themanthatwalks
Recently i've been wondering how i can translate playing the drums on my guitar. Like taking different beats and doing them on the guitar, rhythm wise. I dont mean slapping the guitar with your hands. I meanlike translating the different drum sounds through strumming and chords and such. For instance muting the strings for the hi-hat sound, low notes for bass and harmonics type chords for snare (or something like that).
I think doing this successfully can really spice up my guitar playing, especially when i play alone.
What do you think? How can one translate other instruments to the guitar?
AlanRatcliffe
Sure, it works - Allan Holdsworth plays sax lines on a guitar, McLaughlin plays raga rhythms, etc.. Drumming naturally affects your rhythms, mostly teaching you how to play around a rhythm section or become part of it, but there's no reason why you couldn't do it the way you describe - as long as it works with the music.
themanthatwalks
Yes. I think we sometimes miss the fact that the guitar is just as much (if not more) a rhythm instrument than a melodic instrument. We are always fixated on the fret hand(more speed etc.) but a good rhythm approach can spice us even the most dullest of chord progressions.
Bob-Dubery
I play mostly solo (shut up you lot in the back who thought I was going to say "I play with myself") and rhythmic feel is essential for solo performances. In fact it sometimes seems to me that it's the most essential component of playing with yourself. If you play a bum note often the audience won't notice and you'll get away with it (as long as your face doesn't betray the error) but miss a beat and everybody will know.
Translating from one instrument to another is great way to add colour and distinctiveness to your playing. I think that some of this happens by osmosis. Keira has often given the same advice - soak yourself in whatever it is that you want to absorb into your playing. You want to play latin then listen to loads of it and somehow it will penetrate your conciousness and enter your playing.
You can also try and break down and figure out what it is that attracts you to lines on another instrument and figure out ways to replicate that effect. Richard Thompson says he spends a lot of time listening to jazz pianists, listening to how they have the right and left hands doing different things and trying to replicate that effect on the guitar (which is a very different proposition because of the functions the hands fulfill on each instrument). He also has a lot of bagpipe licks in his playing which adds a very unique flavour to his soloing, as well as building drones into his playing - another thing he learned or absorbed from the Scottish dance music he grew up with.
A couple of years ago I saw English folk great Martin Carthy in London. He's a very rhythmic and percussive player. Not, as you say, through slapping the guitar but really in his stops, the way that he would set the strings ringing and let them ring and then suddenly stop them. Sometimes I thought I heard church bells in his playing. A very strong rhythmic drive in his playing too.
What about John Martyn or The Edge? It seems to me they do very percussive things sometimes.
guidothepimmp
yeh it really does add another dimension.
Alan mentioned holdsworth.. also check out nuno bettencourt for interesting strumming technique as well as gabriela. she does more rasguedo but the feel she gets is phenomenal
PeteM
The repetitive power chords in metal often sound like a floor tom to me but in a discernable pitch.
singemonkey
Maybe consider listening to some funk. A lot of rhythmic expressions there that could be modified based on particular drum rhythms you'd like to work into your guitar playing. Nile Rogers. That dude from Parliament... :? Maybe Prince.
Just a thought
