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Hi and welcome to my YouTube Channel... which is all about playin' guitar.
I've been playing for a long while but kind of stuck with my own way of doing things, rather than spending hours trying to emulate the worlds greatest guitarists. Firstly, what I'm doing here in the videos I'll be posting... is mainly improvising or, making it up as I go along!
I've played in bands where I had all the lead breaks worked out note for note... especially for covers, but I soon came to this conclusion: It's very boring man! Last summer I saw Joe Satriani at the Apollo in London, I love Joe because he plays from the soul... not just like a robot but man, imagine having to play all that stuff at a million notes per minute... note for note as he recorded it for the records! He has to do that, because that's what the fans want... but to me, the really great parts of the show... were when they jammed, or wandered off into unplanned territory?
When you're improvising... you're creating something that is spontaneous. You're never really sure what is gonna happen, until it happens! Playing live is scary... because you really don't want to mess up, but it's also very exciting... and rewarding at the end, if you know you did a great solo!
If you're going to improvise, for me at least... you need some basic rules in order to succeed. Firstly, you need a basic structure... like when you're gonna play quietly, when you're going to let rip (musically speaking). So I prefer to edit my backing tracks to get the basic structure sorted out by cutting them up and re-arranging them digitally. Secondly, if you play the whole thing at a million notes per second... a) you're audience is gonna get tired of it pretty quick (unless you're Joe) and b) you're running the risk of getting lost, going out of time or just f*cking up big time man!
In my humble opinion, the quiet bits and the spacing give you time to think ahead, plan where you're going in the bars that follow? Then, when you do suddenly let rip with some fast stuff... you kind of take yer audience by surprise!
To me, Jimi Hendrix was the first great heavy rock/blues guitar player. I think Jimi played mostly like this, just made it up on the spot, but equally, really thought about what he was doing at the time, as he was doing his awesome thing. And as someone once said... "It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play that really count".
Native American Flute
The Native American Flute uses the pentatonic (5-note) scale... as do most rock/blues guitarists. I got my first flute today from the USA... It's made by Navajo artist Jonah Thompson. You can get them from Fort Worth Trading Post on ebay. I asked them to choose the carved animal fetish for me... they chose the Ram. My star sign is Aries! These video's will teach me how to play it!
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