Guitar Techniques – July 2019
English | 102 pages | True PDF | 55.1 MB

AFTER LAST MONTH’S take-over by Paul Gilbert we’re back to normal. But what an amazing lesson that was and Paul, who’s rather bluesier these days, played some amazing lines that went outside blues’s usual Pentatonics. A lot of it was arpeggio based, which always makes a solo sound articulate and musical. So this month we thought we’d take that concept and run with it.
At some point in our development we’ve all listened to other players and thought they must have some secret scale to which the rest of us aren’t privy. But that’s not the case. As with anything in music, it can be learnt (feel, touch and tone are still down to you). With this in mind Andy Saphir, who’s always a trusted pair of hands with this type of feature, has devised a
down-to-earth lesson that sets out a ton of ideas that you can either lift wholesale or, better still, use as a starting point to create cool licks and solos of your own. The reason the latter approach is best is that it will help cement in exactly why the sounds you are making work. I don’t want to describe it as painting by numbers but there is an element of that involved. Music is arithmetic after all and arpeggios – the nub of this feature – are all numbered intervals within the chords and scales you are playing.
Going back to the early 20th century and the dawn of the guitar solo, most players (Django, Lonnie Johnson, Charlie Christian, Eddie Lang et al) went directly to arpeggios (sequential chord tones) for inspiration. Essentially they ‘joined up the chord tone
dots’ with chromatic scale notes which gave Obviously the be-boppers, and later the fusion players, took this to extremes with complex scale runs added to the mix.
It was bluesers such as T-Bone Walker, that moved guitar from arpeggios to the Pentatonics now endemic in guitar playing. But the ideal with any recipe (including
our musical stew), is to mix the spicy with the bland, the extraordinary with the ordinary, the sweet with the sour. And that’s what Andy has succeeded in doing with this excellent lesson. Do enjoy it, and I’ll see you next month at Guitar Techniques pdf magazine (unless another rock star nicks my spot!). – NevilleMarten, Editor