Just had another an object lesson in all of this, including how soloing intersects with adding mandolin to a contemporary, non- bluegrass tune.
I was asked to record a solo for a local artist's tune. It's an acoustic guitar tracked about four times with some delay and reverb added, electric bass, some tasteful drumming and percussion, and the vocal. I don't know what to compare it to but a female version of Dave Matthews. Lots of driving rhythm guitar. The engineer emailed me an mp3 to rehearse with. I imported it into Logic the laptop recording software I use, and had at it the night before going in to do my take. First, I just tried pure improv -- just jamming along. It was really nice to record myself, because I was able to play it back and see how badly it sucked. Nice to see that I can play fast, but not a solo that went anywhere. No, not good at all. Then I fell back on The Manifesto. I cycled through the tune playing rhythm enough time to get the chords down. Then I thought: Time to learn the melody. And guess what? There really wasn't much melody! The lyrics are mostly sung on the same note as the chords. And then I realized -- again -- that the reason rock guitar solos don't follow the melody is they often have to invent a melody to play, so they're not going (single note) G-G-G-G C-C-C-C G-G-G-G. So instead of improvising (which I really like to do), I made up my own little melody over the chords, including some good old fashioned bluegrassy tremolo. It sounded a lot better. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Taterbugmando" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/taterbugmando?hl=en.
