Saxophone: Difference between revisions
From Allan Holdsworth Information Center
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==[[Allan Holdsworth (English Tour Program 1989)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (English Tour Program 1989)]]== | ||
Born in Bradford in 1946, Allan didn’t start playing the guitar until relatively late - he never wanted to play it anyway, he’d rather have learnt sax - but it was a guitar he was given and so it was the guitar he learnt to play. Guided by his father, apparently a gifted jazz pianist, Allan was a good pupil, always questioning and probing. He quickly realised that the way keyboard chords were arranged differed greatly from the musically limiting system which ‘shape’ guitarists seemed all too willing to adhere to. But, as Allan preferred the more musical sound of his father’s piano chords, he set about the arduous task of transferring them to the guitar: "I started experimenting... taking a triad and going through all the inversions I could get on the lower three strings. Then I’d do the same on the next three, then take a four note chord and do the same... and so on. Then I’d write them all out, find the ones I liked and discard the ones I didn’t." It was this approach that gave Allan his amazing chord vocabulary and led to those tendon-defying stretches - seven or eight frets sometimes - that still put his imitators to shame. | Born in Bradford in 1946, Allan didn’t start playing the guitar until relatively late - he never wanted to play it anyway, he’d rather have learnt sax - but it was a guitar he was given and so it was the guitar he learnt to play. Guided by his father, apparently a gifted jazz pianist, Allan was a good pupil, always questioning and probing. He quickly realised that the way keyboard chords were arranged differed greatly from the musically limiting system which ‘shape’ guitarists seemed all too willing to adhere to. But, as Allan preferred the more musical sound of his father’s piano chords, he set about the arduous task of transferring them to the guitar: "I started experimenting... taking a triad and going through all the inversions I could get on the lower three strings. Then I’d do the same on the next three, then take a four note chord and do the same... and so on. Then I’d write them all out, find the ones I liked and discard the ones I didn’t." It was this approach that gave Allan his amazing chord vocabulary and led to those tendon-defying stretches - seven or eight frets sometimes - that still put his imitators to shame. | ||
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==[[Allan Holdsworth (International Musician 1981)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (International Musician 1981)]]== | ||
Do you have any favourite players?
ALAN: There’s a guy called Steve Topping I like very much. Mostly it’s musicians who play other instruments that move me, horn players for example. I’m more interested in trying to figure out what they’re playing than what some other guitarist is playing. Actually Hendrix didn’t make any kind of impression on me until after he died. | Do you have any favourite players? | ||
ALAN: There’s a guy called Steve Topping I like very much. Mostly it’s musicians who play other instruments that move me, horn players for example. I’m more interested in trying to figure out what they’re playing than what some other guitarist is playing. Actually Hendrix didn’t make any kind of impression on me until after he died. | |||
==[[Allan Holdsworth (Music UK 1983)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (Music UK 1983)]]== | ||
‘In the beginning when I started playing, I wanted an instrument that I could blow on and I’ve now found a way of getting something that I want out of the guitar. About 2 or 3 years ago I basically rediscovered the guitar, if you know what I mean, because I started to find a way of expressing myself through the guitar. In a way the instrument doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what it is really, whether it’s a '''saxophone''', a violin, anything, there’s always a way of trying to find something from it. What I didn’t want to do is sound like somebody else.’ | |||
==[[Allan Holdsworth (Sound Waves 2012)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (Sound Waves 2012)]]== | ||
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==[[Any Key In The U.K. (Unknown publication 1978)]]== | ==[[Any Key In The U.K. (Unknown publication 1978)]]== | ||
Can you pinpoint any one particular influence that helped you evolve your style?
Well,’ I think I was influenced in that I think I wanted to play a different instrument to the guitar! It started very early when I was listening to jazz records. The guitarist would be playing well but I was often more impressed musically with the sax solo. That’s what inspired me really. I wanted to get a more horn-like thing out of the guitar. It’s very natural. I didn’t consciously go out to do that. I knew I loved that but I didn’t know that I was approaching it differently until a few years later. I just like that sort of liquid thing as opposed to guitars with a machine-gun feel. I really like it to be like . . . water. It’s more like patterns as well. I know people mock guitarists who play fast things but I don’t think of it in terms of a stream of notes. It’s like a pattern, you create a pattern or a colour that you see as one. It’s like a colour that appears before your face. | Can you pinpoint any one particular influence that helped you evolve your style? | ||
Well,’ I think I was influenced in that I think I wanted to play a different instrument to the guitar! It started very early when I was listening to jazz records. The guitarist would be playing well but I was often more impressed musically with the sax solo. That’s what inspired me really. I wanted to get a more horn-like thing out of the guitar. It’s very natural. I didn’t consciously go out to do that. I knew I loved that but I didn’t know that I was approaching it differently until a few years later. I just like that sort of liquid thing as opposed to guitars with a machine-gun feel. I really like it to be like . . . water. It’s more like patterns as well. I know people mock guitarists who play fast things but I don’t think of it in terms of a stream of notes. It’s like a pattern, you create a pattern or a colour that you see as one. It’s like a colour that appears before your face. | |||
==[[Blinded By Science (Guitar Player 1993)]]== | ==[[Blinded By Science (Guitar Player 1993)]]== | ||
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But eventually I fell in love with the guitar for other reasons. I played the violin for a couple years too but I missed playing chords. So I went back to the guitar and used distortion to sustain notes and make it do things it wouldn’t normally do. So, here I am playing the guitar… or trying to! | But eventually I fell in love with the guitar for other reasons. I played the violin for a couple years too but I missed playing chords. So I went back to the guitar and used distortion to sustain notes and make it do things it wouldn’t normally do. So, here I am playing the guitar… or trying to! | ||
==[[Guitar Like A | ==[[Guitar Like A Saxophone (Guitar World 1987)]]== | ||
Holdsworth has added a breath controller apparatus to his SynthAxe. Basically a piece of thin tubing that hooks up to the unit and runs to his mouth, this breath controller allows Allan to literally blow the notes out of his instrument. With this bit of tubing, the guitarist’s guitar hero can finally become a saxophonist. | Holdsworth has added a breath controller apparatus to his SynthAxe. Basically a piece of thin tubing that hooks up to the unit and runs to his mouth, this breath controller allows Allan to literally blow the notes out of his instrument. With this bit of tubing, the guitarist’s guitar hero can finally become a saxophonist. | ||
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==[[Guitarist’s Guitarist (Jazz Times 1989)]]== | ==[[Guitarist’s Guitarist (Jazz Times 1989)]]== | ||
Holdsworth’s first interest was the '''saxophone''', and its a fascination that has stayed with him right up to the present day. "I loved the sound of it," he said, "and I still do. But we didn’t have the money to buy one. When I was about 15, my dad picked up an acoustic guitar from an uncle and just left it laying around. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it. at all. But after it’d been around for a couple of years, I started noodling around on it. When my father saw there was some interest, he started to help me out with chords and stuff. He was such a fantastic natural teacher that he understood the guitar, even though he didn’t play the instrument. The funny thing is that he actually wound up teaching it to local students in Bradford. | Holdsworth’s first interest was the '''saxophone''', and its a fascination that has stayed with him right up to the present day. "I loved the sound of it," he said, "and I still do. But we didn’t have the money to buy one. When I was about 15, my dad picked up an acoustic guitar from an uncle and just left it laying around. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it. at all. But after it’d been around for a couple of years, I started noodling around on it. When my father saw there was some interest, he started to help me out with chords and stuff. He was such a fantastic natural teacher that he understood the guitar, even though he didn’t play the instrument. The funny thing is that he actually wound up teaching it to local students in Bradford. | ||
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==[[No Secret (Guitar Extra 1992)]]== | ==[[No Secret (Guitar Extra 1992)]]== | ||
Q: Did your parents push you to take piano lessons?
Allan: My father tried to get me interested in the piano, but it was really obvious that I had no interest in it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the sound of it, it was just that I don’t have any interest in that kind of instrument. Then I really started to like the '''saxophone''', Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, who I heard on the Miles Davis albums. When I heard John Coltrane, I was really moved by it. Then I started going down to the record shop every Saturday-I’d go down in to town and buy an album, and I started buying all these John Coltrane albums. It was only four or five months after I discovered John Coltrane that I read in the paper that he died. It was a real shock because I guess when you’re young and you’ve just discovered somebody, I felt like I really knew him. I just felt like he had a whole lot more left. | Q: Did your parents push you to take piano lessons? | ||
Allan: My father tried to get me interested in the piano, but it was really obvious that I had no interest in it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the sound of it, it was just that I don’t have any interest in that kind of instrument. Then I really started to like the '''saxophone''', Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, who I heard on the Miles Davis albums. When I heard John Coltrane, I was really moved by it. Then I started going down to the record shop every Saturday-I’d go down in to town and buy an album, and I started buying all these John Coltrane albums. It was only four or five months after I discovered John Coltrane that I read in the paper that he died. It was a real shock because I guess when you’re young and you’ve just discovered somebody, I felt like I really knew him. I just felt like he had a whole lot more left. | |||
Q: Were you playing guitar at this point?
| Q: Were you playing guitar at this point?
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Allan: No, because you can’t. Some of the things I’ve tried to do, like changing the sound of the note after you’ve played it, is unbelievably hard to do on guitar. Where as on a bowed instrument, like a violin or a '''saxophone''', it’s really quite easy to shape the note after you’ve started it. With the guitar, percussive instrument that it is, the note is essentially over once you’ve picked it. I have always tried to use equipment and amplifiers where I can change the vowel sound, to change an "ooh" to an "aah", and stuff like that. For the solos, I wanted it to sound more like a horn, and for the chords, I use a volume pedal to sound more like a keyboard, and not so chinky. And I hate strumming, the sound of strumming drives me nuts. It’s the same thing about how the guitar is kind of not the right instrument for me, but I’m too old to start worrying about another one. | Allan: No, because you can’t. Some of the things I’ve tried to do, like changing the sound of the note after you’ve played it, is unbelievably hard to do on guitar. Where as on a bowed instrument, like a violin or a '''saxophone''', it’s really quite easy to shape the note after you’ve started it. With the guitar, percussive instrument that it is, the note is essentially over once you’ve picked it. I have always tried to use equipment and amplifiers where I can change the vowel sound, to change an "ooh" to an "aah", and stuff like that. For the solos, I wanted it to sound more like a horn, and for the chords, I use a volume pedal to sound more like a keyboard, and not so chinky. And I hate strumming, the sound of strumming drives me nuts. It’s the same thing about how the guitar is kind of not the right instrument for me, but I’m too old to start worrying about another one. | ||
Q: Isn’t the attraction to amplified guitar the fact that it can afford so many different sounds and colors, that you can get a lot of different variances in tone quality, probably more so than on a violin or '''saxophone'''? | Q: Isn’t the attraction to amplified guitar the fact that it can afford so many different sounds and colors, that you can get a lot of different variances in tone quality, probably more so than on a violin or '''saxophone'''?
| ||
Allan: Essentially you can’t though. There’s no way that you can do that with a guitar what some guy can do with a bow. I know that from the Synthaxe, because I can do things on the Synthaxe that would be completely impossible on the guitar. I can play a note using a vibrato on it, make the note disappear, make the tone go soft, make the tone go hard again right away after that, so the bottom of the decay is almost gone, the envelope is gone, and then you open it right up again. You can’t do that on guitar. Not even with a volume pedal. The note isn’t there anymore, it’s decayed. I know what you’re saying. You can do a lot with amplifiers and processing, which I’ve tried to do, but it’s not a real substitute. | |||
==[[No Secrets (Facelift 1994)]]== | ==[[No Secrets (Facelift 1994)]]== | ||
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==[[The Allan Holdsworth Interview, part one (Musoscribe 2017)]]== | ==[[The Allan Holdsworth Interview, part one (Musoscribe 2017)]]== | ||
Was it your time with Jean-Luc Ponty that sparked your interest in playing the violin? | Was it your time with Jean-Luc Ponty that sparked your interest in playing the violin? | ||
Early on in your solo career, you became very closely associated with the Synthaxe. What piqued your initial interest in that instrument? |
Oh no, no, it was just curiosity. I messed around with a lot of instruments; I played clarinet for awhile. I had borrowed '''saxophone'''s from band mates in the past, just to get a feeling of how they work and the challenges of each; and it was like that with the violin. I got a violin, and then after that I did buy a viola. But the viola got lost in the shuffle when I moved; I don’t really know what happened to it. | ||
Early on in your solo career, you became very closely associated with the Synthaxe. What piqued your initial interest in that instrument?
| |||
It went back really far into my childhood, actually. Because I always wanted to play a horn or a violin or something where you could shape a note, as opposed to the guitar which is basically a percussion instrument. And I always tried to get the guitar to sound like it wasn’t a percussion instrument.
When the Synthaxe came along, it opened the door to not only different textures and sounds that were unavailable on the guitar, but with the use of the breath control, I could do all the things that I wanted to do if I had been a horn player of some sort. I learned a lot from just playing that instrument. I still use it a lot in the studio; for the stuff I’m working on now, it has probably ended up on every track. | |||
==[[The Outter Limits - Allan Holdsworth’s Out of Bounds Existence (guitar.com 1999)]]== | ==[[The Outter Limits - Allan Holdsworth’s Out of Bounds Existence (guitar.com 1999)]]== | ||
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Your guitar tone is huge and thick, almost like a baritone sax...
"Well that’s the kind of sound I’ve been striving to achieve. I’ll never get exactly what I want, but it’s just like music itself. When I first started listening as a kid, I’d hear some piece of classical music and it would make me want to cry. And I didn’t understand it, so instinctively I knew I wanted to be a listener and an absorber of music. It’s like when you first fall in love and it’s an agony and an ecstasy at the same time; that’s because there’s something that you don’t understand and that’s what I love about music. It’s like being in love with something you know you’re never going to get. And it’s the same with the sound: to me the sound is part of the music; I’ve always strived to achieve a certain sound and that’s a neverending quest for me." | Your guitar tone is huge and thick, almost like a baritone sax...
"Well that’s the kind of sound I’ve been striving to achieve. I’ll never get exactly what I want, but it’s just like music itself. When I first started listening as a kid, I’d hear some piece of classical music and it would make me want to cry. And I didn’t understand it, so instinctively I knew I wanted to be a listener and an absorber of music. It’s like when you first fall in love and it’s an agony and an ecstasy at the same time; that’s because there’s something that you don’t understand and that’s what I love about music. It’s like being in love with something you know you’re never going to get. And it’s the same with the sound: to me the sound is part of the music; I’ve always strived to achieve a certain sound and that’s a neverending quest for me." | ||
...and what has come to light for me is that the music is the most important thing; the way you write it, or the way you play it. I really don’t think the instrument has anything to do with it at all. For me the instrument happens to be the guitar, because I’ve played that particular instrument longer than anything else and am able to express myself more easily on it, than say on piano. It’s only as time has evolved that I’ve got to a certain stage -however grim, or good doesn’t matter- it’s just better now than it was a few years ago. | |||
==[[Allan Holdsworth (International Musician 1981)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (International Musician 1981)]]== | ||
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==[[Allan Holdsworth (Music UK 1983)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (Music UK 1983)]]== | ||
‘In the beginning when I started playing, I wanted an instrument that I could blow on and I’ve now found a way of getting something that I want out of the guitar. About 2 or 3 years ago I basically rediscovered the guitar, if you know what I mean, because I started to find a way of expressing myself through the guitar. In a way the instrument doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what it is really, whether it’s a '''saxophone''', a violin, anything, there’s always a way of trying to find something from it. What I didn’t want to do is sound like somebody else.’ | |||
==[[Allan Holdsworth (Sound Waves 2012)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth (Sound Waves 2012)]]== | ||
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But eventually I fell in love with the guitar for other reasons. I played the violin for a couple years too but I missed playing chords. So I went back to the guitar and used distortion to sustain notes and make it do things it wouldn’t normally do. So, here I am playing the guitar… or trying to! | But eventually I fell in love with the guitar for other reasons. I played the violin for a couple years too but I missed playing chords. So I went back to the guitar and used distortion to sustain notes and make it do things it wouldn’t normally do. So, here I am playing the guitar… or trying to! | ||
