Niall’s Weblog

The world’s oldest known playable audio recording was in fact engraved on a lead cylinder sometime in 1878 or so. It was made by a man called Frank Lambert who also invented the typewriter.

In any case, this very early recording is speculated to have been made as work towards building a talking clock. An mp3 of the recording is available, where you can hear a series of unintelligible noises, followed by silence, followed by Lambert counting out the time from one o’clock to twelve o’clock, although ten o’clock is mysteriously absent. Finally, the last section of the recording is more unintelligible sound, thought to perhaps have been recorded backwards.

I find this all quite fascinating - a particularly eerie audio experience, particularly to hear that voice, and the fact that ten o’clock is ominously missing!

Fundamental to Jazz guitar playing are chords. You need to know lots and lots of chords to be able to play chord-based solos, or to accompany, well. This can be quite daunting, given the number of chords and variations. An easy way to break down learning these chords is to simplify into “6th string root” chords and “5th string root” chords. These are chords with the root note played on the 6th and 5th strings respectively. For all intents and purposes, there are three distinct kinds of chords. Major, minor and dominant 7th. There are variations on these chords - playing a 6th, a 7th, a 9th, a 13th - and so on. Learn the basic shapes for major, minor and dominant 7th. That makes three different shapes to learn - then learn the additional flavours. Very soon you will have no trouble playing any given chord that is called, since you just move the same shape around the fretboard. For each chord though, you want to be able to play it in at least two different positions on the guitar. This is where 5th string root chords come in. For every chord you learn to play with the root on the 6th string, learn to play the equivalent with the root on the 5th string. This will give you the basic versatility. You can also learn 4th string root chords for yet more variety. From here, standard Jazz progressions and changes become much more accessible.

I had hoped to draw out the chord diagrams for at least the three basic 6th string root and 5th string root chords, but I haven’t found satisfactory software to save the output. A useful tool for learning chords though is Tux Guitar, a free Java tablature editor and player, which includes a chord editor.

Jazz is a very challenging form of music to play - many musicians have described it as a life-long quest in which you never stop learning. I found it not only challenging to play from a technical point of view, necessitating excellent sweep picking techniques, but also from a music theory perspective. It is one thing to learn the scales and arpeggios and quite another to be able to use them to improvise over a chord progression. In any case, I never got very far in my studies and don’t consider myself much of a Jazz musician.

However, I’d like to change this :-). My technique is still pretty good. What I feel I need is some concerted effort to learn chord progressions and practise improvisation. Jazz music has a large number of ’standard’ tunes which are played by just about everyone. They essentially consist of chord progressions which everybody knows, in various keys, and then the musicians solo over them using scales and arpeggios. One of the definitive collections of Jazz standards is the Charlie Parker Omnibook. Unfortunately, my copy of this book is somewhere unknown at this point. I don’t much feel like buying another copy just now, so I have been investigating online Jazz resources. I found a site, www.realbooks.us which provides access to hundreds of charts of Jazz standards online, with the ability to transpose them into various different keys dynamically. While I’m somewhat dubious of the legality of this website, it is certainly useful to the aspiring Jazz musician.

I’ve also been searching for online Jazz guitar lessons. Basically I’m looking for scales and arpeggios, and ideas for tunes to work on - along with recommended recordings. I found a few useful tidbits on freeguitarvideos.com which come complete with video lessons. However, this site seems geared toward whetting your appetite in order to sell you guitar education products rather than teaching you Jazz guitar per se. I also came across Jazz Guitar Online which has more content but still has a commercial vibe. There are a multitude of such sites on the Internet and I have yet to find any which are truly great. I will do some more sifting and post any gems I find.

Finally, I have been toying with a software package called Band in a box. Essentially, you feed it chord progressions and it generates an accompaniement in one of a huge variety of styles. Its output is reasonable from a practise perspective, but definitely has that cheesy 80s synthesizer feel. The interface is a bit clunky and amateur looking. However, I think it could be useful for practising improvsation. Simply input a standard, and play along with it. I think this could work well as an exercise. One last thing - the ‘Jazzy’ patch on my Korg PX4 makes my feeble efforts sound pretty damn good

A few months ago I bought a ’90s Gibson SG, a really lovely instrument, however I only had a cheap amplifier on loan from my neighbour. I particularly missed my Fender Blues Deluxe tube amp which is back in Ireland. In any case, I was in the market for getting more guitar gear. Then a couple of weeks ago, my friend Seth told me he’d just bought a Korg PX4. He explained it was a small, portable effect processor for the guitar, and claimed it was a lot of fun. Well, this prompted me to have a look at this thing myself. I was very impressed with the feature list.

Having been playing the electric guitar for a number of years, I recall the scene in the music shops of Dublin being one of very expensive gear. One hundred pounds for a delay pedal, very expensive amplifiers - I paid roughly $1,000 for my Fender tube amp around six years ago. I remember paying around forty pounds for a guitar tuner about ten years ago. I felt quite strongly that I wasn’t interested in all these sorts of gimmicky effects, I just wanted a good tube amp, some fuzz, re-verb and maybe delay for slap-back.
As a poor student I didn’t have any money at all, let alone the money to justify spending a hundred pounds for a measly delay pedal. I used to play around with digital sound editing packages. I’d record some riffs on my PC and filter them. Not nearly as much fun as doing this stuff live. That was the real problem. All the software then was seemingly designed for studio work, none of it was geared toward live effects processing. I was frustrated by this. I remember thinking, why the hell doesn’t someone make a program which records and stops recording on queue (say, pressing the spacebar) while playing back an audio stream, supports looping and basic multi-tracking, and can apply some effects in realtime.

Last year I did finally find a program called Guitar Rig. It emulates a number of different amps and has a ton of effects. It was fun to play around with but, despite having a dual-core 2.2Ghz machine with plenty of memory and some special low-delay ASIO driver installed, there was a noticeable lag in the output. Furthermore, it is pretty annoying to have to plug my guitar into my PC. A portable, low-power device would be much more convenient.

Enter the PX4. This thing cost me $82 on eBay. Its roughly the same size as a Sharp Zaurus C3100 or an older generation iPod. It emulates a bunch of different amplifiers, has lots of different effects - many of which are named after famous musicians’ signature sound. It has a built in tuner. You simply plug in your guitar, and then plug in speakers or headphones or whatever. The sound quality is excellent. It also supports some looping and recording features which I haven’t yet tried. Supposedly it has a practice mode where you can record licks from your favourite band and loop them as you try to learn them.

This post isn’t supposed to be an ad for the Korg PX4. I’m sure there are other similar devices out there that are equally good. I haven’t done a whole lot of research in this area and in fact I haven’t even used the device all that much yet. My point is that I’m astonished at how good this device is, for its price and size. And how quickly this technology has seemed to have popped up. I would seriously question the need for a practice amp, and indeed any other effects units at all. $82 and you get not only one professional-quality sound, but many. And its highly portable.

I was talking about this with my brother last night over dinner, and he mentioned how he was very impressed by a group called Loop!Station which consists of a vocalist and a chello player. Apparently they create very interesting music using a BOSS RC-20 Loop Station pedal board. I myself saw a vocalist (no idea of the name, unfortunately) perform at Burning Man ‘06 who was likely using a similar device, and layered up a very impressive sound indeed. Total one-man show. These things are going for around $200 on eBay. I think I may have to buy one.

Playing in a band is a very time consuming thing to do. Its also difficult to find people who will commit to practicing regularly. Additionally, you need a space to practice in which is added expense and hassle, and you need to carry all your gear over. It seems to me that all these small devices should make it much easier for the individual musician to explore creating their own deeper, fuller compositions with much less overhead. Plug it into your PC, record it, encode it as an MP3 and upload it to your website!