Tommy´s Tracks 2 - That Made Me Love Mary

The Beginner´s Best Musical Tool

No, it´s not your guitar. It´s not your guitar mags.  It´s not scales or modes, great as they are. It´s not even music theory. What is this magical tool then, you´ll be asking?  And how am I supposed to be able to afford it?

The guitarist´s best tool!

Here´s the good news.
It´s cheap.
It´s widely available.
It´s the simple cotton bud.



Come again?



The cotton bud! 
Because the first thing a musician has to do is clean out his or her ears!


Your ears are essential for the simplest of reasons (the amazing Evelyn Glennie excepted).
If you can´t hear it, you can´t play it. 


But by "hearing" I mean every, single note.

I so got what it takes to rock!

Think of the many songs you can sing along to with ease.  Most people can do this.  But can you hear each individual note exactly as it was sung on the recording? Most people can´t.  If you can, keep it up, because it's the most important thing you´ll ever do in your musical life.

Let me explain.

Our ears are very limited when it comes to hearing multiple musical strands all at once. Our ears like to focus on the main thing, like the melody or the guitar solo. Everything else in the given piece of music becomes the background. 

Yet the background is every bit as important as the melody, sometimes even more so.

Imagine you´re sitting in a noisy pub having a conversation with a friend. People are shouting in the background, the jukebox is playing and maybe somebody´s practicing some impromptu cosmetic surgery with a broken bottle without the luxury of anaesthetic.

But you're focused on what you're friend is saying and the noise in the background just adds to the atmosphere.  If the pub was empty, you´d probably go somewhere else.  And if someone shouted your name (or “duck"!) you´d turn around to see who it was. Or duck.

No, I said you were a DUCKING duck,
clean your ears out, will you?

Now let's “put this to music” and see what's happening. The melody - your friend´s conversation - is the most prominent part of the music and the backing is the atmosphere.

Simply put, without the atmosphere, melody doesn't say very much. And if something in the music jumps out at you from the speakers (like “somebody phone the polis!") your ears decide that this is the most important thing.

Why? 

Because it's louder and takes precedence over anything else in the music at that moment. That´s how your ears work and this is very unhelpful if you want to be a musician.

What d´ya mean, my arse is perfectly clean!

My advice is not to spend hours practicing scale shapes all over the fingerboard if you can't make music with the ones that you already know.

And guitar magazines, however helpful, usually condense a year´s study onto one page and give the impression you should learn it all in a week.  They also force feed the idea that the best technique is the fastest.  This is rubbish. Tone, vibrato, string bending and note choice are the most important factors in playing great guitar.

To be a musician, you have to hear everything. 

Hear,  I said!  Get yourself a packet of cotton buds, for chrissake´s!

You have to HEAR ALL THE SOUND.  So do the following:

• Listen to as many great players as possible and absorb ALL their sounds
• Hum guitar parts - licks, melodies, solos and fills, etc., as accurately as possible till you recognise ALL the kinds of sounds players make
• Listen to how guitarists play notes then bend them, or make them wobble (vibrato)
• Train your ears by listening until you can mimic ALL the sounds you hear

Do this and you´ll definitely be... a budding guitarist! 

The Jackson Rhoads Guitar

It´s a sad thing to discover a great talent after they´re dead.  This happened to me with Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne´s guitarist.  I remember the day - March 20th, 1982.  I was waiting for my bus home from work and reading Sounds magazine, a great source of information on hard rock.

There was an article on the guitarist´s death in a flying accident the previous day. (Won´t go into more detail, it feels wrong).  I´d heard many guitarists praise Randy's talent - not least Ozzy Osbourne.

Randy first came to attention in his own band Violet Foxes.  He then joined Quiet Riot and was hailed as a great guitarist.  He gave up teaching guitar at his mother, Delores´, music store, when Quiet Riot, already playing LA hotspots like Whiskey a Go Go and the Starwood Club, were signed to a Japanese label and released two albums. 

Randy wasn't your typical rocker.  Brought up  Catholic, he´s been described as “God-fearing”.  He didn't partake of the usual  rock 'n' roll lifestyle, preferring to seek out classical guitar tutors in whichever city he played in to learn more about his passion - classical guitar.

Finally, he auditioned for ex-Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne (definitely your typical rocker!) and got the job while he was warming up! Most Ozzy fans acknowledge that Randy saved Ozzy's career as he had hired one of the hottest rock guitarists on the planet, something the man himself has never forgotten, mentioning Randy to this day.

Not long before his tragic death, Randy hooked up with a then not-so-famous guitar builder named Grover Jackson to design a guitar nicknamed the Concord.  Randy used it on his final tour and further redesigns resulted in the Jackson Rhoads, also known as the Jackson Shark´s Fin.  At the time Grover was working for Wayne Charvel of Charvel Guitars and didn't want to put the Charvel logo on Randy's guitar.

So he put  his own name.  Jackson.

Sadly, Randy died before he got to play his very own  Jackson Rhoads guitar.

But the guitar lives on!

In the wake of this tragic loss, Grover asked KISS guitarist, Vinnie Vincent, to represent the guitar.  And so Vinnie became the first guitarist to bring this awesome guitar to the attention of the rock guitar fraternity.  He did the guitar great justice back in 1982, playing it with sheer ferocity and skill, and taking the instrument to its sonic limits.

The stunning gold Shark´s Fin.

The Jackson Rhoads is now an iconic design and Randy Rhoads has become an iconic figure in rock music.  Music magazines are still dissecting his work and giving credit to his pioneering, neoclassical rock musical abilities.

But back to me at the bus stop.  I caught the bus, went home and, though I wasn´t a fan of Osbourne, I bought some of his albums, Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman.

Randy Rhoads instantly became one of my heroes.  (I´ve so many guitar heroes it´s ridiculous).  His solos ascended, then with a rapid flick of his Les Paul toggle, he caused a stuttering effect before descending again.  It was like a P41 Mustang hitting its ceiling, stalling, then diving back earthwards.

P41 Mustang

Then, in 1983 there was a snippet of KISS´s Creatures of the Night Tour on TV and I saw – or more exactly heard - Vinnie Vincent make some incredible sounds with a fantastic gold guitar.  It was a Jackson Rhoads Shark´s Fin, so radical back then that I started pestering McCormack´s music store in Glasgow  to get me one!

30th Anniversary reissue Shark´s Fin, updated with Floyd Rose tremelo with fine tuners. Only 30 created!

Well, they´d never heard of it. (And I suppose I´d have looked pretty pathetic with a Shark´s Fin guitar in the Prince Charlie pub in Westmuir Street, anyway). However, four years later Mr. McCormack was planning a trip to a music trade fair in Germany and I asked him to find out about Jackson guitars.

Scotland´s first Jackson Charvel

Next thing I know he has a Charvel (same company - long story, maybe for a future post) .......

....... the very first Jackson Charvel to arrive in Scotland.

And I got it!

I still have it - it's 27 years old now! 

My Charvel is so well-built it´ll probably outlive me.  

So while it was sad that I didn´t appreciate Randy Rhoads while he was still alive, I remember him now every time I strap on my Charvel.