Fred Treece wrote: I think when Jimmy was talking about something he didn't like, it was his way of saying... it's not all about the mechanics, and we shouldn't forget the feeling.
Exactly. He was demonstrating an idea, and overdoing the mechanics of it took something away from the music.
Paul was talking about the same thing when he was discussing the scalar approach. Getting caught up in scale-oriented pattern playing, especially at higher tempos, is not only difficult on steel guitar, it also doesnât sound very musical.
Friends of mine and me talked about this back in the 80âs when guitar solos seemed to be turning into gymnastics exercises inside a car race. It was interesting and maybe even inspiring for us to hear what was technically possible, we supposed, but where was the music and what were the players actually saying?
I guess I'm not explaining this well.
I'll give it one more try....
When I approach a song, and let's say and some point in time the song goes to a diminished 6th,
when I'm working out how to solo over that chord, I don't stop and examine what intervals are involved in that cord.
If I were to play those notes, guess what? The piano player is on those notes as well.
I can hear and recognize when musicians are trying to play the intervals of a chord over the chord.
This invariably leads to solos with lots of short phrases and sounds like....well a "word salad" instead of flowing music.
What works over the dim 6 (I'm using that as my guinea pig) are notes that are relative to it.
Although the notes of that cord will be found in the relative scales, some are not.
It may seem like a fast and easy way just to use the intervals of the chord, it's also very stiff.
One might ask, ok, so if your not going to use the intervals of the chord, how can we determine what notes will work? Most of the time, just by experimenting as the song plays in real time.
Or if this yields no desirable results as a last resort I'll play that chord on the guitar or piano or hold the keys down on a keyboard and begin playing over the chord that I can't seem to make come out right.
After I got better at this, I began to notice scales or scale sequences that were a route through the changes.
When I first approached Jazz and Swing chord progressions, I was doing what Paul Franklin is suggesting...find all the intervals in the chord. I got noplace fast that way. With 2 chords in every bar, how would anyone ever keep up? Although knowing the intervals is important for building chords.
This is just what works for me. May not work for everyone.
There are steel players who use chords to improvise with. I don't see any way around an intervalic approach for chord playing.
I've been talking about Jazz and Swing.
But if we were to go to talk about playing Country music and fiddle tunes and intervalic approach would probably be just the ticket with the chord being 1,5,1,4,1,5,1,4...no improvising.
I hear a lot of major scales in the E9.
