Blues Rock Guitar history

[Mr. Perfect]

Saw Clapton live, along with Buddy Guy, Jeff Healey, and Robert Cray, at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre.

This was the previous night before the last concert of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Clapton's percussionist, Ray Cooper, was phenomenal.

That would have been something to see.

[Mr. Perfect]

Here's my problem with a thesis of this thread:

The search for authenticity is nothing more than a way to subjugate American folk/dance forms to European standards. And in that, it has largely succeeded and now we are in sort of a morass. The tradition is now more of a superstition than a living thing.

Part of this was a racial issue, as the cultural critic Martha Bayles points out; but she also points out that when we talk about American music, and it's an African-American legacy, it is not only a "black" thing as country/western hillbilly music is in there too. The separation was more of an external imposition than a great barrier.

Jazz wasn't serious until it adopted what Bayles calls European Modernism in both it's romantic and perverse stages.

And part of it is the discomfort of Europeans of what had been the economic model and social relation of the musician in the United States to what was found in 20th century Europe.

Black musicians, particularly developed the "entertainer-artist" free from the old patronage system of Europe.

I should clarify the thesis.

This few bars of music was a culmination of decades of guitar culture. It didn't drop out of the sky. It came from somewhere.

I think that this is maybe the greatest guitar piece of all time. It's so perfect. The gear, the era, the composition, the whole thing is perfect.

The problem is no one knows how to play it. I've seen dozens of these over the years and they all have something wrong. How does a 23 year old kid just walk into a studio and know how to do it? It's not just talent. There are very specific skills and techniques that went into this.

He'd gone to school on people utilizing similar techniques and it just came out naturally. But it doesn't come out for many people naturally because they didn't follow his developmental path.

As such, they all get this wrong. It's really mind boggling. After so many decades I still don't think I play it right, or even very close. He did it in probably a few takes.

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[Mr. Perfect]

For us old crusties that learnt how to do this before the internet, we just called it the "pentatonic scale". Now the internet kids with their correct terms along with policing call it minor pentatonic, as opposed to major. Because of the minor third and the seventh.

I'm thinking this is incorrect. I worked with a blues cat for a while long ago, and he kept saying the good stuff is in the Albert King box. Ok, that's not hard, so whats the big deal?

Well, when you are playing 2 strings in that box that seventh note becomes suggestive of a seventh chord as opposed to a minor scale. So pentatonic minor I think of more as a 7th scale. Just a little subtle shift in perspective.

[Mr. Perfect]

Best guitar amp ever? Could be, I made one. It's my favorite.

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[Mr. Perfect]

This guy has some Hendrix tone dialed in.

Did I say that I like Strats?

5PaiDuiLzas

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

For us old crusties that learnt how to do this before the internet, we just called it the "pentatonic scale". Now the internet kids with their correct terms along with policing call it minor pentatonic, as opposed to major. Because of the minor third and the seventh.

I'm thinking this is incorrect. I worked with a blues cat for a while long ago, and he kept saying the good stuff is in the Albert King box. Ok, that's not hard, so whats the big deal?

Well, when you are playing 2 strings in that box that seventh note becomes suggestive of a seventh chord as opposed to a minor scale. So pentatonic minor I think of more as a 7th scale. Just a little subtle shift in perspective.

If I'm following you correctly, I'd say it's function is more of a #9 color tone.

In a rock context, you are soloing over a major(7th)/fifth interval thing in a lower register...that's a turnaround #9.

Or a suggestion of a harmonic minor dominant V- clarifying the ambiguity of a pentatonic.

Harmonic Minor= middle eastern music= Spanish guitar and so on. The instrument was made for it.

The dom7#9 as a chord, is the Hendrix chord. Also defeats the western system of classification pretty thoroughly.

[noddy]

magor/minor 3rd ambiguity and heavy on the minor 7th is all through this type of music.

the hendrix chord from purple haze, voodoo chile etc is 1 , magor3 , minor7 played alongside a minor pentatonic

bending the minor 3rd into an almost magor 3rd is stock cliche # 1.

jimmy page and billy gibbons both slip into magor pentatonic when they want to break up their solos.

minor 2nd and magor 7th are the only no go areas really , thats metal.

---

i may have stuffed some terminolgy since its 20 years since i was into music theory and modes

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

And major penta... is country music.

World wide pentatonic scales are very interesting because they capture all sorts of these sorts of things. Or they show some inventiveness. Like the bagpipe system. 9 notes, a trillion 5- notes scales.

Who knew someone could blow so much?

[noddy]

Best guitar amp ever? Could be, I made one. It's my favorite.

I never could afford a bassman back in the day, so had a fender twin instead.

my only problem with it was the volume required before "that tone" kicked in.

[noddy]

And major penta... is country music.

World wide pentatonic scales are very interesting because they capture all sorts of these sorts of things. Or they show some inventiveness. Like the bagpipe system. 9 notes, a trillion 5- notes scales.

Who knew someone could blow so much?

yah, leaving a bit of space in the scale seems to change the rules, you get more colour out of it, not less.

eg: to kick a dead horse, santana's dorian vs any of the pentatonic fellows

[noddy]

even to this day i can instantly tell when someone is running modes.. its an instant buzzkill.

very few seem to be able to take them to the next step, and really find the melody in them, tear them apart from the theory the way the minor pentatonic has been.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

even to this day i can instantly tell when someone is running modes.. its an instant buzzkill.

very few seem to be able to take them to the next step, and really find the melody in them, tear them apart from the theory the way the minor pentatonic has been.

That's a major, major problem. Very talented people trained to have no melodic grasp. I wish it was just me doing a "kid's these days" but I've heard these complaints a lot from other's- whiz kids capable of everything pattern of scale and mode possible but cannot play Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer on the spot. Seems there's been a period of teaching where the harmonic information was stuffed, with the assumption the melodic would come naturally.

[Mr. Perfect]

That's why I'm big on teaching beginners common vocal melodies on guitar, and let that dictate what scale we work on. The biggest problem in guitar and has been for a long time is kids wanting to learn to blaze scales. You aren't going to be musical doing that.

[Mr. Perfect]

I never could afford a bassman back in the day, so had a fender twin instead.

my only problem with it was the volume required before "that tone" kicked in.

That's for sure. The magic of tube.

Have you checked this stuff out? This one is unreal. You can build your own amp circuit from scratch.

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[noddy]

As I mentioned in the other thread a fair few pages ago , I did pull the guitar out of storage and look to getting back into playing.

Part of that was getting a Fender Mustang Mini , digital modelling amp that has the fender emulation of a bassman and tube screamer builtin.

Its not brilliant but the dynamic range (reponsiveness to pick technique) is amazeballs for what it is and it works nice at middle aged loungeroom volumes.

the downside is half the emulation power exists in a desktop app which reprograms it and not on the amp, you cant get to the entire thing from the buttons on the case :/ tedious.

[Mr. Perfect]

This is a way better video. The capability these days is mind numbing. I hated modeling from the get go, this is the first thing that I like, and it's the ability to design your own circuits that put it over the top. For me to do that is dollars and time mocking up prototypes, this I can get the sound as fast as you can think of it. Whatever you can think of it will do.

I think the intro model is like $100.

5U7OSeMZdyw

[Typhoon]

And major penta... is country music.

World wide pentatonic scales are very interesting because they capture all sorts of these sorts of things. Or they show some inventiveness. Like the bagpipe system. 9 notes, a trillion 5- notes scales.

Who knew someone could blow so much?

Many traditional E Asian instruments are built to play music in a pentatonic scale.

A cover of a electric guitar classic on one such instrument:

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and as this a blues thread

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In this case the Korean version of the string instrument, the gayageum.

No idea how she tuned it to play these covers.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Eric Clapton is a talented guitarist. However, his one song that I like is his signature piece, Layla, from his Derek and the Dominoes days:

NFW6lAQy6-o

Saw Clapton live, along with Buddy Guy, Jeff Healey, and Robert Cray, at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre.

This was the previous night before the last concert of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Clapton's percussionist, Ray Cooper, was phenomenal.

Well, Layla is quite the song, but another example of an instance where he wasn't the best player on the track (or stage).

Though, pace me, as easy as it is for me to criticize him...having a 5 decade track record of attracting talented musicians stops being luck at some point.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

That's why I'm big on teaching beginners common vocal melodies on guitar, and let that dictate what scale we work on. The biggest problem in guitar and has been for a long time is kids wanting to learn to blaze scales. You aren't going to be musical doing that.

I think that's a good strategy- especially people with good singing voices. I've done that, where I've told the guy to just come in with lyrics and the vocal melody on guitar, and we'll figure out the chords and arrangement from there.

But here is the rub. The reasoning and subcultures of guitar playing are wrapped up in notions of masculinity.

Anyone who has met amateur (and some professional) musicians knows exactly what I'm talking about. Learning all those legato tricks is another form of dick swinging.

You don't run into that with flute players (or the exact same kind of dick swinging)...but the flute isn't popularly known as a particularly...ummm....manly instrument.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

My point is that for a lot of these "legato"-everything guys [or however you want to categorize them] are playing guitar exactly how they want to. And it's not just them. It's the art school/garage kids, too.

It's fading a bit, with the general decline of decline. But we have whole traditions of it, and these unstated bits get passed along.

The whole blazing-scale techniques is not my thing. I think it sounds awful 9 out of 10 times. And when it does sound good, it is often sparingly or...a case like Van Halen- where it was heavily moderated and edited by some mixture of ego and taste on behalf of the first two lead singers. Eddie Van Halen, for all his guitar sounds he can conjure up, cannot write & structure a song for the life of him.

[noddy]

Paganini waves

----

the 'shred guy' with perhaps the most scope beyond just being fast was Satriani - cant say im the biggest fan but my mum even bought his Surfing with the Alien record and listened to it for background music and thats a bar hardly any of them could cross.

personally, if im in the mood for someone "blowing" ill slap on Mike Stern or something like that, buts its rare and in small doses.

[noddy]

Eric Clapton is a talented guitarist. However, his one song that I like is his signature piece, Layla, from his Derek and the Dominoes days:

NFW6lAQy6-o

Saw Clapton live, along with Buddy Guy, Jeff Healey, and Robert Cray, at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre.

This was the previous night before the last concert of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Clapton's percussionist, Ray Cooper, was phenomenal.

Well, Layla is quite the song, but another example of an instance where he wasn't the best player on the track (or stage).

Though, pace me, as easy as it is for me to criticize him...having a 5 decade track record of attracting talented musicians stops being luck at some point.

when we are discussing a 100 years of recorded music across 10's of thousands of artists, not being in my top 5 most inspirational is not really a criticism

Clapton isnt bad per se, I just wouldnt put him in the elite groupings.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Well, just speaking for me and him never being the best musician in whatever ensemble he's playing in.

Snottiness and impudence in knowing everything but boundaries.

------------------

Same thing goes for Jimmy Page. I get what Mr.P is saying. The guy is a phenomenal rock guitarist with a very distinctive musical sense. Moreover, he's clearly a great songwriter and an even greater producer- something he never receives enough credit for.

And that's before you pair that with:

-a world class arranger as your bassist
-heads and shoulders the most influential rock drummer this side of Ringo Starr& maybe Keith Moon
-and a preternatural wailing front man straight out of the Lord of the Rings.

It's a very potent combo.

Yet, it still sounds extra gross to me. Something has gone terribly wrong. And we are left in the ruins with their epigones.

[noddy]

ill take cock waving , cartoon strutting rock all day every day over mopey, whiney, sooky lala modern rock.

stairway to heaven is horrid, id put it next to american pie as a parody of music and best burned in a fire and forgotten.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

ill take cock waving , cartoon strutting rock all day every day over mopey, whiney, sooky lala modern rock.

stairway to heaven is horrid, id put it next to american pie as a parody of music and best burned in a fire and forgotten.

Stairway to Heaven (looking it up) has been played the equivalent of 44 years straight on rock radio across the US.

And that's a song with a zany 8 minute structure with a faux-chorus- all done with arrangement tricks. That's, to me, the impressive bit.

-------------------------------

as for the wimpy modern rock...rock has lost all its masculine mojo. Which is a bad thing.

But as far as I can see cock rock and mopey are cut from the same perverse cloth and exist as a tandem.