Soloing

Contents

Allan Holdsworth (Guitar Player 1980)

When you solo, do you organize runs in terms of scales, or chords, or whether you're high or low on the neck?

I try to just play naturally. I don't analyze what I'm playing - I follow my instincts. I suppose some people are very conscious of what they're doing. "Oh no! I played a high note; now I've got to play a low one." I try to hear something that makes sense and sounds reasonable, and I play it.

Allan Holdsworth (Guitar Player 1982)

How do you relate your solos to the chord changes? Do you consciously try to cover those chords?

Yeah. I break it down to find out what the chord structure is, what scales I can use, if I can superimpose things over the top such as triad. I generally experiment with it. There's no set way. I don't go about each tune thinking, "This is what I have to do." For me to be able to play it I have to be able to see it in my mind's eye. I can't play off a piece of paper. If I do, I've had it.

Have you ever tried recording a rhythm part on a cassette and working out a solo to the playback?

I have done that, but I usually don't. I usually just study the chords and make a few notes for myself.

Do you think the register that a solo is played in has an important bearing on it?

No. The solo itself has an important bearing on it. I don't say it has to be slow and low. I don't think being one way makes it any more of one thing than another. I don't make any rules about it. If it's a solo that starts out low, I'll think about the notes in that area, but I don't divide the neck up. It's all one.

Allan Holdsworth (International Musician 1981)

How much are your solos improvised?

ALAN: All of them are improvised. All players improvise their solos don't they? No? (look of astonishment crosses face) Oh well, all of mine am.

Allan Holdsworth’s New Horizons (Downbeat 1985)

("I tend to hear flurries of notes as a whole, from beginning to end, rather than hearing one note after the other")

At home he continues to practice "unusual scales or anything that I feel I'm really bad at. I practice playing over chord sequences, for example. I want to be able to reach a point where I can improvise without falling back on anything. Because sometimes when you play and you're in a gig situation, you kind of dry up and you fall back on the things that you've learned - all the things that you've practiced. And that's really when I feel bad, because then I'm just doing the parrot thing, I'm not really playing. I live for those few moments when I'm really playing and coming up with new things. "Some guys practice certain things so that they'll be able to play them on a gig. I never do that because I would feel that I only got good at practicing. That way, I really didn't learn anything new at all. So when I practice, I try and improvise and play something different on the same theme each time, as many variations as I can think of without ever repeating myself!'

Castles Made Of Sand (Guitarist 1987)

When you're soloing you're generally soloing over your own changes, so you know them inside out.

You'd automatically assume that because I've written the thing it would be easier for me to do that, but it's not. In actual fact some of the tunes that I've written I find incredibly difficult to solo over, and sometimes I have to sit down for a long time. Because it's one thing to harmonically create something and it's another thing to blow like crazy over it. So I have tremendous problems with some of my own tunes, unless they're particularly simple. I like to put chords in orders that they wouldn't necessarily come in and I've seen other guys have a little bit of trouble with them, so that always makes me feel a lot better.

Are you thinking musically or arithmetically that this scale or this arpeggio will fit that chord?

I try to think of improvisation as being an unconscious release of everything you've learnt in the past. But you don't particularly want to be so concentrated on it that your creativity's bunged up. You know what the chords are and what the scales are that constitute the chord progression, and what I try to do is to solo over them as inventively as I can at the time. That might mean superimposing different things - chords on top of other chords, in a scalic way - because I like things that kind of tweak your ear and make you want to hear that bit again. I just try to be as inventive as I can, which is not that Inventive, but it's the best I can do at the time.

No Record Contract, No Big Hoopla, But The Fans Have Kept The Faith For Allan Holdsworth (Guitar World 1982)

"Single notes I hear like a long note. Then if it's a flurry of notes, I tend to hear them not as one note after another but as a whole, from beginning to end, like seeing a color. If you play over one chord and superimpose another one over it, just to move it around a bit - I do that 'cause I always like those things that are harmonically interesting, where you want to go, 'What was that? Gotta hear that again!' I'm trying to find that feeling. It's slightly different from a 'sheet of sound,' in that most of the notes are important. I hear it like a line over a particular chord change."

No Secret (Guitar Extra 1992)

Q: In soloing, you seem to prefer to stay on the top four strings, and do a lot of moving up and down the neck.

Allan: That's because the sound is important as well. If you play the note in the A string, and then play the same note on the D string, it sounds a lot better on the D.

On The Level (IM&RW 1991)

IM - So when you are soloing do you actually think about resolving back to chord tones and that sort of stuff?

"Yeah, I am just superimposing things over the top of it. It's like you are superimposing things over the top of each other. You try and extend the harmony. It's nothing different other than the fact that I have tried to stay away from a normal kind of approach to it. Like, in the approach of playing over changes from a BeBop standpoint. What I want to do is be able to play over anything, any kind of chord sequence and not to be able to hear anything that came from BeBop because I didn't come from that. I don't think it's essential at all. In fact, I think it's slightly limiting because it's like you've already got blinkers on to a certain extent."

Patron Saint (Guitar Player 2004)

Do you hear solo lines in your head before you play them?

I wish I could hear a solo in my head from the very first note to the very last, but they kind of go their own way. I choose a note to start my improvisation, and I go from there-just trying to make some melody or sense out of it. I often get into problems if I try to think ahead. I do this more with chords, rather than when soloing, but if I think ahead five or six chords and then "hear" a blank spot, there's a 99.9 percent chance that there will be a huge clam when I actually get to that spot. This is because I already know I don't know what I'm going to do! So it's best if I don't think too muc

The Innocent Abroad (Musician 1984)

Still, the breathtaking quality and economy of Holdsworth's solos are more compelling to the "blow me away" psychology of the pop audience than the subtlety and chordal sophistication of Holdsworth's compositions. Holdsworth himself is well aware of the blow-me-away factor: "Those are the kind of things I like, three triads at once over a given chord, unusual harmonic things heard as a color when they're played very fast. That way it's a striking kind of thing, like 'Wow, what was that???!' I like the idea of making people want to pick up the needle and put it back to the solo."

The Open End (Boston Sound Report 1988)

BSR: Do you approach soloing live differently than you approach soloing in hic studio?

AH: Not really. I accept the fact that the environment is so different. I just try and play well no matter what. Some nights it doesn't happen and some nights it does. It's like that in the studio.

BSR: Do you do your solos in one take, or do you "punch and splice"?

AH: No, I don't edit. I've done solos with other bands that were punched in. Now I just try to do more solos; I try to do five or six takes until I get the one I like.

BSR: When you're soloing, are you thinking of the solo note by note, or do you create an outline in your mind?

AH: I'm thinking of the chord sequence and what I can do with it creatively, what notes I can play over the chords. It's just normal stuff. I try and do it a different way. I don't want it to come out sounding formulated, or like someone else's formulation. I want to get my own playing up to a certain level, or to try to get better. Well, for example, a lot of guys come up to me and say, "you can't possibly be a great improviser if you have never played certain kinds of music."

I don't think that's true at all. For example, you can't say that to an Indian musician. Try telling an Indian drummer that he can't improvise just because he's never played “Stella by Starlight."

I want to be freer in the way I hear things harmonically. I do the same things other people do, but I try to do them in a different way. I try to figure out all the ways I can play different scales or different chords to make them sound different. Essentially, they may be the same - I may be using the same scales that other people would use over those chords. I try to juggle the notes around in such a way that the order in which they are played makes it sound different.

The Reluctant Virtuoso (Guitar World 1981)

"As far as soloing in general. I've never been given the opportunity to do much else. But I didn't always mind that, I enjoyed it. But that band' [Bruford] was so sterile that when you'd play live gigs it would sound so plastic. I used to be really miserable and I couldn't concentrate on what I was doin' . . . my mind would wander off. It's bad when I'm not in there having to think, there's too much time to drift off."

The Unreachable Star (Guitar World 1989)

GW: But you've often said that, when recording with bands like with Bruford and UK, listening to the band through cans in a separate room or on tape - a separate musical situation - can really debilitate your spontaneity.

HOLDSWORTH: It's still like that, but I've kind of gotten used to doing it that way over the last few albums, just for practicality. It made more sense for me to worry about the performance of the other musicians than to say "I'm gonna use that track some other guy in the band doesn't like just because I played a great solo on it." I don't work like that because I want everybody to be happy with what they played. I worry about myself later. But I don't wear cans to do overdubs; I just go into the control room and play and listen. I try to be as inside as I can get in an overdub situation. It's difficult, because it's easy to overdub something that sounds like a good solo, but hard to make it sound like it was part of what was happening. I like to live with the tapes and listen to them until I get to play solos over them, to get an idea of what the men were doing there. I try and play off of what they were doing, so there is still the relationship. I like to strike the combination betwe en fitting in and maintaining a few ideas I feel are reasonable.

Another thing I've done is to play solos live, but not spend any time on them; you know, just get a really cheesy tone, stick a Rockman into the board or something, play the solo for a vibe thing, and then replace it with a proper tone. Some of that is dictated by the music as well, because of some of the pieces. For example, when I started using the SynthAxe, I started playing all the accompanying parts myself.

GW: Why do you think you're afraid?

HOLDSWORTH: I know that I won't like what I do. I'm scared that I'm going to be stuck with something that's not going to make it, so I'm afraid of it. I really want to do it, but I'm scared of it at the same time. I just try and be as creative as I can at any particular time, and sometimes it doesn't feel like I am. Sometimes, I feel like I'm not creating anything. I'm scared of the day that I'll go in there and play a solo like one I've already done.

GW: I'm still curious as to why that bothers you so much. Don't you think that a musician's style is defined by consistency in his vernacular?

HOLDSWORTH: No, style is different. Style is just a way of somebody doing something, but a style in itself doesn't mean much, really. To have one is fine, but the thing is that I have to keep hearing a progress in my playing, harmonically I just want to keep hearing a musical growth in my solos, and I'm scared that I won't. Luckily, when I finish a project, I can usually hear some kind of progress. I mean, harmonically speaking - the internal things, not the external things. Not so much the way someone does something, or a tone or anything like that, but actual substance of it. I just want to continue to grow musically and play more intriguing or interesting harmonic ideas That's the part that I'm afraid of - that I'll get to a point where I just can't soak anything else in. I don't mean that what I've soaked in is anything substantial at all, I just mean that I might get to a point where I have to say "Well, you know, I can't hold any more water so I've got to get off."

GW: Do you experience that anxiety while you're playing or when you're hearing yourself play on a record?

HOLDSWORTH: Sometimes I experience it while I'm playing because I'm conscious of my limitations, but mostly, if I'm feeling relaxed and I've been playing for a few hours, then it's easier for me to play ideas, because I won't be so worried about my hands. For the first few hours that I start soloing in the morning, sometimes I feel that my limbs are in the way, that there's no connection between what I want to play and what my hands are doing. And then the more I play, the more connected it becomes, and the easier it is to get your hands to do as they're told.

As you learn something, it unlatches a door to another room that's full of all the other stuff you didn't know about before. You knew it existed, but you didn't know how to tap into it, and it goes on and on and on. A better analogy would be... When you get to the top of one hill, you can see that every hill ahead is bigger than the one you just climbed, so you really know that you can't get anywhere.

GW: You may be painting a pretty bleak landscape here.

HOLDSWORTH: Well, each person can only absorb so much in a lifetime, and some people can absorb more than others, but that's why a lot that has to do with music is passed on, just because no one guy comes along and does everything all at once.

I only speak with regard to soloing, be cause that's the thing about music that I'm most intrigued by. I've always wanted to be able to play good solos. And I never can. I never can get what I want - and probably nobody ever does - but at least I learn from each album and year that goes by this stuff that I didn't know before. And, as I said, this has nothing to do with style - they don't even really connect. One thing is my ability to play through sets of changes and try and come up with something inventive. I didn't learn music in a normal way inasmuch as my ultimate goal was, and is, to he able to solo well over anything. I mean, that's always been my dream. I want to he able to improvise over any changes - bop changes or anything - but I want it to sound like it came from somewhere else. I don't want to he beaten by the changes, that's all. Playing over changes is the big challenge, but I don't want it to sound like it came from bop.

GW: Can the two things work exclusively?

HOLDSWORTH. Oh, of course! I mean - try telling an Indian musician he can't improvise! [laughs] You don't have to do one to be able to do the other, but it might be more difficult. I've probably bitten off a whole lot more than I can chew; but that's my goal: I don't want the changes to eat me up.

Whisky Galore (Guitarist 2000)

When you solo, do the notes flow like a stream of unconscious thought?

"Improvisation is the musician drawing from everything he's learned so far The things I'm practising now, it may be a year or two before they're unconsciously coming out in my playing. Obviously you're conscious of the harmony, but it's an unconscious release of all the things you've ever learnt, played over a particular harmonic backdrop. But if your girlfriend runs away with your best buddy and you've got that on your mind when you're on stage, you're probably not going to play your best - unless you're really happy about the event!"