Chords and harmony: Difference between revisions
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==[[Allan Holdsworth (steveadelson.com 2000)]]== | |||
TCG: When you play chordally, obviously we’re not talking standard II-V-I progressions. Are you following your ear or possibly that Ravel and DeBussy influence?
AH: It’s just what I hear. If I write a piece of music, I try to get it harmonically settled. I don’t really think about where it’s going. I let it go where the music sounds like it wants to go. | |||
==[[Axe Maniax (TGM 1993)]]== | |||
A lot of my playing is based on chord voicings which are very keyboard-like, and so a keyboard type of sound is better suited to my style than a distorted lead ‘guitar’ sound. Gibsons may suit a lot of people, but really if I got given one then its only function or use to me would be wallpaper - I’d just hang it on the wall to look at!’ | A lot of my playing is based on chord voicings which are very keyboard-like, and so a keyboard type of sound is better suited to my style than a distorted lead ‘guitar’ sound. Gibsons may suit a lot of people, but really if I got given one then its only function or use to me would be wallpaper - I’d just hang it on the wall to look at!’ | ||
==[[Blinded By Science (Guitar Player 1993)]]== | |||
Allan’s practice routine reveals much about how he develops musical ideas: "There are things I work out away from the guitar, like various scales. I’m not concerned with modes, rather the permutation of intervals that differentiate one scale from another. I never think of a scale as having a set bottom or top. To me, it goes from the lowest available note to the highest on the instrument itself. I get this total vision of the whole neck instead of viewing a scale in a certain position. I like to see all of the notes at once. I think of the scale as a whole family of notes, with chords being parts of that family. If somebody writes a Cmaj7b5 chord, I won’t necessarily play an inversion of that. I play groups of notes that are part of that scale." | Allan’s practice routine reveals much about how he develops musical ideas: "There are things I work out away from the guitar, like various scales. I’m not concerned with modes, rather the permutation of intervals that differentiate one scale from another. I never think of a scale as having a set bottom or top. To me, it goes from the lowest available note to the highest on the instrument itself. I get this total vision of the whole neck instead of viewing a scale in a certain position. I like to see all of the notes at once. I think of the scale as a whole family of notes, with chords being parts of that family. If somebody writes a Cmaj7b5 chord, I won’t necessarily play an inversion of that. I play groups of notes that are part of that scale." | ||
==[[Joe Satriani Meets Allan Holdsworth (Musician special edition 1993)]]== | |||
ALLAN HOLDSWORTH: "Well, because my dad was a jazz musician he had records of most instrumentalists including guitarists, so after Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, I grew up listening to Joe Pass and Jimmy Raney; I loved Jimmy Raney. And all those guys were absolutely wonderful, but there was something about the guitar that I didn’t like even then. Guitar chords only consist of four DIFFERENT notes, generally---you can play more, but they’re usually duplicates or an octave---so it becomes more limited. When I’d hear chord things, I’d recognize the sound of the chords straight away; you almost knew what was coming. You’d appreciate the fact that it was MARVELOUS---it never took anything away from that---but I thought it would be nice to do something, where the chords sounded different. And unfortunately, unless you have two guitar players and they don’t duplicate notes, the chords will naturally sound a bit more ambiguous in some ways, although they’re not, you know? So I started to think of chords as being related to families. I don’t hear one voicing move to another; it’s like, that chord belongs to a family, a scale, and the next one belongs to a different family, and I try to hear the FAMILIES change as the sequence goes. You can play anything that sounds nice, as long as the notes are contained in those scales as they move from one to another. I hear that in piano players I like. They don’t sound trapped with this chord-symbol thing. Whenever I hear Keith Jarrett, it’s just these harmonic/melodic ideas, and they all sound RIGHT, but at the same time have this kind of FREEDOM in the way they move." | ALLAN HOLDSWORTH: "Well, because my dad was a jazz musician he had records of most instrumentalists including guitarists, so after Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, I grew up listening to Joe Pass and Jimmy Raney; I loved Jimmy Raney. And all those guys were absolutely wonderful, but there was something about the guitar that I didn’t like even then. Guitar chords only consist of four DIFFERENT notes, generally---you can play more, but they’re usually duplicates or an octave---so it becomes more limited. When I’d hear chord things, I’d recognize the sound of the chords straight away; you almost knew what was coming. You’d appreciate the fact that it was MARVELOUS---it never took anything away from that---but I thought it would be nice to do something, where the chords sounded different. And unfortunately, unless you have two guitar players and they don’t duplicate notes, the chords will naturally sound a bit more ambiguous in some ways, although they’re not, you know? So I started to think of chords as being related to families. I don’t hear one voicing move to another; it’s like, that chord belongs to a family, a scale, and the next one belongs to a different family, and I try to hear the FAMILIES change as the sequence goes. You can play anything that sounds nice, as long as the notes are contained in those scales as they move from one to another. I hear that in piano players I like. They don’t sound trapped with this chord-symbol thing. Whenever I hear Keith Jarrett, it’s just these harmonic/melodic ideas, and they all sound RIGHT, but at the same time have this kind of FREEDOM in the way they move." | ||
==[[No Secret (Guitar Extra 1992)]]== | |||
Q: How did you learn your first chords? | Q: How did you learn your first chords?
Allan: From him, because he had a real understanding of the guitar - he knew where all the notes were, he knew where all the chords were. He couldn’t play guitar himself, but he knew where everything was on the guitar, so he’d say, "Do this, do that, put your fingers here, put your fingers there." I didn’t even want to learn it, because I’m a little bit stubborn, and I like to learn things on my own. I don’t like to find out what somebody does and then have to ask him about it. I’d rather listen to it and then go and try to figure a way of my own to do it. By that time I was just noodling on the guitar a little bit, and before I knew it, I was in a local band, still with no intention of being a full time musician. | ||
==[[On The Level (IM&RW 1991)]]== | |||
Chords
IM - That brings me to an aspect of your playing which is very rarely talked about - your approach to chords. How did you arrive at that? Did you use a mathematical formula to arrive at the voicings that you use or again, was it some other approach?
"The only time I have used mathematics with regard to chords is when I was either finding ways to make unusual scales or just permetating (sic) them - inversions, it’s good for that. But inversions you can do a lot of different ways. I will take a particular voicing because of what it sounds like rather than what it is. You can play certain inversions of chords and nobody would know what it was. You play a couple of chords and they say, ‘What’s that? Then you tell them and they go, ‘Oh no it’s not’. When I write things I just start with a melody and I just improvise with chords until I have some nice sequence going. I try work on it and extend it and change it. I usually record it then I go back. Sometimes after I have been working on something for a while I go back and listen to what I had been doing the day before and scrap. It’s one of the nice things about recording stuff, when you’re constantly expanding on something you can forget what it was in the beginning." | |||
==[[The Innocent Abroad (Musician 1984)]]== | |||
On his chordal accompaniments, Allan has been striving for a more "orchestral" sound, using layers of delays to get shimmering, pulsating textures from his sophisticated fingerings. "For my rhythm sound, I’ve designed a setup where all the signal processing is driven from one master board; I put each effect into one fader." His digital delays are two ADA STD-1s, two AMS units and a Yamaha E1010. The whole rhythm setup is run through a Yamaha PG-1 instrument pre-amp, some P2200 power amps and S412 speakers. The mixers are a Yamaha M406 and a M516. Allan also has an Ovation ‘83 Collector’s Series acoustic and a Chapman Stick. | On his chordal accompaniments, Allan has been striving for a more "orchestral" sound, using layers of delays to get shimmering, pulsating textures from his sophisticated fingerings. "For my rhythm sound, I’ve designed a setup where all the signal processing is driven from one master board; I put each effect into one fader." His digital delays are two ADA STD-1s, two AMS units and a Yamaha E1010. The whole rhythm setup is run through a Yamaha PG-1 instrument pre-amp, some P2200 power amps and S412 speakers. The mixers are a Yamaha M406 and a M516. Allan also has an Ovation ‘83 Collector’s Series acoustic and a Chapman Stick. | ||
==[[The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever (Guitar Player 2008)]]== | |||
Do you still play chords by striking the notes simultaneously using the fleshy part of all four fingers?
Yes, unless I need to do what I call “scrubbing,” or running the pick across the strings so it is sequential rather than one event. But when playing chords I like to hear all of the notes at the same time, unless the composition calls for something else.
Have you ever experimented with fingerpicking?
No, I’ve never developed any kind of skill with that. It’s funny, now that you mention it, I don’t think I ever thought about doing that. I hear chords moving like they would on a piano rather than something where you go from one string to another, like on a banjo, where basically you arpeggiate everything. | |||
==HARMONY== | ==HARMONY== | ||
