Diary: snow day at UM Farmington

Did a master class at UM Farmington. so much snow that classes were cancelled. But guitarists showed up anyway. The guitar as a system was the topic. Hope I influenced some young musicians. Jammed with Gustavo Aguilar-that dude is a monster.

Guitar Technique of the Day: EQ

Clarifying frequencies opens a spatial dimension in addition to wavelength consideration or opening up frequency spectrum.

EQ helps define the SIZE of the instrument and the sound.

Multiple stages of EQs is basic technique.

SHADOW metaphor

Because the guitar tone control is a low pass filter, the control doesn't have any effect on the low frequencies below the EQ's cut off frequency; it only effects higher frequencies above the cutoff frequency. Since most EQ is subtractive, an EQ after your guitar, before the amp, enables access to low frequencies for roll off (or boost too, but watch out) depending on the instrument, the amp, and the room/space you are playing in, and your ears. Get big ears. Grow golden ears.

...more to come for sure.

Reality Check: Jimi listening to Buddy Guy

Check out the this video of Jimi Hendrix listening to Buddy Guy in a New Orleans club in the 1960s and "experience" a reality check. Nothing comes from nothing and that's good - that's culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v5YWSBD23U

Zen Posts

1. Learn and set the form
2. Now exceed it.

Zen Posts: Unilinear Time in Music and Life

In most mainstream American music (including jazz, new music, and popular music), time moves linearly forward in infinite, yet quantifiable units that bind us all to a single grid like a giant Excel spreadsheet. Time in rows and columns. This is a deep cultural bias - white people stuff. It seeps into all temporal-cultural thought in a world where the West has beaten (literally) the competition. Even the ex-colonials live in white time now.

But Time is relative, and this is a property of nature, a scientifically provable fact (thank you Albert E. for letting us know that some mystics had it right all along: that Time is fluid and multiple, and that absolute time is an illusion of the Newtonian physical world humans inhabit, but not the law of the universe.) And relativity has metaphoric-ideological repercussions for intelligent artists and inventors.

Even the groove (grid) music I love is most exciting when something exceeds the grid or form. Think of Miles or Prince or Stevie Wonder. Magic is off-grid. Step off the grid if you can, or be a clone, a widget, a willing servant, or slave to GarageBand. Dudes, My mom bought me a computer. Now I'm an artist!

Fascism is the father of on-grid compliance... the realm of the thoughtless or mindless recreation of structures that are no longer vital because they have hardened into reified and commodified objects in the technological-industrial world. These forms, once liberating, are now straight jackets for original thought imposed from above by the now elders who once dreamed of freedom, and can now only advertise freedom as a modus operandi, a formula, for all to follow in order to maintain their elder authority or power in the world of status and money. What is sad is that young artists are drawn into this conservative sphere of time in order to further their own conservative careers and ideas. I read a blog recently where an up and coming young composer wrote, "originality is overrated." Hmmmmm. Methinks he doth protest too much.

Artists, think of shapes other than forward-pointed lines. Also, forget about unilinear progress, even while nurturing experience. Do not be a slave to the ruling industrial assembly-line experience of time; use it creatively; ride it like waves in a larger ocean. Set up your temporal form; then exceed it.

Zen Posts: Is Guitar Playing a Form of Music?

  
There is no best or better unless guitar playing is decontextualized from actual music and turned into a male sporting event as it often is. Boys can be ridiculous and/or stupid so much of the time.

Notes on the Guitar as a System

The acoustic guitar is a context unto itself, thus it's appeal for solo work. A small universe of sounds is available to the careful player and listener.

The electric guitar requires an amp to complete a system. Without amplification, a solid or semi-hollow body electric guitar has minimum, barely audible resonance. Amplification brings out the resonances and overtones that are the magical qualities associated with electric guitars. The guitar must be played and amplified loudly to make the electric guitar sound vibrate to its potential. electric guitar = electric guitar + amplifier.

Also, for me, the electric guitar requires the context of an ensemble, as its harmonic/resonant capabilities (particularly at solo volume levels) are smaller than those available to an acoustic guitar in a solo context.

The reason acoustic guitars sound mostly bad amplified is because the piezo and sound hole pick-ups don't "pick up" the qualities of the resonating body (guitar top) that is the acoustic transducer, nor do they pick up the bi-tones that result from a stopping a string with a finger on the fretboard.

The acoustic guitar is about maximum vibration before amplification while the electric guitar is the inverse.

It all about resonating bodies.

Topic of the Day: MICROTONES

Microtones focus your attention to qualities of distance not available in equal temperament.

On an electric guitar, a slide can act as a quasi-third bridge allowing normally inaudible bi-tones to be amplified by pickups.

A slide can also trigger bi-tone multiphonics due to changing the proportions of the strings on the left side of the third bridge. Bi-tones are sometimes called ghost notes/tones in popular parlance, but this name only serves to obscure this well-documented aspect of string vibration.

On an acoustic guitar, bi-tones are normally audible and add to the complexity of the acoustic sound.

Resource: List of Books and Videos about Amps and Electric Guitars

More commercial than academic, but sometimes that's just right or better.

http://amptone.com/booksrecording.htm#_Toc142020948

Topic of the Day: RESONANCE

Resonance. The minimum through maximum vibration potential of a system. Includes inductive vibrations in supposedly unrelated circuits (i.e., natural, human, and computer system environments). Metaphorically, not formally, related to resonance in electronic circuit theory.

 

Microtones bring your attention to qualities of distance not available in equal temperament. It's all about resonance, both in and outside your ears, and the ears' ability to map space in your brain.

In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he [Messiaen] cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon which provides chords with a context which he felt to be missing in purely serial music.^[44] An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of Messiaen's first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"); the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.^[45]  - Wikipedia: Messiaen, Olivier. 1/4/11

Solo or Group Event No. 1 - Amigo

Some ideas I've been working on. (click on image for original size). Let me know what's what, eh?