Talk About Rock

Let´s start with the name - this is very simple.  Rock and roll, like jazz, was a Negro (Black American English) term for sex, so in puritanical America, the music definitely had a transgressive edge.

Defining what rock is musically is relatively simple too.  Obviously, the main ingredient is the electric guitar, but to be precise, it´s the riff-based sound created by overdriving the valve amp into saturation. 

This overdriven guitar tone was achieved by turning the amp up full and letting the valves do their magic.  By driving the poweramp section of the amp (turning it up loud) a great crunchy tone was produced – AC/DC, for example - though it usually deafened everyone in the room!

The guitar sound makes a musical statement.  What that statement is, is debatable. For starters, power, rebellion, mass.

Rock music evolved from early players such as Chuck Berrry in the hands of 60s performers such as Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.  Guitarists like Eric Clapton discovered the beauty of driving a Marshall amp at full tilt.  Each of these artists was a musical innovator, taking their musical influences from blues, classical and jazz and inventing their own, unique sound.

Some early musical experiments were unsuccessful, however. Take the Kinks, for example,  who tore their speakers to make them distort, resulting, not in harmonic overdrive, but uneven, harsh distortion. 

The bands mentioned above created the template for what became Hard Rock in the 1970s, as some guitarists began driving their amps harder by using an overdrive pedal through their already overdriven valve (tube) amp. The music became more powerful, even more riff-orientated and the riffs more repetitive.

As I discovered reading British music papers like The New Musical Express and Sounds NME, the best rock bands were Journey, Kiss, Boston, Utopia, Angel, Rush, Rainbow, Van Halen, UFO, Styx, Starz, Angel, Whitesnake, Alice Cooper, Scorpions, Boston, Thin Lizzy, The Babys, Aerosmith, Montrose, Mott The Hoople, Foreigner, Rush, Sweet, building on the music of Ted Nugent, Free, Bad Company, Judas Priest.

In fact, NME covered the KISS 1980 British tour and crowned them the Kings of Rock.

Then Hard Rock mutated again. By the late 1970s, amp manufacturers realized that guitarists wanted a more overdriven / distorted tone and began to add more valves in the preamp section of the amp causing it to distort more at lower volumes.

The result was an unpleasant, fuzzy tone which became the sound of Heavy Metal. This fuzzy preamp distortion severely limits how the guitar responds to the player´s touch (though it can give single notes a singing, sustaining quality). Using dissonant, disjointed figures and chordal movements added to dropped tunings and double bass drum patterns, all played to the extreme with screeching vocals, the music began the decline into the aggressive, mechanical banging of today´s thrash, death and black metal.

These “genres” that lack the harmonically rich poweramp overdrive, musical substance, ebb and flow, feel, soul, or rock or roll, aren´t rock and roll.

And in my opinion, they aren´t music!

What do you think?

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!