General questions. Monthly discussion.
Added 2020-11-15 14:56:14 +0000 UTCGood morning everyone. I want to start a thread for general questions. One of the liveliest discussions we had was our thread a few months back asking you to suggest songs for upcoming posts. Many of you send me great questions privately, and to respect everyone's privacy I wouldn't post them publicly without permission. Often times the questions are really good and I think many of us would benefit in participating in the discussion. If you have questions about guitars, technique, elements of the transcriptions, etc, please post them here.
I also want to clarify, I made a post a few days ago announcing the West Coast Blues instructional video was coming soon. I realized the post was premature and took it down, but the video is still coming. Expect a post by the end of next weekend.
Comments
Hi Vlad, Thank you for the suggestions. I have the Contemporary Guitar record as an LP, it would be a good excuse to finally get the turntable and speakers setup again after our move this summer. There are some tracks I've always loved off of that record, Bukka White and The Fahey Sampler especially. I'll have to refresh my memory on the Taussig tune. This would be the second Jack Rose suggestion in recent memory, so I'll have to familiarize myself with his catalog. I still have yet to survey the depths of Basho's work. I think some Jansch is coming for the next post. I probably should have done Angie, but I went another direction. Hoping it turns out well. Warm Regards, Andy
Andrew Lardner
2021-04-22 22:21:32 +0000 UTCHi Andy, thanks for providing us with all this awesome material. I always enjoy your monthly selections of tunes, there's a lot of stuff that's new to me and its really cool to discover all those cool sounds through your posts. Every 1st of the month feels like Christmas Day hehe ...please keep it up. There's this little rather obscure track by Harry Taussig that was included on the LP Contemporary Guitar https://krakenfiles.com/view/228cf9f34c/file.html (FLAC) The one I'm referring to is Children's Dance ...there is really something to it. Perhaps you also might like it enough to consider for a monthly post... Also anything by Robbie Basho or Jack Rose would be great to see some day! And of course Anji (the Jansch version) I think deserves, at last, the spotless treatment only you can give it. A huge thank you for your efforts!
Vlad Ruskin
2021-04-22 08:05:40 +0000 UTCOne could probably make a thesis out of this topic, and right off the bat I will say I don't think there is a "correct" approach. We all play for different reasons, and certainly should feel free to do whatever we wish to arrive at an end point, if there ever is an end point. Lets start here. If a publisher advertises something as a note-for-note transcription, it should be, and I'm willing to take a hard stance on this. I got into transcribing because I'm a perfectionist, among many other undesirable traits, and I saw the problems with most published guitar music right away. A big box publisher like Hal Leonard has an entire staff of guitar transcribers who crank out tablature all day. I personally know one of these people, they downright hate John Fahey's music, yet they created several transcriptions in a John Fahey book that was published by HL. Is that kind of person going to put in the research and care in a product like this, or are they going to put a bunch of numbers on a page and call it close enough? There are many other instances of transcribers and publishers who have their hearts in the right place, but should have never been allowed to release the work. Imagine publishing an entire book on Lonnie Johnson where the tunings for many of the songs aren't even correct. Transcription is an art, but you also kind of get to play the part of a forensic scientist, and I think many aren't willing to put in the time to ensure that a piece of music is entirely correct. When we talk about normalization, here are my thoughts. I think it is ok when it comes down to correcting something that was likely played incorrectly. When I alter a transcription to deviate from a recording, I'm usually doing so because every other recording of the piece of music says that the particular passage was not representative of the artist's intention. Such was the case in "Red Pony." There was a passage with a very regular pattern and two notes that didn't fit the pattern. several other recordings revealed Fahey's most likely intent was to play it the way that I wrote it. When I created transcriptions for Stropes Editions, we would usually choose one recording that we thought best represented the piece of music, but I would then analyze 10 different recordings to see where there were inconsistencies and try to determine if there were any notes that could be considered a mistake. With players like Blind Blake and Rev. Gary Davis, I think the spirit of their compositional approach is to have a clearly identifiable melody but be able to vary it 100 different ways. Blake's three different recordings of West Coast Blues exemplify this. Broonzy's different recordings of Shuffle Rag/House Rent Stomp do as well, but I'm more so referring to the recordings that are recorded within a few years of each other. So yes, if we are creating a transcription I think it should be as close as possible to a certain performance. But an interesting question to consider is, are we somehow misrepresenting the artists' intentions if we solidify a piece of music into a transcription based on one single performance? In the end, we are free to do whatever we want with a piece of music, and what we do is likely informed by our individual personalities. I have a lot of people ask me why I'm not composing my own music. I never know how to respond, a part of me is offended, but I think people have no ill intent when asking. The thrill I get from playing the guitar is in figuring out things that I've long puzzled over.
Andrew Lardner
2020-11-15 21:46:07 +0000 UTCAndy and I started a discussion in email that I'm summarizing and moving to the General Questions area in case this topic and his answers are of interest to other members. Background: Andy answered some questions over email that I had about Ernie Hawkins' transcription of Twelve Sticks, the one he has an instructional video out for. Andy's analysis was "I see what he did with the transcription. Kind of a mish mash of versions combined with a lot of normalization and then straight up arranging more simplified parts." This is a similar issue to and got me thinking about the questions I posted on this Patreon about the 2 versions of Doc's Guitar and this all touches on a larger issue I've been trying to wrap my head around for years - and it also relates to what I perceive as the (perhaps, unspoken) mission of this Patreon project. What I perceive as the mission of this Patreon is something like: A) Achieve the actual "sound" of master players / landmark songs or performances through highly accurate transcriptions and a detailed understanding and reproduction of the unique pick and fret hand approaches of each player. Resulting in: B) Approaching these songs as "compositions" much like a classical guitarist approaches a formal score written by an old Master composer. The goal isn't to grip it and rip it or to jam on it or improvise off of it. The goal is to play the Composer's composition accurately and beautifully, keeping true to the artist's vision of their composition. Note: I only use the approach in B when I have a reliable transcription as in A (note perfect transcriptions and detailed explanations). B doesn't work without A. IMHO, Andy is one of best sources to get A. I really enjoy working within the framework of this (perceived) mission on many songs, but there are always some exceptions around the edges, and that's where I have a few questions. Exceptions: For example, on Doc's Guitar most of us don't fret 2 strings with one finger. On Red Pony you, thankfully, normalized a few notes in the last thumb over part to make it more consistent. On Doc's guitar, I play a more normalized version of the alternating bass and, while I generally stay true to the 2nd transcription, I do prefer m32-33 from the 1st transcription and play that, instead. This borders on a mish mash, but I can live with myself for doing it. All of these exceptions seem within the spirit of the mission. Ernie Hawkins, in his lesson on 12 Sticks, however, takes it too far. Some normalization and hybridizing seem to be ok, but over-simplifying the parts is a bridge too far. He is no longer faithful to the original master player. He is now creating his own "arrangement." He is no longer providing A (note perfect transcriptions and detailed explanations). My questions: What I grapple with is that the lines are very blurry/grey as to what level of variation from the artist's original work is acceptable and what is too much. Where to draw the lines? If a guitar player doesn't share the goal of trying to faithfully interpret an artist's "composition" then this is a moot point. Most guitarists will argue vehemently that you shouldn't even try - that's fine, too. But that's now what this Patreon is focused on. I'm also hesitant to apply the "composition" approach (B) to some of the songs we've covered in this Patreon. It works well for, say Judy, Turnpike Terror, and Maple Leaf Rag, or for a song like Mona Ray by Kottke. But does it work for songs like Shuffle Rag or Doc's Guitar? Did Big Bill and Doc consciously try to carefully reproduce their compositions or did they just let 'er rip on some "generally consistent song structures that have room for +/- 10% variation" depending on the mood of the day? For me, as a casual front porch picker, it doesn't really matter. This is NOT a stressful topic, it is purely a fun and interesting topic think about. And it's a lot of fun to play the songs no matter! If I don't have A (note perfect transcriptions and detailed explanations), available, I don't worry about B as much. But I really like it when A and B are both possible. I wonder what you, however, as a professional musician, one of the world's leading experts on Fahey, Kottke, and accurate transcriptions, think about this topic. How do you resolve these ambiguities?
John Good
2020-11-15 16:01:19 +0000 UTC
