Tag: guitar

Book review: Play it Loud by Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna

play_it_loudI took up the guitar a few years ago, and play in the manner described by Kurt Vonnegut, that’s to say with little skill but expanded horizons. I read The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port a while back and Play it loud by Brad Tolinska and Alan Di Perna is in a similar vein, a book about the electric guitar and the music that came from it. Whilst The Birth of Loud focused on Leo Fender and Les Paul and a period from the early fifties to the mid-sixties Play it Loud starts earlier and extends later and is broader in scope.

Play it Loud is divided into chapters which typically cover one or two people and one or two guitars, each illustrating a technical innovation or change in musical style. Broadly each chapter follows on from the previous one in time, taking us from the 1920s and thirties in the first chapter through to around 2015 by the end. It finishes with a timeline, which I liked.

The book starts with George Beauchamp in the 1920s and the first guitar pickups designed to pickup the vibration of the strings rather than the vibration of the guitar body, this followed the invention earlier in the century of the electronic valve amplifier and the paper cone speaker – both prerequisites for useful electric guitars. Guitars had been around for some time, and in the twenties guitar-based Hawaiian music was popular in the US. Hawaiian stringed music had its roots in Portuguese sailors in the 18th century. Beauchamp with Rickenbacker produced the first electric guitar based on this technology, the A-32 ‘Frying Pan’ in 1932. This was a cast-aluminium lap-steel style guitar.

The next development was the Gibson ES-150 in 1936 with a bar pickup that sat under the strings, rather than over them as for the Beauchamp pickup, ES stands for electric Spanish – it was the first of its kind. The guitar was made popular by the endorsement of Charles Christian, a Jazz guitarist, who was considered better than Django Reinhardt and Les Paul at the time. He was to die at the age of 25 of tuberculosis. This type of endorsement is a recurring theme, celebrated musician endorsements are massively valuable to guitar companies.

By the early fifties a number of people had realised that the guitar body was largely a place to hang strings and pickups and no longer needed to be hollow – the hollow chamber of the guitar is the amplifier in an acoustic guitar. Thus was born the Fender Telecaster and then the Stratocaster and, at Gibson, the "Les Paul". This is the period covered in The Birth of Loud. It is worth noting that Les Paul was one of a breed of musician/technician who were to recur with Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai in the late seventies and early eighties, who pushed forward the development of the guitar. I hadn’t realised but the very futuristic looking Gibson Flying V and Explorer models were born in this period of the late fifties – they were unpopular then but saw a resurgence in the early eighties.

The new solid-body electric guitar, Fender’s Precision Bass and new amplifiers meant that by the early sixties an electric four-piece band could fill a hall with sound (previously this required a big band or an orchestra and by the late sixties Jimi Hendrix could make rather more noise than that. At this point Tolinska and Perna highlight how the electric guitar fitted in with protest and counter-cultural – also citing Bob Dylan and his infamous switch to the electric guitar. His electric set at the Newport Country Festival was so short because it had only been brought together a few days earlier.

By the late sixties the quality of Fender and Gibson’s offerings was dropping, and players like Eric Clapton started looking for the discontinued Les Paul models. The drought in good quality guitars was to extend for a while, in the mid-sixties, when Fender and Gibson were dropping in quality Japan was producing a large number of cheap, low quality guitars. In this environment, an after-market parts market grew with names we recognise today like Seymour Duncan, Jackson Charvel and Larry Dimarzio. Japan was to later produce high quality guitars – Steve Vai chose Ibanez to make his signature model.

The book finishes with a chapter centred on Jack White of The White Stripes, and his enthusiasm for very retro, and not highly regarded guitars and amplifiers. This represents a thread running through the book, guitars are more than their technical components – the choice of guitar says something about what a players intentions are. So Eric Claption took up the discontinued Les Paul to ape the earlier blues players. The punk and garage bands were trying to get away from those blues roots, and cheap, plastic guitars fitted that vibe. They were also trying to get away from the comfortable middle class hobby guitarists (like me) who would happy spend a couple of thousand dollars on a signature or classic guitar because they could.

In common with my reading of The Birth of Loud I found myself googling for the guitars mentioned and thinking I should get one!

Book review: Guitar Looping – The Creative Guide by Kristof Neyens

creative_loopingFor completeness I include my review of Guitar Looping: The Creative Guide by Kristof Neyens. This is in the same series as Guitar Pedals by Rob Thorpe. These are both quite short books but I’ve found them useful.

A looper pedal is a simple recording device which is started and stopped using a footswitch. A loop can be built up by making successive recordings, or layers, one on top of another. Typically loops are only a few bars long at most but modern looper pedals can record for tens of minutes.

I bought a looper pedal a year or so ago (reviewed here) and, to be honest, it has languished a bit on my pedalboard. I think the problem is a lack of education in the right format. Also I probably should have started with the simplest looper available, the author uses a tc electronic ditto rather than a step up (my Boss RC-3).

In common with Guitar Pedals, Guitar Looping contains lots (117) of short examples annotated in normal musical notation and guitar tab notation with accompanying audio files downloadable from the website. There is a brief text introduction to each example. I find these nice exercises in ear training, it’s good to be able to follow along with the tune.

The author is quite fond of the volume swell as part of a loop, this has got me thinking I need a volume pedal – previously I couldn’t see the point of them. This presents a problem because I’ve run out of space on my pedalboard!

Aside from the technical skill of starting and stopping loops at the appropriate point, there is also the skill of controlling the volume of your play within a layer and also getting the volume of different layers right. The loops illustrated often contain a percussive layer made by playing with strings muted, a rhythm/bass layer and a melodic layer which may be single notes or simple chords. Neyens talks about providing both harmonic space and dynamic space in layers. That’s to say there is no point in recording a layer loud and filled with sound because there is nowhere to put additional layers. This means that individual layers can sound quite simple and sparse. To get harmonic space you might play low notes with an octave pedal, on the lower three strings and melodies on the higher three strings, further up the neck.

The other useful piece of information I picked up was how to make your guitar sound like a clarinet! You pick the string 12 frets from where you are fretting – so if you are holding down the low E string on the third fret you need to pluck it and see. Try it and see.

After reading this book I’m using my looper pedal a bit more, there’s a lot of ideas in here and perhaps the most important thing is a stimulus to play around a bit – it doesn’t cost anything!

Book review: Guitar Pedals by Rob Thorpe

guitar_pedalsAnother brief sojourn with a guitar related book, this time Guitar Pedals by Rob Thorpe. It has the lengthy subtitle "Discover How to Use Pedals and Chain Effects to Get The Ultimate Guitar Tone", and the front cover continues with a range of other promises as to content. This isn’t intended as a criticism, it just struck me as an usual stylistic effect.

For those not familiar with electric guitars, an guitar effect pedal is a little box of electronics, around the size of a cigarette packet but rather thicker, with a socket on one side to take input from a lead from your guitar and a socket on the other side to send the modified signal out to your amplifier. On the top face of the pedal is a switch to turn the effect on and off, and one or more knobs to configure it. Guitar pedals are usually grouped together on a pedalboard which will hold up to 10 or so of them, chaining their effects together. They introduce effects such as distortion, reverb, delay and so forth.

If you watch videos of live music you’ll most likely notice the guitarist and bass player with a pedalboard on the floor at their feet, occasionally poking it with a foot to change the sound of their guitar.

Guitar pedals are a cheap and easy way of changing the way your guitar, I have a couple of more expensive Boss pedals which cost about £100 and a couple of Donner pedals which were under £40.

Guitar Pedals runs through chapters describing a bunch of distinct effects, talking first about the background of the effect before going through some short examples of the effect in different contexts with different configurations (these appear as written guitar tabs, and accompanying downloadable audio files), and finishing with some examples in real music.

Since reading "The Birth of Loud" by Ian S. Port it struck me that much of the development of the electric guitar and its ecosystem has been the story of electrical equipment abused. Particularly so with distortion /overdrive pedals described in the first chapter – the original distortion pedal made by Gibson in 1962 (the Maestro FZ-1) attempted to replicate the effect Link Wray achieved in Rumble by stabbing his speakers with a screwdriver! Jimi Hendrix was a fan of the Arbiter Fuzz Face but quality control was so poor he would buy a bunch of them and pick the best (or even get his guitar tech to cobble together a pedal from the parts of multiple examples). Purple Haze is an example of Fuzz Face in action. Overdrive is what you get when you turn the volume of your amplifier right up – pedals can achieve the same effect without making a really loud noise.

Next up is a chapter on delay – essentially an echo effect which was originally implemented on tape. I’ve always thought of delay effects and reverb being related with reverb the more important of the two. Reverb and compressor effects each get their own chapter but Thorpe sees them as more production effects than pedal effects per se. Tracks like Beautiful Day by U2, King of Zion Dub by King Tubby and Country Boy by Albert Lee use delay.

The chapter on modulation effects covers phasor and flanger effects, where part of the signal is phase shifted and mixed with the original signal. Shine on you crazy diamonds by Pink Floyd is an example of a phaser in use, and Barracuda by Heart uses a flanger. Also included are chorus effects (where part of the signal is delayed) and tremolo (where the volume is modulated). The first chorus pedal, the Roland CE-1 started life in Roland’s Jazz-Chorus 120 Amplifier. A background in physics is quite handy here, vibrations and waves are at the heart of any physics degree, as are operational amplifiers – pedal effects are these things in action! Come as you are by Nirvana is a good example of the chorus effect, and How soon is now by The Smiths demonstrates the tremolo effect (for this performance the tremolo effect comes from the amplifier rather than a pedal).

My wah pedal is my favourite, and it gets a chapter largely of its own. Think Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix (watch his left foot at the start of this video) or the theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes. A wah pedal is an adjustable band pass filter, in the same why that the tone knob on any manner of audio equipment is an adjustable low-pass filter. The wah pedal is unusual in that you adjust it during play – the position of the pedal controls where the band pass sits, other pedals have their configuration set before hand and are simply switched on and off. All I can say is it’s great fun to play with!

Next up are octave pedals and other pitch shifters and harmonisers, I’d assumed the point of an octave pedal (which plays a note one octave above or below the note you are playing) was to emulate a bass guitar, but it seems not.Jimi Hendrix’s Octavia pedal added a tone an octave above what he was playing, on tracks like Fire and Purple Haze. Jack White of The White Stripes uses octave effects to add notes both an octave above and below the played note to give a "thicker" tone – try tracks like Ball and a biscuit and Blue orchid.

Originally effect pedals contained simple analog electronic circuits (or even liquids) which did one job, now with digital processing a single pedal can emulate many different effects. I must admit I find multi-effects pedals a bit overwhelming – it’s no fun trying to navigate 50 or so effects, and their configuration on a one inch display with a couple of buttons.

The book finishes with a chapter on ordering of guitar pedals, and how this can change the sound made and finally there are some interviews with professional guitarists, and how they arrange their pedals. A point that both Thorpe and one of his interviewees makes is that tone, the sound of the guitar, depends a lot on the player and how they play. Chasing after a tone by buying the same pedals as your heroes is a losing game.

Guitar Pedals is a short book, it doesn’t have the high production values of the Rikky Rooksby but it carries much of the style – embedding the example riffs in the chapters works really well for this book. Online guitar courses tend not to cover effects pedals, this book fills the gap pretty well.

Book review: Riffs: How to Create and Play Great Guitar Riffs by Rikky Rooksby

riffsAnother guitar book in this review, I previously read How to write songs on Guitar by Rikky Rooksby, this book Riffs: How to Create and Play Great Guitar Riffs is by the same author.

A riff is a short musical phrase which is repeated throughout a track, it is common on guitar in rock music. It’s pretty easy to identify a riff in a rock song – which bit of "Smoke on the water" by Deep Purple do you think of when I mention it? "Back in black" by AC/DC? "Money" by Pink Floyd? That’s the riff. Later in the book Rooksby tells us that a riff can be as little as a bar long and 4 bars at an absolute maximum but it can be reinforced by repetition and variation. It’s surprising how few notes are required for a riff – two or three are sufficient at a push, five or six are plenty.

Riffs (the book) is structured into 6 sections, the first three sections cover riffs built on intervals, scales and chords respectively – there are roughly ten types of riff in each section. Section four covers playing and recording riffs, beyond the bare notes in the riff. Section five is a masterclass with John Paul Jones, of Led Zeppelin. The book finishes with a section which provides notes on the tracks on the accompanying CD which are illustrations of all the different types of riff with a few extras.

The first three sections running through the different types of riff features examples from "real" music to illustrate (and usually several examples per riff type). I really like these examples to refer to in discussions of music, I’m not at the point where I can read Rooksby’s commentary and understand what he means but the examples help make sense of the words. I found myself sitting with Spotify beside me as I read playing examples as they were mentioned.

It becomes clear looking at the examples which types of riff are the important ones – they feature the most well-known examples. For example, the mixolydian scale riffs include "I can’t get no satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and the chord version of this scale include "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen and "Won’t get fooled again" by the Rolling Stones.

Rooksby comments that it isn’t entirely clear what is a chord progression and what is a chord riff – he differentiates in terms of speed and distinctive rhythm – riffs are faster.

Guitar tabs are not provided for the examples, I suspect this is largely for copyright reasons. The book contains references to several hundred tracks – I don’t like to think about the amount effort required to collect permission for all of the guitar tabs for the key riffs!

The techniques section talks a bit about the process of composition – recommending a drum track to assist the process. One of the key insights in the book is how key the rhythm is to a recognisable riff. He also talks in this section about how riffs are arranged both in terms of what the bass and drums are doing with the riff and also how the riff is created potentially with multiple guitars configured differently to "thicken" the sound.

I’m ambivalent about masterclass with John Paul Jones, it read like a high level technical discussion which went over my head but it was interesting to see where riffs come from "from the horses mouth".

The accompanying CD contains 56 tracks, almost all under a minute long and most of much less than that. The first 16 tracks fit in with a more tutorial introduction. The core 30 tracks illustrate the types of riff introduced in sections 1 to 3. Each track has the riff in standard musical notation and guitar tab format. The tracks feature the riff with an accompanying drum and rhythm (chord progression) track. I really liked this section, it helped clarify what each of the riff types sounded like and how they were constructed. It was also rather nice to be able to follow along matching up the music to the tabs for short musical phrases.

Experienced musicians make much of the importance of ear training, normally bemoaning the fact they did not do more when they were learning. I think they forget how hard it is, ear training is a combination of listening and knowing what is likely to come next on the basis of musical theory (or a lot of experience). If you don’t have that implicit knowledge, ear training is really hard. This book is handy in providing musical context.

In common with How to write songs on Guitar, I really liked this book. Rooksby’s writing style is good, there is some music theory but what makes it great is putting that theory into context. My next task is to go through the riffs recorded on the CD with my guitar and the book and see if I can recreate them.

Book review: How to Write Songs on Guitar by Rikky Rooksby

how_to_write_songsIn a somewhat uncharacteristic turn my next book is about writing popular songs: How to Write Songs on Guitar by Rikky Rooksby. For me it follows on from Guitar Method – Music Theory by Tom Kolb. I’ve read several books about music theory as I’ve learnt to play guitar and they have left me a bit cold. The presentation of the algorithms to generate scales and chords is my sort of thing but there were always references to how chords made you feel that were never really explained. I was never clear on what I was supposed to be doing with this theoretical knowledge.

After Guitar Method I thought the next thing to do was look at chord sequences, and this book came close to the top of my searches. I also got Chord Progression Encyclopaedia by Tammy Waldrop which does exactly what it says on the cover – list out loads of chord progressions for guitar.

How to Write Songs is quite a different book, in fact it was just what I was looking for! It puts the musical theory I’ve learnt into context. It covers off some of the traditional musical theory of scales and chords but hones it down to what you are likely to actually need to write songs. The four ingredients are rhythm, melody (the tune of the voice), lyrics and harmony (chords). Rooksby seems to prefer "melody first" songwriting but outlines other methods on an equal footing.

How to write songs is divided into 16 sections, these cover the four ingredients listed above and some other things too. The sections on chords are nicely laid out, with which strings are providing which notes included (this is helpful because to the beginner this can be a bit mysterious). Rooksby also talks about how different chord variants "feel". The chord dictionary is spread across a couple of sections with more complex "fancy" chords covered in the second section.

Central to writing songs are "turnarounds", repeated sequences of chords that are used to build the harmony (chords) of a song. The melody (tune of the voice) fits in with this, or doesn’t, for effect.

There are sections on making demo recordings and a couple on more guitar specific techniques, I particularly liked the section on "altered tunings". I have seen these tunings annotated in guitar tabs but not been clear as to why they are used. Rooksby provides a good explanation as to the various types of altered tunings and where they are used. In a number of places Rooksby refers to how chords, particularly those including notes from a second octave are easier to play on piano.

The book finishes with three sections which recommend individual tracks, and albums that Rooksby sees as good examples of the songwriting art and some quotes from famous songwriters as to how they go about composing. The theme of whether songs are invented or discovered comes up a few times here.

Rooksby is opinionated in various places: he doesn’t like drum machines, fancy chords, or spontaneous decorations of melody (called melisma). This gives the book a human touch, and I suspect his opinions are pretty sound.

One of my frustrations with learning guitar is that numerous teachers go on about ear training, they often talk about not doing enough of it when they were learning. I realise now that there is a very good reason for this: ear training is actually really hard if you don’t know about the structures and chord sequences you are likely to hear. This is because for the naïve listener there is a large number of possible notes they could be hearing, and it is difficult to identify what it is. However, learning how songs are structured, and some of the theory and the options narrow down dramatically.

Everything in the book is supported by references to popular songs, and typically multiple songs are referenced for each point, so you’re likely to have heard at least one of them – and these days its very easy to find music online. I’ve listened to a lot of Radiohead and Arctic Monkeys which turn up a few times, I suspect the same will apply to many people (just with different artists).

The next steps for me are to look at the "song chords" table which lists the chords in each key, and also look at the chord sequences with their examples. Rooksby has written a number of other books, I think I might add his book on riffs to my reading list. Finally, I’m making Spotify lists of the recommended tracks and albums.

The production values for How to Write Songs are high, it is clearly and neatly laid out and well-printed. The prose is enjoyable and manages to avoid sounding dry which is a risk when writing about music theory. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in how popular music "works" on guitar.

I must admit I’d assumed that Rooksby was an American, possibly someone who had written a few songs I knew, but it turns out he is English, lives in Oxford and has a PhD in English literature (website)!