August 2022 Guitar Newsletter: Let Your Guitar Playing Be Inspired By Other Instruments
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There is much to be learned from listening to music composed and played on other instruments. Music consists not only of melody, harmony and rhythm, but also of the tone, timbre, texture, dynamics and playing style unique to each instrument. These elements are an equal part of the musical equation and help us understand why genres exist and why a brass quintet is recognizable from a traditional bluegrass band.
Listening closely to how other instruments are played is a field of rejuvenation, especially if your main music diet is guitar dominated. For example, recordings of solo flute or other wind instruments shed insight on phrasing melodies differently than what might come naturally on the guitar. Similarly, listening to jazz pianists using all ten fingers challenges a guitar player’s concept of complex chord voicings because guitar players are limited to a maximum of 6 notes that can be played at once. Tuning into the endless rhythmic patterns of percussionists and drummers from around the world opens up the gate for innovative strumming patterns and challenges our ability to count and keep time in odd time signatures. Allowing yourself to meditate on the beautiful sounds of the sitar, sarod or oud, ancient guitar-like instruments, sharpens the ear to hear microtones, which are not standard to the modern guitar.
Recently, while revisiting recordings of the amazing polymath Albert Schweitzer playing J.S. Bach organ music, I was mesmerized by the huge tonal spectrum of a church organ. The sustained and flowing sounds of air being blown through organ pipes recorded in a large cathedral are so different from the standard approach to guitar playing which requires a constant plucking of the strings!
After absorbing Albert’s interpretations of Bach’s Fantasia & Fugue in G Minor (BWV 542), I found myself in front of my effects pedalboard attempting to emulate the sound of a church organ. With the aid of a volume pedal, plenty of reverb, tremolo, some delay and an octave shifter, these so called stomp boxes really opened up the sonic landscape of the electric guitar and led to hours of exploring!
The electric guitar is an amazing creature partly because it can act like a gecko and camouflage itself quite well if the player can use the technology at hand creatively. Once an electric guitar signal hits an assortment of effect pedals, a new palette of tones arise, much like a graphic artist making use of digital technology to drastically alter their images.
Similar to a wasabi pallet cleanser while enjoying a variety of sushi, steeping into non-guitar music and feeling oneself into how other instruments are played is very refreshing. Better yet, visualize how those tones might be replicated on the guitar with whatever possibilities are available to you! Not only is this journey fun but also filled with surprises and unexpected outcomes. Along the way you might accidentally brew up completely new guitar sounds, some quite funny, others disturbingly scary. Ultimately, this process can be extremely inspiring and recharge your inner creative juices. Remember, if you do stumble across a sound you really like, take a picture of all the settings or jot your discovery down in a notebook so that you can duplicate it again. Every tiny adjustment will effect what is coming out of the amplifier!
There are so many amazing sounds in our musical universe thanks to the huge variety of instruments, both ancient and modern, that create a blossoming garden of genres. Why not explore them all and incorporate them into your playing! I hope you enjoy this month’s playlist featuring a selection of non guitar music of various solo instruments. Have fun finding new possibilities approaching the guitar from another angle!
Chris
