Lots of notes vs. defining the melody

[allenhopkins]

Didn't George D Hay say, on the Grand Ole Opry, "Keep it down to earth, boys"?

[red7flag]

Bill Monroe was asked about the current crop of hot pickers (Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Bela Fleck, that generation). His response was some thing like this "When you right a letter to a friend, you want every note to count." I guess this is why I gravitated to the BB Kings more than Stevie Ray Vaughn. I went more with Earl Scruggs than Bela Fleck. And more with Mike Compton than Chris Thile. I am not saying they are better, just that their music speaks to me more and I try to emulate them more in my music.

[JeffD]

I listen to recordings of a guy that used to play a good amount of breaks that were pre-learned breaks/arpeggios and had no hint of melody. His name was Bill Monroe, have you heard of him?

I am far from a Bill Monroe expert, and likely haven't heard everything he recorded. I have not heard a Monroe break that struck me as not belonging in the tune or as being irrelevant to the way the tune goes. And if someone showed me one, it would be a break that I likely would not enjoy as much as I enjoy others.

JeffD, I've noticed over the last few weeks that you have some strong opinions on how someone should select an instrument and how they should approach playing it. I'd love to see some videos of you playing, to see how music should REALLY sound. I wish MC had a sort of musical skill level rating system for its members so someone could know if they're getting advice from an advanced player or a hack.

Relio, you caught me. I'm a hack. The moderators can show you how to ignore me.

[JeffD]

I found this piece of brilliance by Chris Thile. I love it. A good example of doing it all - keeping relevant to the tune, and going fast and furiously creative.

And making an old war horse interesting and fun again.

[Mandoplumb]

Monroe played around the melody sometimes further from it than other times but always around the melody and never to my knowledge just a lot of notes that could be played over the chord progression on any number of songs. This is what a lot of people call improvisation and is easy to fall into if you ignore the melody. Every break of Mr. Monroe's I have heard was well thought out and complimented the melody.

[Bill McCall]

Listen to Monroe's break on Time Changes Everything, on the Decca release. It's awful, at least to my ear. Couldn't swing a bucket.

[Ivan Kelsall]

Harking back to what Dave Hanson said about Earl Scruggs. In the book ''Earl Scruggs & The 5-String Banjo'',it's mentioned that listening to Earl practice one day,a family member asked what the tune was. Earl mentioned the name & 'whoever' told him that ''if you can't play the melody then give up'' - or words to that effect. From then on,Earl held to the melody line in everything he did.

Having used Earl's recordings to teach myself banjo,that's how i play. Coming to mandolin,i still play that way,but i feel the need to ''fill the gaps'' with ''added notes''. One of my biggest influences these days,is Adam Steffey. He can construct glorious solos & intros. & still hold the melody line. It seems to me that some players have developed a virtuosity,that within the context of Bluegrass,is a tad 'too notey' (at least for me). I still like to hear the melody line in any song / tune,after all,that's what we're supposed to be listening to - the ''tune'',
Ivan

[farmerjones]

https://youtu.be/VjLDvR4-Xj4

Thank you. I guess we hear two different things. This is entirely possible.
I understand a mandolin can't replicate a person's voice, so it can only do so much.
But I hear the mandolin playing melody during the break, with pentatonic blues tag licks added.
If he were playing chord arpeggios, he would be doubling the bass and guitar.
I don't hear that. Pretty typical Monroe break. IMHO

[ProfChris]

I'm not a mandolin player (started out on bass, now play ukulele, some four-string theme going on here) but I've seen several musicians progress from intermediate to accomplished on various instruments, and they all took the same path:

1. I can play most of what I want to play, but struggle with some bits, so I keep working on them.

2. Hurrah, I can play everything I want to play, though it takes all my attention to do so, so I'll throw it ALL in.

3. Now that I can play everything I want to play without it taking all my attention, I have time to decide what I SHOULD play to make the music work.

Stage 3 is the accomplished player. Some people seem get stuck at stage 2, and I guess it requires both practice and thinking to move on to stage 3.

In my own playing I reckon I'm getting to stage 3 for strumming* (an important part of uke playing), and I definitely went through the first two. For picking I'm trying to get beyond stage 1, without hitting the excesses of stage 2 (difficult).

Having been a bass player helps - that teaches you that the spaces between the notes are at least as important as the notes themselves.

*Not saying that I'm a great uke strummer, just that I can now do all I want to do for my music and have time to choose what I will do.

[Jim Hudson]

Well defined professor. I'm definitely at stage 2 on most stuff I want to play. Working on stage 3 for more familiar tunes. It makes me feel better having my insufficiencies well defined (sincerely, it makes me feel better that someone else has experienced the same thing). Thanks.

[ProfChris]

I find it helpful to watch the really good players to see how they rein it in. Doing it oneself is, of course, damned difficult.

This is a good example:



Yes, plenty of fireworks, but note how much less he's doing than he could choose to do. And all the pyrotechnics fit and take the song onward. Mighty impressive.

[ralph johansson]

I like it wild and always have. If you can play flashy, then do it. " to many notes".. That's what they said about Miles Davis, Paganini and Chopin, just to name a few...

Miles Davis???

[ralph johansson]

Do you have a youtube example of Bill Monroe playing like that?

Not a vid, but the Decca recording of Blue Ridge Mountain Blues (with Frank Buchanan singing lead on the verses) would be an example. Thre are many examples of Monroe abandoning the melody in favor of bluesy licks and arpeggios - one of the first I heard on a studio album was Cotton Fields, recorded in 1961. The very first song recorded at the very first Bluegrass session was a 12-bar blues and only Chubby Wise's introduction paraphrases the sung melody. Earl Scruggs plays what would later be known as Foggy Mountain Special.

I very rarely listen to Bluegrass these days, but I do play a few Monroe tunes, and the ones I picked lend themselves excellently to improvisation, which is my reason for doing them; tunes like Lonesome Midnight Waltz, Watson Blues and Crossing the Cumberlands.

[catmandu2]

Miles Davis???

He's confusing what Miles purportedly had SAID (in reference to Coltrane's more florid approach).

[FLATROCK HILL]

Why Did You Wander https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhDfro3D5ao
One of my favorites. Great kick-off and break by Mr. Bill. Lots of notes, not much melody. Works for me.

[catmandu2]

Something Bird was studying on was "rhythm as melody." Not to equate or necessarily relate bird's be-bop approach to Mr Monroe, or anything else in this idiom, however: if you step back and consider music (in all its aspects) from a very wide perspective, you might find correlation and epiphany where you might least expect. It's possible, that bird and bill could have been drawing inspiration from some degree of common source, in this aspect. Creativity can refine vast distances..

[Polecat]

He's confusing what Miles purportedly had SAID (in reference to Coltrane's more florid approach).

If I recall correctly, after one of Coltrane's machine-gun-sheets-of-sound solos, Miles reportedly said to him "Don't just do something, stand there". True or not (one should never let the truth get in the way of a good story), its one of my favorite Miles quotes.

On a similar theme, Lester Young once reportedly said that if you don't know the words to a ballad, you shouldn't play it. I agree.

[pops1]

I don't have a problem playing lots of notes in a ballad, long as the left hand isn't moving--------tremelo

[Billy Packard]

Notes--Schmotes--
A melody starts at the beginning and then takes you somewhere. It not so important how many notes there are but rather what they say. The actual song is the melody that starts the journey, it is the real story and improvisation should embellish it. Or if the improv is to be something completely different it must have a purpose, a destination, and tell a story of it's own. With blues for example the soloist will likely produce something style/theme related but unique in itself. Or vamp off the theme with variations. Again, your improv should have a theme, variations and conclusion.

[ralph johansson]

Reading about Earl Scruggs, if he got too fancy when practicing at home his mother would call out ' Earl I can't hear the tune '

Sums it up well.

Dave H

The issue, most likely, was articulation. The threefinger style by its very nature creates a continuous flow of notes, where about 1/3 have melodic significance, the rest only serve a harmonic or rhythmic purpose. Note, for instance, that several of Scruggs' instrumental pieces, like Earl's Breakdown, Flint Hill Special, and Randy Lynn Rag, are really song melodies embedded in three finger rolls. And, of course, it takes some practice (even Scruggs once was a beginner) to learn to emphasize or articulate the melody notes.

[ralph johansson]

I don't have a problem playing lots of notes in a ballad, long as the left hand isn't moving--------tremelo

Tremolo is an expressive device to be used when it expresses something. For a long time I've been trying to minimize its use, and I often cringe at performances that tremolo all the way through, even down to eighth notes.

A while ago I wanted to work up Only You, in the key of Eb, only to realize that there was too little melodic movement to sustain interest - and that tremoloing all the way through would be very trying. So I wound up writing a new melody over the same changes (and then, of course, that I wasn't the first to use them, as the changes are virtually the same as in There Will Never Be Another You).

44 years ago I experimented with avoiding tremolo completely on a slow tune, the Swedish sacred song O store Gud: http://www.mandohangout.com/myhangou...c.asp?id=22331

And I think the improvised section (first 16 bars of second chorus) clearly illustrates that "melody vs lots of notes" is a false dichotomy.

[PhilGox]

Hello,

Just to share my experience of years of music.

In the begining I tried to play solos on the trumpet with lots of notes, pentatonic and blues scales played very fast, but without no sense.
Then I realised I would never be able to play fast AND good so I changed my mind.
I begun to learn to improvise simple melodic phrases instead of fast series of notes.
At the same time people begun to say to me that my solos had good feeling.

So now I do the same with banjo and mandolin.
Although they are instrument which are often played fast, I still improvise simple melodic phrases that make sense with the song.
So I'm sure I can play my few notes with feeling and ease of playing.
Of course, sometimes I'd like to be able to play fast things just for fun.
But as people say I'm a good melodist on my banjo, I go on this way.

With banjo or mandolin, I really feel happy when I ear someone whistle a simple melody of mine and tell me: "Nice! It stays well in my ears!"
You can't have this if you play hundred notes in a second.

Take the squeleton of the melody, add very little ornements and don't play more than necessary.

[JKA]

I am squarely an intermediate player, despite my many years of playing. I have worked hard to get some "fancy" leads under my fingers and can even pull one off in a jam occasionally. I've made the statement at gigs and jams that my listeners get a lot of notes for their money. At this point, however, I am finding myself gravitating back to the simpler, more melodic leads. It allows me to keep the chord progression in mind better and then improvise from there. I almost wish I had never learned some of the "lots-a-notes" leads I spent so much time trying to master. I know great players will define the melody with the first lead and then expand on the melodic ideas with their second lead. I think the fancy leads took my mind off the melody and, more importantly, the chord progression. As such I've not developed my melodic sense as well as I could have, given the amount of practice time I've put in.

I encourage other beginning to intermediate players to avoid being distracted from the melody and the chord progression just to show off your licks.

Have others gone down this road?

If you're playing in a jam or with a band, play to make the others sound better. (As everybody else should be doing) If you do this it makes no difference if you shred or play subtly...it'll sound brilliant no matter what you do...

[pops1]

Tremolo is an expressive device to be used when it expresses something. For a long time I've been trying to minimize its use, and I often cringe at performances that tremolo all the way through, even down to eighth notes.

A while ago I wanted to work up Only You, in the key of Eb, only to realize that there was too little melodic movement to sustain interest - and that tremoloing all the way through would be very trying. So I wound up writing a new melody over the same changes (and then, of course, that I wasn't the first to use them, as the changes are virtually the same as in There Will Never Be Another You).

44 years ago I experimented with avoiding tremolo completely on a slow tune, the Swedish sacred song O store Gud: http://www.mandohangout.com/myhangou...c.asp?id=22331

And I think the improvised section (first 16 bars of second chorus) clearly illustrates that "melody vs lots of notes" is a false dichotomy.

I can't think of any tune where I would tremolo the whole melody, but a slow tune, with an instrument without much sustain, will require some tremolo. It's the way a mandolin sustains, unlike a violin drawing a bow slowly.