Thursday, October 30, 2008

我的結他雜記: chord-melody, practice, bass amp, nylon

Tried following this lesson. The song it taught is the most popular jazz standard called "Autumn Leaves" and Download #3 on that page is the TAB. If you don't bother to follow the lesson, just play the TAB. This style is called "chord melody", i.e., the guitar plays both the chord and the melody so other instrument is not necessary. I consider this the 最高境界 of jazz guitar.

In addition to "Autumn Leaves", I have learned a few more chord melody tunes, like "Stella by Starlight" and "Norwegian Wood." Saw a kid played "Yesterday" on YouTube. He told me his arrangement came from the same book that I got my version of "Norwegian wood!" So I started playing that. It will be quite a while until I could play as fast as he does.

I have always had some free time at night. I don't spend all of it on guitar though. I'm rather lazy. Usually it's just 30-40 minutes. Half spent on theory (like playing ii-V-I in different keys and arpeggio of those chords) Half spent on songs.

Years ago we tried to figure out what blues scale and the flatted 5th were. Now I play more jazz and they don't seem to be essential to playing jazz. On the other hand, adding the 7th (and higher, e.g. 9th, 13th) to chords really make songs sound jazzy. As far as scale is concerned, major scale works very well. Even pentatonic works. And blue scale is just one of the scale that works.

I bought a cheap bass amp when I was trying to start a new rock/metal band a few years ago. I really regretted that purchase because even though it was a 120W amp, I could barely hear it when playing in a practice space roughly as big as the "big room" in President studio! I expected a 120W to sound loud enough but this one didn't. Beware of the brand Behringer. I bet a Hartke 120W sound louder. Besides, I was never able to get a band started and used it 3 times only. However, I learned that some bass amp could actually be used as guitar amp and sounds pretty good with guitar. (The most famous one is Fender Bassman) Some people used bass amp same as mine for jazz! I plugged my Spirit into it and it indeed sounds not bad. The emphasis on the bass makes the sound very warm. Good for jazz.

I listened to more and more classical guitar these days. And some classical masters also play flamenco. I'm buying a cheap classical nylon string guitar. I played my teacher's and really like the sound. Very acoustic, warm, jazzy. Also, there is more separation between strings on a classical guitar so hopefully it helps me fingering those difficult chord (right now my fingers are too close and muting the next string!) The action is usually very high though so barre chord will be more difficult. In any case, I want to try something different. Nylon string feels very different from steel too.

In the 80s and 90s, Japanese made a lot of high quality copies of American guitar (Fender, Gibson) Should be able to find some good stuff in Tokyo. On the other hand, a brand new "real" Gibson Les Paul is ~US$2500, which costs less than a trip to Japan!