Also, familiarising with 1st, 3rds and 5ths of both the Major and minor chords in a song, as a starting point.
More now I am in agreement with the idea that teaching (or coaching) young people is the way to go for … enlightenment, satisfaction, progress etc.
If I can get three kids to play a song together, that’d be more cool than writing three songs.
I’m working on a tune. Coming soon. Its an Indian tune. The vocalist is outstanding.
More coming soon
What kind of Indian?
An issue that I have been trying to find good advice on for years is PHRASING. Any suggestions for where to find good discussions, particularly for guitar?
The kind of phrasing I am interesting in is about character and structure of phrases as they participate in development of larger structures. That will touch on lots of things like ascending/descending, straight/swing, repeat/vary and assonant/dissonant. A good discussion of varied and expressive phrasing would be useful to the composer as well as the improvisor.
thanks
How much phrasing from players that you like have you spent time getting in your ears and hands? That’s where it all starts. And it sure helps to start with stuff that is well within your playing ability. All the great players that I know of spent a lot of time copping licks from recordings. And many of them didn’t know a thing about music theory, or very little. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t think about those licks they were learning. Likely the opposite by far. They had to make some kind of personal sense of what they were learning in order to use it in their own ways.
And after you have some phrases in your hands, you have to put in time playing around with them, changing them up, extending them, generally seeing what you can do with them. You can start over a section of the recording from where you got them, or to a recording of your own. A looper pedal is a fun way to approach this, because it is so simple and fast to use, taking the focus off of any tech stuff. And it allows for changing things up quickly on the fly. I didn’t know the value of a looper pedal for working on improvising until I got one. Every musician should have one, in my opinion. It’s a deserted island piece of gear. Guitar, amp, looper pedal.
I think what we’re trying to do here is something like putting together a wardrobe of costumes. Get one that you like and put it on, see how it feels, try to play the part. Get another and repeat and so on. Then start mixing them up to see what feels interesting and where it can go. Start altering them to taste. Eventually arriving at putting together our own costume(s).
What BW said.
I expounded fairly comprehensively my opinions on this kind of stuff in the old lounge, never compiled it though.
Yes, what BW wrote is the kind of advice I have seen lots of.
But what does it tell me (or a younger guitarist) about the process of coming up with the sort of phrasing that will serve your song, express your lyrics, satisfy your improvisational mood? Yes, trying stuff, mimicking stuff and playing with variations is all good for a student. I think there is more.
Similar to other sorts of learning by trial, it leaves out other levels of thinking and comprehension that won’t come from copying. Try to learn Japanese by repeating what you hear on the street in Kyoto, and you might agree that you need something more. More principled, more grammatical.
Consider how musicians learn harmony, and it’s clearly not by copying. Sure, copying and practicing patterns is part of the learning, but harmony is much more cognitive, more about patterns, planning, design.
I suspect that there is a teacher out there somewhere who has taught “phrasing” with that sort of approach.
Would love to read what you’ve said, Morgo.
Here is part of what I am looking for. Alan Holdsworth and Eric Clapton both did the kinds of things BW advised (as he suggested). They copied, invented, tried stuff out, and made personal sense out of the resulting vocabulary. I suspect it would be useful to take two looks at what made Holdsworth’s phrasing what it was, and what made Clapton’s phrasing so different. A principled description of the difference would involve descriptions of how each of them used the basic aspects of phrasing.
There is more of that in jazz. I have a book about Cannonball Adderly that describes and gives examples of how his phrases emphasized 9ths, flatted ninths and elevenths, and how he resisted resolving his phrases all the way to the root, leaving them somewhat suspended. Similarly, teachers of jazz rhythm guitar have made pedagogical sense out of how Freddy Green developed and used shell voicings.
How people most effectively learn language is by being immersed in an environment where the language is spoken, not by analyzing it as in a classroom. Babies go from zero to speaking coherently within a few years. It starts off with mimicking what they hear, without understanding at all the meanings of what they are saying. Over time, connections are made between words and meanings, more words and combinations are learned, and kids are expressing thoughts using language coherently, often in interesting ways.
If you would rather take an analytical approach, there are tons of people who teach that. Personally, I think it can be helpful, after you have a) spent some solid time immersing yourself in learning from recordings and trying to put what you learn to use b) internalized relevant music theory. But it so happens that tons of great players don’t end up needing ‘b’ at all, or very little of it. I see no point in getting analytical before you have some things in your ears and hands to analyze. It’s like trying to teach babies about literature and poetry before they can speak and express anything in language.
If you think you’re ready for it, lots of people on Truefire are teaching analytical approaches to playing. If that seems like what you want more of, try and find a good local teacher who you can actually communicate with about it.
Thanks. The approaches I have found are not what I am looking for, whether analytic, or not, or partly. Many times a teacher tells a student to think about phrasing, or try to phrase their playing better, and the student says, Whaddya mean?
On the side, think about this. Maybe children learn poetry and literature from day one, and know more about performance and style than they do about grammar. I think they go together, just like musically playing from memory and improvising. Or like learning by feel AND learning by patterns.
Phrasing is a loose term. It can mean the physical techniques you use to play a line (sliding, bending, vibrato). It can mean how you lead into notes of a line and how you transition to new ones (chromatically, diatonically, ascending, descending). It can mean where you go altogether and how, given just a few key notes. You can think about it all until you turn blue, but what matters is what resonates you when you hear it. Let yourself get inspired by those things, collect them, copy them, internalize them. Those things that resonate you are pieces of your language that you are finding. When you have enough of those things internalized, along with things that you stumble onto and invent that also resonate you, filtered through personal life experiences, you are expressing in your language. You have to find those pieces and experiment to find the other pieces. And it’s an inefficient process that takes lots of time. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not an enjoyable process or a progressive process. But it can seem in the beginning like it is illogical (and it is to some extent) and like you aren’t moving forward (because of the relative time). But if you start doing it, you’ll start seeing it coming together over time. Like how babies start talking (like magic). And it feels really good, like when you hear those things from other players that really inspire you. And the more you play in an inspired manner (not noodle or drill), the more you’ll discriminate and develop and express what you want to.
Michael Brecker made a pretty good comment on learning solos and licks/phrasing here
Basically he didn’t learn the whole solos,
if he heard a lick he liked he’d steal it,
he got the record, slowed it down and learnt it,
then played over it to capture how it sat in the groove
He used to find if he worked on it,
he couldn’t use a lot of it straight away,
but a couple of months later it would just pop out in his playing
That whole interview is pretty interesting actually
He considers rhythm the most important part of playing
Plus he took lessons his whole life off various different teachers
Some were fans or peers who balked at him asking for lessons 
Part 1 [ 1984 Michael Brecker Interview - Part 1 - YouTube ]
All good advice and observation. I use all of those philosophies/methods/developmental techniques.
To novice soloists I suggest initially getting adept at finding the first, third and fifths of each chord in a progression and become fluent at targeting them on the fly. The other scale tones 7ths, 9ths etc. may easily be factored in later on relative to those.
So mastering the three types of barre chords [C type, A type, E type] in both Major and minor means that with practice you can on short notice play good sounding solos to a chord progression all over the fretboard.
And then everything that’s been mentioned in the above posts comes into play.
The guitar wanker instrumental soloist thang is an interesting ‘discipline’ imo as everyone does things slightly differently in an infinite environment such as music making.
At this point I figure practical examples could be useful so later I might post some gtr leads I did on that recent record in the ‘Mastering the mayhem’ thread.
One of the top jazz players of all time.
I don’t disagree. Having a feel in your playing is huge. I watched part 2. He talked about copying stuff from recordings and music being largely intuitive for him. I think it must be for most people (or that is where we want to get to). Not that knowing some theory and thinking about music in theory terms isn’t helpful. It definitely can be. But theory is an aid, not an end. But then again, different strokes for different folks.
Yeah Wes is iconic
Heaps of him in George Benson as well
I think there are a lot of ways to learn and teach. Different students have different needs, and one way of studying/learning is always amplified by other ways.
The problem that BW mentioned - there are lots of definitions of “phrasing” - is one reason people are talking (and playing) past each other. Consider this - when someone is playing (or composing), they often stop and ask one of two questions. First is, “What comes next?” Second is, “How should that next thing get played?”
Was thinking about Wes and how he must’ve played and communicated with others. Did he ever play at that all night jam and say something like, do that again but in triplets. Did he ever rehearse with a pianist who said, ok hold back and then really let it go. Or did he ever tell the bass player to stay on the five, or stay off the one, or stay just behind the beat?
These are vague ways, shorthand ways of communicating about phrasing.
More specific talk happens too. Say two players are making an arrangement for performance and someone suggests, right here I could do descending chords while you do ascending arpeggios! Or the singer wants quiet for a refrain and says, just play the melody!
And between student snd teacher it might be more specific. Like “on the tonic just alternate between root and major 7th and then on the IV chord descend in quarter notes to land on the root. Or alternate between major pentatonic and minor!
Sometimes advice is more about technique or dynamics. Like play soft then big attack on beat 3. Or try playing the melody by approaching each note from one fret below. Or play a bar of chords, then a bar of melody, the two bars of trills.
People say (and think) all kinds of shit when they are considering what to play next and how to play it.
Playing involves ear, hands, voice (sometimes internal), listening to others, copying solos, knowing the song, goofing on harmony and pushing limits. That’s a lot and so can’t be mastered one way.
Think about this. Practicing with hands by copying licks will give power to the hands. Practicing with chords and substitutions will give power to the math part of your brain. Feeling out melody gives power to the lyrical brain. And push push with strum strum gives power to the drummer inside the guitarist.
Good guitarists - Wes, Jimi, Belew or Duane Allman - do …
All the above. And they can talk about it and teach it.
That last sentence was kind of a lie, but I want it to be true, and that’s what matters in today’s world.