Category Archives: News

Update – New Guitar-Muse Soloing Article, New Tracks Et More!

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Hi Everyone!

I just wrote an “instructional” post for Guitar-Muse about soloing that’s coming more from a self-pedagogical/ philosophical/ motivational standpoint but talks about the factors determining when a song needs a solo and how to develop your own voice when soloing.   It works off of some of the ideas I’ve written about here and you can read that here.

For those of you into the RedLnyx Trials games – you can hear me playing a solo on a track called “Come Alive ” on the new Trials Evolution game.  There’s a video for that here.  The solo starts at 1:26 or so and followed some directorial cues for what they wanted for the solo.  I’ll have a post about my video game recording experiences up next week.

I’ve mentioned Manrico Montero’s awesome Mandorla label before, but I’ve just sent a new soundscape track off to him for an Autumn-themed net release.  I have no idea how my field recording gone awry track will fit – the text for the track is:

“The ground grows cold

the sky holds it’s breath

in Autumn the bill comes due.”

so it may be ambient soundscapes – but it’s not new age by any means!  No word on release date for that yet.

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More reviews on the way.  I have a new set of monitors that I dig for the price range and I’m working with a beta version of the new Scuffham Amp update for a forthcoming review (early verdict – it’s cool!) More online lessons are also on the way.  I’m trying to get rough hewn tracks out the door and working on tracks for a new project.

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Finally, I’ve gotten a lot of really kind comments from people about the GuitArchitect’s… book series and I wanted to thank everyone for their support.  I’m happy that the books are out there and that people are getting something useful from them!

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Thanks again!

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The GuitArchitect’s Guide To Chord Scales Is Out Now (As Well As The New 4 Book Pdf Bundle!)

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The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Chord Scales

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Update – 2/3/2013

Hello everyone!  As of 2/1/2013, all of my books are available for order exclusively on my Lulu.com page and on Amazon which means that while I may run an e-book  bundle offer directly in the future as of right now, unfortunately, no bundle options are available.

I’m leaving the page up for archival purposes but if you go to the Books link at the top of the page, you’ll find more detailed information about the books below and the other books in the GuitArchitect’s Guide To:  series.

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I’m happy to announce that the Chord Scale book is done (with the help of massive edits from John Harper and Doug Kearns – thank you both!)!  

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 I’ll talk about it a little more below – but as a shortcut there are now 5 ways to buy the book.

(based on the 6/5/12 – pricing model)

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  • If you would like to purchase the Chord Scales pdf (or any other individual book pdf)  for $15 (usd) please click the PayPal link below.  (Also, when ordering, please specify which book you’d like – The GuitArchitect’s Guide To Modes: Melodic Patterns, The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes:  Harmonic Combinatorics, The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration, or The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Chord Scales).

 Any 1 GuitArchitecture pdf for $15

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  • If you would like to purchase any two book pdfs for $20 USD (and save $10 off of individual orders) please click the PayPal link below.  (Also, when ordering, please specify which 2 pdfs you’d like – The GuitArchitect’s Guide To Modes: Melodic Patterns, The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes:  Harmonic Combinatorics, The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration, or The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Chord Scales).

  Any 2 GuitArchitecture pdfs for $20.

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  • If you would like to purchase any three book pdfs for $30 USD (and save $15 off of individual orders) please click the PayPal link below.  (Also, when ordering, please specify which 3 pdfs you’d like – The GuitArchitect’s Guide To Modes: Melodic Patterns, The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes:  Harmonic Combinatorics, The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration, or The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Chord Scales).

Any 3 GuitArchitecture pdfs for $30. 

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  • The  Four-book PDF bundle (which includes The GuitArchitect’s Guide To Modes: Melodic Patterns, The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes:  Harmonic Combinatorics, The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration, and The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Chord Scales) is available for $40 USD using the PayPal bundle button below.  (A $20 savings off ordering the books on their own).

4 GuitArchitecture books for $40. 

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  • If you’d like a paper based version (and save yourself printing and binding costs), you can go to the link here ( Lulu.com ) to buy a nicely bound version of any of the books.

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Please note:

I turn all orders around within the same day I receive payment notification.

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Chord Scales is 190 pages of instruction and reference.  It’s the shortest book I’ve written, but it’s just as deep as any of the other books.  The big difference between this book and the other books, is that this book starts by taking one chord scale and really putting it through the ringer and demonstrating how to use it in ways that are intuitive and musical.   Once the process for what to do with a chord scale is demonstrated, the book  then goes on to outline all the unique chord scales from 3-12 notes!!!

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The book has a lot of performance insights and presents the material in a way I believe to be truly unique (at least I’ve never seen it dealt with this way before).  It’s incredible exciting to me, and while it’s been written as a soloing, compositional or improvisational resource for guitarists – it could be invaluable to musicians in general.

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Here’s the front  cover (more jpegs of the book can be seen below).


For more information about ordering, just skip to the bottom of the page.  For those of you who want to know more about the book, just keep reading.There are a couple of posts that I’ve put up that excerpts and adapts material directly from this book.  To get a sample of the book’s style you can check out :

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CREATING CHORDS AND LINES FROM ANY SCALE – A HARMONIC COMBINATORICS / SPREAD VOICINGS LESSON

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Making Music Out Of Scales

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The lulu.com page includes a preview option for the first 12 pages of the book, but I’ve included some additional jpegs of some of the Chord Scales book  pages below.  Since the jpegs were converted from the pdf of the book, there’s some pixelation in the jpegs that’s not present in the pdf,  but these will still give you an idea of what’s in the book.

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More Information:

If you’d like to find out more about the other books in the GuitArchitecture series, you may want to check out this post as well:

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DIFFERENT PRICING TIERS ANNOUNCED FOR BOOK PDFS

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As I said about the books, I’m striving to create content that represents something I would be psyched to find on the web and hopefully it evokes a similar reaction in you as well.

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Thanks for reading!

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Guest post on Joe Gore/Seymour Duncan’s Tone Fiend and The Fortunate Demise Of The News Page

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So, in typical GuitArchitecture “last thing first” style, the news page is gone.  It seems to make more sense to just put updates about gigs, recordings, etc. here.  I always forgot about the “news” aspect of the page anyway so (even with about 30 pages of updates and info in the hopper)  it’s not much of an immediate loss.  For those of you who subscribe to the blog, I’ll try to keep the news posts to a minimum.  In the meantime, here are some recent items that may be of interest.

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Guest Blogging for Joe Gore’s Tone Fiend

Big thanks to Joe Gore for posting my article (and editing my chicken scratches into something coherent) on the wild string sounds of Vietnam on his great tone fiend blog.  If you want to see some crazy guitars (and some crazier phrasing) you can czech out that post here.

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  • In other guest posting news, I have a (relatively) new post up on Guitar-Muse.  If you’re looking for a warm-up lick (and some good playing advice) check it out! A cool  interview with Mike Scuffham (of Scuffham Amps/S-gear) is also up here , and you can find all my posts (interviews, lessons, and more) here (it’s 3 pages so just tab through the bottom of the page.
  • Books.  I just want to take a moment and thank everyone for their pdf orders (and kind words about the books in general).  It’s simultaneously affirming and humbling at the same time.  So thank you!  If you’ve ordered a hard copy, I still hope to have print editions  by the end of January.  As soon as I get proofed editions – I’ll  get one out to you!

There’s more to come!!

As always, thanks for reading!

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The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Melodic Patterns Book “Pre-Release” Now Available

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6/5/12

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The official version of this book has been released as both a print and PDF version, so I’m leaving this page up  as a pointer for  historical purposes (and so that people who are interested in the book can get some more detailed information).   

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All ordering information (including an overview of the book and jpegs of sample pages) can be found here.

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Thanks!

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FnH Interview Online and other Guest Blogging

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Hey all – a couple of brief news things:

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1.  My interview with FNH Guitars is now live on Live4Guitar, a very cool guitar blog with a paid lesson service as well.  I’m going to be posting some lessons and additional content there fairly regularly, so check back here or at Live4Guitar.

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2.  I’ve also taken on a new weekly column for Guitar-Muse.com, that will be a 10 questions with various builders, players and tech people.  I’m in the process of lining some cool people up – but wanted to get your feedback as well.  The first person on the block is Jonathan Wilson who’s doing incredible work making bowed guitars in SoCal (check out some of the awesomeness on the Togaman GuitarViol site).  Update: This interview is now online, you can read all about it here.

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I’ve also got interviews with FnH Guitars, Jack Sanders and a couple of other people lined up.  But I’m interested to see who you dear readers, would like to read about.  If you could take a second to just put a name or a company name in the survey, it would be very helpful.

Click here to put your request in

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Thanks for reading!

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Rough Hewn Trio – Some Live Excerpts

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The Rough Hewn Trio –  an instrumental trio consisting of Chris Lavender on Warr guitar, Craig Bunch on drums and myself on guitar are getting back into the rehearsal cycle and gearing up for some shows this spring.  To get a feel for what the shows will be like here are some live excerpts from some improvisations we did this fall.  The live sets – will include a combination of pre-composed and improvised material.

For those of you who are interested – this session is all drums and laptops.  I’m running Pod Farm and Sooperlooper and Chris is using Guitar Rig. (an amp was used to re-amp the guitar in 1C – which had some gnarly digital distortion tho…)

Note:

mp3 playback is sometimes a little glitchy in Safari.  If it doesn’t play in your web browser – you may just have to reload/refresh the playback page.

Enjoy!

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Improv 2b

Improv 2a

Improv 1c

Guitarchitecture Post Featured In Guitar Player Holiday 2010 Issue – Quick Licks Section

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It’s been a couple of productive days – The pentatonic/blues lick that was featured in the quick lick/rig du jour post has been featured in the Guitar Player Holiday 2010 issue. It’s the issue with Santana on the cover.  Thanks again to Matt Blackett  and the GP staff!

The long overdue Tubtime cd, “We Bleed The Sun And Make It Pay” – is finally up for sale on Itunes and on the CD baby tubtime page. Featuring the talents of Patty Barkas, Geof Chase, Joe Rauen and Keichi Hashimoto – Tubtime was the first project I was involved with that was based solely on of structured improvisation and in many mays was a cornerstone of what I do now. In addition to cd baby and Itunes – it’s also available on emusic should be available on Amazon and any other digital distribution service over the next several months.

Rough Hewn Trio @ CalArts was a big hit!  We should have video/audio up soon.

More info coing soon!  Thanks for dropping by!

Tubtime: “We Bleed The Sun And Make It Pay” now available on CD Baby

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The long overdue Tubtime cd, “We Bleed The Sun And Make It Pay” – is finally up for sale on the CD baby tubtime page, and should be available on Itunes and Amazon over the next several months.

Featuring the talents of Patty Barkas, Geof Chase, Joe Rauen and Keichi Hashimoto – Tubtime is an experiment in 2003 to see if an accessible cd of structured improvisation could be successfully executed.

The CD notes are below:

Tubtime has its roots in work in the unholy union of drummer/engineer Geoff Chase’s “Directive 4″ project that featured rock improvisation with various Boston musicians and guitarist Scott Collins’ goal to be able to work with musicians of such a high caliber that they could perform a full set of improvised material that sounded pre-composed.

Over the course of 2003-2004 Tubtime ended up with several cds worth of material that will all hopefully see the light of day. The music is being finally released after numerous relocations and other various hold ups, because we kept running into people who had heard of us (or heard the tracks) despite having never played live. While we haven’t performed since then – the threat of more music is always a real one.

“We Bleed The Sun And Make It Pay” was the culmination of 4 such sessions. All of the music was written and tracked live and in real time (although, Geoff took some of the improvised material and used it as transitional material on transitional tracks.)

The poem on the cover photo (taken by Joe Rauen) was inspired by a quote attributed to Dick Cheney who rationalized a series of governmental policies by saying, “this is out due.” It was such an incredibly brazen sense of entitlement that the poetic fragment was written around it.

Visually, the Tubtime project was working around a “disturbed child” aesthetic with lots of pictures with distorted perspective and coloring outside of the lines. I think that the music captures some of that as well. There is a certain honesty of immediacy that comes from real improvisation – and hopefully that translates as well.

There was no real concept when we recorded the tracks, but I developed one when assembling the cd. As the tracks were mixed and sequences there was a specific story line worked out involving themes of narcissism, paranoia and altered states of perception.

“We Bleed The Sun and Make It Pay” is a type of sonic documentary of where we all were at the time of recording it. As it takes a couple of minutes to develop each of the pieces – I think It works best as a bumpy 58 minute sonic journey. I hope you enjoy both the turbulence and the scenery.

The tracks were performed by:
Patty Barkas – vocals
Geoff Chase – drums
Scott Collins –guitar & loops
Keichi Hashimoto – trumpet
Joe Rauen – bass & loops

Thanks for reading!

Rough Hewn Trio

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I just wanted to take a second to announce a new project I’ve been working on with Chris Lavender  and Craig Bunch.  Rough Hewn Trio is a project that mixes through composed ideas with heavy doses of improvisation.

We have our first gig this Thursday @ CalArts where we’ll be accompanying Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s  Brilliant “lost” film – Kurutta Ippeiji, (aka Page of Madness or Page out of order).

Craig and I have done a preliminary mix of some live recordings we’ve made – so we should have videos and mp3s up on a dedicated site soon with other novel things like an EPK and a bio.

Thanks for reading!  More info coming soon.

A quick lick – and a rig du jour update from Ho Chi Minh City

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Greetings from the former/current Saigon. (Technically Ho Chi Minh City but many of the locals call it Saigon).  I had hoped to post a couple of blog updates up before I left, but instead was running around checking things for the trip. Now a jet lagged – iced coffee and soon to be bahn mi –  fueled post:

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1 lick or 2?

So first – here is a lick that works off of the swept pentatonic idea (alternating 3 and 1 note per string ideas) that I explored in the last online lesson (you can find a pdf of that lesson here).  While the online lessons have focused a lot on pentatonics – I wanted to add the tritone to make “the blues scale” and show how this approach could be adapted.  Here is the idea ascending:

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It’s very scalar – but I added  a couple of points of interest:

1. the little descending turn around allows you to play the basic ascending idea starting on both up and down strokes.

2.  I started on the tritone (if played over E minor) or the b3 (if played over G major) instead of the root.  If you’re playing this over G – think Bluegrass metal ; )

3.  The motion is more diagonally oriented than the strict pentatonic example but is the same basic approach.  I start the lick with my first finger and then shift positions for the D on the 12th fret of the D string and the D on the HighE.

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Here is an mp3: Lick1

As variation – I took the same concept and applied it in a more positional approach.  Be careful with this stretch!  If it hurts stop immediately!!!

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Here is an mp3: Lick 2

And finally here are the 2 licks played back to back:  backtoback 1

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Laptop Rig

So I bit the bullet and got an apogee duet.  WOW!  It really has made a stunning difference in resolution and I suspect will help a lot with future mixes I’m working on. With that in mind I wanted to share with the rig I used for the mp3s above.

Here was the basic amp setting I used in Pod Farm 2.0.  This was based on a customtone forum patch called Electric Gypsy.  I just swapped in a tube screamer and bypassed the cab (using the Recabinet impulse responses instead).  One of the big revelations that I found in pod farm is that I could put preamps AFTER the power amp.  Adding that in to the signal chain opened it up a lot.

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I blogged about using impulse responses over the cabs before.  The lie 6 cabs sound good – but to my ears the IR’s add a whole other area of depth.  Here are the IR’s I used – these were from the Modern 1960 4×12 set.  The screen shot is from LA convolver.

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Finally – a screenshot of how it all lays out in AULab.  I just hit the record button in au lab and edited out the noise before and after the take in fission.

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FNH Guitar –> Apogee Duet–>AULAB–>PSP Vintage Warmer–>Pod Farm 2.0–>La Convolver (w. Recabinet IRs)–>Sooperlooper

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I’m still tweaking things – but I think that soundwise everything is improving a lot from where it was even a month ago.  Once I get an A/B set with the floorboard – I think that the laptop is going to be the rig du jour.

One last note – the macbook has is using 4 gigs of ram and was updated with a 7200 rpm Seagte internal drive. (500 gig from OWC).  My computer accepts a 4gig chip in 1 slot – so I may go up to 6 gigs – but the faster internal drive made a big performance difference in the machine. I’d say you’d really need to have that if you’re going to try to go this route.

* Note – I’ve recently posted more on this topic here which may be of interest to you.