Lollipops at The Wigmore Hall

The live music experience experiment ended in December with two recitals of what are known in the trade as `lollipops': short, familiar favourites. First up was Gautier Caucon (Cello) and Jerome Ducros (Piano) with a selection ranging from Barber's Adagio For Strings to My Way and Singing in the Rain. I was sitting eight rows back in the middle (cheap seats Saturday lunchtime). Someone had turned the volume of the piano down (or those other pianists really were ham-fisted) so I didn't have to rush to the exit to protect my hearing. Monsieur Capucon prefaced each piece with a little explanation or story, and the two of them played together as well as if they had been rehearsing to make a CD. Oh. Wait. They had. The sound was still louder than I would dare at home: one forgets how loud even acoustic music is. The performances were well-judged and nicely emotional.

Next up was what I thought was a jazz trio: Martin Frost (Clarinet), Roland Pontinen (Piano), and Sabastien Dube (Double Bass). They even had two pieces by that well-known Baroque composer Chick Corea (1655 - 1702). The only piece I knew was the Poulenc Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, which they did in a spirited manner (which is a nice way of saying `a bit fast for my taste'.) Forst enjoys playing the clarinet ("an ill wind nobody blows good") and seemed to be doing most of it from memory. This time I was at the back on an aisle seat, but I didn't have the feeling that I was hearing reflections (as long as the reflection paths are less than 12 metres shorter than the direct path, you won't. The Wigmore is a long rectangle, so it's not likely.). perhaps I had had enough practice at listening to live music by now, because I got carried away by the whole thing. I didn't even listen to any music on the way home, but used the ANC on the in-ears.

So in summary (so far)

The concert hall sound experience is not the hi-fi experience. Hi-fi is quieter, the soundstage is clearer and more defined, and the sounds are more precise. The live sounds don't have a sense of reflection or echo, but that 35ms buffer gets used, with the result that the sounds are very open and slightly blurry round the edges. Soundstage is not really a thing unless you're right in front of the players, and for acoustic chamber music, it was never intended to be. The music should come as one piece. Nothing involves quite so much as volume - as long as it stays below wince level - and live music can and is be played at more involving levels than I can get in my 'umble mid-terrace house, where I tend to listen at around 60dBA, which is less than the volume of my acoustic guitar or the human voice.

Will I be listening to more live music in 2023? Almost certainly. Orchestral rather than chamber, I suspect, and since I need to defend what's left of my hearing, I won't be going to see Above and Beyond at Printworks in April.

What Black-and-White Excels At

 A kid, his Dad, a bloke walking down stairs, some random lines... in colour it would be... meh. For some reason, in black-and-white, it really works. The people are more significant than they would be in colour.

Happy Christmas

 

Tone is Not (Only) In The Fingers

Everyone says tone is in the fingers.

Here's an experiment.

Take your guitar with your favourite schredmeister tone.

Play My Favourite Things, you know, the song Coltrane made a hit.

Uh-huh.

You sound like a guy playing My Favourite Things with a metric tonne of distortion.

Not a wicked schredmeister.

A mixture of sound effects only becomes a tone when it fits the style of music.

Only the Blues can survive anything from an acoustic to heavy fuzz. Everything else only works within a fairly narrow range of tonal variation.

Choose the genre you are playing, and within that, what the song demands.

There is a cottage industry of people creating effects, from downloadable settings for modelling amps, to complicated plug-ins for DAWs.

I'm going to leave DAWs for now, so this is about getting tones from an amp and/or pedals.

The starting point is easier for most guitarists than it sounds: to judge by what the majority of YT guitar guys say, we take up the guitar because we want to play like (enter name of hero(s) here).

I was horribly mislead in my early years by wanting to sound like John McLaughlin, who has himself at one time said he’s what people who don’t play guitar think is a good guitarist. I have no urge to be a virtuoso. Allan Holdsworth leaves me cold (I know, I will be saying several Hail Marys later), as do all the heavy metal shredders and a lot of the jazz virtuosi. Playing hundreds of notes a minute and permuting arpeggios is what people with no musical ideas do. Not that I want to be controversial or anything. Shredding is the rock / metal version of those be-bop solos that relay on playing arpeggios. Done well it sounds and can be impressive, but it’s one of the first styles that will turn up as an AI plug-in.

I liked what Indian raga players did, those long slowly-developing single-string improvisations based around some traditional changes and themes. It has moments of high skill, but always at the service of the groove music.

I prefer Bert Jansch to John Renbourn, even though it is obvious Renbourn has the superior technique. The players I admire most are Neil Young, Larry Carlton, Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Cropper, and Frank Zappa before he started shredding. None of those guys play fast, all of them play intense, sometimes funky, and even melodic. All of them can do the important thing, which is make one note count.

All of them were fussy as heck about their instruments and sound. If you want to make one note count, you kinda gotta be fussy about tone.

The search for tone is also the search for soloing style. By now I was realising that what I did / do on the acoustic was NOT going to translate to a Les Paul.

But let's start by getting a) a decent clean tone, b) a decent distortion-y Blues tone, c) some nice Ambient-y sounds.

Another Classic Street Photograph, London Bridge

 

Yep, the one with the guy turned into a black shadow against strongly-lit stone buildings.

First Sessions With The Les Paul

Okay. Les Pauls are a touch zaftig.

All electric guitars are heavy, but Les Pauls are the king of heavy. There's a Rhett Schul video about buying a Les Paul, and he weighed the ones he was trying out. 3.8 kg. I paused the video and weighed mine on the bathroom scales. 4.1 kg, just over nine pounds. I weighed my acoustic for comparison, 1.2 kg.

At first it kept sliding to the right from my knee. Was this a bad guitar? Was I doing something wrong? Did I need to wear a strap? All the cool guys in the videos had their LPs resting naturally on their right leg with nothing holding it. Maybe I wasn’t cool enough to do this?

Then I picked up the acoustic, and was reminded it was neck-heavy, so my left arm held it up slightly. Muscle memory that transferred itself to the Les Paul. Which is body-heavy and so kept sliding off, because I was lifting the neck. So I made myself hold the neck down and it stayed on my lap. That took a few hours to become natural. Playing a musical instrument is a lot about getting the physical relationship to it so it becomes a part of you.

Here's something else no-one will talk about.

Electric guitars do not sound great out of the box.

Unless you know what you're doing, which as a first-time buyer, I didn't.

Out of the box, electric guitars sound pretty... meh. When I was choosing in the shop, I was choosing between one meh and another. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Now began the real learning curve with electric guitars.

The Search for Tone. Learning how to play the amplifier and pedals.

Another Classic Street Photography shot, Waterloo Station

 

I really am starting to understand how those B&W guys took so many evocative shots.