Guitaring dynamics

cain

Hi guys

Im not sure its really a lesson but ive been doing some research and LOTS of watching videos as of late. No doubt there is some really talented guitarists out there and sometimes watching them play can be inspirational one day and break you down the next. I have just realized, their success lies in mostly knowledge and not playing ability. Sure that is just as important, but by knowing allot it all becomes much easier.

So to the dynamics part ... Allot of guitarists today go into scales which is cool but it gets easy to get hooked to one scale ( Im a prime candidate for being that way ) but really restricts your playing. Watching tons of marty friedman, zak wylde, tomas blugg, eric johnson, etc lessons ive gotten to realize the key in making decent solos that won't become monotonous. You can learn all the scales you want, and still never sound like any of these players. It all goes down to how you aproach your solos.

According to marty friedman, Arpegios are the basic principle for creating good solos. Use them to follow chord changes and by doing that you will be able to easily follow the harmony of the song by just playing the notes within the arpegios of every chord. If you think about it, sometimes when you play a solo over a song in "C Major" using the Ionian mode for example, some of the notes dont really "FIT". They are valid withing this key and this mode, but they just don't sound right. You can go about avoiding this, in one of two ways, either you can memorize all the notes on the fretboard as well as all the notes in every chord. This is good but extremely tedious, this will come with years of playing. The other would be using the scale as well as using the arpegios for each chrod in the progression. By using this it simplifies the soloing procedure allot. Playing the notes in these arpegios alone would prove more usefull. All of the notes in the C Maj arpegio will fit perfectly over a C Maj chord. By using these arpegios over the chords, it will improve the melodic control over your songs.

Use different scales and modes. The players people love these days are all about using different modes. They use these modes to control your mood and keep you interested. Lets use a song, if your a metal head writing a song about something that annoys you, try using phrygian for eary / evil sounding parts, aolian for sad parts etc. Keep it changing, but keep the basic theme of the song there.

Major dynamics are with changing tempo. Tho the songs tempo will remain the same, change the tempos of your riff and solos. Switch to tiplets, 16th notes, sixtuplets if you can from time to time. Playing a single notes fast for 1 bar and following them by a slower riff on the 2nd are used often and sound killer. Even eric johnson is a great example of this, the plays slowly and then plays super fast fills just to flavour it. Another example would be shredders in general, people tend not to like listening to them, this is because their technical and fast but they dont have any dynamics. Listening to a solo going at 120bpm and using 16th notes the whole time, starts getting borring very quickly. As a guitarist you enjoy watching technical guitaring but that does not make it musical.

The last one on dynamics would be dyling down distortion, use of distortion, playing harder on some parts and softer on others. Those are more common concepts and easy to do.

Final word

The use of various aspects of dynamics in guitaring will make you an awesome guitarest in time. The more you can flavour your music, fill with slower and faster passages and control peoples emmotions the better guitarist you will become and the more people will enjoy listening to your music.

Garth-S

Good one Francis, this is such an appropriate lesson...

Francis Viviers wrote: Listening to a solo going at 120bpm and using 16th notes the whole time, starts getting borring very quickly.

This is so true... have you ever tried to listen to an entire Dragonforce album? it is SO tiring!

Sometimes using a simple melody line on the guitar works wonders, and a catchy one really draws listeners in. I love finding simple melodies and adding a couple of faster solo bits in between. Keep it simple I say. It's all very well if you can shred flat out, but it takes a real musician to harness his/her ability ?

AlanRatcliffe

Very good post Francis!

cain

Thanks ?

Gray

Kudos to you Francis,

It’s a great piece of text you’ve written here. I’m glad there are so many educated people on this forum so guys like me can think outside of the norm and recognize it when it crosses our path.