Timeless Albums

What makes a "Timeless" album? When you play it, you enjoy it, it speaks to you, and there's no nostalgia involved. It seems it could have been made today. The rules are: one album per artist, except Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, because respect for the Greats. John Mayall is there twice because The Beano Album is there for Eric Clapton. Picking a timeless Beatles album is arbitrary, as is picking one by Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, John Martin, Van Morrison, and probably others.

I wavered over Cream / Traffic / Eric Clapton. The Bind Faith album is an All-Time Favourite, but it is of its time, as are the Cream albums. The Beano Album is the Blues, so it's Timeless. There are many fine albums from the 80's, but many of them sound like 80's albums, and while that puts them on the All-Time Favs list, it disqualifies them from the Timeless list. Except the Loose Ends and Level 42 albums, which get by somehow. I had The Crusaders' Chain Reaction on the list for a while, until I accepted that, ATF it may be, it has that 70's sound to it. Saraya's self-titled first album was there, until, let's face it, for all it's an ATF, it's as big-hair 90's as a band can get. Thriller is a Classic, but it is of the time. Some Classics are Timeless, and some are not.

I get that a Gen Z hearing ABC's The Lexicon of Love might be blown away by it, and hear it as a contemporary album, in the same way that we now hear the Beatles as the best indie band in the world, but this is about how I hear it.

Kinda by definition of what the list is, the majority are going to be from decades very past. I have Park Hye Jin, Charli XCX, Keep Shelly In Athens, and DJ Seinfeld from the last two decades, just to convince you that I am listening to new stuff. Just be thankful I haven't put Jason Aldean's Highway Desparado on the list.

Anyway, here's the list...

Abandoned Luncheonette - Hall & Oates 70's 

After Bathing At Baxters - Jefferson Airplane 60's 

Astral Weeks - Van Morrison 60's 

Band of Gypsies - Jimi Hendrix 70's 

Bare Wires - John Mayall 60's 

Bedrock - John Digweed 90's 

Before I Die - Park Hye Jin 10's 

Bless The Weather - John Martyn 70's 

Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan 70's 

Greatest Hits Vol 2 - Bob Dylan 60's 

Blues Breakers (Beano Album) - John Mayall 60's 

Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene 90's 

Blue - Joni Mitchell 70's 

Can't Buy A Thrill - Steely Dan 70's 

Crash - Charlie XCX 20's

Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd 70's 

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere - Neil Young 70's

Genie - The B. B. & Q. Band 80's 

Getz Giberto - Stan Getz 60's 

Goats Head Soup - The Rolling Stones 70's 

Hot Rats - Frank Zappa 70's 

In A Silent Way - Miles Davis 60's 

In Love With Dusk - Keep Shelly In Athens 10's 

Kind of Blue - Miles Davis 50's 

King of the Delta Blues - Robert Johnson 40's 

Level 42 - Level 42 80's 

Live at the Village Vanguard - John Coltrane 60's 

Mirrors (Remixed) - DJ Sienfeld 20's 

Rubber Soul - The Beatles 60's 

Solid Air - John Martyn 70's 

Second Toughest In the Infants - Underworld 90's 

So Where Are You? - Loose Ends 80's 

St Dominics Preview - Van Morrison 70's 

Texas Flood - Stevie Ray Vaughn 80's 

Timeless - Goldie 90's 

Zodiac Variations - John Dankworth 60's

Learning Electric Guitar: Let's Talk About Ability

Playing classical music, the difference between me (or better, someone who can actually play with their right-hand fingers) and the latest crop of graduates from the music schools, who go on to record a CD of guitar music by composers who were once named only in the lesser-read pages of Groves, is one of degree: they can read music better, interpret better, play the notes with more confidence and accuracy, their technique is smoother. (The same might be said of the latest crop of Berklee graduates as well.) I know what to do to get to where they are, even if I don't have the energy to do it.

That attitude, when carried into rock or even jazz, is mis-directing. It means a focus on technique, and specifically fingerboard virtuosity. Berklee has convinced everyone that jazz is about music theory and the fingerboard technique to apply that theory.

But rock, folk, soul, funk, dance, ambient, post-rock, country, and many other generes, are not about technique. They are about music first. The technique enables the music, but does not direct it. There are some consummate professionals in country and jazz, but they aren't there because they can shred.

They are there because they can do what's needed, and contribute when it's needed.

The difference between me and Tim Pierce, Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Chris Spedding, and Steve Cropper... and that's a silly way to even start a sentence. It's not that they play better than I do. I could learn all the scales and chords and music theory and it still would not begin to close the gap. They have better ears and can hear what the chords are and what they need to play over those changes. They can compose breaks, riffs, solos, and in some cases, songs that got to the top of the charts. They understand and can play within the conventions of genres from blues and funk to rock and country. They can hear a solo or a song a couple of times and play it back. They can hear the effects another guitarist is using, and work out how to get those effects. It's the whole package; they are simply much better musicians and much more complete craftsmen.

While I was playing my trusty old acoustic, I never thought about all that. Taking up electric made me aware of it. I don't mind not having the chops, but finding out there was so much else I didn't even know about, and have subsequently turned out not to be so good at, has been... if I'm honest... disheartening.

Learning Electric Guitar: So Now Let's Make Some Music

The classical guys are trained to play the notes other people wrote. That's how classical music works now - though in the past, the composers were also often virtuoso performers (nobody ever shredded better than J S Bach) and the instrumentalists fill in chords and bass lines from the barest notation, while the singers were given a tune and expected to improvise around it. Mmmmm. Sounds familiar.

Contemporary classical is not how rock and jazz work.

If you learn and play the Rikki solo, you're either in a tribute band (when the closer to The Skunk the better) or you're not, in which case, you're just imitating The Skunk, and it's lame.

   

Putting something that recognisable, and that good, in the middle of an otherwise competent but not inspiring song would distract from the song. Nobody would remember anything else. Oh, yeah, that's the song where they use the Rikki solo. The song needs its own solo, as generic as it may be, and people will say "nice guitar". That's what the guitarist is hired to provide.

This is partly about the law. In rock and jazz, the Rikki solo and its like are protected by copyright - that can be worth the cost of enforcing. In classical, either the copyright has run out, or the fees are cheap, or it's not worth the cost of enforcement. Which is why all those string quartets can play Bartok and Beethoven quartets without bankrupting themselves, and why it is worth the musician's time learning to interpret them, and learning to read music in the first place. (Something similar applies to jazz, when it is treated as a classical form.) Rock musicians often don't read because they are not in the business of reproducing other people's music faithfully and interestingly.

Professional guitar-playing is about being able to learn a piece of music quickly; adapting your tone to the needs of the band / song / studio; and composing or improvising solos, breaks and backing phrases as needed. (Also showing up on time and ready to go, behaving well and getting along with everyone - but that's pretty much standard operating procedure in any job.) The fundamental skill in rock guitar, even more than jazz, is the ability to make music. Even a four-note phrase between the lines of the verse. (Especially that, now I think of it.)

The technique and music theory is an enabler for that. You can know a zillion scales and chord extensions, but if you don't have the taste to apply them when needed, you may as well stick to the basics. The distance between learning the technical stuff, and actually playing, is huge. It's about one's ability to hear what is going on, and play something that fits in with it.

Noodling ("improvising or playing casually on a musical instrument") is primarily therapeutic. How many people sit through a slow movie with an acoustic in their lap, playing scales, riffing chords and phrases, to fill out the time between plot points? Electric guitars open up the possibility of noodling with tone as well. One can noodle one's way into learning the Turkish Diminished Locrain scale, or into getting the cowboy chords at the tenth fret. It keeps the hands in and the fingertips hard. One can spend an hour comparing Santana's tone on the CD with what's coming out of the DAW or the digital pedalboard. One can noodle with aplomb, and one can noodle so badly that one disappoints oneself. (Sighs. Puts down guitar. "Time to do the washing-up".)

Go Paula, Go Paula

 

I spent quite a bit of one trip in and out of town recently with a silly grin on my face because this track is a DOOZY!

Catch-Up

At the end of August, I got a cold, followed by a cough that wracked my torso for a couple of days, and by about two weeks later, I felt physically better, but lacking a certain amount of zip and zest. Even in this fourth week, I'm still lacking get-up-and-go.

It got so bad that I drafted a farewell post - I mean, after not posting anything for four weeks, a blog is defunct, right? And it would be if I was doing this for money or reputation. But I'm not. I thought about the reasons for stopping (running out of ideas, feeling tired, run it's course) and for carrying on (gives me a reason to figure stuff out, to vent about the stupidity du jour). The best reason for keeping a personal blog is that it's a journal that's edited for public consumption. A journal isn't one's Morning Pages. Those fulfil a very different purpose.

So I am going to carry on. The posts from the 9th to the 23rd are part gratuitous filler, and a couple that I drafted during those weeks but couldn't commit to publishing.

However, this is one of those colds that puts an upper limit on my ability to plan ahead or produce long chains of consecutive thought. So there may be stutters.

In the meantime, here's a new track from Alix Perez, who practices the lighter side of drum and bass.

Still Life with Judie Tzuke

A long while ago, I was experimenting with using the Zuiko lenses from my old OM10 on the X-E4, and this happened. I have since re-arranged the room and it isn't there anymore.

Gain and Volume

Yep, it’s tech time again. There are numerous explanations of these two features of an amplifier, and all those I have seen don’t explain it very well. Mostly because they don’t use a model of an amplifier, which I’m going to do.

Picture your guitar amp. At one end is the guitar jack, which carries a tiny, tiny current from the pickups. If that was transferred across to the speaker, we wouldn’t hear a thing. Nothing like enough power. So we need some more power from somewhere - which is why the amp is plugged into the mains, to feed a transformer that feeds the amp’s circuitry. That feed is run through some kind of “amplifying widget”, which might be a valve, a transistor, some combination of both, or some other device.

This widget takes the guitar signal in one connection, the transformer feed in another connection, and combines them in such a way that the signal from the guitar affects the current from the transformer flowing through the widget. (See electronics textbooks for details.) If the widget works properly, the output will be a signal that looks like the input from the guitar, but on a large-enough scale to drive the speaker.

In summary…

Guitar input signal -> widget
+
Current from transformer -> widget
=
More powerful copy of the guitar signal from widget to the loudspeaker

Gain controls are on the power input side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Gain up increases the amount of power into the amplifying widget, and increases makes the output signal… Gain at 0 = signal direct from guitar with no increase in power, Gain at 10 = guitar signal amplified to maximum input power

Volume controls are on the power output side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Volume up lets more of that power pass to the speaker, so it gets louder… Volume at 0 = no output power, Volume at 10 = as much out as the Gain creates. 

Now here’s the thing. The amplifying widget will change how it responds as more power is applied to it. That’s why turning up the Gain often produces distortion (unless the widget has a kilometer of “headroom”). But when we adjust the volume, it won’t change the way the widget works, because the volume is on the output side, after the widget has done its thing.

However, adjusting the volume will affect the power going to the speaker, and that will affect the way the speaker reacts. Less power and it won’t be able to transmit the fine details in the signal loud enough for us to hear. Which is why a crunchy distorted tone at high volume turns to a nasty fizz at low volumes.

So that’s that.

First Guitar Lesson

It’s been a long time since I got in the car and drove anywhere except the local supermarket or Richmond. I choose one of the hotter days of the year to do it, and there were works on a road which is notorious for not moving very quickly at the best of times. I made it to the tutor’s place about fifteen minutes late. Fortunately his schedule was not rammed.

We had an introductory chat, and he made approving noises about my Epiphone Les Paul - it does look good. I plugged into a solid-state Marshall (which had a far better clean tone at conversational volumes than my Katana) and we set off on Samba Pa Ti. We had settled on it during our back-and-forth of messages.

This is the first time in many, many years another person has been in the room while I played.

There are many reasons for having a tutor, and many more lessons to be learned than which notes go in what order. Some background: classical music has definitive scores because composers wrote what they wanted playing. The score is the music, all the rest is interpretation. Jazz, rock, folk and most everything else by contrast does not even have a definitive recording. There’s the album version, the version on the later release of out-takes, four versions on You Tube, and the legendary version they played at the (insert name of concert hall here). Very often in these genres there is no sheet music, and if there is, it can be unreliable. So even today, if you want to learn a song, sure look for the sheet music, but you may well find a good recording and learn from that. It’s what the younger jazz players did in the 1950’s.

If you have perfect pitch or a well-trained ear, and an amount of patience. My tutor has a well-trained ear. I made a note to get back to doing ear training.

There are other things as well. Until then I had only suspected that the chords in pop-music sheet music were… ummm… directional. My tutor was quite clear that the scores and tab charts available on the big-name sites such as Ultimate Guitar had enough errors to be an actual waste of time. (I rather like the look of the regular notation on MuseScore, and they are having a June Sale. I may do that.)

Teachers today are very different from they were when I was a pupil. They go in for making encouraging remarks, instead of saving the grudging praise for Christmas. Mine was no different. At the end he told me I was (by the standard of the pupils he has, granted) a “good guitarist”. I’m going to interpret that as meaning that my technique and knowledge of theory is enough for rock ‘n roll. (Which actually has quite high standards these days.) Which I will take as meaning I should concentrate on the music, rather than learning yet more scales or chords.

I came away with four bits of homework: unison bends; ear training; using my third finger to make a barre in the middle of the fretboard; polishing Samba Pa Ti.

The next lesson is booked in.

Finding A Guitar Tutor

I had my first guitar lesson a few days ago.

I have been looking at guitar tutors in my area. There are a couple of websites they all seem to use - tutorful.co.uk and musicteachers.co.uk - and Google found me those.

The tutors are mostly younger (which is ‘under 35’ to me), offer roughly the same range of subjects, and have varying degrees of experience playing professionally and of teaching. All very solid, I felt, but something was missing.

I didn’t want to do ABRSM - I sat my last exam in my twenties and have no intention of doing any more - and I don’t want to learn jazz either. Music-school jazz is journey-man’s music: an all-purpose technique to make familiar sounds over the chords of any song. Which is not to detract from the considerable skills required, and the musical creativity of the very best of the musicians. But that’s the point: all the rest of them cats sound the same. If I want to learn some obscure chord changes and the weird scales that go with it, I can get the music and

Then I ran across one tutor who mentioned “becoming a competent songwriter”, and all doubts left my body. Yep, even if I never actually write a single darn song, that’s what my aim is. I’m a writer of words, not a speaker of them; I’m likely a writer of music (my heavens that sounds pretentious) rather than a performer.

Having found a tutor, you send them a message describing briefly what you are looking for, they reply and you back and forth for a bit, until one of you pulls the trigger and suggests arranging a lesson. So that’s what we did.

More of this to follow.

Sight-Reading

I’m also spending some time learning to sight-read. Using the Allemande from the first Bach Cello suite. Since it’s for the cello, it’s in the bass clef, mostly in the octave below middle C, with occasional excursion above and below. It’s best played in concert pitch on the guitar, as opposed to an octave lower, though it could be played an octave higher.

Repeat after me: Every Good Band Deserves Fans And Cash. Those are the notes on the lines of the bass clef, starting with the ledger line below the main stave and ending with middle C(ash) one ledger line above the main stave.

I tried this a long time ago, but I struggled with the bass clef. Attempting to sight-read on the piano, which takes the “Grand Clef” (treble on top, bass below, middle C, well, in the middle) seemed to have eased reading the bass clef, partly because I spent a long time reciting the notes on the staves.

Remember running your finger under the words to help you read? Remember pronouncing a word one syllable at a time? Remember looking at a combination of letters and thinking “huh”?

All that and more. I follow the notes for a while, and then the tune drops to the bottom of the stave and I’m like “ummm, A? B? G?” Or I follow four notes but don’t finish on the E but the D. Huh? Oh! That’s an A I should be starting on, not a G.

As for playing the notes so that an actual tune emerges?

Oh. The tune? Where’s that?

The tune emerges when I play the notes without hesitation, fluently.

Ah yes, fluency. Playing the right notes in the right order isn’t enough. There’s more.

I know what it takes to read fluently: one has to read ahead and think about that, while one’s fingers are playing what one read a moment ago, because it was passed it to the complier, translated into muscle actions which were stored in short-term memory and are now being played . Which is what fluent word-readers do.

It takes a while for the brain to create that compiler, the memory, and the mechanism to take the muscle actions from memory and execute them. Building all that is what it means to “read music”.

It isn’t memorising the piece. That’s different.

This is one of those tasks that one starts and carries on despite seeming to make no progress, because I suspect that when the brain does construct the read-ahead compiler, it kicks in fast and makes all the slog worthwhile.

Talk to me in a year.

HX Effects - Effects and Sounds

There are a whole load of pedals out there, and some can cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds (Klons). All of them do one of these eight things: 

Drive (Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz); 

Compressors / Limiters / Noise Gates; 

Reverb / Echo; 

Delay; 

Modulation (Wah, Chorus etc); 

EQ; 

Looper; 

Volume / Effects level control. 

Guitar output and amp Master volume affect the tones, especially the Drive tones.

Even back in the 1960’s, when life was simple and Jim Marshall made you an amp while you waited (well, ok, not quite), studios had a number of effects: reverb, EQ, compressors, filters, as well as a bunch of special effects that the electronic music people had invented. The ultimate piece of electronic music of the 20th century, the Doctor Who theme, was made in a 1960’s sound lab on magnetic tape that was hand-edited.

The processor in the HX Effects can handle up to nine effects (or “blocks”) in one Preset, and has six switches for each pre-set. So I can build an effect out of nine others.

None are compulsory, and some play better with others. A tone based on Drives usually doesn’t work well with anything else except a simple-ish Reverb, but I understand that shoegaze bands started with a metric tonne of distortion and added more effects. So there’s that.

The one effect that hasn’t been transferred to pedals is the resonance that an acoustic guitar has. It’s a mixture of sustain (caused by the momentum of the vibrations of the wood) and reverb (of the sound waves in the hollow body). This is different from the sound of an electric being strummed with the power off, where the resonance comes from the continued vibration of the strings. Take your fingers off the strings on an acoustic and there’s still a lingering sound. Do that on an electric and the sound stops dead.

My unconscious was looking for that acoustic resonance, and I’ve been finding it something like it in combinations of delay and reverb.

Then there’s the most divisive drive pedal there is: the Tube Screamer. Apparently if you use 11’s and a Tube Screamer, you will automatically sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but without, you know, the talent. I have 11’s and have tried the Tube Screamer effect, and even allowing for my lack of talent, I still don’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, so there must be something more to it.

Any tone I get under these circumstances is an amp in the room tone, as opposed to guitar in the mix tone. Get a neat tone in-the-room and then use it play along with a backing track: chances are it won’t blend in. At all. For a long time now, the original sound of the instruments has been merely a starting-point for the final sound. If I do get a tone - usually by randomly messing with the pots - that blends in, often it sounds thin and unconvincing in-the-room.

So here’s the pay-off.

In one session recently I was tweaking one of the ready-made presets in the Effects: it had a delay, reverb, chorus, boost and maybe some distortion. I took out the distortion, experimented with the chorus, reverb and delay, and started playing some triads. Twenty minutes later, I stopped.

That’s when I realised what I was really looking for. A sound that makes me want to play more and more. That I can get lost in. Usually that means something ambient-y with delays and reverbs, but it needn’t. So far I’ve found a couple, not counting neck-pickup-clean + a sprinkle of reverb.

HX Effects + Katana Set-Up

I bought an HX Effects at the end of March, from those nice people at GuitarGuitar Camden, where you can buy any guitar you like as long as it’s a Strat and costs £2,000+ (I am exaggerating only slightly. It is cheaper than Denmark Street where the prices start at £2,000 and ascend very quickly.) Since then I haven’t written anything about my endless Tone Journey.

Imagine being dropped in a guitar shop, given the keys to the pedal cabinet and told to play around all your like. That’s what getting an HX Effects is.

I’m playing it through the Katana, (edit: 9/6) using the Instrument In, pre-amp gain at zero, pre-amp volume nearly dimed, Mid-EQ dimed, Treble and Bass at 12:00. The power amp is set at “0.5W” (/edit) and I control the output with the Master volume.

I’m playing mostly between 65-75 dBA, and have made the following very important adjustment to the amp positioning.

I sit on a barstool about two metres away, on a chair about a meter away, depending on whether I’m using the HX Edit program.

Brief acoustics digression. When the wavelength of a note is less than the diameter of the speaker, that note and those above it will start to “beam” out of the speaker. For a 12” speaker, that frequency is around 1100 Hz, which is about the highest note on the guitar. BUT, guitar strings produce a lot of overtones - fifths and octaves - which are not a lot quieter than the fundamental tone - so that playing A440 produces second harmonics of 1,760 Hz, which will go out like a lightbeam from a big speaker (okay, there are lobes to the side, but only if you’re doing a science degree). Stand to one side or above the speaker and those higher harmonics will pass you right by: the sound will be smoother and lack bite. What I heard over at my friend’s place, where we sit with our heads at speaker level, were all those higher harmonics, which gave the impression of bite and air. This is why mic-ing speakers is more of an art than it should be: where you put the mic affects what exact mix of overtones and bass notes you get.

Chasing tone is to acoustics what cooking is to chemistry: there’s a science underneath it, but mostly it’s applied magic.

The towel under the front of the speaker means I get the overtones beamed at me, so I hear a sound with more air and snap than I would if the speaker was pointing parallel to the floor. This makes a BIG difference to my appreciation of the “tones” I’m setting up on the HX Effects.

I have one Preset with nothing in it, to send the guitar output unchanged to the amp, but despite that the sound through the HX Effects sounds a little tighter and snappier. I’m assuming that the ADC-in / DAC-out conversion, plus any other system circuitry in this “empty path” through the HX Effects, creates some compression. I’m not complaining. It has given me back the neck pickup, which sounded too snarly and nasal through the Katana.

Okay… set-up over. Actual tone-chasing next.

Brandon D’Eon - Cliffs of Dover

Cliffs of Dover is a venerable Eric Johnson instrumental that seems to be for electric guitar what Angie was or is to acoustic guitar. Brandon D’Eon is a twenty-something jazz guitar graduate with a theatrical manner and what looks like a well-subscribed guitar course. 

   

 Yep, it’s gratuitous catch-up time. Eight YT channels I’ve been watching on and off recently.

The Real Reason Why The Pros Like Amp Sims (and you should too)

At some point in any review of any guitar amp, no matter if it’s a 1 watt Marshall or a 100 watt Fender, the reviewer will say something along the lines of “this thing can get real loud”. Every amplifier, every review. Maybe there’s a reason?

There is. Guitar amps have Celestion speakers, or something very similar. These have sensitivities around 100 dB / watt at one metre for a 1kHz tone.(1) That’s eight times louder than you play your stereo just before someone else in the house asks you to turn it down.

At one watt. Never mind five, ten, or twenty-eight watts.

It’s not the guitar that’s loud, it’s the speakers.

What everyone wants is a) a decent amount of sound with a “clean” tone, followed by b) that magical edge-of-breakup as the valves start to run out of headroom and clip the output waveform.

However, in a conventional valve amp, achieving the first means that the second is only available at ear-damaging sound levels. Conversely, getting edge of break-up at practice volumes almost ensures that the clean sound isn’t that consistent.

So the world is full of guitar enthusiasts, and indeed professionals, with wonderful valve amps that are forever on 2 and never reach break-up, which is daft, because the point is the edge-of-breakup tone.(2)

Except…. I mean, I can play Band of Gypsies on my hi-fi and hear that tasty Hendrix tone at sensible volumes - granted that the excitement from higher volumes is missing. What’s going on?

The edge-of-breakout tone needs the valves in the power amp to be driven hard, which produces a powerful output. Is there a way of sending the waveform to the speaker without sending all the power? It’s usually called attenuation and can be done in a number of ways, and usually, the cheaper the way, the more that lovely hard crunch turns into an irritating fizz.

At least for analogue methods. Using a decent ADC -> DSP -> DAC sequence may be better, but this starts to turn the amplifier into a hi-fi amplifier, with consequent costs and development programs that only the larger companies can even consider. Guitar makers are old-school electrical engineers unused to the delicate touches required to keep ADC / DAC chips running well, and DSP algorithms are still “secret sauce” even in hi-fi.

The result is that we have amp-simulation software, developed by computer-centric companies. Kemper, Helix, and others.

The idea is to record an amp doing its thing as its designers intended, and then throw some kind of wavelet analysis at the input and the output.(3) This provides a description of the change from before-to-after which can be summarised by a mathematical model, which can be turned into fast algorithms run on multi-core chips in specialised computers disguised as multi-button pedals. The required tone is now available independently of volume levels.

It’s not perfect (though neither is the manufacture of valve amps) but it’s a process that can be iterated for improvement.

So we have a gadget with an ADC at one end, a bunch of algorithms running on fancy chips in the middle, and then a DAC to provide an analogue signal to an analogue amp, or a USB connection to a laptop running a DAW.

And not a speaker to be seen, let alone heard at intolerable volumes. This is why the professionals jumped at using the computerised stuff, despite already having a studio with selection of valve amps and speakers. It was much quieter and much less temperamental (just listen to engineers talk, for instance, about how mic placement changes from speaker cab to speaker cab, even when both cabs are the same make and model).

This also changes the role of the amp / speaker for live listening. We’re not looking for it to provide the tone - clean or beak-up - but to be as neutral or flat as a hi-fi system.(4) Right now the guitar business doesn’t have too many of this so-called FRFR (full-range, flat-response) kit, and what it does have is often described by the familiar phrase “this thing can get real loud”.

Which really does bring us back full-circle.

(As you can tell, getting a Helix LT is now my current first step on the gear-upgrade path.)


(1) Hi-fi speakers are often in the 83 - 90dB / watt range. Which is somewhere between half and a third as loud. 

(2) Unless you’re Tim Pierce and have your speakers in a soundproofed basement, played as loud as you need with only microphones to hear it. 

(3) It probably is wavelet analysis, but it might be something else with the same result. 

(4) Yes, I know. But in comparison to guitar amps, decent hi-fi’s are pretty neutral.

Electric Piano + Boss Katana - With Added Sound

(Now updated with sound file)

Plug one end of a guitar (or other male-male) cable into the Katana input. Connect the other end to the Headphone socket of your electric piano (a Roland FP-10 in my case). You may need a 6.35mm to 3.25mm adapter. Turn on the Katana. Select the Clean channel, turn the Pre-Amp Gain to zero, and also turn off any boosters / drives. These don’t work so well. Modulations, reverb, echo and delay all work really well. Adjust volume and power level to taste.

(Blogger doesn’t seem to want to embed audio files on their own, there’s some complicated business with links to upload sites instead. So I put it in a movie file. This was played through the FP10’s internal speakers and recorded on my iPhone.)

You’re welcome.

Ear Training

One of the many skills academically-trained musicians have is being able to identify an interval - the distance between two notes. There are twelve in an octave, from the minor second - 6% increase in frequency) - to the octave - a 100% increase in frequency.

There is of course an app for that. Several. I tried Earpeggio, which offers a wide range of tests. I passed the test of identifying which of two intervals was greater, and I can reliably spot a unison (same note, no difference) and an octave.

You’d think anyone could tell the difference between a minor third and a major sixth, seeing as how they are different ends of the octave, but nope. Major thirds went unidentified. If I’d been guessing, I would have got about two out of the twenty examples right, so even 50% isn’t awful. I noticed that as soon as I had two succeeding intervals close together, I was much more accurate, since I was relying on the memory of the previous note. But an interval on its own… ouch.

However, I’ve never done this before, so it’s not hopeless.

My quick foray into identifying chords was much less impressive.

It’s a neat thing to do when you have twenty minutes to spare in a quiet place, or with headphones.

Decisions, Decisions

So here I am at the wrong end of the age range, seemingly attempting to do something I don't really have the temperament to do. Which means, I need to adjust what it is I think I'm going to be doing and expecting of myself, if I'm not going to be wasting my time. If such adjustments are possible.

At this point, I want to remind you that I totally do not mind doing spider-walks (look it up on You Tube) for minutes on end. I have something to build on.

Most people studying music academically pass the next Grade, then the BMus, or whatever, then to get a gig somewhere. Others may want to find a bunch of guys to play with, and then get a gig somewhere, while picking up what they need to know along the way. It's the gig somewhere that's the end goal. These days, that "gig" might be a TikTok channel on which they demonstrate preposterous virtuosity.

Here's what I could aim for: be able to create a loop of chords that have a sense of direction and some harmonic spice, and solo over it.

Creating a loop with a Looper pedal is nowhere near as easy as people make it look. Putting together some chords isn't just some random thing either. Neither is soloing, if it's done with any taste. The chords could come from other people's songs.

In support of this, there is...

Musical Literacy: reading music, making sense of what is in the score, identifying chords etc

Sight-reading: a) connecting the notes in the score with the notes on the instrument; b) playing those notes in a musical and fluent manner. (if the notes come from a bunch of Miles Davis solos, so much the better!)

Basic Composition: how do chords go together? what creates a sense of direction? How do solos fit over the chords (aka "playing the changes")?

Familiarity with the instrument: where are the notes? Where are the chords? (Electric: where are the tones and effects?)

And in support of that, there is...

Technique: a) getting the fingers where they need to be when they need to be there, and no more (no going down shredding rabbit holes); b) learning to use a Looper pedal, and how to set up the gear to do so.

What about genre?

Classical / Flamenco / Folk / Acoustic Blues / Jazz Solo. Fingerpicking is beyond me.

Metal. Horrible un-musical shredding.

Rock / Funk / Soul / Jazz-funk. The guitar is basically an accompanying instrument. I'd need to be in a band.

Jazz. I'll have a post about jazz, but in summary: chord-scale is no more musical than shredding; cocktail / lounge jazz is cringe; Older styles, fine.

Ambient. Possible, but as a secondary subject.

Noise (Sonic Youth etc). Pass.

Playing classical pieces for solo cello and violin: do-able, but short on self-expression!

Electric Blues / Blues-Rock. This is what I imagine myself playing to an audience if I imagine myself playing to an audience.

So, yeah. Looks like I'm going to learn to play the Blues.

And you will get progress reports.

Making Music Needs Commitment

90% of all the guitars sold in a year are bought by people who give up playing in the first year.

Learning to play music is hard work. In the case of stringed instruments, it is literally painful, since you need to grow hard fingertips on your string-stopping hand.

Learning to play a musical instrument is physical training in the way that gymnastics, ski-ing or skateboarding are. Except all the physical movement is in the hands. The pianist Leon Fleisher describes musicians as "athletes of the fine muscles". An instrumentalist needs to be able to do things with their hands that is as far away from anything an ordinary person can do as a 10-second 100m sprint.

Different types of music require different movements of those fine muscles. Classical is its own regimented thing: the aim of classical training is to make everyone sound the same. So they can play in orchestras. Outside that discipline, where individual style and sound are an asset, in Rock, Indie, Jazz, Folk, Blues, Funk, Prog, Flamenco - all the details are different. Leave Europe and try to jam with a band playing "African" genres and you'll be lost: those styles require totally different fine muscle movements and sense of rhythm.

Learning those fine movements takes time. Learning how to use the stylistic gestures of a genre takes time. Learning how to play with "feel" takes time. Working out how to do all those things your way takes time - and classical guitarists are rigorously trained to sound almost identical.

This variation of fine muscle movements, and the time it takes to learn everything, means that, at the start, a musician has to commit.

The people who make some kind of success at music choose a genre (which might be "classical music") and stick with it. Sure, a lot of players can play party pieces in other genres, but they don't live there. They live in their chosen genre. Just like the Baroque musicians did. They had to commit at the start or they couldn't learn enough in the time.

Nobody drifts into playing classical guitar. They may have done it as a child, but as they go through adolescence, they may realise they don't have what it takes (as some of the other pupils they have seen obviously do) to be successful and they don't want to be a guitar teacher for the rest of their lives, so they need to get a "useful degree", or they realise that they aren't nerds, but career and long-term hobbyist musicians are. If someone is playing classical guitar for a music degree at 21, they chose that. The same applies to kids who form bands when they are teenagers.

Musicians are called, the lifers feel that nothing else is worth doing, and the most important thing is to play. Because that's the only thing that counts: extra musica non vitam est. They may need to hold down a day job, and it doesn't have to be something precarious and part-time-y (they are musicians, after all, not actors), but it's a day job for money. Not a career.

I can't do commitment (a philosopher who commits is an activist or an ideologue, not a philosopher), and I cared about what kind of life I lived 'outside'. This is also philosopher thing: philosophers who go into business have to do as well as the rest of their character will let them.

I do have the ability to stick at something once I've decided to do it. Philosophers are allowed to have temporary enthusiasms.

My History Of Playing Music (Short Version)

Let’s go back to Junior school (7-11 in the UK). In those days everyone played the recorder in Music lessons, and Music lessons were as compulsory as maths. Our Music teacher was Mrs Poole, and she was the second most-feared teacher in the school (the most-feared was Mrs Toombs). She wasn’t scary, but she was firm. In a class of twenty, she could hear one descant recorder playing the wrong note. She knew what she wanted from the class, and we were under no illusions that anything less would do. The handful of us who showed any kind of ability at all got to play the coveted treble recorder, and the real virtuoso got to play the tenor.

Everyone in the school could sight-read simple decant recorder pieces. It wasn’t even regarded as a thing. It was the minimum ability required not to feel hopeless.

I went one better. I could play a new piece by ear, as long as someone next to me was reading. Either that or I was following their fingering from the corner of my eye. My sight reading declined as a result.

I tried playing guitar in junior school, and have memories of my mother taking me to a house heaven knows where in south-east London with a guitar teacher in it. The only thing I can remember is making a mess of sight-reading Little Brown Jug. That’s it. It didn’t last long.

Then I went to the Big School and that was the end of playing music.

I bought a guitar in, let’s say 1970 because I can’t remember the exact year. This time round, I practiced my scales and learned some cowboy chords (though we didn’t call them that then), but my left hand was not up to barre chords on that instrument, and right-hand finger-picking was… I tried, I really did, but you know when you’re trying something that your body just isn’t equipped to do? I played through the blisters, the hard skin on the fingertips, the disappearance of my finger-prints and their re-appearance again. I went from barely being able to co-ordinate my left hand with the plectrum in my right hand, to being able to rip out strings of notes almost as fast as John McLaughlin on Bitches Brew.

And there I halted. Metro Bulo Bouvo Dodo. Commute, work, drinking, sleep.

I had a steel-string acoustic guitar I played with a plectrum, and I listened mostly to electric guitarists. That doesn’t work very well. I was not playing for an audience, I was not aiming to play Bach, nor was I aiming to learn to play songs. At one time I had a Joni Mitchell songbook, and a Steely Dan one, and I could play those chords (not knowing that such books bear only a passing resemblance to reality), but it never left me feeling smug with satisfaction. Occasionally I played rambling single-string extemporisations which would engage some of my more tangled emotions.

I would play along to tracks I liked - as long as they didn’t change keys too often. Sometimes I’d have good ideas, other times I’d play some routine licks, and occasionally I’d barely be able to find the key. There was no purpose behind this, just entertainment. I was the very model of a home noodler.

Then came the Lockdowns, when you’d think I’d be playing every day. I didn’t. Weeks would go by without me even picking the guitar up.

Which is more or less where I was eighteen months ago.

For some reason I think playing or learning the guitar is going to be my Next Big Project. I will finally learn all the things I should have learned right back in the day. Minor 7 sharp third chords. The Phrygian Armenian scale. How to play “rhythm changes". Passing tones on a III-VI-IX blues shuffle. Getting enough strength in my left hand to play barre chords on the acoustic. Learning to stretch out my fingers to get those chords that spread over five frets - in the first position. Picking up a working familiarity with DAWs and hence composition. All that good stuff.

That music students spend years learning.

As if I have anything else to do with my time.

There’s a BUT isn’t there? You can hear it.

Chasing The Tone

Everyone goes on and on about tone (1). It's in the fingers. It's in the wood, the pickups, the pots, the fretboard, and even the nut and tuning heads.(2) It's in the pedals and the settings. It's in the amp and the speakers.

John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter both played tenor sax. Tenor saxes are made to sound the same, because it's a band instrument. The player can make a slight difference with their choice of reeds, and their breath control. So you know how you know it's Wayne Shorter or John Coltrane playing?

They play different notes. They play different phrases. They structure phrases differently. They sound different not because one uses a Selmer and the other some other make: they sound different because they play different.

Tone is in the music.

Play My Favourite Things, with fuzz, blues drive, lots of reverb, chorus, slow drive, whatever... it's still My Favourite Things and it's still a showtune. At no point does it become a metal anthem. It has a mood all its own, and turns all the tone-gear into a sound effect.

There's a video of Jimi Hendrix playing an acoustic guitar. He sounds like himself, playing an acoustic. Because he's playing Hendrix phrases and chords.

Bad news for people chasing that SRV / Hendrix / Beano Album / Dave Gilmour / whoever tone: if they want to sound like Dave Gilmour, they will have to play like Dave Gilmour.

All those pedals and amps are sound effects. The sound effects are an extension of the electric guitar - and in John Martyn's Glistening Glynbourne, the acoustic guitar as well.

Ambient is all about the sound effects, not the tone. So are a lot of post-rock instrumentals. The guitarists in rock bands don't have a tone, they provide the sonic backdrop required for the song, which changes from song to song. They might have a personal style of soloing, or creating fills, or a distinctive rhythm attack, and that's how you know who it is. Not because they of the distortion setting on their RAT pedal.

Learning what sound effects are available is part of learning to play the electric guitar. Every guitarist should know how to get a Blues tone, a fat jazz tone, a biting bridge rock 'n roll tone, and so on. Even if they never use them. That's knowing your instrument. (The Katana is outstanding in making that possible at a stupid low cost compared to buying a valve amp, interface, mic, pedals, and supporting gear.)

The search for tone is partly learning your sound effects, but it's really the search for your voice.


(1) Defined as the distinctive sound of a given guitar or guitarist, that only vanishes after excessive amounts of metal distortion or ambient effects.

(2) According to John Lill, the sound of a guitar is in the scale length, the position of the pickup(s) from the bridge, the height of the pickups, the pickup wiring, and the settings on the tone and volume pots.