Author: aloeroot

Mentors vs. The YouTube Experience

At one time, if you were serious about learning guitar, you found the local guru and tried to get accepted as one of his pupils. You did that because he was clearly the embodiment of what you wanted to learn. If he took you on, you committed to studying whatever was necessary to become a musician just like him. There is an organic continuity to a relationship like this that is very different from our current view of “learning to play the guitar”.

Today, there are literally thousands of guitar methods, approaches and modes of delivery out there. YouTube alone has changed the way we learn to play. It has allowed us to access players and material never before available. But, as in all things, there’s a price to pay.

We are tribal beings. We are built to emulate our heroes; to stand on their shoulders and be part of something bigger than ourselves. A relationship with a mentor involves much more than information. It involves sharing a history and a philosophy. It involves intellect, passion, humor and everything in between. It’s personal. Armed with this, we can enter the world fearlessly knowing we “came from somewhere.”

Try finding that on YouTube … Just sayin’ …

The Hybrid Blues/Funk/Rock/Country Scale

Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but this scale is used by everybody.  It doesn’t have a legal name, (at least I don’t think it does), but it’s what happens when you combine the most common   version of the Blues Scale (the Minor Pentatonic with the passing b5):

with its Country/Bluegrass cousin (the Major Pentatonic with the passing b3): 

The result is the hybrid Blues/Funk/Rock/Country Scale:   

As you can see, this thing is just three notes short of a chromatic scale!  (And the fact is, those     remaining three notes tend to be used constantly as passing notes – so what can I say!)  Still, it’s one of those structures that every good Blues, Funk, Rock and Country player knows inside and out, and that’s because it can be perceived as either a Blues Scale or a Country Scale with ‘additions’.  This means that all of your current licks (whether ‘blues’ or ‘country’) will work like a charm except now you have a bigger palette to work from.  Let’s listen to a few examples. 

(This is blues, funk, rock, country folks.  I didn’t include written notation here on purpose.  If you want to learn these, use your ear – it’s the way it’s been done in this music since time immemorial.  Slow ‘em down if you have to, but listen to the sounds, relate them to actions on the fretboard and internalize them.) 

Lick 1

Lick 2

Lick 3

A Point of View

Possibly the Most Important Aspect of Music Creation

‘Option Anxiety’ – that’s what it’s often called – the horrifying recognition that everything is available to you. It plagues composers, improvisors and writers, and it happens any time they don’t have enough discipline to impose limits on their output. The results of failing to define the boundaries of a composition or improvised solo is music that sounds like pots and pans falling downstairs.

The best advice often comes in small packages. One phrase can say it all. In this case, the phrase related to arranging, and went something like this:

“If you are going to arrange a piece of music, it is vital that you have a ‘point of view’ with relation to the piece. Without it, nothing will come together.”

(Mike Crotty … arranger extraordinaire)


That point of view can be anything from soup to nuts. It can be formal to outrageous, funny to heart stopping; it doesn’t matter. Once it has been defined, it will create a ‘raison d’etre’ (ahh … the French!) for the entire piece.

This, of course, applies equally to composition and improvisation. It is also a organizational principle that informs any number of philosophies relating to perception, the nature of reality and all that. But I digress! Let’s take a look at this as it relates to improvising.

‘Positioning yourself’ as you approach a solo can often help you deliver a coherent narrative. It can be something as simple as silently voicing ‘lyrical’, ‘busy’, or ‘fluid’; to imagining a shape, a graded dissonance or angular motion. Once that suggestion rings you have a basis for what follows.

One tried and true framework for improvising is to simply cop a little of the style of a favourite player. Whispering ‘play like Miles’, ‘like Wes’, ‘like Coltrane’ or like Metheny’ just before you play can have some startling results. These guys will actually ‘visit’ you for a minute, and might even set you on the path of a great solo. Now I don’t mean quoting a bunch of Methe-ny licks at the head of your solo to start it off. That’s just plain foolish and it will get you no-where.

No, what you want to do is connect with the feel, the tone, the ‘point of view’ of the guy – just for a minute There’s absolutely nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of your he-roes. Dead or alive, these guys are all around us and they wanna help. Fact is, if you are ac-tually committed to ‘playing’ you don’t stand a chance in hell of sounding like any of them anyway. You will always end up sounding like you.

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