required to control the unplayed strings?
For every note played, the other five strings
must be muted every time you play a new
note! And the muting doesn’t come from
one simple source. You can use the palm of
your picking hand, the pick itself, the tips
of your fretting fingers, the front side of
your fretting fingers, your thumb, or even
just turn off your distortion box at a precise
moment. Most of these techniques utilize
small, specific physical motions that are
barely visible, but again, are vital.
Of course, no one notates this sort of
thing when writing out sheet music. It
would be painstaking to write and cumbersome to read. But in the real world of playing rock guitar, it has to be done!
Imagine if a drummer had to do this.
If every time drummers hit their snare,
they had to lightly hold every other drum
on their kit to keep them from making
an unwanted racket. Only octopi could
be drummers! Or think of the piano. In
order to play a single, clear note, pianists
would have to stretch out their arms in
both directions to cover and control the
other 87 notes! The sensitivity and feedback potential that rock guitar players use
(to their advantage) would make many
other instruments simply uncontrollable or
impossible to play. This is why I feel that
the art of playing a distorted electric guitar
should not be underestimated. Distortion
exaggerates the potential for beauty or ugliness, and it’s purely up to the guitarist to
steer the sound one way or the other. This
is one of the things I love most about the
electric guitar. It may have dangerous risks,
but the sonic rewards for getting it right
are glorious.
And then there’s vibrato. Again, those
jazzy flatwounds tend to keep things
on the safe side. In fact, they are barely
I must admit that when I see a
rock guitar player strap on an
instrument, the first thought that
enters my head is worry. I’m
worried that it’s going to be noisy.
bendable, while slinky roundwound strings
open up a whole world of vibrato possibilities. The whammy bar and the slide are
other variations on this fantastic theme.
Like before, the subtleties that separate
the beautiful from the noisy are nearly
impossible to notate on a written page. You
can show “where” the vibrato should happen, but it would be impractical to notate
“how.” And the “how” is everything! If you
listen to one note from B.B. King or Brian
May, you can immediately tell who is who,
just by their vibrato. I love them both, but
I can’t imagine how to write down the difference in a way that could be quickly and
easily read.
There’s more: Rock guitar players gain
expression by sliding in and out of notes,
using different pick angles to squeeze out
pick harmonics and manipulate different
attack textures, using pick scratches and
other percussive sounds, and controlling
harmonic feedback.
What is my conclusion from all this?
First of all, if the most important stylistic
ingredients of rock guitar can’t be realistical-
ly notated or perceived visually, this leaves
us to use THE EARS. Written music cer-
tainly communicates something (notes and
rhythms) that forms the skeleton of music.
Your ears will give the music its body and
soul, and bring it to life. Rock music may
be relatively simple harmonically, but the
performances are as deep as the human
spirit. In the vast majority of great record-
ings and performances, no one had any
charts in front of them. It was all by ear.
Fig. 1
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