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Transcript

Reinventing Your Guitar Style Through Genre Exploration · The Steve Stine Podcast

• 0:36
  Steve: Hey, steve here, thank you so much for joining me.
• 0:37
  Steve: Today we're going to be talking about stepping outside your comfort zone and learning how to play different styles of music.
• 0:44
  Steve: Maybe some music, maybe some songs or bands that you normally play, but you do it to look for creativity and advancement in your technical skills.
• 0:53
  Steve: You know you work on different kinds of things when you like.
• 0:57
  Steve: For me, I grew up playing a lot of metal.
• 0:59
  Steve: Then I developed the skills that go into and once I started playing other styles of music I was certainly lacking in skill sets, understanding, feel, different kinds of things with other kind of funky that you can work on.
• 1:12
  Steve: Maybe a unique styles of chords.
• 1:25
  Steve: Maybe you're going to work on different kinds of ways of studying room and approaching that.
• 1:29
  Steve: So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a few different songs here to look at.
• 1:33
  Steve: Some of them are kind of straightforward and then some of them kind of get out there, but it's all kind of funky.
• 1:40
  Steve: So Stevie Wonder, you know, james Brown, bruno Mars, Prince, there's just there's all kinds of.
• 1:48
  Steve: You know, earth, wind, fire, you know I could name just a billion things, but they're all really great things to look at.
• 1:55
  Steve: So the first one we're going to look at is a song called Isn't she Lovely?
• 1:57
  Steve: By Stevie Wonder.
• 1:57
  Steve: Now, we're not going to break down the whole song, but I want you to listen to it a little bit and think about how you would approach playing If you were in the studio with Stevie Wonder and your job was to play this.
• 2:13
  Steve: How would you approach the rhythm for something like this?
• 2:16
  Steve: So let me play a little bit of the beginning of this.
• 2:19
  Steve: Okay, so we're hearing this of the keyboard right Going on in there.
• 2:27
  Steve: So, basically, what I'm doing for this.
• 2:31
  Steve: Your chords might be different, but I'm playing C sharp minor seven, and then I'm going up to F sharp nine, and then I'm going to a B sus, and then I'm going to an F sharp nine and then I'm going to a B sus and then I'm going to an E major, e major seven there.
• 2:44
  Steve: So what I would do is I'd think, okay, at the very least, maybe I'm going exactly that, just playing these, or maybe I start kind of thumping along, or maybe I'm going to kind of mimic what the keyboard player is doing, you know, and I could take that even further, you see.
• 3:30
  Steve: So there's lots of different ways I could approach this.
• 3:32
  Steve: So this is one of those songs where it's a little more ambiguous and we're able to make some choices on how we want to approach both the chords which could be basically just major and minor if I wanted to and the strum.
• 3:45
  Steve: So as I start trying to think about playing along, don't want that song.
• 3:51
  Steve: I'm kind of going back and forth between the and then the On every other chord.
• 4:18
  Steve: Now you wouldn't have to do that, but I find it interesting and I like the way that sounds.
• 4:30
  Steve: That doesn't mean I would do it every time, but it's a great opportunity to learn something new.
• 4:41
  Steve: These songs, I tell you, stevie Wonder is always so much fun.
• 4:42
  Steve: Songs are always so instrumentally interesting going on in there.
• 4:45
  Steve: So you listen to it and you get caught in Stevie's voice and the melody and what he's talking about, that sort of thing.
• 4:50
  Steve: All the rest of it just blends in underneath, but when you really start looking at it there's a lot going on in there.
• 4:55
  Steve: So this is just my first song to kind of look at here, but it's a great one to look at if you've never learned something like this.
• 5:02
  Steve: So again you could start as basic as just doing two, two, two, two, two, two, two, three, four.
• 5:09
  Steve: Two, three, four, two, three, four.
• 5:14
  Steve: One, two, three, four, you know, or add just a little Kinda staying out of the way, or you can get in there In whatever way you want.
• 5:32
  Steve: So isn't she lovely?
• 5:33
  Steve: Next one I've got on my list here oh, walking on Sunshine.
• 5:36
  Steve: So this is Katrina and the Waves.
• 5:38
  Steve: I'm sure you've heard this song before.
• 5:39
  Steve: This would have definitely been a song when I was a kid.
• 5:41
  Steve: I wouldn't.
• 5:42
  Steve: If it came on the radio I'd probably change it right.
• 5:44
  Steve: But the rhythm is really quite fun as a guitar player.
• 5:48
  Steve: So I'm basically just playing B flat, b flat and F.
• 6:00
  Steve: And this starts our conversation about the importance of the strumming hand and how, in this style of music, the strumming hand is the one that leads.
• 6:04
  Steve: Oftentimes, when we're playing things, you know, the chords might be pressed down, and then we, you know, strum up some sort of pattern down, down, down, whatever we're going to do, press down, and then we, you know, strum up some sort of pattern down, down, down, whatever we're going to do.
• 6:15
  Steve: When you start getting into this funkier stuff, the strumming kind of exists the entire time.
• 6:18
  Steve: You're kind of strumming everything and if not everything, almost everything, and then you just press down when you want something.
• 6:25
  Steve: That's the big difference.
• 6:26
  Steve: And I remember when I first learned this, when I was again it wasn't this song or anything, but I was certainly aware of this when I was younger, as a kid, and it was just interesting to me how you could press down when you want to sound.
• 6:45
  Steve: So, when we think of this song Walking on Sunshine, so the first chord and the third chord are starting on a down strum, and then the second and fourth chords, which used to.
• 7:17
  Steve: If you've never done this is learning how to keep that strum going down and then letting up.
• 7:37
  Steve: You see, so with this song, that's all we're doing.
• 7:40
  Steve: This is a 1-4-5, just Bb, eb and F, and then the chorus of the song is just F to Eb, back and forth, like that.
• 7:49
  Steve: Sometimes people will play it pressing on the first string there as well, again, chordally.
• 7:56
  Steve: You do whatever you want with this thing.
• 7:57
  Steve: My point is is the rhythm.
• 7:59
  Steve: That's what I want you to be, all right?
• 8:00
  Steve: So the next one I've got here is Uptown Funk.
• 8:04
  Steve: Now Bruno Mars.
• 8:05
  Steve: You might like him, you might not like him.
• 8:07
  Steve: Again, that isn't my point.
• 8:10
  Steve: I don't sit and listen to Bruno Mars all the time, but there are songs that they play.
• 8:14
  Steve: They're great musicians.
• 8:16
  Steve: Okay, one of my favorite guitar players, mateus Asato, toured, I think, more than once with Bruno and talks about how he learned a lot from hanging out with him, writing with him, thinking about how, learning how he thinks about instrumentation and playing.
• 8:32
  Steve: So it's not just chords and you know, these lines of this is a chord, this is a scale, this is a strum.
• 8:39
  Steve: It's learning how to hear things and then replicate them and feel them.
• 8:43
  Steve: So when you play, your expressiveness is coming out in the music and it matches what you're trying to do.
• 8:48
  Steve: So if we listen to the beginning of the song a little bit here, so like right there I'm playing 10, 13, 13, and then 10, 12, 13.
• 9:06
  Steve: And it's again driven by the strumming hand.
• 9:09
  Steve: By the strumming hand, you see, playing just on those thin strings to get that kind of sound which is really.
• 9:26
  Steve: There's a lot of really neat stuff in this song.
• 9:28
  Steve: Once you get into the kind of moving from the verse to the chorus.
• 9:30
  Steve: There's this kind of thing in there, and then there's this chromatic climb that all the instruments are doing this, which is really neat.
• 9:37
  Steve: So there's lots of fun stuff that maybe you wouldn't think of if you're a rock player, right, or you just need to try and work on, get that strum down a little bit and get some funk into your groove, because obviously what happens with this stuff is that it tends to be far more staccato.
• 10:02
  Steve: You know, we're not letting everything ring out all the time, and in that sometimes we even want to make the chords even smaller, that we want to make them even tighter, so we're not holding the chord for a really long time, and that's kind of how we get this sound.
• 10:15
  Steve: And again, you have to sort of explore this stuff.
• 10:17
  Steve: So the next one I've got on the list is Celebration, if I can find it here.
• 10:22
  Steve: So Cool and the Gang another really, really fun song, okay, and then here's this, all these other instruments that come in doing all of this stuff.
• 10:39
  Steve: It's really great when the chorus comes in, because it's almost difficult to keep concentrating on just your part.
• 10:44
  Steve: But basically what I'm doing here is just octaves on A flat, on the fifth string here, eleventh fret, and I'm thinking da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
• 10:54
  Steve: That's all I'm doing, and when I hear that I'm just pressing down.
• 10:57
  Steve: So if we listen to just a little bit of the chorus.
• 11:08
  Steve: There's all kinds of stuff happening there, so you've got to kind of concentrate on your part.
• 11:21
  Steve: Now there's other stuff.
• 11:22
  Steve: Well, that's in there.
• 11:33
  Steve: Now we can go up there.
• 11:35
  Steve: That works too.
• 11:38
  Steve: So there's lots of different chordal stuff underneath that you can learn as well.
• 11:41
  Steve: But this is what I want you to really try and focus on.
• 11:43
  Steve: Is that just getting that strum in there and then hitting when you want stuff.
• 11:51
  Steve: So that's a really fun one too.
• 11:53
  Steve: The next one I'm going to show you is Car Wash, an old song, often forgotten.
• 11:59
  Steve: Maybe the part I want is in the verse here.
• 12:07
  Steve: That, okay.
• 12:38
  Steve: So again, a really cool little thing happening here.
• 12:40
  Steve: I'm playing 13, 12, 13 on the first second strings.
• 12:44
  Steve: Then I'm just moving up a half step to 14.
• 12:46
  Steve: And that's what it does Da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, just that thing right there.
• 13:00
  Steve: Okay, so we're just making a D7 is really what we're doing.
• 13:04
  Steve: Just that half step slide into D7.
• 13:06
  Steve: But it's a really fun one.
• 13:10
  Steve: Again, you're on those first three strings, getting this thing going.
• 13:14
  Steve: So there's a lot of commonality in this funky style of music using these thinner strings to create the sounds that we want, not these big thick power chords we might be used to.
• 13:25
  Steve: We're on the opposite end here, making these sorts of things so really fun.
• 13:30
  Steve: Now, the last thing I'll say is there are songs out there that not only are they rhythmically challenging, which we're kind of finding here is that some of this stuff would be a little bit hard to play, and even if you can play it, you still got to try and play it accurately so it sounds right, it fits the music.
• 13:45
  Steve: It's tight and small, like we talked about.
• 13:47
  Steve: That's what you're looking for.
• 13:49
  Steve: Some of these songs, though, go beyond that Like, and there's Michael Jackson songs where you know you look at the bass part for Billie Jean.
• 13:56
  Steve: If you were to play that live, you don't really get a break.
• 13:58
  Steve: Not that it's so hard.
• 14:00
  Steve: I'm not comparing it to dream theater.
• 14:01
  Steve: I'm just saying like it's got to be accurate, it's got to be tight.
• 14:06
  Steve: It's not just about whether you can or can't play it, it's is the rhythm locked in, because that's what all of this is about, is the rhythm's got to lock in.
• 14:14
  Steve: Everybody's got to be really tight when they play.
• 14:16
  Steve: That's half the fun.
• 14:18
  Steve: So there's a song that I really love by Stevie Wonder.
• 14:21
  Steve: I Wish, and I'm going to play just a little bit of this.
• 14:23
  Steve: So you hear that guitar back there and it's very palm muted.
• 14:32
  Steve: So you hear that guitar back there and it's very palm muted, kinda going on back there.
• 15:01
  Steve: It's just really fun.
• 15:03
  Steve: Sir Duke is another one.
• 15:05
  Steve: There's so many songs that are really fun as a guitar player playing Superstition's, another one Playing Stevie Wonder stuff, but this one we're in E flat, so we've got this.
• 15:15
  Steve: But this one we're in E flat so we've got this kind of groove going on and then you're kind of giving it a little bit of a palm mute.
• 15:39
  Steve: So it's not super rock and roll playing all the we're not looking for that.
• 15:43
  Steve: It's really subtle and it's really palm muted.
• 15:44
  Steve: So it's a really fun thing to play Now because it's in E flat and it's basically E flat 7, you know you can do kind of that uptown funkish stuff over the top of it and it sounds really cool, even though it's not in there.
• 15:56
  Steve: At least I think it's not in there.
• 15:57
  Steve: But you never know, because there's so many things going on in some of these songs.
• 16:01
  Steve: So if you're looking for something that's more of a challenge in terms of single note playing and things like that, oftentimes I'll try and even cover the horn parts in songs like this.
• 16:10
  Steve: Look at Sir Duke the.
• 16:12
  Steve: The middle section of Sir Duke is just really fun to play.
• 16:15
  Steve: Look, I Wish, look at.
• 16:17
  Steve: A lot of these songs will have a lot of funkier, jazzier style chords too, which can be really fun to learn.
• 16:23
  Steve: So, again, just trying to inspire you and motivate you to keep playing number one, number two break out of your traditional way of thinking about music and start looking for some different things out there that might be really fun for you, might be motivating because it's not what you know, and it might even give you some appreciation for other musicians, why people consider that music right.
• 16:45
  Steve: For me, it's all about not getting locked into.
• 16:47
  Steve: Sure, I have styles of music that I like more than others, and there's bands that I like within those styles of music that I like more than other bands that are in that style.
• 16:55
  Steve: But I like good music.
• 16:58
  Steve: If it's good music, I like it, you know, especially if it's got something to offer from a guitar perspective, because that's what I do for a living, so I really appreciate that as well.
• 17:05
  Steve: It doesn't always have to be fast, it doesn't always have to be heavy, it just has to be interesting.
• 17:11
  Steve: And so with these kinds of songs, what I really love about it is once you get a handle on what it is that you're trying to do you know the strumming or whatever then you really start trying to focus on where do you fit in the band right, where do you fit inside here?
• 17:25
  Steve: Because you're really not just trying to play over the top.
• 17:28
  Steve: You know, if you're used to playing ACDC, you're used to being very upfront and over the top.
• 17:33
  Steve: In these kinds of songs you're trying to find your space and not run into everybody else while you're doing it.
• 17:39
  Steve: So everything's again kind of smaller, right.
• 17:42
  Steve: Everything's a bit tighter when you play, and so that's really fun because it's like all of a sudden you're kind of part of another, you're a part of the band.
• 17:51
  Steve: It's not just about drums and bass, but there's keys or there's all kinds of stuff going on and you're finding that thing, you're locking into it, then you're just hanging out there, which is really neat.
• 18:01
  Steve: So, anyway, take care, stay positive, obviously, keep practicing, and hopefully this helped you a little bit, okay.