Wild Stringdom Hello everyone, and welcome to my column. In the next few months, I’ll share some of my ideas on how you can improve your guitar technique while expanding your melodic and harmonic horizons. When people ask for my advice on becoming a better player, I always tell them “Play with your ears!” By that I mean don’t worry so much about what your fingers are doing. Try to find great melodies that work over the chord progression you’re playing, and the speed will come in time with enough practice. I don’t think guitar playing has as much to do with technique as everyone says it does.
Even though I may play fast at times, that’s really not the important thing. Music is all about creating melodic ideas. The most important thing is that the scales and arpeggios you play are musical and fit the chord progression.
Like most kids, I started out listening to and playing rock and roll. But I quickly tired of the pentatonic sound. All the rock guitarists I listened to always played out of the pentatonic “box” patterns. Consequently, all their solos sounded very similar and very blues-oriented. I guess I was looking for something different. Eventually I started listening to classical music—first to Bach and Vivaldi and later to violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini. They blew my mind! Hearing these great composers changed the way I approached music. Bach was pretty much the guy when it came to composition. And even though Paganini came along later than Bach, you can hear a lot of Bach in his compositions, particularly in his 24 Caprices. After studying their music, I became aware of the beauty and importance of arpeggios and chord tones. At the same time, I still loved rock and roll’s energy and the great tone of a sustaining electric guitar. I guess it was only natural that I would end up combining both the melodic intricacy of classical music and the power of rock to create my own sound. Listening to classical music, particularly to Bach’s pieces, helped me to develop a strong sense of melody.
I was also able to incorporate some of his melodic and harmonic moves in the context of my soloing. One way you can make your scales sound more melodic and interesting is by using pedal tones, a melodic device mastered by Bach. A pedal tone is simply a sustained or continuously repeated note. Its name comes from the days when you had to use a foot pedal on the pipe organ to sustain notes. I use pedal tones as repeated melodic stabs that are alternated with scalar passages. Pedal tones are simple to play, and they can create some very cool licks. I’ve written out a few of my favorites for you.
FIGURE 1 depicts a very basic pedal-tone approach—notice that I alternate the high F note with a descending A harmonic minor (A B C D E F G#) scale passage. FIGURE 2 takes this concept a step further by using different pedal tones over an Am-Dm-Am E7 progression (E, F, E and B, respectively). In both of these examples, I use my left-hand pinkie as an “anchor”—it holds down the pedal tones while the other fingers fret the other notes in the scale. Keep in mind that you can pedal more than one note when you play a melodic passage. In FIGURE 3, I alternate a three-note phrase (A-G#-A) with an ascending A harmonic minor scale. And in FIGURE 4, I alternate the same three-note phrase an octave higher with a descending A harmonic minor scale. Notice that even though the basic progression is Am-E7, the implied harmony is much richer (the implied chord changes are notated in parentheses in the music). In all these examples, there’s a lot of left-hand stretching (refer to the tablature for all the left-hand fingering). I play these licks this way in order to get a very smooth, violin-like tone. If the stretches are hard for you at first, slowly work up to them. You don’t want to hurt your hands by playing these examples without warming up first. See you next month.
