The Elysian Fields

The other day, I found my guitar stand - it holds three guitars. More accurately, it will hold the guitar in the icon, the bass, and the acoustic. Or, it would, if I could figure out where in a quarter billion boxes I packed the bottom 3 U shaped padded bars that actually do the holding up part of the deal.

I thought I had an idea in what sort of box these three things might be hiding in, so I looked.

I found my music - not quite all of the manuscript books, but the two most critical. These include my first manuscript when I started taking lessons with Robin. It contains a ton of stuff - some, what she was teaching me, includes scales, patterns, chords, and snippets or entireties of tunes; others include my original music. The second book has newer material, more refinements to Fantasia Macabre (although I'm not sure I have the entire 45 minutes (+/-) written out anywhere), as well as definitive parts to Forbidden Love/Forgotten Royalty - with the exception of the third part of Forbidden Love. Unfortunately, I don't think that's written out or recorded anywhere. I have an idea what I did for it, but it will need to be recreated, and it's not likely to be the same. Close, but not the same.

The collection also includes the entirety of Demon's Kiss, which is actually much easier to play than FL/FR. Think Empire-era Queensryche combined with Abigail-era King Diamond combined with early Iron Maiden, with lyrics about a vampire. FL/FR is a loose interpretation of the Lord Soth tale from Dragonlance - the first half is clean, technical arpeggiated chords; the second half has so many different parts, rhythms, and structures. It is easily the most technically difficult piece I've written. Think Marty Friedman's stuff with Megadeth, with a few shades from Hall of the Mountain King-era Savatage, early Queensryche, a riff that combines a Black Sabbath feel with fast technical pull-offs, a healthy solo section that makes a deliberate nod to the latter half of Judas Priest's Dying to Meet You, a heavy doom/thrash bit, and a light, airy riff that comes somewhere in the middle of all of that.

There are some bits and pieces that might be able to be lifted for use by The Lefty Valdez Band (or whatever we decide to actually name ourselves! =), but very few completed tunes will fit in - acoustic stuff like Talent Lost can be used, and we may be able to take one of the heavier tunes - Sorrow's End - and do an arrangement on it with the horns.

Even cooler was that two of my "exercises" were in there. I've been working on the first, originally titled Scalar Goof Off, and later given the more lofty title of Ascension, and can now play through it fairly smoothly, if not nearly as fast as I should. Justin is pretty sure that even that slow speed is a few knots faster than what he can manage on the keyboards. The piece is mostly ascending 7th arpeggios, with a few melodic segments, and a couple of arpeggiated fragments that can almost-but-not-quite be played with a sweep. I was, even at my peak of practice and playing, not quite able to sweep them, and, surprisingly, I'm not far from being able to do so now. Quite a workout.

The other, which captured its title Childhood's Dance a dozen years ago when toddler-aged Justin did so, was crafted on the computer, as with Ascension, but where as the first was just random in-key splatterings of notes and patterns, the second was crafted explicitly to be a collection of exercises for guitar that had at least a wee-bit of melodic interest to a listener. Etudes, I suppose you could call both of them. They sound best with a clean guitar and a single coil neck pickup. Lots of reverb is required, and, adding a thick delay (preferably strong enough to contain a handful or more of canons an eighth note away) decreases the fretboard workout aspect and makes them a bit more interesting to listen to. The software they were written on allowed only four voices - that is, four same or different sounds, one note per voice - and included a trumpet playing the half note bass part and three kazoos doing the canon.

Anyway, after getting the first few parts of Ascension down the other day, I finished it off last night and played through it a few times, getting it smoother and a little faster. My fingers are now floating over the keyboard (computer, not musical) somewhere in the 90wpm+ range, and wondering why they are standing still and not doing something more useful with all their free time. Although it was just starting to be called so at the time I wrote it, this style of playing, boys and girls, is what is now known as shred.

3 out of 4 of the active members of the Lefty Valdez Band got together last night to work further on The Tune.

We started out on the front porch, until it got dark, and Deb unlocked the door and let us back in. After a few rounds of practice, some playing around on other potential themes, we got to work on The Tune. A second riff for the bass introduced itself to me, and so I played it for noone234 and Rachel. Once we came back inside, we set to work devising the sax part for the transition and the new riff, and, by the end of the night, we had it.

We refined the existing parts by following the lead Justin had accidentally set when he first transcribed The Tune, and we don't give the horns a measure off between each of their lines. Now, we come in pretty much at the same time with only a quick slide on the last bit of the 4-e-and-a, so, boom, we all start at 1. Four measures of intro, then we segue to the new bit, which, on its own is 12 measures of bass. The final holding note of the intro hangs over that first measure (so we have 5 measures of the horns) and we've got the sax part for the next two measures, completing the first figure of the new part. We'll tighten that up once Justin gets back from vacation and writes his trumpet part - posibilities are: harmonizing the sax part, sitting out for a short sax solo and coming in after, or doing something completely different. In any case, the tune is shaping up nicely.

We met, briefly, our temporary percussionist - Korg, his name is - although we couldn't hear a beat he played on account of a distinct lack of RCA plugs (or 1/4" to RCA conversion cables). noone234's cousin sounds like he'd be a good fit, although he'd have some difficulty commuting down from Buffalo. So the position is still officially open.

I have determined that if you play The Kraken's Theme (from Pie Rats of the Carob Bean Too, which co-stars one of the Monkees, looking slightly worse for the wear since his glory days on television) on an acoustic guitar - with a palm mute - the first phrase sounds an awful lot like the Peter Gunn Theme.

For reference, that would be: D-D-F-D D-C1-B1

If you transcribe it to E, it sounds reasonably low and spooky. I suppose if I had been more ambitious, I would just tune the low E down to D and taken it from there. It works well on bass as written (because the bass has it in the right octave, which is to say, low.)

Of course, if you play it on bass, and you add the triplet accent on the D pedal, and you don't do that sort of thing often, you get a blister on the tip of your index finger that says to you "Yeoww!" and "I really wish you played the thing as a slap bass line everytime." And, days later, it is no longer a poufy skin-colored bit, and is, instead, a reddish-orange blotch of skin that no longer hurts. Much.

Despite being a guitarist and spending my free time hanging out with drummers on the Row, my single most memorable moment at Berklee was because of a bassist.

They brought all of us in - can't remember if it was during my History of Rock class or during the History of Jazz with the other half of the freshman class.

We all filed into the classroom - the Berklee Performance Center - and heard many a eulogy for a guy who used to pull frets out of his Fender bass, and inspired many of the speakers to do the same.

The point of all this was to announce the passing of a giant.

If you pretend to play bass, but haven't heard Jaco, that's all you are doing: pretending. I've heard other good bass players - other great, earth-shattering, virtuoso, incredibly talented bass players. I've even had the pleasure of playing with one or two of them. None have matched, let alone surpassed, Jaco.

This album features - Bach and Beatles excepted - Jaco as a composer. One key word that comes to mind - maybe even more than 'brilliant' and all that other kind of very applicable type of stuff - is fun. There's a playful spirit in this music. Brandon's already shown an interest in Jaco's first disc - don't think I've played him the birthday concert yet - but I fully expect him to have a blast bopping and dancing along to this one.

Who knows, if Deb doesn't pick up the bass again, maybe Brandon will...