Writing and Playing A Lead On A Track
Friday, June 3, 2011 at 12:01PM Today I was practicing the guitar parts for the upcoming All Wood and Doors tour of California and I realized a couple of things about writing lead guitar parts and figuring out the best way to play them.
First of all, you can only write a guitar part as well as you can play, so if you write the guitar line on your guitar, you are limited by your expertise.
Sometimes that can be a good thing as you play to your strengths and downplay your weaknesses.
Miles Davis never did those sheets of notes that Coltrane did or the speed runs of Gillespie, but what he did do is play the way he played, with his expertise and his sensibilities and he literally changed jazz music for ever. Very cool.
And yes, not all of us are blessed with that kind of genius, but there are some things we can do to compensate.
Try listening to the track and then just singing a lead. And if I were you I would record every single pass of your singing the lead.
By just singing it, anything that you can imagine will come out.
Then when you find something you like, go to your instrument (in my case the acoustic guitar) and figure out how to play it. Also remember that you can play the same thing in many different positions on the neck.
What you want to do is to find the place where it is easiest to play the figure.
I was amazed to find that the way I fingered the solo on Moonliight Drive, was not the easiest most expressive way to do it.
As I was practicing I discovered that some of the figures were just so hard that I was spending all my attention on just making it happen. No thought to the expressiveness of the delivery.
By moving it to a different place on the neck, I suddenly had the time and the freedom to hang with certain notes, add vibrato to certain notes and just basically play more expressively than I had been doing.
Just by changing the position.
So once you come up with a solo, look around on the neck or the keyboard or the finger levers on your horn, and try to find the place where it’s just easy to do it (with practice of course—everything becomes easier with practice, and once you have the ease down you can get into the art of performing it, delivering it, finessing it.
“Get the picture?”
“Yes, we see” --from Leader of the Pack
Reader Comments (2)
Great picture of TD. :) When was it taken?
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