Random thoughts on picking:

Pick swiftly but not hard. Try to gut the strings like a sword rather than hooking them like a boxer. The way to do this is a combination of arm and wrist movement. The muscles in your shoulder can generate more speed and power than your wrist which should pivot away from the plane of the string to avoid dragging it down. This technique is also really useful for playing chord melodies. It’s possible to make the melody note stand out by accelerating your pick just as it gets to the top string. Loosening your grip on the chord to dampen it also highly effective. So is catching the same chord with the upstroke. One of the most seemingly challenging things is deciding whether to start a phrase on an upstroke or downstroke to get the most efficient string crossing for the phrase. Practice!

Three discoveries:

Discovery#1- After geeking out and watching three episodes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles every night, I understand why she gets second billing to the Terminator. The show suffers from the same lameness that all movies adapted for TV shows do (exception: M.A.S.H., Odd Couple) being that anything on Fox is lame to start with (exception: X-Files) . What got me watching it is my great love of time paradoxes, cyborgs and AI’s. Summer Glau is pretty good as the latter. Watching the emotional development of her Terminator is interesting, an she’s alot cuter than Brent Spiner. Anything can happen anytime in Star Trek, like Lt. Data’s “emotion-chip.” However, the comparitive crudeness of the terminator makes you wonder how real her emotions are and how far they will develop. Even more impressive is Garret Dillahunt plays FIVE DIFFERENT ROLES over the course of 2 seasons, and is convincing and entertaining in all them: robot white man, B-movie actor, Beastmaster, cunning predator, childlike AI. It’s ironic that the other actors playing the “humans” in this show were incapable of that (exception: Stephanie Jacobsen -rrrrr!)

Discovery#2 – About three years ago, I acquired a broken Boss CE-1 on eBay. I’ve been trying to fix this hunk of junk to resell. The final obstacle was cleaning the chassis. I let it sit in my closet for MONTHS before using an old toothbrush to scrub it down occured to me. It looks much better now.

Discovery#3 – On the D-G-B strings in the middle of the guitar, I worked out an exercise for playing different types of minor scales inside a 4-fret radius. These are all just one-octave using one finger per fret. It’s usesful as finger training through one of the trickest parts of the guitar, and also is an easy way to compare visually and aurally the subtle differences between different minor scales, modes, diminished and diminished-whole tone (aka Super Locrian.) Many of these scales only differ from another by a half step (e.g. harmonic minor/natural minor, natural minor/phrygian, phrygian/locrian, locrian/super locrian, etc.) The exception is the diminished scale which is different in construction and sound, and much more useful than the others. So really, this excercise is about helping me to learn the diminished scale.

Here is a reBlog from Xanga:

The Chords that Were Never There

It baffles me how I couldn’t come up with any decent ideas to play over those two bars in Valdez in the Country that go F#9-F9-E9. So I played ii-V7s and it sounded like bebop – not the effect I was looking for so I put the guitar down and sat on the couch. That’s when I remembered a sequence of chords I tried to play when I was transcribing the tune:

|Ab7b5-G7-|Gb7 aug.—|

These chords are just a whole-step up from the correct chords, and share the tri-tones. I read about this trick, but could never use it until I realized that I heard it. So I played those chords instead of F#aug-F13-E7 and suddenly it sounded good.

Why bother with the chords that are already there?

Eddie sent me a long list of standards to learn by our session at Blues-Tsuki on the 25th. When you say “session” in Japan, it’s used as an abbreviation for “jam session. ” However Eddie has warned me that this is not what this will be. It’s really a stage-test for me to see if our styles are “stylistically compatible.” I’ve been trying to convince him that they are, despite my preference for more modern and danceable jazz. After all, I played with him in his club every Friday for 6 months, and before that at Crossoroads in New Jersey. Nevertheless, he says that my repetiore of standards is not enough– in otherwords, I still have some dues to pay before I can be considered a “serious jazz guitarist.” This is the whole point, of course. My heroes George Benson and Pat Martino both cut their teeth and debuted professionally with organ trios, so I want to put myself in a similar situation. Only the chittlin-circuit is long gone, and so is Eddie’s Lounge so I have to create the situation for myself now. I’m hoping we can continue these sessions every Monday night or every other Monday. First I’ve got some homework to do…