Lucas Brar on Ted Greene.

This needs a bookmark too. After being so impressed yesterday with Lucas Brar’s rendition of “Take Five”, my click-stream wound up referencing Lenny Breau, and then Ted Greene, and that reminded me of an absolutely brilliant clip of Greene demonstrating improvisation in the style of Bach, which I saw years ago and figured I should probably bookmark here as a resource.

What’s funny is that I then saw a reference to that very session, along with a little analysis…from Lucas Brar.

Brar’s analysis is truly excellent, I think, and his demonstration is inspiring. Happy to give that its own bookmark.

And also, I can now close the loop on what I remember from the legendary Greene himself. Turns out there’s an entire YouTube channel called TedGreeneArchives, and on that channel there is a playlist to the five-part series called Baroque Improv:

There is so much to unpack there…holy cow. And watching Greene work, in this context, reminds me of watching Oscar Peterson demonstrate his ideas, on a different instrument perhaps (piano), but very much in the same way. Clearly, here, there is a synchronicity of knowledge, skill, intelligence, presence, and availability to the muse, that seems to suggest the word genius.

Anyway, it is now bookmarked, and I’m happy to have it here.

‘Take Five’ for solo guitar…daang.

Lucas Brar for the win today. I’ve long loved the Paul Desmond classic “Take Five” made internationally famous by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and have even studied the score a bit. Today I ran across Lucas Brar’s treatment of the tune for solo acoustic guitar, and…

uh

Hard to take in all the awesome of that, in one sitting. His phrasing is glorious, and I’ve studied enough of the score to recognize that most of the sax solo part is bloody note-perfect. (For me that is one of the most perfect solo breaks I have ever heard–unbelievably lovely from Desmond’s alto sax, and I’d be hard pressed to imagine it being better translated to guitar than Brar manages here, plus a flash or two of his own devise. Wow!)

I nearly spit my coffee when I realized he was also incorporating the rather famous-unto-itself Joe Morello drum solo (in 1959, even in jazz, anything in 5/4 time was pretty unusual–going to the point of the album as a whole–and an effective drum improvisation within that framework stood out even within that context); I haven’t studied that part nearly as extensively as the sax solo, but I think Brar does brilliantly at bringing out all the identifying signatures of what made Morello’s break so distinctive. Truly, amazing.

And I’ve never really even considered trying to arrange it for solo guitar. At one point I could play almost the entire sax solo part by itself, but certainly not along with the comping chords. I might guess that it would be harder to do in my tuning (Guitar Craft standard tuning, C2-G2-D3-A3-E4-G4) than in standard–intervals are spread out further–but I haven’t tried it before.

Seeing something like this, though–something like this done this bloody well–makes me want to try it. Thank you, Lucas Brar, for the inspiration!

Julian Lage, ‘Omission’.

Man, did I need this today. Popped up on YouTube as I went to start up browsers: Julian Lage, “Omission”, live.

Everything that live music can be. You can feel his energy from the first note–I dunno, there’s something about this guy that has just vaulted him into the topmost circle of acts I would want to see in person.

A useful reference for playing MIDI Guitar software, from LoFiLeif.

This guy is impressive, both as a creative artist and crafstman, and as a distiller of “stuff you need to know”. I wish I had discovered his YouTube channel back when I first invested in MIDI Guitar 2. But no matter, better late than never. Among all the other gold over at that channel, I am now bookmarking this gem. All about MIDI Guitar 2 settings, tracking, and latency.

There is some stuff in here that I might have guessed, with the experience I’ve had, but it’s always nice to have some confirmation. There’s also some stuff in there that I had no idea about: e.g., the “MIDI velocity” section’s “Tone” dial being a way to broadly bias the triggered note’s velocity toward either the low end or the high end (to compensate for instruments notably weaker in signal at either extreme); and the “Curve” dial being essentially an overall MIDI velocity compressor (above 50%) or what he calls an “expander” (below 50%). And given the amazing things that you can see him play, I’ll take his advice about technique modifications very strongly; I think I have felt myself trying to do some of these things naturally to compensate (e.g. aggressive muting) but will absolutely apply more of his suggestions to see how much of a difference it can make for me.

Exciting goals to have, coming at a time when I bloody need ’em. Here’s to woodshed time!

Lemme ‘splain… No. There is too much. Lemme sum up.

I suspect I’ll shortly have more to say about this re-emergent-for-me landscape in other posts, but I’ll give this particular nugget its own standalone post and get back to it when I’m ready to start digging in to its particulars.

The TL;DR of it all, is this: right as we arrived in Anchorage for a long weekend of two kids athletic tournaments, I noticed an email pop up in my inbox inviting me to beta-test the forthcoming new major release of the MIDI Guitar software I invested in a few years ago. Oh, that’d be cool, to be on the beta test group for MIDI Guitar 3 for Mac…

And then I started actually looking in to the promise of it, and what some people have been doing with the prototype that has now gone to beta.

Mind: blown. Immediately. Of course I didn’t have a suitable instrument with me to even test with (arrgh!), and even now that we’re home it may take me a few days to feng shui appropriate time to honorably dig in a little bit.

Mo Willems called it: Waiting Is Not Easy!

Anyway, among the truly gobsmacking resources available at LoFiLeif’s YouTube channel–which you’ll see more of referenced here, before long–check out this idea: the MusiKraken app, which turns your iPhone or iPad into a MIDI controller workshop:

I’m no expert in MIDI by any means, but I’ve seen a number of pretty creative controllers out there–but nothing like this. As it is now, the potential power is…intense. As a platform for further expansion, at least from what I can see, the word revolutionary just seems a bit…limited.

Will have to see where this goes, but I’m excited about it!