking and legato placement. Also, think of each group of two notes on one string as a cell, and try varying the pattern within each cell, and stringing each cell together in different ways. You can certainly apply this pattern to other chord types, but four-note seventh-chords are probably going to work best. Try raising or lowering the fifth, or raising the root one half-step to imply either a C7b9 or C#dim7.
I Haven’t Gone Anywhere.
Just a heads-up: I know it’s been a while since I posted, but I have been utterly consumed with a new composition project. I’m rearranging a cool jazz ballad I wrote in more of a modern metal, “Djent” style for what I hope to be either a live rehearsal or an online collaboration.
I have worked out the first 18 seconds of music, only to scratch most of what I wrote and start over; and tonight I realized I may start over again. With each pass, the overarching concept is strengthened; I just need to refine the details.
As soon as I have something worth sharing, I will be glad to post it here.
In Memoriam: Dave Brubeck (1920-2012)
For whatever reasons, Dave Brubeck is often overlooked by purists when recounting the greatest artists of jazz. But his legacy is nearly as impactful as any artist of the last century, and his music easily as inspiring.
Brubeck, always smiling.
I first encountered him when I was 18 years old. He was a featured artist on VH1′s “New Visions Jazz,” hosted by Ben Sidran. Mr. Brubeck was performing a couple of standards (“I Hear a Rhapsody” and “These Foolish Things”) at a jazz festival in Florida; and even I, with my then limited capacity to understand the subtleties of jazz, was dazzled by they way he could evoke orchestral textures from a piano. In a subsequent interview, he was asked how he felt about playing the old fan favorites dozens of times per year, for years on end. Hardly a month goes by that I don’t recall his answer as one of the first lessons I learned about being a performer. He said that he was fortunate to be playing music for so many people, and for so long, and that if people wanted to hear “Take Five” for the 200th time, it remained his job to play it for them, and to do so with as much intent and fervor as he ever did.
Another of the several lessons I learned by listening to his music was that a style is represented by its distilled essence, not by its most frequently used techniques. To illustrate: “Blue Rondo a la Turk” is one of the greatest blues pieces ever written and performed, and without adhering strictly to the incessantly repeating twelve-bar form. Today, remember Dave Brubeck in hindsight the way countless students and fans enjoyed him in person — by taking delight in the impeccable structure, exhibited both on the page and in improvisation, in the music of Brubeck’s classic quartet, who were matchless both in their knack for craftsmanship and in their appeal to humanity’s basest feelings.
Arranging “Call Me Maybe,” Part 3
In Part 1, I described how I devised an overall strategy for the arrangement, then transcribed the verse parts. In Part 2, we examined the keyboard part in the chorus. Today, I shall conclude by summarizing the other rhythm parts in the chorus and bridge.
The guitar in the chorus is elementary: 5th chords in rhythmic unison with the keys.
The bass doubles the roots throughout.
As I mentioned in Part 2, the keys need to dominate the arrangement right here. I have found in performance that laying low with the guitar part can be a challenge. Right before this tune, I need to do something that attenuates my overdrive channel volume. For now, it’s selecting a quieter model on my Variax, which I prefer to turning down the OD1 channel on my amp, which might prove difficult to do just the same way every night. This is a situation where a volume pedal or an extra EQ pedal might make life easier.
Our band’s manager asked if I could give our horns something to do. I wasn’t crazy about throwing horns into the mix, but it doesn’t hurt to give a group options. This arrangement will work with our without the horn section. I decided to use them only in the chorus to reinforce the keyboard.
I could have voiced the horns with the trumpet doubling the highest note of the keyboard — an obvious approach, given that the highest notes seem to carry an important melody. But that also seemed a bit too near the edge of the trumpet’s range. When you push an instrument that hard, its intensity can distract attention from the principal voice of the arrangement. So I took a chance in assigning the lead voice to the tenor sax and trombone, playing in unison, with the trumpet playing roots above. In jazz, this would be blasphemy. But after hearing this in performance, I’m okay with the results. The trumpet does tend to pop out a bit too much at times; but I figure that even if savvy listeners might notice something about the lead line that doesn’t resemble the album (which is unlikely), they have already accepted the use of horns — already a departure from the original.
The second half of the chorus has the guitar doing a repetitive, 4-note pattern:
This sounds like a synth in the original; it’s tough to tell because it’s one of the more subtle components of the arrangement. In performance, I cut my overdrive a bit. My approach is to use a Boss SD-1 throughout the tune, coupling it with the clean channel for the verse riff and the above pattern, and switching to the amp’s overdrive channel for the power chords in the chorus and the lead in the bridge. As in every other part of the arrangement, my objective is to lurk in the shadows and provide textural support. It is important to use your technology to suppress as well as impress.
Note the volume swell in the guitar part at the end of the first chorus:
Here I also had the tenor and trombone double the bottom two notes of the 5th chord. This is a type of subtle touch that often comes to mind when you are focused on making an arrangement sound ideal, and not simply transcribing parts.
Finally, here is the last new phrase in the song, a guitar lick that soars above the bridge:
I indicate “long delay” at the end of this section, so the final two notes can echo in the background during a break.
The rest of this arrangement was a matter of cutting parts here and there and mapping out sections. Finally, I double-checked the legibility in the parts, and made sure there were rehearsal marks and helpful dynamic markings where appropriate.
I hope this process has been educational. I recently completed another arrangement that I’d like to share in an upcoming post.
Practicing the Omnibook with Animated Sheet Music
I would expect any jazz student to be familiar with the Charlie Parker Omnibook
YouTube user dancohen has created a series of videos which follows the original recordings with note-by-note animations based on the Omnibook transcriptions. One hazard of learning solely from another person’s transcription is being unaware of the quirks of rhythm and accent that cannot easily be notated. I found these videos useful for learning how Bird’s phrasing might sound different than mine if I simply learned the transcriptions as written.
Arranging “Call Me Maybe,” Part 2
In Part One, I described my process for preparing to arrange the pop tune “Call Me Maybe,” and some of the decisions I made in charting out the verse. Now, let’s look at the chorus:
I remember reading in the Songwriter’s Market way back in the 80′s that a successful song needs two hooks, one vocal and one instrumental. In this tune we get both at the same time, each occupying spaces left by the other. The classic riff that drives this section is found in the keys:
Note the directions to switch to arco strings. It helped to know that both arco and pizzicato strings are common patches on keyboards, and often found within close proximity of each other. Asking a keyboardist to use specific patches can sometimes invite trouble, but definitely not here, especially with the rest before the double-bar.
As for the voicings, these pretty much took care of themselves. Listening to the recording, it’s fairly easy to hear the octaves in the right hand. Double the bass line, then fill in the remaining harmony notes in the left hand et voila. Still, I double-checked my results against a couple of online arrangements.
The risk here is having your keyboard player not play the right hand part loudly enough. It needs to dominate the arrangement. However, keyboardists are all too easily buried in a live mix, and often rightfully so: I find that electronic keyboards often have a difficult time finding the zone between too loud and too soft, and the guys I work with tend to err on the side of caution. They understand that guitars and vocals are usually at the center of a rock arrangement. That attitude won’t work here, though; and I place the forte marking hoping for the best.
Here’s the biggest problem spot:
Every second time through the chorus riff, the strings do this rapid descending passage. I saw it notated online as a G major scale in 32nd notes, but wasn’t sure of the accuracy, so I slowed the recording down. Sure enough, it sounds like a string section playing all the notes in a G major scale. Is this a sample, sped up? Perhaps. On the other hand, I noticed in the recording that the strings are slightly out of sync with each other, which is to be expected when they are playing this rapidly in unison. Now how to mimic the passage in the keys?
I faced a couple options: Simplify the passage by reducing the number of notes, or remove one of the octaves. The second option was out — one test, and it proved too thin sounding. So how to simplify? Use a pentatonic scale? Simply mark a long glissando? Neither option sounded good in practice. So I took a chance on the performer. Normally I wouldn’t advocate this when arranging for a working group, but I chose to notate it as closely to the original as I could, and let the keyboardist find his own shortcut. Sometimes if you do this, who knows? You might be surprised at what your performers are capable of.
In part 3, we will take a look at what the rest of the rhythm section is doing during the chorus. I’ll also share how I tried adding horns.
Hooking the New Student
One thing I used to think made me a good guitar teacher, when it actually might have worked to my detriment, is my aversion to Instant Mentor Validation Syndrome. IMVS is a (rather awkward) term I coined in an article I wrote some time back; and I defined it as the tendency, common among guitar instructors, to teach small sections of riffs to beginning students — like those in “Smoke On the Water,” “Come As You Are,” or “Enter Sandman” — to create in the instructor a sense that he has accomplished real progress, when no actual musical understanding or technical fundamentals have been instilled.
Another guitar teacher with whom I shared a workspace explained to me that he only teaches new students out of method books, because “If they have the patience to get through that material, they’re ready to learn the fun stuff.” This might have had some impact on my own decision to adhere to a curriculum that focused on musicianship, not rote memorization of riffs.
I felt it important to understand music while learning it. Any songs I taught were hand-picked to suit a student’s ability to play them straight through, and I treated songs as études: “Brain Stew” by Green Day was an introduction to 5th chords, “Come Together” by the Beatles is an exercise in blues rhythm and whole-step string bends. I saw no value in teaching only a fragment of a song, solely for a student to find temporary joy in having learned one classic riff.
Wait, back up: What was that about “joy?” Is that truly something to be avoided in a guitar lesson? In hindsight, I fear I may have come off as a bit of a crank with that attitude. What bad could come of a student enjoying his time in my studio? How dare a young guitarist learn something for fun!
I have turned my opinion on the matter completely around. For the guitar instructor, student retention is crucial. There is already a high turnover rate among guitar students, so why should we scare them off with our grave seriousness?
I realized not long ago that I may never meet a student that is as serious about the instrument as I am. If I ever took lessons in, say, racquetball, would I be doing so with the intent to go pro? Most likely not, and likewise I should not expect my students to be committed to bringing their guitar skills to world-class level.
I would suggest to any others who think as I once did: Hook your students early with “I didn’t know how easily I could do that!” moments. Their enthusiasm may carry them further along than you would have had to drag them.
