Music Branches and Day 22

In my post titled "Regression" I talked about being able to back up in time to find the influences of your favorite bands that would in turn be able to influence you in your playing with the same genre.  Sometimes though, you do not have to go back, but you can branch sideways in time.  For this I gave the example of "Grunge" in the 90's.

The person I was talking to likes some Nirvana.  I told this person that this was only natural, as their favorite genre was Punk.  I said that if you take the top Grunge acts of the early 90's, you can basically split them with Grunge and a more classic style and see EXACTLY how they formed their music.

If you take the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, and Black Flag, and you add the typical Grunge characteristics to that style of music, you're going to get Nirvana.  Kurt Cobain wrote in his own personal journals that the Sex Pistols were thousands of times more important to him than The Clash.  He was also a huge fan of the pre-punk band The Stooges, and of their lead singer Iggy Pop.

If you look at the "world music" influenced heavy rock of The Who and Led Zeppelin, and then listen to Pearl Jam, you're going to see similarities there too.  Heavy 70's rock mixed with Grunge fits with classic Pearl Jam perfectly.  If you take heavy metal, like Black Sabbath and Motorhead, and mix that with grunge, you're going to get Soundgarden.

Being a fan of Grunge might lead you to being a fan of playing more genres than you ever thought you would.  Nirvana can lead you to Soundgarden which then leads you to heavy metal, or it can lead you to Pearl Jam which will lead you to classic rock.  All the while you can be going back and finding those influences and before you know it, you are a very very diverse musician.

Day 22

Holy crap did I play a lot in day 22.

Started out before lunch doing my warm ups in Rocksmith.  I have pretty much stopped doing Gone Wailin' every day, and I only play it when I'm in the mood for it.  It has helped me with my chord strumming, and I very much appreciated it, but I have lots to do now and I feel like I can drop it.  I still find Ducks Re-dux good for getting my mind thinking about the fretts, I kind of need it to get past the 12th fret faster, as I'm getting into some songs that use a lot of stuff up there but that marker skip to 15 is F'ing me up.

After lunch I checked out the Everlong that is in the game.  I had pretty much stopped playing this version because its a version of the song I never see myself playing.  I know the parts that I don't play, but I don't really practice them.  As I've said before, Everlong is done live with 3 guitars and a bass.  The "Lead" version on Rocksmith has stuff in it that sounds HORRIBLE unless you have a rhythm guitarist backing it up at the very least.  Anyway, I was doing a few things wrong, and I needed to know if I wanted to do the reverse lead up on the last uptake of the chorus.  I also went to youtube to see more versions of how people play it online.  I fixed a couple of things I was doing WAY wrong, and it has made my version sound much better.

I then decided to record my little bits of songs I use to practice the Pentatonic minor/major scales, and a few other little phrases I play a lot.  I named each one and recorded them on my phone in case I ever go a long time w/o playing them and want to remember them.

I then practiced several songs in Rocksmith that I had already done.  Blitzkrieg Bop I have learned and played to 95% completion.  I just mess up a little going through the whole song, but I know the parts.  That is by far my most done song, and its also rated the "easiest".  Though, Everlong has several songs rated below it on the easiness meter, and I disagree with it.  I tried Thunderkiss '66 and did quite well.  I was right to wait till I had done a ton of palm muting.  I am very surprised to do that it is tuned in Standard E also.  I did 16 Saltines and I am fairly confident that I could get all of it, except the solo, with an evening of really focusing on it.  I tried one of the random "I don't know this band" songs because it was listed as easy, and it was, but omg, I think i'd rather mute the TV.  There were a couple of more that I can't think of right now, I'm typing this the next morning instead of after the practicing like usual.

I watched a movie and playing in the pentatonics while watching the movie.  They are easy enough to do without looking at the fingerboard, so I was fine even though it was a sub-titled Japanese samurai movie.  So all in all, it was a real productive day.

Regression and Day 20

I posted before how my decision to play what is fun to me helped me become a better bassist(and eventually a better guitarist).  The other way that broadened my horizons and improved my playing was finding my influences and looking at their influences.

Some of the players over at Talkbass have some amazing talent, and they show it in youtube videos.  As I began watching them I noticed that there were probably 2 real camps of play style that I liked.  There were the slappers, which I already knew their influences.  I really don't have a knack for it.  Another was the jazz bassists.  They idolized Jaco Pastorious and the artists influenced by him.  I had tried to listen to Jaco several times, and I just never "got" it.  Later I learned more theory, and I learned about more technique, and one day I listened... and it hit me.  It was one of the most game changing days of my musical creative hobby.  I understood what his fingers were doing, and I understood his techniques and I understood what was amazing about him.  There was still a lot of "elevator" music I could not stand to listen to, but I eventually found songs of his I liked.

I listened for more music that featured this sort of fast play "busy" bass playing.  Yes, finally, I heard John Paul Jones, frequently down mixed in songs so that Page got the spotlight, but I could hear him back there, going nuts, making great music.  From John Paul Jones I looked at those that he influenced and found Robert DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots.  I had their first 4 albums, so I go back and listen and holy crap does it sound like John Paul Jones' style.  Stuart Zender of Jamiroquai was kind of doing funk slap with this "busy" bass style too, Virtual Insanity has some great bass.  Many of the artists I found playing like this never cited John Paul Jones as a inspiration though, so I dug around and found that JPJ and many others idolized Motown.  I learned of James Jamerson, who played on more #1 songs than the Beatles and Elvis combined.  Songs like Bernedette by The Four Tops, What's Goin' On and Let's Get it On by Marvin Gay.  My Girl!  Heard it Through the Grapevine, I was Made To Love Her, Aint Nothin' like the Real Thing.  ALL JAMES JAMERSON.  I listened to these songs over and over, and learned the parts that I was good enough at the time to play. 

Guitar is like that too though.

Like ACDC or The Rolling Stones?  Angus Young and Keith Richards love Chuck Berry.  Even their tone is similar to the stuff Chuck was doing long before either were in a band.  If you look up Chuck Berry playing on TV you might see something familiar.  Angus Young's antics on stage.  The way he walks when he plays and the way he struts when he does solos, it is all an homage to Chuck.  Well if you want to play like Keith and Angus, Chuck Berry is a great way to start.  If you can play Back in Black or Highway to Hell, chances are you could play anything Chuck Berry has put out.

"aliens have found our voyager spacecraft and have sent a message, I will read it as it comes in... it looks like it is only 4 words long... the words are; Send More Chuck Berry"

Watch his solo in that video.  There's a lot of famous guitarists that got their start seeing this on TV and thinking it was the coolest thing they had seen when they were kids.

Rocksmith actually has this built into the game

I was talking to someone about punk.  They really like Greenday.  Well, Greenday has their influences as well.  I told them to listen to bands like The Clash and The Ramones.  Rocksmith has a Ramones song, and learning that would help with learning Punk in general, Ramones is a great lesson in punk rock's basic music origin.  I told this person that they could look outside of punk as well.  The Kinks is where a lot of the punk sounds came from, particularly the punk leading up to Greenday anyway.  Dave Davies pioneered the whole fuzz type of distortion, and if you can play several of the easier Green Day songs, then you have all the tools you need to play The Kinks' earlier stuff.  The Kinks is on Rocksmith 2014 as well.  So you have 3 good generations of "punk" music each separated by about 20 years, but each close enough that you could tell the influence.

This kind of lead to talking about genre mixing bands that are still taken together as a whole, but that's another post for another day.

Day 20

Today I figured I would do the Power Chord lesson.  Green Day's "Brain Stew" was a simple song I learned early on.  It was easy to play and it was recognizable by people I knew.  It was not until much later that I realized that this was the perfect introduction to Power Chords.  I practice Brain Stew even today, to keep my finger's memorizing that shape.  Power Chords keep their same shape all over the board, so unbeknowst to me, I was learning skills that would help me on about a billion songs.

The lesson was pretty well explained.  The problem I have with the lesson is that they do not going into the finger positions very well.  You start telling new players to use their pinky on something as simple as Power Chords and they are going to get sore, tired, and stop doing it.  I use the old blues man's left hand techniques.  I rarely use my pinky finger because I gotta be ready to bend strings at any situtation, so I learn to stretch my ring finger for that.

There is perfectly good ways to learn to use your pinky finger, I just don't think power chords is a way of doing it.  I have never seen anyone use their pinky finger on Power Chords in a real life applicable way.  I built my strength of my pinky playing My Girl on bass.  The version I played was based on the minor pentatonic scale and it turns out I was learning that shape without knowing it... so bonus.  But the point is, on bass the frets were so wide I had to use my pinky in that song.  I see people use their pinky while doing minor pent stuff all the time.  If you're going to give someone an exercise to build up physical conditioning, make sure it is going to be useful.

Anyways.  I feel like I have taken the lessons that have really interested me and stayed doing session mode stuff and improv way too much.  So for the next couple of days, I am going to focus on perfecting the lesson tracks of the last few lessons and even getting academic about the minor scale positions.