Bassists Matter

People who ask whether bassists matter or not are just plain ignorant.

Again, I will repeat this: people who ask whether bassists matter or not are plain ignorant.

Every time you take out all the bass frequencies in any piece of music, it will sound bare. It’s as if you took out a person’s spine.

Some people try to further ponder upon the question, :Do bassists matter?” by examining isolated bass tracks. That is probably one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever seen on the Internet.

Here’s a better challenge to those who question whether or not bassists matter: Try to listen to tracks of any of these artists without the bass tracks:

1. Rush
2. Primus
3. Iron Maiden
4. Return to Forever
5. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

Any person who would say that bassists don’t matter at all after hearing bass-less tracks of these artists are idiots.

A Big Reason Why I Have a Career as a Music Transcriber

I was browsing through my Facebook page when I found this string of comments from a Steve Stine post:

One of the guys who commented on the new GuitarZoom “Guitarists of the 80s” course said, “Hey buddy! Are you reading the music to these leads as you play??”

Steve replied, “Tom, just wrote them out in my head and played them…”

Most of the time (myself included), many musicians write out their music inside their heads and just go out to play them. Another thing is that most of these musicians don’t have the time (or patience!) to write them out on paper for themselves. Let’s face it. The fact still stands that music transcription requires time, effort, and heaps of patience. These musical geniuses (like my buddy Steve Stine) give folks like me some kind of employment, and I am very thankful for that. Such musicians provide one big reason why I have a career as a music transcriber.

Perhaps there will come a time that the compositions inside my head will bring me great financial reward to the extent that I’ll just hit “record”, start playing, and then I could never be bothered to write them out on paper for myself. That would be a time that I will probably hire someone just like me to write them all out.

Until then, I’m the one being hired to do that sort of documentation. I really got nothing to complain about.

Greg Bennett Electrics (Samick) No Longer in Production

I am a proud owner of a Greg Bennett Concord CD3. I call it my all-purpose guitar simply because I can use it for every genre or style of music. It has a fixed Tune-o-Matic bridge so it’s very easy to maintain. It plays so well and can hold it’s ground against the Fenders, the Gibsons, the Ibanezes, and the ESPs (this I know because I’ve played every one of those guitars). It is an underrated guitar hence its relatively affordable price point. Unfortunately (or fortunately in the case of a collector), Samick has ceased production of every electric guitar in the Greg Bennett line. I wonder why.

If you check out the Greg Bennett web site, all of the electrics and the basses are now in “The Vault”, meaning that such models are now out of production. My friend, Allan, store manager of Lazer Superior Musical Instruments in SM Bicutan said before that I had acquired one of the last remaining Greg Bennett Concords in the Philippines. How many of those were actually shipped here I would not know, but I’m glad I got mine 2 years ago.

If you have the money for another guitar and you see a Greg Bennett, I suggest that you get it. When properly set up, they play very well and they sound really good. I like mine so much that I would never trade it for my friend Pastor Abong’s U.S. made Fender Showmaster or any other electric for that matter. Matter of fact is that if I can get another Greg Bennett Concord, I’ll go have it fitted with locking tuners and a floating Wilkinson bridge (or some other floating bridge that is easy to maintain, the opposite of a Floyd Rose).

So, to those people who have got themselves a a Greg Bennett electric, I salute all of you for making a great choice. Take care of your Greg Bennett electric because I doubt you’ll see another one again.

SMALL UPDATE: Greg Bennett now designs guitars under the Ethan Hart name. They look really good.

Explorations Into Jazz

I love listening to jazz. I also happen to love playing it as well (at the very least I try to). In another effort to prostitute myself to cyberspace as a musician a.k.a. shameless self promotion, here are some recordings I did while attending Gary Burton’s Jazz Improvisation course via Coursera. These early 2013 recordings are my (futile) attempts at improvising over jazz standards using mostly piano and/or guitar plus a melodica on the Chick Corea/Return to Forever classic “500 Miles High”:

I hope that you (whoever you are and wherever you might be) enjoyed the sort of jazz crap I’ve been trying to spew out from my innermost being (other than my own original works).

Johnny Alegre’s Jazz Guitar Workshop @ Tiendesitas Super Jazz Weekend – Part 1: “The Experience”

(Author’s note: Earlier this week, I asked permission from Mr. Johnny Alegre to post this piece. Last night, I was granted permission to do so and even got help completing the piece in its final form from the legendary jazz guitarist himself. I feel very honored.)

Around 3 p.m. last Sunday (May 25, 2014), I stopped by Tiendesitas to attend a very much anticipated jazz guitar workshop. This jazz guitar workshop was facilitated by none other than one of the top jazz guitar heroes of the Philippines, Mr. Johnny Alegre. I’ve heard of Sir Johnny around the late 90s, but I became acquainted with his work through his CD “Eastern Skies”. The blend of jazz guitar and the sounds of the Global Studio Orchestra (conducted by Gerard Salonga) was captivating to say the least, and I wondered how Sir Johnny was able to do his thing. This afternoon’s event was a chance I took to somehow find out how he thinks musically as well as gain some useful information to improve my jazz composition and piano/guitar skills.

The workshop kicked off with an interview conducted by Zach Lucero (former NU107 DJ and drummer of Imago and Humanfolk), which served as kind of an introduction to Sir Johnny. Afterwards, Sir Johnny tried to figure out what his audience was like that afternoon, a mixed group of people consisting of beginner-level guitarists to people who’ve had many years of experience, such as myself. The key tips in his workshop were:

1. Be in tune.
2. Play in time. Have good timing.
3. Strive for the right tone.
4. Have good visualization (e.g. practice playing all your modes across the fretboard, draw fretboard charts)
5. Listen to great works of music.

The workshop had discussions ranging from some of the most basic topics such as getting in tune and scale shapes to more advanced discussions of jazz theory such as modes and the impact of Latin American music.

In terms of jazz guitar playing and composition, one of the points that greatly captured my interest was Sir Johnny’s discussion and demonstration about modal interchange and secondary dominants. Why is it such a big deal? It is because it explained a lot of things such as playing minor pentatonic or the Dorian mode over a major blues chord progression, “out there” soloing, the use of color/passing/approach tones, and other stuff that makes jazz sound like what it is. Modal interchange and secondary dominants make perfect sense as to how many jazz pieces (bebop and modal jazz in particular) start at a particular key signature, drift in and out of different key signatures, and then end right back at the original key signature without sounding jarring like a 20th-century serial composition (Ascension-era John Coltrane is a different case for another discussion). Sir Johnny’s words regarding the matter had confirmed what I have been hearing and trying to do before: Modal interchange has big implications not only in the way we approach soloing but also in reharmonization and composition.

The seminar sort of felt like most of my jazz theory discussions with pianist Steve Nixon, with the exception that this time it’s about jazz guitar. I have been learning jazz through a pianist’s perspective for most of my life as a musician, but this afternoon was the first time that I was able to learn jazz directly from a guitarist’s perspective. For years I have done work to try and understand the theory of jazz through a piano keyboard and have been trying to transfer that knowledge through the guitar. Thanks to Sir Johnny’;s workshop, I was able to confirm that I must be doing something right with all that experimentation and self-learning. More than that, I now have some understanding as to how Johnny Alegre approaches jazz guitar and this big musical language called jazz itself. Would I say that the workshop was a success? I would say yes simply because my understanding of how and why jazz guitar is what it is has improved vastly thanks to Sir Johnny.

So, how did it all end for me? Well, like a star-struck fanboy, I fumbled around thanking the man for the stuff I learned and I asked permission to publish this post (with snippets of the recording and photos). As star-struck as I am, I forgot to introduce myself properly, despite trying to converse with him three times, and I forgot to purchase his latest album (which I will BTW) despite having prepared some cash for it. I even made an embarrassment of myself by asking, “What was that piece you played at the end?” only for him and another member of the audience to tell me that it’s Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” in a tone that seemed like, “Isn’t it obvious that Johnny’s playing ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’? Duh…” Oh well, if I do meet him again, I’ll take note of these things and hope to be a bit more composed and refined in the way I conduct myself in front of him.

If time permits (and if I am allowed to do so), yours truly will  transcribe some of examples Sir Johnny performed in the workshop and make them available here (in standard notation and tab). Watch out for Part 2 of this piece as I try to retell some of the things I have learned from Mr. Johnny Alegre.

For more information about Johnny Alegre, his latest and past albums, and his other projects, please visit this Facebook page or his website.

To Shred or Not To Shred?

It’s been established that most of Devin Townsend’s work does not feature guitar solos. Case in point is that in the Strapping Young Lad album “Alien”, only one song gets a guitar solo. As you can see in the video above, Devin Townsend can shred (or, in his own terms, wanky wank wank), although the point of this video is sort of a mockery or a parody of the guitar hero phenomenon. In fact, in one of D’Addario’s videos featuring Mr. Townsend, he goes on to say that, “Anybody and his dog can play wanky guitar,” which I would think means that anyone can go on and play a gazillion notes without any semblance of meaning other than to impress people. So the question now is the title of this entry: To Shred or Not to Shred?

If Mr. Townsend would perform what can be called meaningful shred, it would be something like this:

 

It’s a medley of Devin Townsend songs with a title that let’s people know what his opinion is about shred guitar in general.

I remember reading that Mr. Townsend always puts the song in mind and that more often than not, wanky guitar doesn’t work well in a song (in his songs at least) and it does not add anything to it. It sort of echoes Claude Debussy who once said “The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.” So, if we are only trying to communicate “danger” through shred, is that all there is to it?

Perhaps a sort of balance must be always kept in mind. You can shred as long as it will add something to a song or musically make a point, making shredding inevitable to the music. It would certainly be the case in other kinds of musical work. In other cases, we have to accept that shred will not work well. For example, in Dream Theater (a band known for shredding prowess) songs like “Lifting Shadows of a Dream” or “Disappear”, shredding on a guitar would be a worthless exercises because it will not add anything to the song. Clearly this shows that John Petrucci knows when to say “pass” to shredding even if it is one of his strongest points.

So, if we can forego shredding in music, then why even attempt how to do it in the first place. One reason is that there are occasions where it will work and it will add wonderful things to a song. I can’t imagine a song like “Highway Star” or Mr. Big’s “Addidicted to that Rush” without all that shreddy guitar work. Second, learning how to shred improves motor skills and reaction time in music. Steve Stine usually says in his instructional videos that the point of learning how to shred or play difficult stuff is not the goal itself. But rather practicing such things builds skills and confidence that will enable you to do things easier and more effectively. If you can play difficult material then lower level material would be easier to play. It builds skill that will enable any musician to accurately reflect what should be expressed. It’s kind of like functional musical gymnastics.

I remember my piano teacher, Prof. Richelle Rivera, saying something to effect like, “Playing fast is not the goal. We already know you can play fast. Producing a good tone is.” I am of course paraphrasing my piano teacher’s words but in essence meaningful expression is always more paramount than superficial flash. I remember getting a bit impatient about myself playing slowly on pieces by Bartok and Beethoven and so I decided to speed up a bit (especially on the Bartok Bagatelle I was assigned to work on), only to be reprimanded by my teacher who insisted that I play the piece at an almost dragging pace. In such a manner, I was again reminded that playing slow is actually more difficult than playing fast. Articulating the notes in a way that accurately represents what you want to communicate to an audience is harder than impressing an audience with a gazillion notes per second. To this day, despite no longer being a piano major, I still work on my piano skills as my teacher had instilled upon me.

So, to shred or not to shred? To shred, as long as it is done meaningfully and appropriately, the opposite of shredding as a means of self-indulgence.

That is all for now…

I don’t know if I should be happy that my piece entitled Filipino Mediocrity Starts with the Individual is getting some form of attention lately. At one point, it is flattering that some people think it makes sense.  It cannot be helped that there are people who will revile it and/or use it as a jumping point to promote their religious or philosophical affiliations. At the very least it has an audience.

First off, this site is mostly intended to feature yours truly as a composer and musician involved in everyday life. Other than that, things such as my opinions regarding society, politics, etc. are secondary. Don’t get me wrong; I am delighted in the fact that some people are taking my alternative views seriously, happy even that it is creating some form of awareness among readers regarding what are the ills of Filipino society and what can we think and work on as solutions (something that is not my expertise whatsoever).

From time to time, I may write about Filipino society, but I’m guessing it will be from the perspective of yours truly as a composer, musician, and family man and how it affects me rather than launching off into a political agenda of some sort which is very much beyond my capabilities. I’d rather talk about music instead.

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In other matters, Joel de Guzman’s (head honcho of Cycfi Research, Inc.) Cycfi Research Neo hexaphonic pickups have begun to emerge out of his shop. Watch out for those. I hope to have them installed on some of my guitars soon for more musical experiments.

That is all…for now…

LCSMC Stringed Instrument Ensemble Live @ “A Hundredfold for the Lord Music Festival” 03/08/2014

Yours truly on classical guitar, first guitarist from the left

Last Saturday’s “A Hundredfold for the Lord Music Festival” at UCCP-Ellinwood Malate Church was absolutely wonderful! I played as a lead guitar player for the group I now dub as the LCSMC Stringed Instrument Ensemble. All instrumentalists, solo singers, choirs, and support staff gave their all for the Lord. For the many people who have missed it, here’s the LCSMC Stringed Instrument Ensemble’s short set:

1. “Introduction” (Improvisation by LCSMC Stringed Instrument Ensemble)
2. “Rock of My Salvation (Music by Teresa Muller, instrumental arrangement by Joel Gervacio)
3. “Salamat Musika” (Music by Gary Granada, instrumental arrangement by LCSMC Stringed Instrument Ensemble)

Some of the things that I hope to have done in the concert include play one of my original compositions on solo piano and perform some piano as well for the ensemble (although this would equate to completely missing the point/concept of the ensemble). Anyway, there were at least six pianists around during the concert, and so it would have been redundant had I been plucked out to play some piano (plus there were much superior pianists around like Rev. Leo Rempola and Rey del Rosario).

I had initially planned to record the entire concert straight from UCCP-Ellinwood’s Main Sanctuary audio board. Unfortunately, technical limitations only allowed me to record the set where I played in. What sort of technical limitation was that? The sound guy only hand one RCA cable which he had to use to hook up mp3 players for first musical offering acts (Christian Pop). Since the group I played with was part of the second musical offering, I could only ask the sound guy to record my group’s set.

However wonderful the concert was, here’s are two items that I think could have made the concert a lot better:

1. Improved promotion. Search the Internet for this particular event and my blog shows up as the top result. LCSMC doesn’t seem to be keen on promoting their concerts except using limited exposure via Facebook. I’m not sure if this was done, but perhaps they could have also advertised the concert at 98.7 DZFE, NCCP, etc. You get the drift. I do think that the LCSMC should promote such events to a wider audience rather than to just member churches.

2. An LCSMC House Band. I am very much peeved by the preferences for backing tracks (what we call in the Philippines as “minus ones”) over live musicians by the majority of the pop singers (no offense, okay?) that performed in the concert. Such music could have been performed to a professional standard by a group of musicians available within the LCSMC. I do think that LCSMC has an abundance of instrumentalists that could have been commissioned to become a sort of house band that would play all sorts of Christian music ranging from contemporary to even classical.

Anyway, the most important thing about this concert was it was done as an expression of worship to the Lord through music. It is my sincere prayer that those who have witnessed the performance be blessed.

Prog/Dream Theater Fan Humor with PSMS and Devin Townsend @ Sea

I’m a Dream Theater fan. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I like every Dream Theater album, and that includes the much reviled “Falling Into Infinity”. This is the band that got me into prog in the first place. Though largely known for extremely lengthy complex prog metal masterpieces like “Scenes From a Memory”, they do have good short tunes too, like this one:

This, my readers, is “Burning My Soul”, a rather serious hate/rant song with lyrics by Mike Portnoy. It was originally a lengthy song with a slower tempo instrumental section (which became, through executive meddling and producer manipulation, a separate instrumental called “Hell’s Kitchen”). Anyway, enough of that history. It’s a pretty serious sounding song, right? The video above demonstrates a fragment of Dream Theater’s impeccable musicianship skills. However, my new favorite version of this song is this bootleg video from “Progressive Nation at Sea 2014”, performed by ex-DT members Mike Portnoy and Derek Sherinian (Keys) with Tony MacAlpine (Guitar), Billy Sheehan (Bass). and Devin Townsend on vocals and stand-up comedy antics:

One comment posted said that this is a train wreck done in style. I’d say in great humourous style. It’s as if Frank Zappa came to life with Devin Townsend’s vocal cords. If you’re a musician and a fan of Dream Theater and Devin Townsend, I would bet that you will find this to be funny. If you’re not enjoying and laughing at this then I feel very sorry for you.

Cycfi Inc., Neo Pickups Coming Out…Soon!

I happen to be one of the few people who have tried out the prototype of Cycfi’s Neo Pickups, and so I have first hand experience of how awesome they really are. With its flat response, Joel (Mr. Cycfi Research himself) and I were talking about sculpting and shaping its sound to whatever we want, only to be limited by the capabilities of a parametric EQ and one’s imagination. I remember saying that one of the most basic things you can do with it is mimic an acoustic guitar. A few days later, we now have this video demonstration:

Notice that this guitar player is assuming a classical guitarist’s seated posture, playing Francisco Tarrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” on a Fender Strat, but it does not in any way sound like your typical quacking Strat! (I would know how a Strat should sound like because I grew up with one). Matter of fact is that it sounds eerily close to a concert classical guitar. I’ll be first to admit that (having had some classical guitar training) certain nuances like the sustain and attack of the notes would give away that it’s not a classical guitar, the timbre is very close that only classical guitar nuts (like some of the people I know) would be able to tell that it’s not. Perhaps there is some form of bias on my part that I know it’s not a classical guitar (having physically manipulated that guitar), but it would be safe to assume that a casual listener might not be able to figure it out.

This is a point that was proven in a blog post by Roy C (http://royconguitars.blogspot.com/) regarding the Neo Pickups. In this test, there are four clips and the challenge was to try and identify what sort of guitar and/or pickups were used in each clip:

Is it a MIDI guitar, a Martin, a Taylor, a Gibson, EMG 81s? None of the above, folks! It’s just a Fender Strat with Neo Pickups. Heck, the guitar could have been a cheap knockoff and it would have sounded like some of the most expensive guitars in the world with those pickups. I suppose it would be safe to say that what the E-Bow people call “string synthesis” could be easily done with Neo Pickups. Who needs MIDI guitars when you have these, right? And it is very obvious that I am GASsing for one of those that I already envision taking out the EMGs on my ESP LTD and replacing them with these. Without a doubt, I will soon write a composition utilizing these pickups (with the side effect of fulfilling one of my composition requirements at the university, hahaha!).

The Cycfi Neo Pickups target release date will be somewhere around March 2014. For more details, visit http://www.cycfi.com/projects/neo-series/.