For those of you here who don't know me, I am Kyle, and I do research towards my Master's degree. I belong to the department of civil engineering and do my research in geotechnical, or soils engineering. The overarching focus of my work is finite elements, which can be more than a slight pain. Otherwise I am your typical guitar guy, hoarding as many as humanly possible, drooling over them on the internet, and talking about my problem as the weeks sanctioned MC
.G&L question of the day:
Craig a few weeks ago had a poll up, to see which G&L you would like to see return or introduced. Much to my surprise most of the folks here wanted the baritone, myself included. I am a bassist and like long scales, they are just comfortable for me, but the change in timbre associated with scale length is fairly prominent in stringed instruments. They gain more 'clarity', through a reduction of overtones and strengthening of the fundamental. This of course depends on string gauge and tension, so if we say same strings, they will have more tension, but be smaller relative to the scale length. String gauge vs scale length is important, as thicker strings acquire larger errors in the overtones (but that is a story for another day).
Why would you like to see the baritone rise form the ashes. And what shape would you want it to be? I would love to see it as a baritone asat special, soaps and all.
Off topic question of the day: Growing as a musician, and your musical taste
I would like to focus on what you are listening to and why, and how it has changed over the course of your playing. Tomorrow we'll try and look at what you are playing as you grow, but listening is a good start for today. I started simple, out of necessity like all of us, but I was always a rocker, and never cared for the mainstream of my generation. Playing bass at 14 I quickly gravitated towards bands I don't particularly care for, such as Tool, to try and challenge me. Then on a whim I bought a songbook, from a band my Dad said had great basslines, but I also was not fond of. Rush. I learned to play that book front to back, my playing went forward leagues, and my perspective changed. Over the course of the years though, I became a little stagnant, I discoverred metal, being a fan of power metal, and have mostly dismissed that. I discoverred jazz, and that is where I am going nowadays, the more I play, the more I want to play jazz and fusion, a place that even a bass player will be respected as playing an instrument, every time. I even branched out to listen to country, as some players caught my eye, namely one in the spot light Brad Paisley. His excellent guitar work urged me to explore this territory left uncharted since my childhood, as my mother was a big country fan.
I have a penchant for listening to anything and everything nowadays, with one exception. Some of my favourite players are Govan, and Vai. Not shredders in your typical sense by any means, sure they can play fast, but there is always an overarching melody they stick to, and their musical ideas and melodies, although being a bit more complex, I find very satisfying. This was not always the case however, it took a lot of growth, and understanding of music in itself to get there. I used to dismiss a lot of these guys as mechanical, boring, and so on, but that was mostly ignorance talking. I cannot defend guys like Michael Angelo Batio or Jason Becker I mind you
(the focus has to be the music first, ability to bring it out second). Vai is easily one of the most expressive players I have ever seen, not to mention his extremely intimate connection with the guitar is quite admirable. Then we have alternate styles of playing. I almost pulled a Jamerson and ignored anything not finger style, dismissed it as wrong or not necessary. This would have been folly as what you can bring out with your expression and will is more important than how you play. This opened a whole world of interesting bass players, like Victor Wooten to my spectrum.
At the end of the day I find I can listen and find what I need in near anything, I steer clear of 'extreme' or technical metals however, as they have left music behind for complexity, or just vomit into a microphone and annoy me. The rest is pretty much fair game, there have been many bands I had to grow into, and even acquire knowledge before I could understand, and assimilate what they were doing, how they were achieving it and so on before I could appreciate their music, but it was worth it. In ye olde times, people knew much more about music, they only heard a performance of something once, maybe twice in their life. They could pick out things like modulation on the first listening. Shame that doesn't much exist anymore eh?
Nowadays I don't listen to much rock, I find it a little too straight forward, too cut and dry if you will. It doesn't really do the trick for me. Bands like Uriah Heep still find their way into my musical library however.
I leave you with a song I am currently working on, a bit of a serious one if you take the tone. (Vai also has the best guitar faces in the industry, I dare you to post the best guitar face you have seen
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And that's cool, though sometimes I wish I could simply be the second coming of B.B King, lol! I'll keep going through the books and pick up a riff here and there, and work to better my understanding of how it's all supposed to come together.
