If you wanted to study what Kirk Fletcher is doing, the name dropping is a great resource to have from the man himself. You can listen back to hear what influenced him. For a really good player, it’s often the case that a player’s earlier influences are more accessible, which can be a better place to start.
Maybe what he should have been more explicit about is that there is a lot of work to be done up to that point, where everything is being brought to together. In that short video, he is just starting in on bringing those things together which were previously covered.
On the Friedman vid
Good points made, but I think these are points about harmony, progression, chord changes. That is the part of phrasing that gets the most attention - like how to sequence (diatonic) notes to suggest a 2-5-1 jazz cadence, or how to sequence (pentatonic) notes to suggest a 4-5-1 cadence. What Marty does not do here is describe how he moved between notes and chose note movement to mimic the chords. As he put it, he was “arpeggiating a lot”.
Similarly, he suggests thinking about a relative minor, and “substituting” it, but he does not describe his flow, his ups and downs, his directionality, his rhythms in USING a relative minor pattern.
I like what he said about knowledge, control and how that gives you the possibility of being more aggressive, more creative. If you learn licks and trust your fingers, you are not using knowledge, not constructing new ways of doing stuff, not pushing the limits, not trying the non-obvious. He says learn more about the notes you choose and MEAN it.
At about 28 minutes in, he plays in a kind of habitually emotional way. Mix of sixteenth and triplet notes, bends in all the obvious places. Boring. But then he stops and (duh) addresses the more important issue, which is BUILDING a solo. He takes a melody (more like a phrase), repeats it, develops it, varies it, does counterpoint on it, arpeggiates over it, and tries to find something that is both SAME and DIFFERENT.
An example of that strategy is where he says he ascends in C Major then descends in A minor at about 38 minutes). But here again, the stuff he is presenting is harmonic, not phrasing. Shifting between CMa and Ami is not a matter of phrasing, but a matter of equating two equal chords. The notes he plays and their timing - which is where phrasing matters - is not addressed.
As a blues-centered guy myself, I find it funny that Friedman says to practice this with a metronome so that you get “cleanliness”. The pro and con of “clean” playing is definitely a matter of phrasing. Too clean and it’s shit (IMO) but with the right amount of dirty, it can become a shining star of expression. He says, “anything with an even number is easy to start out with.” Yuck
He says he wants to avoid any repetitive picking patterns so as to avoid making everything sound the same. But … hello … it sounds the same.
On bending, at about 40:00, he strangely says that there are a lot of ways to bend. This is strange because it is as obvious as saying that there are a lot of ways to skip across the playground at school, or a lot of ways of saying that you are pissed off at your boss. Duh.
My question is - WHAT are the various ways?
great drummer
Could you clarify what this has to do with phrasing, or particularly melodic phrasing.
I am not a drum guy, but I “sense” melodic phrasing" in the work of drummers like Paul Motian and Jack DeJohnette.
The first few points:
“Keep it moving”. He goes into that just after making the comment. Using passing chords and tones.
“Jumping around on the whole chord”. He is playing different notes of the full bar chord and using hammer-on / pull-off ornamentations to add interest.
“Walk in half steps down into chords”. He mispoke. Kirk dropped down a whole step from the root chord and then back up, instead of just hanging out on the root. This is part of what Kirk meant about “Keep it moving”.
This is very common with good players (and generally people who run on intuition), not being able to translate things they are doing into specifics. I call it, talking in blobs. But keep in mind that this was an instructional video that came with a booklet, where what was played was also written out. Also, it is unfortunately very common for people who make instructional material to not have a target audience in mind. If his target were advanced guitar players, they might very well know what he means by all the talking in blobs. But beginner or intermediate players would need more detail about what is going on. His assumption here (whether he realizes it or not) is that you already know your arpeggios over the neck, which isn’t made explicit.
Learning a lick and playing it well is only the beginning of the work. Next is getting to a point where you can improvise on that lick. Altering it in numerous ways, using it as a jump off point to do something else, connecting it up with other things. Having some knowledge of the patterns being used is of course very helpful.
Keep in mind here that this isn’t a video about phrasing specifically. It’s about approaching his melodic style for playing metal lead guitar. I referenced it from memory (something I watched as a kid), because he does touch on some aspects of phrasing that are worth thinking about, depending of course on what your definition of phrasing is in the first place. As Paul Gilbert said, Bringing it all together.
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