BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE

Here's an interesting item. This excerpt is from the outtakes of the early seventies PBS special about Roy Buchanan. Roy played this solo with Merle Haggard and his Strangers. It shows how you can use a Tele to play a Bakersfield country-type solo, but with a bit more bite and raunch to it.
Roy splits a bridge on the Lefty Frizzell classic "Mom and Dad's Waltz." (At the end of Roy's solo, you can hear steel player Norman Hamlet come in so seamlessly I had trouble hearing whether it was Norman or Roy.) Most of his available recordings are more in a blues or rock vein, but this rare snippet represents the twilight zone between trash and twang.

Roy Buchanan was heavily influenced by Haggard's guitarist Roy Nichols, but it's mostly in outtakes and obscure recordings that you can hear the country element in Buchanan's work.
(note-- the notation is temporarily gone due to a Blogger error-- when it's fixed i'll get it up here again.)
TECHNICAL DISCUSSION

Any kind of guitar playing with a lot of bending is hard to notate. My program, Finale Guitar, doesn't have a way to clearly indicate whether a prebent note is struck again while bent, for example. (At least, I can't figure out how to do it.) On top of that, for those who have trouble reading already, the addition of bending symbols makes it even more confusing. I suggest using this transcription as a rough guide to where to put your fingers, and relying on your ear to get the timing and other details. I've left out muted string raking to embellish a note, and other little things. Roy's brief solo here illustrates one thing he may have seen in Roy Nichols's work-- the ability to move all over the neck efficiently to get desired effects. I think Nichols knew where the bending licks were, and could jump around to set himself up for the next bend. Whereas blues players often camp out in one position, players like Nichols often move up and down the neck constantly when filling or soloing. This Buchanan excerpt can help you get used to doing that.

Of course, most people revere Buchanan for his unique sound. Colleague Jeff Lang told me that Roy B. cranked up volume and tone knobs on amp and guitar to get his classic Fender/Fender tone. Probably true, but when I put my amp's volume and treble on ten it's pretty painful, so when I want to get a Roy Buchanan sound I start at ten and back off (usually WAY off). I've also found that I can get a fair approximation of the sound at a lower volume by using a Z. Vex Super Hard On with a Tube Screamer (drive down all or most of the way). On top of this, an Analogman CompRossor helps wake up the snarling false harmonic stuff. (This is a good place to plug www.analogman.com/ , the place to go online for great knockoffs of classic pedals, modifications to make your pedals sound more classic, and hip current boutique stuff like Z. Vex pedals.) All of that will get you in the ballpark, but ultimately you have to dig in with your pick and yank the hell out of those strings. The amp won't do it for you, and i guess most people reading this know that the Tele won't do anything without a fight. (I read somewhere that Buchanan liked his string action high, also, because he thought you should have to work to get your sound. I agree.)


www.karlstraubmusic.com/ROY MOM AND DAD'S WALTZ SOLO.mp3

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PHIL BAUGH, "COUNTRY GUITAR" CLIP

Here's a clip of the unsung great Phil Baugh, playing his classic showpiece "Country Guitar," where he apes Les Paul, Billy Byrd, Merle Travis, Luther Perkins, Chet Atkins, Hank Garland, and Duane Eddy.


He really captures each player's sound and style, and all with a Mosrite guitar. I'll tell you-- I used to have a Mosrite, and if I'd known you could get it to do all that stuff I would never have sold it.

I don't know if I'll get around to transcribing this stuff anytime soon-- that would take some serious work! Maybe if I get an avalanche of viewer mail about it-- In the meantime, enjoy the clip. There are other Phil Baugh clips on youtube, too, but this "Country Guitar" is a classic. You can get it on CD, as well-- a pretty good Phil Baugh collection called "Live Wire." (The studio version, according to what I've read, has Phil on a Tele.)

I got this clip from Charlie McCardell. (More evidence that steel players forward the craziest shit.)

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DON'T COME HOME A'DRINKIN' (GUITAR SOLO)

The guitar solo on "Don't Come Home A'Drinkin' " comes in at 1:01. here's the link.
www.last.fm/music/Loretta+Lynn/_/Don't+Come+Home+A-Drinkin'+(With+Lovin'+on+Your+Mind)?autostart

In an allmusicguide review, Eugene Chadbourne said this about the album this track came from.
"The series of lead guitar/pedal steel interchanges that run through this album are certainly more attractive than the Nashville freeway system, and definitely contributed more to 20th century civilization." Well put.

This guitar solo, probably played by Grady Martin, (although it may have been Johnny Russell) is a perfect illustration of how a country solo should be played.

The basic vocabulary is a mixture of major scale and major pentatonic ideas, plus a bent blue note or two. This analysis could describe what many rock and "alt-country" players have done on records, but the solo on the Loretta Lynn record has something those many "almost country" solos and fills don't have-- country phrasing. Notes are syncopated through the use of ties, pre-bent strings enable the player to "unbend" to a note, and the articulation throughout is mostly staccato. These are all things that rock players often omit when they are trying to play country. On top of that, the solo begins in a pickup measure, i.e. before beat one of the next section. This is a valuable technique for adding excitement to a solo.

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FRETBOARD BLIND SPOTS

THIS IS AN INCOMPLETE (AND TEMPORARY) POST. eventually i will put up info about using the "CAGED" system to learn how to play in all positions on the guitar. I'm putting it off for two reasons--
1. it's going to be a pain in the ass to put it together for you
2. most of my students get bored with this topic, and don't put the time in necessary to use this information.

if those two excuses don't scare you away, please post a comment! I'll tell you this much for now-- being able to play all over the neck is essential for a serious player. many of my posted lessons assume you have some notion of this. if you don't, then reading tablature or notation anywhere but the first few frets will be MUCH harder than it should be. if i get some feedback about this from people eager for me to write about it, i'll get on it.

thanks!
karl

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STRUCTURING A SOLO

link to recorded example.
www.karlstraubmusic.com/Structuring a solo C-02.mp3

Here's an approach to organizing/planning a solo. Through the influences of Lee Konitz, Joe Pass, traditional fiddle tunes, and probably some other things as well, I've been practicing improvised eighth note lines. This is a common exercise for jazz musicians. You set a metronome at a slow or medium tempo, and play exclusively eighths as long as you can keep it up. This exercise pays huge dividends-- it builds your stamina, forces you to learn how to continue ideas, pushes you away from muscle-memory licks, etc. At some point I may do a post about this.

At any rate, after all the good things that happened to my playing, I eventually figured out there was a downside. The perpetual eighths approach often resulted in me having trouble ending ideas. It also makes it harder for me to put rests in my lines. These two problems are not always big negatives when I'm playing in a Lee Konitz or Tristano-esque jazz style (or trying to!) but they can suck the life out of country picking. This is because country guitar lines use rests as a big part of the idiom. It's also essential to be able to end an idea exactly where you want it to end, and I've found that this skill only gets developed if you think about it and work on it.

So I came up with this approach. It's a structural plan you can follow when you're improvising. If you are at the point where improvising is hard, then preplanning a solo following these guidelines would be a good exercise. I've broken my country lines into several categories.

FLOWING
this means mostly eighths, avoid rests. You could take this in a fiddletune/flatpicking direction, or think more melodically.

TREADING WATER
this means using a repetitive short riff idea, a very common country device.

CHOPPY
this means a bunch of short ideas, separated by rests, which add up to a longer idea.

BLUESY
this includes using dissonances called "blue notes", tension/resolution patterns involving blue notes, slurs, and other things that make up what I call "blues language."

BOOGIE
this means using the kinds of licks you hear on hillbilly boogie records, Hank Williams's bluesier material, a lot of records Grady Martin played on, etc.

ENDING
using a phrase that "sounds like an ending."

(I know a lot of my shorthand explanations here are vague! I hope to do later posts that flesh out these ideas.)

for the exercise, I put these approaches together in a specific order and then follow it in my solo. I usually do two bars for each one. This kind of method could be varied any way you want to-- leave out some of the styles, come up with your own, put them together in different orders, instead of two bars use some other phrase length, etc.

I use this order.
FLOWING
TREADING WATER
FLOWING
CHOPPY
BLUESY
BOOGIE
FLOWING
ENDING

I'm using the "Gregory Walker" chord progression, which goes back at least to the 16th century. These changes have been used countless times in countless pieces of music, and they make a good progression for exercises. (Thanks to picker Ira Gitlin for telling me this progression had a name!)

TECHNICAL TIPS FOR PLAYING MY EXAMPLE
there are some positions and fingerings here that may not be familiar to you. I tried to put some of it in open position, but some of these ideas sound less "country" to me when a more obvious fingering or position is used.

in bar 2, using the pinky to pull off from the fifth fret to the second gives this phrase a snap it wouldn't have if it was all in open position. (I think I stole this lick from Orrin Star-- if not the actual lick, I know he started me thinking about the idea of using awkward stretch fingerings in the open position to facilitate what he calls the "judicious" use of pulloffs and hammerons.) to get there, you need to play the F# with middle finger, G with ring.

In general, I'm shifting positions for each two bar idea. If you follow the tab exactly, it should be clear when you need to shift your hand.
for the "choppy" section, bar 8, I'm in 3rd position, and I reach down briefly with index finger to get to the C#.
You'll have to jump down to get the low F (bar 12) and then jump back to 3rd position.

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HANK WILLIAMS LEAD GUITAR

www.last.fm/music/Hank+Williams/_/Mind+Your+Own+Business?autostart

Although Hank Williams's records are more known for the great steel playing by Don Helms, there's excellent guitar playing on some cuts. I'm still investigating who played on what, but the intro on "Mind Your Own Business" may be Bob McNett. It's a perfect example of how fifties country guitar often blended the muted/staccato kind of playing with western swing type ideas. The muted/staccato approach eventually led to chicken pickin' and what we know think of as twang, but it's interesting that before the sixties revolution with Burton, Don Rich, et al, twang and swing often went hand in hand. (Roy Nichols was the rare Burton-influenced picker to keep the swing elements in, probably because he spent much of his youth learning Eldon Shamblin licks from Bob Wills records, and brought the Burton stuff into his playing after he'd played professionally for a while.)
In my transcription, I've taken the lazy option and not indicated all the muting stuff-- it's a pain in the ass to put it in, and a pain to read as well. I suggest using the transcription to get the notes and rhythms, and then listening to the recording to get the phrasing nuances.

This intro is a typical four bar "5511," and as these often do it begins with a pickup measure. (Because my notation program considers a pickup bar to be a numbered bar, when I refer to bar numbers I'll include the pickup bar as bar one, although I don't think of it that way-- for me this is a four bar intro, which the soloist begins before beat one. This is incidentally what I try to do when I play intros, or enter for a solo, because it adds excitement. I've heard this approach used on countless country records, and it was a favorite technique of Charlie Parker and many other jazz players.) It uses a couple versions of the #2/3 kind of lick, which was one of the basic idioms fifties country pickers used for the country version of a "bluesy" feeling. Bar two alternates between #2 and 3 on a B7 chord. Bar three has a grace note slide from #2 to 3, over an E chord.
The intro also has a tricky "guitaristic" challenge, the kind that country pickers always seem to throw in with relaxed ease. The third and fourth bars cover more than two octaves, going from a high B on the high E string way down to a G# on the low E string. The line begins more or less as an arpeggio, including the root, third, and fifth of the triad plus the sixth as well. By the end it's become a boogie-type lick. This boogie kind of idea is a staple of fifties country guitar, and fit in well on Hank tunes with a bluesy flavor. (Incidentally, for you advanced players, all of this could have been played in fourth position, but I chose to use open position for a lot of it to take advantage of open strings. More to the point, it sounds twangier that way.)
Lastly, I'm guessing McNett played a Gibson, or something in that vein. Beats me what he played, frankly-- it doesn't sound like a Tele, but it does sound great!

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