Jason Becker Blackberry Jams as an arrangement case study

General Music Discussion Songwriting
#1

If you’ve never listened to Blackberry Jams, it’s a great compilation of unfinished versions of mainly his Perpetual Burn material where many of the songs aren’t fully arranged and you can listen through the entire album and pick out where one song became two entirely different songs and fused with parts of others.

Strongly recommend going through this as an example of how building up a body of material and rearranging it into a finished album can work.

One example - part of this ends up in altitudes, part ends up in Temple of the Absurd:

3 Likes
#2

Love this album. As far as I’m aware it’s just him playing over himself. Very raw recordings.

You can really tell how skilled and quirky his playing is.

Like you said a lot of his songs are in here mixed up, I love this one, part of eleven blue Egyptians. And temple of the absurd.

1 Like
#3

Ive been on a bit of a Becker bender lately just to cop some cool blues licks of his and was perusing the forum and found this picture of Becker’s hands you posted. This has got to be fake right? You posted it awhile ago in this thread:

image

1 Like
#4

Lol not sure if that picture is real or not but I’ve seen multiple claims Jason was very double jointed.

Also rewatching those videos of his playing it does seem a lot like Vinnie Moore’s elbow picking with forearm rotation escape movements

#5

It’s real, has long flexible fingers, great for arpeggios.

Kinda like Paganini lol

6 to 13 hammer n pull offs

#6

One thing I’ve been struggling with in past is acually how many choices and how complex recent software is. It gives you a lot of options, but I think it messes with our natural flow.

Most of the classic music we listen to before software really took off is made with very basic technology, like just recording a raw backing track, and then adding layers onto that. It’s a very logical and natural way of building a song.

When you try to do this with modern software, there are so many options to fiddle with that it takes away from that classic style of building a song layer after layer. The examples in this thread with Jason as far as I know are very basic, I think it’s a 4 track recorder. So really takes a lot of the fiddling away and lets you just build a song layer after layer.

1 Like