Electric Bard

Hey, there’s a new jam in town. Wednesday night, 8PM, at Duffers. Yeah, the golf course bar. It’s hosted by Charlie and the Mad Dogs. The Malarkey’s drummer, Jay Dallamore, is their usual drummer, so I went down last night to check it out. I brought the Tele. I got up with Jay and Mad Dog Dieter on bass, and we rocked some Freddie King (Tore Down), an original tune called “Baby, Won’t You”, and then that good old standby, Brown Eyed Girl. The audience was very receptive.

I was playing through a Mesa Boogie – nice! I was a little hoarse after just those 3 songs, ’cause I gave it everything I had. I ran into Ashley Perry there, and she’s still rockin’ the roller derby thing. Check out the SS Rodeo site for details on the next match, March 12 in Penticton.

Mrs. Electricbard found some old pictures today. Was I really that young once? From left to right, Linda McRae, Rick, me, Gail.

Coming up on March 5, join us at the Bike Shop Cafe on Ellis Street. We’re on at 7PM until 9. Good food, mellow vibe. It will be fun! You could order something like this:

When we were there, enjoying the pasta, we listened to some great instrumental guitar music by Almost a Few, and shot a bit of footage on my iPhone, which you can watch on The Malarkeys YouTube channel.

I’ll be bringing along the Gibson J-45, but not the Tele on March 5. We hope to see a few friendly faces there!

Our band, The Malarkeys, have just posted a brand new song onto the band’s web site. The song is called Right as Rain.

The acoustic guitar tracks were laid down using the Gibson J-45, and all the electric guitar tracks feature the Squier Classic Vibe Telecaster, making its recording debut at our studio. The mandolin on the track is my 1917 Gibson A-4. The electric guitar was plugged straight into a little Mackie mixer and patched through a Beringer compressor, and then I used Logic Express 9’s Amp Designer to craft the guitar sounds. The amp models are a lot of fun to play around with, and I think I got some really good sounds on this track. I hope you agree – let me know if you do or if you do not!

Last Saturday night we played a wedding at the Summerhill Pyramid Winery. We had a lot of fun. I brought along my Gibson J-45, the Fender 12-string, and my Robert Cray model Fender Stratocaster. As the evening progressed we brought more rock to the set, including songs like What I Like About You, as well as a couple of blues tunes – Tore Down by Freddie King and Mercury Blues.

We had a request for Led Zeppelin. This is not the first time we’ve played a wedding where someone requests Zeppelin, and we’re a Celtic-influenced band, you know? But no fear, we had an answer. If you’ve never heard our version of Drunken Sailor, well, you’ve never experienced a full-on Malarkeys Celtic mash-up. Yes, our version of Drunken Sailor eventually winds its way into the guitar solo from Stairway to Heaven, with the Strat on full shred. The Squier Tele just wouldn’t have cut it yet, it’s still being broken in. The Strat was totally up to the challenge after 5 years of regular playing. As usual, the Hughes and Kettner Statesman Dual 6L6 kept all the guitars pumping.

Our next show is a public one, March 5, at the Bike Cafe on Ellis in Kelowna. Don’t miss it!

My birthday was this past Sunday, and some friends and I went to Poppadom’s for a fine Indian dinner. They brought me a slice of chocolate cake with a sparkler, plus one for Don, whose birthday was on Saturday. We had a great time there, as usual. I tried Tree Brewing’s Thirsty Beaver pale ale, which helped tame the curry. It was a delicious evening out with friends.

Also for my birthday, Gail (aka Mrs. Electric Bard) rented me a Squier Classic Vibe Telecaster.
It’s a really great guitar. I love the way it looks.

The sound is very Tele-esque, with a nice commanding bottom end. Playing individual notes it sounds very good and can really go from jazz to full-on twang no problem. It also sounds great doing blues. Saturday night I debuted it onstage at our UBCO gig for Art on the Line.

It occurred to me that the middle position on this Tele actually sounds a like the tone I used to pull from my stolen custom-built Les Paul. At one time I owned a walnut Les Paul that was built for me by a luthier named Gord Litster. It was a beautiful guitar, and if I can find any good pictures I will post them. I experimented with pickups on it over the years I had it, but when I last saw it there was an EMG-85 in the tail position and a standard Gibson PAF in the front. The thing was, though, that the guitar had a mini-switch that let me throw the pickups out of phase, and this was the position I used the most. It gave the guitar a slightly thinner, more nasal kind of sound, but still had plenty of sustain. The Tele gets that kind of in-between sound in the middle position too, and it sustains amazingly well (better than my Robert Cray Strat, which is a hardtail and sustains fairly well since I swapped out the original bridge saddles).

Is the Squier Classic Vibe Tele the ultimate Les Paul, then? Well no, not quite, but dang, I am having a lot of fun with this guitar. If you’re into Fenders and dig the oldies, check out the Squier Classic Vibe. Ignore the ‘Crafted in China’ decal and pay attention to the tone, fit and finish, wonderful colour and wood grain of the pine (!) body, the comfortable tinted neck, and guess what it’s all worth before you look at the price tag. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Last but not least, here are a few photos we found recently of Gail and I performing onstage with Randy Bachmann at Bluebird North in Vancouver, several years ago. Wow!

On Sunday I was in San Francisco and I had a chance to visit the Guitar Center on Van Ness. I was hoping to see the Gibson Les Paul Studio Deluxe ‘60s but I didn’t see one there. It looked they had a Les Paul Traditional Pro way up on the wall, but I couldn’t reach it and it wasn’t really what I was looking for anyway.

What I did see was one of the new Fender Blacktop Strats, in candy apple red with a maple neck, as well as a Blacktop Tele. I did not get a chance to plug them into an amp. The store was busy and some guy was shredding metal and the noise level overall was kind of intense. Nevertheless, my impression was that these guitar are mighty impressive for the money – $449USD and with the Canadian dollar at almost par, that’s a screaming deal compared to the $625 those guitars cost in Canada. I don’t know what duty or shipping would set you back.

I also had a chance to pick up the Paul Reed Smith SE Singlecut Korina. This is a nice looking guitar, very clean and minimalistic. It was surprisingly heavy, although not at all unmanageable. They also had an Epiphone Casino there. Those guitars are very light. There was lots of guitars to look at, and some very cool looking Ernie Ball basses in delicious colours. Almost makes me want to be a bass player just so I could have one of these things.

In my quest for the “ultimate” Les Paul, I’ve been outlining in this blog the kinds of features I’d like to see if I were to have, say, my own signature model Les Paul from Gibson. Having studied Gibson’s lineup carefully, I can’t find a model that gets it just right. A number of other manufacturers have some interesting takes on the iconic Les Paul design, though.

Paul Reed Smith guitars offer some lovely looking models, that include a few of my dream Les Paul features: two humbuckers, and a volume control you can reach with your right pinky for doing volume swells, as well as a pickup selector switch that won’t get in my way on the upper bout of the guitar body. And yet, as lovely as they look, the ones I’ve tried so far just don’t have “it”. I have not had an opportunity to try the SC 58, though, and it is so close to what I’m talking about in a Les Paul. Too bad they put the pickup selector where they did.

I recently say a new Godin guitar online that looks very impressive, especially in the electronics. Its pickups can be run as humbuckers, single coils, or P-90s. Wow! That covers it. The guitar is not bad looking. I wonder what it weighs. It’s called the Icon II Convertible . Is that really the best name they could come up with?

But maybe there’s another alternative showing up from, could it be, Fender? Fender’s new Blacktop Strat has two humbuckers with a 5-way switch that includes a couple of single coil modes, a master volume control (is it logarithmic?) and two tone controls. It’s also got 22 frets. They’re inexpensive and with a couple of mods might be very cool. I know I’d want to swap the saddles out for something more modern, and maybe change the amp-style knobs. With any luck I’ll get to try one out this weekend when I’m in San Francisco.

Right now in 2010, top 40 radio does not include a lot of epic guitar solos. Thanks to YouTube, though, the guitar solo has not gone away, and every day guitarists are uploading videos of themselves either reproducing a famous guitar solo, or showing off their own improvisational skills.
This YouTube guitar army is an awesome resource as a guitarist. In many cases you can see your favourite guitarist playing a solo you’re curious about learning, and you can see how they themselves played it. You can also find lessons and breakdowns of how a particular guitarist gets their sound, or how to play a famous solo in note by note detail.

For a lot of guitarists, the way into learning to solo is to reproduce someone else’s solo note for note. Another simple technique to begin playing lead guitar is to learn the melody of the song and just play that. Once you step beyond those techniques, you’ll want to start learning a few scales, or as is the case for a lot of lead guitarists in rock and blues, one scale in particular.

If you want to play jazz solos, be prepared to learn your theory. If you’re going to be good at it, you need to be familiar major scales, minor scales (harmonic minor, diatonic minor), and modal scales with exotic names like Mixolydian, Dorian, Ionian and so on.

The Pentatonic Scale
For rock and blues players, and even country, we can get away with one scale. I’m not saying this will make you a guitar god, but in combination with dynamics, vibrato and timing, you can go a long, long way with this one scale. The Pentatonic scale, as the name implies, is made up of just 5 notes. I’m not going to explain everything about that scale in this post, but here are a couple of pages you can visit online to get the basic information.
Pentatonic Major
Pentatonic Minor
Another way to express what the guy in these video links above is saying is that if you’re playing rock or blues in the key of, let’s say G major, use a G Pentatonic scale to build your solo. It will sound ‘bluesy’. So the rule is, whatever key the rock or blues song is in, play the corresponding Pentatonic scale, and that will always be a reliable place to start. This is what he refers to as the Pentatonic Minor scale.

If you’re playing a country song in the key of G major, use an E pentatonic scale, and howdy partner, you’re sounding kinda country. The same rule applies in any key. Without getting all technical or theoretical on you, think of it this way: Blues in A, scale in A. Country in A, go down 3 frets to F#. Works every time. This is what he calls the Pentatonic Major scale.

Here’s a quick reference chart:
Country song in the key of… play a pentatonic scale in the key of…
G -> E
Ab -> F
A -> F#
Bb -> G
B -> G#
C -> A
Db -> Bb
D -> B
Eb -> C
E -> C#
F -> D
F# -> D#

This is just a start to get you playing some notes that will sound OK. As you advance, there are other elements you’ll need to introduce that help define your signature style, like string bending and vibrato, which I’ll touch on in another post.

My interest in playing slide started with George Harrison. Guitar solos like the one in My Sweet Lord featured slide to great effect, and I wanted to get that sound. Learning to play slide involved a lot of experimenting on my part. I bought a big metal slide and started sliding around. The first thing I had to figure out which finger to put it on. The right answer is whichever one works for you. If you watch proficient slide players, you’ll see that different players prefer to wear their slides on different fingers, so it’s really personal choice. I’ve linked up some videos for you in this post featuring George (above) and Eric Clapton (below). They’re both using their pinkies, but peronally I use my ring finger. They’re famous and I’m not, so maybe you’ll want to consider that when you’re figuring out which finger to learn to use for slide playing.

Using your little finger for the slide leaves the other fingers free to do some fretting, so it’s a more versatile approach. Because I admire George and Eric’s slide playing so much, I’ve really tried to emulate their little-finger technique, but it just doesn’t work for me. I struggle to sound in tune, but with the ring finger I’m much more capable of playing in tune.

The other thing you have to sort out is what kind of slide to use, metal or glass? They have different tonal qualities, but again, it’s a matter of your personal choice. I used metal for years, but lately I’m using glass.

Finally, you’ve got to develop your fretting hand technique so that you’re kind of in tune, and not pressing too heavily on the slide and grounding out on the frets. I find that to play in tune, I have to aim to stop the slide right on top of the fret, as opposed to just behind it as your finger would be placed if you were fretting the note with your finger instead of a slide. Once you get that down, work on adding some vibrato (a little shaking of the slide on longer held notes), and you’ll sound cool as these guys.