E PEDAL TONE EXERCISE

Another provocatively titled exercise.



Pedal tone is when you keep one voice held on one note, while the other voice has more movement. Keep a droning pedal tone note on the B string, fifth fret, while moving lower voice chromatically up and down. I use a pick for the low voice, and ring finger for the pedal tone, but you can use any finger combination you prefer.

This is a great technique warmup, mostly for left hand, although the right hand part can be tricky too, especially when the spread between strings is wider. Besides being good for technique, you can use it to prepare various pedal steel-ish licks. Charlie McNamara reminded me that you can also find a lot of great Grant Green/Kenny Burrell bluesy jazz lines too.

Any kind of line you want, as long as it's not moving superfast, is in there somewhere. You can play simple pentatonic stuff, get a little more chromatic, bluesy, etc.

A great way to make your line "denser" so that it's less thin. It's effective to throw in this texture once in a while as a contrast if you typically play single-note lines-- textural contrast of this kind can make a long solo sound more interesting.

Here is some additional material from guitar colleague John C. McCain--
These are some chords suggested by the double stops in the exercise. (editor's note: depending on the musical situation, the double stops can imply various chords, or you can just hear the non-pedal tones as tension tones against an E chord, or an A. A lot of pedal steel counterpoint licks use the pedal tone as root or fifth of a chord, with lines below. Steel players often will alternate licks using root on top with fifth-on-top licks, in the same solo or same passage. It's also hot to think of the pedal tone as the 7th of a dominant chord. But all that's another discussion-- perhaps I need to do some more posts on this topic!)


some common harmonic implications (courtesy John C. McCain):


e & d = E7 or Asus
e & c# = AMaj or c#m
e & c - CMaj or am
e & b = E Maj or Em
e & Bb = C7 or Em7b5
e & a = AMaj or am or B7sus
e & g# = EMaj
e & g = em or CMaj
e & f# = D9 or F#7
e & f = FMaj7 or dm9
e & e = EMaj or em or modal anything
e & d# = EMaj7 or B7add11
(John C. McCain can be found on myspace. www.myspace.com/johncmccain

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IMPROVISING COUNTERPOINT (TWO VOICES)

Warning! This improvised counterpoint business is not for the faint of heart! You need to know a bit of theory first-- you're going to be finding specific intervals on the neck, and if you don't know what that means, you're probably not ready for improvised counterpoint. However, there's no reason why you can't play the examples, and if you are gung ho to do this, you may be able to do it just from imitating what I've written, and skipping the remedial theory .

Counterpoint is two or more melodic lines moving simultaneously. The more independent they are, the more "contrapuntal" the effect. In the world of counterpoint, the stuff here is pretty basic-- but if you get the idea of this, you can do a hell of a lot with it. It will definitely help you with harmonizing a melody-- the kind of counterpoint I'm doing here is basically harmonizing a melody, but not harmonizing each note.

We'll be using two different approaches.
1. Two lines, both moving in quarter notes.
(this is not really counterpoint, it's just a harmonized line.)
2. Two lines, the primary line (either upper or lower) moving in quarter notes, the secondary line moving in half notes.
(this is a little more contrapuntal, but you still have one line in a subordinate role.)

Eventually, you can move on to
3. Two lines, moving as in #2, but the roles of primary and secondary switch back and forth.
but my examples are just #1 and #2.

We'll use simple major scale motion for the primary line. The secondary line will be formed by harmonizing with the primary line so that one of the following intervals is created--either 3rds and 6ths (either major or minor), or the compound intervals you get by adding an octave to those (10ths and 13ths). If you use the same interval each time, the lines sound less independent. If you vary the intervals, you get a more contrapuntal effect. It can sound good either way. (Incidentally, if you are operating diatonically, i.e. using just the major scale, each note will require either a major or minor interval to fit the key. If you pick the one that is not in the key, it might still sound good, so experiment. In my examples here, I'm sticking with diatonic notes.)

PLEASE NOTE: I HAVEN'T PUT RECORDED EXAMPLES HERE YET, I'LL GET TO IT EVENTUALLY.

NOTE ON THE WRITTEN EXAMPLES.
The examples all have the same top line. The first series of examples is two lines moving with the same rhythms, with the same interval throughout. The next series is half notes against quarter notes, with the same interval throughout. After that you have half notes against quarter notes, but varying the intervals. There are many other combinations than the ones here, and you should be able to figure out some other ways to put it all together.

If you work through all of these, you may find yourself experimenting with a different melody, or treating the bottom line as the primary and making the top line the harmony part. My examples are just to get your feet wet; by the time you can play all the examples, you'll probably be stumbling onto some variations. After playing some counterpoint exercises I got from John C. McCain, I found myself improvising in this vein. I suspect that anyone who puts in a lot of time with the examples here will figure out how to take it to the next level. For me, the various intervals and fingerings became familiar after a while, and my fingers started gravitating to them. There are a lot of other places on the neck to play these ideas; these examples are just to get your feet wet. If you know what thirds and sixths are, it will help you to find more of them on different string sets. ( I ended many of the examples with an octave, to suggest the ending of a phrase . You can use octaves if you want to stop the motion of the line.)

(NOTE-- if anyone wants some information about intervals, there should be plenty of theory sites . If anyone is itching to have ME explain it, please leave a comment! )

Try to keep the secondary line ringing when you change the primary note. In some cases, this will create a momentary dissonance. You may not like some of these dissonances-- I recommend being able to play the examples with the notes in the secondary line held for full value, and by the time you are able to do that well you may be used to the dissonant sound. Once you develop the technique of holding one line ringing while the other moves, you can choose whether to cut those notes off or not.

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BACH COUNTERPOINT EXERCISE

www.karlstraubmusic.com/BACH COUNTERPOINT.mp3


This little gem comes courtesy of guitar guru John C. McCain (no relation to the Senator). It's an excerpt from J.S.Bach's Minuet in D minor, from his Anna Magdalena Notebook. John took this from the first three bars of Bach's original piece and arranged it for guitar. John's arrangement is the first example in open position. I have refingered it so it can be played all over the neck, and the second two examples show closed position versions in D minor. The first closed position example is on a lower set of strings than John's open position version; the second follows his string sets an octave higher. The last example is the first closed position example, but transposed to G minor. Both of these closed position versions can be played all over the neck. The same fingerings can be used for all twelve keys, although some keys might be awkward or impossible on guitars without a cutaway. To put them in any key you want, find the tonic note of your new key on the A string, or D string, and then use the same fingerings as in my examples.

a few fingering tips-- in the open position, d minor, first bar-- ring finger on A, middle finger on E, pinky on D, ring on C#. this enables you to shift the middle/ring doublestop up a fret in the beginning of the next bar.

first moveable version-- same place in the music. ring/pinky for first doublestop, middle to C#, enabling you to shift ring/middle up to next fret in the second bar, and then index takes the next note.

second moveable version-- the same fingerings, more or less, as the open version should work. Index barre in the first measure enables you to hold the tonic note while the upper voice moves.

full disclosure-- i played these examples with a pick and fingers hybrid approach.

You can find music by John C. McCain at his myspace page.www.myspace.com/johncmccain

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