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And I'm *not* looking down my nose at anything, so how can it be inverse snobbery? In fact, I signed off the first reply to all this with "There are more than 15 ways of skinning a goldfish, as someone once said, and none of them are wrong".
This is why you end up with odd note groupings, 33 notes to the bar and such- he isn't trying to do anything other than shred your face off and end on a big note with wide vibrato.
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I've had to learn a few tunes and they are mostly good exercises for the hands but I don't really enjoy playing them.
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I know this song inside out everything you need to know about playing changes is right in there.
Same with Carlton- the Kid Charlemagne solo is a masterclass in playing changes.
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I play rhythms, chords, and melodies. I don't really know the notes or the intervals when I play single-note lines, I just play what I feel sounds right - like singing a tune, but without words. (I can't sing.)
I probably play much more like an acoustic guitarist and not like a normal electric guitarist, even when I play electric - I almost never play riffs, only chords progressions with extra bits, and linear solos which are usually based around chord shapes and box shapes, mostly major or minor scales rather than pentatonic.
The well-known players who I think I most sound like are probably Neil Young and J. Mascis, some of his more recent stuff in particular.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Edit: the solo works of course, who knows how many records Larry has done as a session musician
I'm the last person to have a downer on shred, of course - but I don't enjoy his particular brand of it. Not for long anyway - I could manage it for perhaps one or two songs, but after that it starts to grate. I know how important he was, but there are so many shredders who've come since whose stuff I enjoy far more.
His vibrato is peerless though. Stunning.
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I think I feel the music in terms of structures, so things like rhythm, phrasing, general pitch of what I'm playing relative to other parts of the arrangement... those are the things I see when I play, rather than the harmonic progression, the intervals I'm using, the numbers on the frets or anything like that.
It sounds arty or maybe like I'm off my tits, but that's the best way I can describe it.
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When I started off I had a bit of the "reverse snobbery" thing. My early bands had a mix of people who were entirely self-taught and 'theory blind' (like me) and people who'd done a fair bit of music at school, and it's a fact that the 'ignorant' people were usually better, especially in terms of tone and rhythmic feel.
I don't think there's any great surprise in that. We were playing blues or blues-rock with a smattering of pop. The people who were motivated and hard working enough to teach themselves drums, bass, guitar etc in their own time were better at it than people who were often coasting on skills they'd picked up playing classical music in so-so school orchestras or working through piano grades.
Also many of our heroes, The Beatles, The Stones, the black blues tradition, folk tradition etc had little musical education.
When I was at school there was a dance venue for people in their teens, a municipal affair. On Friday and Saturday nights they'd usually feature two bands, a resident band and a guest band. The guest band were mainly local rock/pop bands, of a varying standard.
The resident band were made of the cream of the local muso scene, pro musicians playing in TV studio bands, teaching, in receipt of Arts Council grants for their jazz compositions and so on. And they were utterly terrible. They were playing rock and pop from charts, and had absolutely no feel for it whatsoever. I can still (unfortunately) hear them murdering "Black Night" by Deep Purple, a female singer who could hold a tune but had no body to her voice, a guitarist (a very fine jazz player who went on to be an important jazz educator) getting some generic fuzz noise from a Gibson archtop, a drummer playing a jazz kit with no presence or drive.
That age has passed. The genre snobbery that meant trained musicians usually couldn't play a simple rock tune authentically has gone. Young rock players can read and know theory and play a bit of jazz if called on. But the inverse snobbery thing, the idea that trained musicians couldn't play rock, did have a basis in reality.
And in some ways maybe still does. Say Lennon or McCartney had been spotted aged 8 and hot-housed through a conventional musical education. Would they have been happy writing pop tunes in their 20s? Or would they have been writing pseudo-sophisticated classical music for TV documentaries? Would there be more more or less good music in the world?
A lot of the discussion has been about not being able to play in certain types of situation without a musical education. But I've never wanted to play the kind of gig I'd need to be able to sight-read, or be a session guy, or teach, or be a jobbing musician. For me - and for most of the people I know - it was a case of having a bash at "making it big" playing your own material as a youngster and if that unsurprisingly didn't happen settling for a conventional career with music as a hobby.
Back in the 80s I played in a band that did a support slot for a household name (movies have made about him and stuff) and he was using a well know British session guitarist whose privacy I will not intrude on by mentioning his name. The guitarist and I had a very long chat. He was a fantastic player, and a very nice guy - and he left me in no doubt that I absolutely did not want his professional life. He was recently married, away from his wife in early winter, touring towns he didn't want to be in, playing music that wouldn't have been his first choice, earning very modest money and not sure where the next gig was coming from. And this was a guy who had the talent and had done the work to be one of the best in the country. (I believe he's teaching at one of the London music schools now). I might be a boring, conventional bastard, but you can keep that.
Don't get me wrong, on balance I'm on the side of theory. I do believe it's made me a much better player than I would have been without it. I especially wish I'd learned to read properly earlier and would urge kids starting out to do that. But I also accept there's a shitload of players who don't know much theory but are far better players than I am, because they worked harder or took it more seriously or have more innate talent. And unless you really want a career as a session guy/teacher/reading-gig type player - if you just want to do your own thing, or play in a rock covers band - you can easily get by without it.
Having a small smattering of knowledge though is a very useful thing and knowing where all the notes are means you can talk to other musicians in our common language ..... which makes life a lot easier ........... I mean if the keyboard or horn player wants to know what key your gonna so Valerie in tonight he doesn't want to hear your starting on X fret on X string ..... that means fuck all to them
I didn't get it when I was younger.
Now I think it is probably the best written, played and produced pop or rock music there is.
YMMV of course.
I worked for Larry Carlton at a guitar clinic once (just one event)- I was his guitar tech.
It was amazing to see him playing up close - he was a really nice guy as well.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
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I think Robben's best playing is his solo on Naima and his version of Golden Slumbers.
Yeah, some of Larry Carlton's solo work treads into the smooth jazz realm for sure and gets boring.
I am not calling all musicians who did not learn theory lazy ignoramuses.
I haven't said that and I don't believe that.
As far as I am concerned provided you can play the gig then I don't really care if you understand music theory.
This is the best case scenario when working with untrained musicians- it just means that when I am talking to you I give you rather more spoken information than I need to with a guy who has been through the same process as me.
For instance I can tell @Bucket to play a ii V I in C then a parallel modulation then another ii V I.
He will know that the chord progression is
Dm7 G7 Cmaj7 Cmin7 F7 Bbmaj7.
Or he can say the same thing to me and I know what he means- it is a two way communication system- that is the point.
With you I guess I'd have to give you the exact progression.
This isn't a problem- I've done this loads.
If you can't play well enough and I have to carry your ass all night then I'll get a little annoyed but it won't be a problem.
I've been in this situation many times- it isn't a deal breaker it is just more work.
This could be where I have to physically show you where on the neck the chords go, or I could have to show you how to play some short cut voicings to make it easier on you so you aren't stuck playing barre chords all night and getting in the way of the bassist.
I might have to show you a few links note for note.
The people I was describing are the ones who look at trained musicians as somehow less capable because 'all that theory stuff gets in the way of playing from the heart, man'.
These are the guys who refuse to be shown anything 'nah man, I'm not doing any of that technical shit' and then end up completely lost, in the wrong key, coming in at the wrong time, yada yada.
There are loads of those guys out there and they are mostly un-fun to work with.
It is the reverse snobbery that I'm describing- those guys are the ones that make life hard for everyone.
That might be you- it might not- I don't know- but your comments above indicated that might be your position.
Possibly, but I'm not saying anything different now to what I said my first post on this topic.
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That is all.
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I play the guitar with it resting on my right knee and I use a Herco Blue Thumb Pick, and Dunlop Brass 0.015's.