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While working on some jazz-flavored lines for the Pickslanting Primer update, we though this would be a good topic for a blog post. Do you âneedâ fancy picking techniques to play complex music? Not at all. And who better to exemplify this than John McLaughlin, one of the most formidable technicians to ever wield a plectrum. With a simple single-escape motion and maybe a little sweeping and legato, you can craft some killer stuff in almost any style. This is why we always recommend working on vocabulary wiht the technique you have right now, rather than chasing the technique you may think you need, but donât yet have.
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This is Robben Ford discussing exactly this topic.
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I like a lot this concept and sometimes sit down to try and write stuff in this way (my preference is usually DSX a la McLaughlin), like you did with the âDown Around The Worldâ pack.
However I am not good at writing, so Iâm really hoping to see some cool tunes written by other CTC-savvy forummers. People, please populate the âShow and Tellâ sections with stuff like this 
. With proper knowledge of how pick-style guitar works, we (well, you mostly!) can write some really fun stuff to play!
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Iâm noticing a zeitgeist, if you will, of âwe need a way to compile sets of ideas/licks to play that are organized by what sort of picking style you need to play them.â
More on topic: OP is a very very very good post and very worth thinking about.
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What heâs saying about doing more âplayingâ than âpracticingâ is interesting, and something that at least a few of the players we have interviewed have also described. Albert Lee is the example I always think of. He couldnât play a straight major scale when I asked him, probably because he never really worked on stuff like that in any serious way.
More generally, when Robben says you end up playing what you practice, and if you practice scales and patterns, thatâs what youâll play â that has been true for me. I havenât really found any strong direct correlation between learning to play a scale rapidly, in a straight line, and the ability to improvise more twisty-turny melodic type phrases like you find in styles like country and bebop. I only get better at those styles of playing when I specifically try to play in those styles.
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Troy, really cool post!
In the Dominant Bop DSX Sixteens example, these arenât lines that McLaughlin plays as far as I know - Is there a particular player that you modeled these lines off of?
thanks!
No theyâre not McLaughlin lines. I tried to be clear about that in the post, but I can understand the confusion.
The idea was simply that we were working on more trad / old-school bop type lines for instructional stuff, and I started writing / playing things in the style as a kind of a baseline for anyone who likes jazz. Not everybody wants to play the Yngwie six-note pattern, and a few players have specifically mentioned that the focus on high-gain rock is a turnoff for them. Which honestly I agree with â we need more variety.
That being said, we canât cater to every kind of jazz player that buys a copy of our lessons, but we should have something that speaks them in a very general sense. So an old-school toe-tapping swing style seemed like a good place to start.
No specific player model here, just what I think groovy old school swing sounds like.
Edit: Added the following to the blog post for clarity:
The idea isnât to sound lke John, and to my mind this phrase, with its use of chromaticism, really doesnât. One look at the short âCherokeeâ tablature excerpt above makes clear several of Johnâs more signature stylistic elements, like two-note-per-string motifs, which weâre not trying to copy here. Instead, the idea is to take his relatively simple and straightforward mechanics and implement a musical style â in this case, an old-school swing type vibe â that on the surface you might think would require more technique to accomplish.
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I love Johnâs playing but he doesnât really play bebop lines. I think studying Jimmy Raney (who uses a legato technique) , tal farlow , chuck wayne (the first jazz guy to use economy or sweep picking), Billy bean, Joe pass , pat martino or George Benson would get you closer to sounding like a bebop guitarist . John plays more patterns whereas a bebop guitarist is more linear and has lines that switch directions moreâŚmore varied peaks and valleys within the line.
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For sure. Again, apologies for the confusion here. The idea was to copy Johnâs phsyical mechanics, because they are simple and straightforward, not his musical style. Even a picking technique that you might think of as being more suitable for pattern-based playing is quite capable of playing the kinds of varied lines that bop players typically write. Those are the examples we compose in the blog post, and they are more similar (to my mind) to the kind of swing style playing youâre referring.
Weâll be clearer next time!
Fun fact, I once owned the domain TalFarlow.com. Never did anything with it, let it lapse.
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No need to apologize of courseâŚas a jazz player who dabbles in metal I have learned a lot from your materials. I really just wanted to point out that Johnâs picking every note approach is very uncommon among jazz guys âŚmost use legato stuff to make the asymmetrical music flow on the guitar. Tal Farlow is a great example of thatâŚit would be cool to see a tutorial of that stuff (at least for me!)
Thanks for your answer Troy - I was just curious because players like Benson, Farlow, and Django are all upward escapers/USX (not sure what the lingo is now) So, I was wondering if you knew of any Bebop/Straight Ahead jazz guitarists that used primarily DSX?
Too bad Larry Coryell passed. Of the three speedsters of that era (DiMeola, McLaugjin) he was the most bop influenced, in terms of lines. Would love to see how he negotiated the head from âScotlandâ which has driven me nuts for 30 years! While weâre at it, would love to see a solution/transcription of that amazing line John M. and Jerry Goodman play at the beginning of âEternityâs Breathâ. Those are my two Bucket List lines!
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Bensonâs mechanics would make a great study! His sweeping lines are brutal, as are the kind of chromatic, reverse-cascading lick he does to end the first chorus of his solo on âAffirmationâ (did I use the term âchorusâ correctly? Sorry for being semi-literate).
I only became aware of Robben Ford when I was cutting out extracts from my old guitar magazines to keep the bits I wanted to save space, and inside one for August 1998 was a transcription of his version of Duke Ellingtonâs I ainât got nothinâ but the blues, which the transcriber said was the hardest song he had found himself transcribing. So I had a better look at it.
And this I think is what Robben is getting at when he refers in the above video to the difference between technique and music; Iâll leave it to those who have not heard the studio 1988 version of the above song to find it out and have a listen because the difficulty comes not in the notes played but in the phrasing.
And in a number of interviews Robben will say the same thing, learn your chords, learn your chords, just learn them.
So when I think Iâm stuck at writing something new I always think, chords, phrasing, and itâs surprising whatâll turn up.
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Totally agree with this -
I bashed away at crosspicking for 5 months, but actually the John McLaughlin motion is the only one I can do right now.
Now Iâm just practicing with that and I can now play much smoother, quicker lines arranged for this motion. Also Iâm having a lot more fun learning, because I can learn these lines quicker.
I have left the crosspicking stuff for a while, hopefully developing a 2-way escaped motion will come eventually and I can come back to the bluegrass tunes later, but at the moment I enjoy learning 3nps lines arranged for DSX and also pentatonic stuff too, as well as just using a bit of hybrid picking or legato to change after upstrokes.
Thanks Troy for this great article and also the liberating advice to just work with what you can do now!
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No reason you canât include some Jake Workman-style bluegrass in there too. Not every string change in every phrase may work, but whole phrases will definitely work. The vocabulary of bluegrass, jazz, and country all have similiarities in terms of the swing-style upbeat accents, where chord tones are placed versus passing tones, etc.
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Have you checked out the bop phrases we wrote for the blog post? All the stuff youâre asking about is in there â swing-style upbeat accents with passing tones, de-emphasized downbeat chord tones using slides and legato, chromatic enclosure approaches to chord tones, etc. These are all the âingredientsâ of swing as I see it, and they need to line up rhythmically, as you have pointed out, or things sound off.
In the Instagram version of this I stepped through one signature swing phrase in particular that almost everyone plays, slowed down, so you can see exactly how the picking structure works:
This is pretty much the universal way to do II-V or II-V-I no matter what your picking style is. It just happens to be a perfect single-escape lick. When it comes to pure alternate picking, there is no difference between doing it this way or the USX way. Just the order of the pickstrokes flips. If you wanted to argue for the DSX way, as Iâm doing it here, you could do that, because it places downstrokes on downbeats and upstrokes on upbeats, which is cool.
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yes thatâs true. Actually I need to get back onto transcribing the Jake Workman video. I started, then we had guests so I had to plug into some headphones onto my electric and I got side-tracked with that!
"The ability to teach yourself world-class guitar technique is impressive. The ability to teach yourself a technique you donât even know exists , and then to organize an entire musical vocabulary around that technique, while being largely unaware of doing so, is positively super-powered. Thatâs what separates the greats from the rest of us. "
I have pondered these issues for a long time and I want to question what has become âcommon wisdomâ , namely a feeling of awe for these people because of unconscious skill acquisition, I feel this is misplaced.
We can all be in momentary awe for each other for flights of magnificence(it would get pretty boring otherwise), but I choose the path less traveled which is awareness of self in thought and action, as I understand the word is for this pursuit is Phenomenological awareness.
I love piano a lot but the one reason I also pursue plucked exposed stringed instruments is John Mclaughlinâs playing but the idea of letting players find there own way with technique is just not sound mentoring anymore. And its not that one should look for or try shape someone completely, no not at all but awaken an awareness of what is happening and most important why and how to unlock the door to a feeling of true self expression not days, weeks months later but in the actual presence of the master becoming a part of or becoming truly aware of expressing oneself within that lineage.
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