From his days being mentored by legendary luthiers Jimmy D’Aquisto and Mario Maccaferri to the unsurpassed honor of having his instruments displayed at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monteleone has proven himself one of the most gifted and original archtop builders in the world.
Monteleone’s Grand Artist guitars are inspired by his mandolin-making years and feature an elegant scroll on the bass-side bout. Photos by Vincent Ricardel
Taking a stellar instrument in your hands can be a bit overwhelming— especially when it’s a masterfully built piece of high-functioning art. For starters, you don’t want to ding it, drop it, scratch it, or do anything that might cause its owner pain or expense. Secondly, and possibly even more powerfully, you might not feel worthy of such an instrument.
Among the instruments likely to cause such a reaction, those built by John Monteleone up the anxiety ante considerably—like, to heart-attack level. But despite the jaw-dropping beauty of his instruments, Monteleone insists his central goal is always to make his guitars player friendly. From his early incorporation of side sound ports (which has since become much more common among high-end builders) to his use of a tailpiece that can be minutely adjusted to ease string tension, Monteleone’s archtops are a player’s dream come true in spruce and maple.
Sounding Off
Early on, Monteleone
was concerned that
the archtop had been
pigeonholed as a jazz-only
guitar. “That idea
never sat well with me,”
he says. “I knew it was
capable of much more
than that, and if I could
bring it into an arena
that was more friendly to
the broad application of
guitar, then I’d be going
in the correct direction.”
Monteleone grew up in Manhattan in a family of artists, craftsmen, and engineers, so his background suited him well in his conquest to expand and develop the archtop guitar. He spent several years working for his father on blueprints, generating different kinds of objects and things from paper to reality. It was interesting work, but Monteleone felt he was searching for something else. “I wasn’t quite sure what that would be, or if it was even possible to find a direction that I really was going to align with,” he remembers.
Monteleone makes 17" and 18" versions
of the Grand Artist scroll-body. One
client calls it “The Terminator” for its
aggressive tone, “yet it can be as mild
as you want it to be,” Monteleone says.
In a classic quest to find himself, Monteleone took off to backpack through Europe, where he hitchhiked, slept out under the stars, and dreamt about the future over a period of months. He knew he didn’t want to spend his life working in his father’s pattern shop, but still wasn’t completely sure how to craft the rest of his life. Then it hit him.
One day he was listening to the radio while working, and a show came on featuring Stan Jay and Harold “Hap” Kuffner from the Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island. “They were entertaining live, and they were fielding questions about instruments,” Monteleone says. “I think I called in to find out more about a certain mandolin—a Gibson mandolin that I had seen in a store.” Monteleone had already built some instruments as a hobby by that time, but says, “I had no idea you could turn it into a profession or a business.”
He decided to go meet Jay and Kuffner, who had just started their now-famous business of buying and selling vintage instruments and were, unbeknownst to him, looking for someone to repair them. Fortunately, Monteleone happened to bring along two flattops he’d been building and ended up getting the gig. “With a smile on my face I drove home that day with a Gibson Bella Voce banjo to re-neck as a 5-string. Also on the backseat of my Volkswagen bug was a pre-war Martin 000-45 and a D-28. What more could a starry-eyed guitar geek want to spend the rest of his days with?”
While he was working on rare instruments at the little workshop in his house over the next few years, Monteleone learned a few tricks of the trade from legendary mentors such as Jimmy D’Aquisto and Mario Maccaferri. “I was very lucky to have that experience,” Monteleone says. “Everyone has their own building styles, and I admired Jimmy’s talents. I know they’re not my own talents—and vive la difference! That’s great, everyone should have their own signature on things. Same with Maccaferri. I did some work with him purely on a friendly basis, not as a business arrangement, because I just loved the man. I knew that his approach to building was not my own, but I could appreciate it.”
Even so, Monteleone says D’Aquisto and Maccaferri influenced his luthiery in the same ways that master musicians influence aspiring musicians. “These things play into your own development of how you think about sound, about tone, about construction of the instruments, too. I wasn’t necessarily going to follow their examples exactly, but things do play into your cards at some point.”
Despite having such close working relationships with two of the 20th century’s most famous builders, Monteleone says his main design philosophies came from his hands-on experience working as a repair tech. “You’re a problem-solver when you’re doing this—you’re fixing something, you’re righting something that was wrong. Or something happened to the instrument that was not the fault of the design.” Because of that, Monteleone’s guitars are a product of his reverence for vintage instruments, as well as his desire to improve projection, tone, and playability, but not to turn a guitar into something it’s not. “In design and construction of instruments, there’s a lot to be learned from others. Some of these guys I still hold in high regard, and in some ways, you wouldn’t want to change [what they pioneered].” But in other ways, he says he found certain design aspects called out for change. “Not just to change it for the sake of changing something— that’s not a good reason.” Monteleone says such changes are warranted, however, for the betterment of functionality or user experience.
“The basic design of my instruments, the foundation, is something that is easily identifiable, and recognizable as the instrument we all know, as opposed to a spaceship, or ‘What the hell is that thing?’”
LEFT: The 25.4" Blue
Comet uses Indiana curly red
maple harvested from the
Hoosier National Forest for its
back, sides, and neck. RIGHT: Several internal
inlays of turquoise and mother
of pearl run around the interior
of the guitar’s sidewalls.
The Train: A Vehicle of Inspiration
In addition to his Four Seasons models, luthier John Monteleone has done several themed guitar projects. Here,
he shares the inspiration for his Train series, which is currently in progress.
I have been intrigued with trains since I was a child. I still have a few sets of these trains. Not unlike many other young kids, my interests were also drawn to the guitar, if not a variety of other musical instruments in my particular case. But for me, the train was about imagination. There were many other fascinations with trains, including the deco design and style elements of the great train era. It could be seen in the trains themselves, inside and out. The architecture and design of the great train stations are still with us, the ones that thankfully managed to survive.
I came to realize that many of us guitar players share this childhood activity, and there are many train enthusiasts out there who collect and have a passion for the subject. The trains that I focused on were the more famous ones that ruled the iron rails from the 1920s into the 1950s. They were known for their land speed and luxury of design. Before the jet plane replaced them, they were perhaps the most popular method of getting from city to city.
Trains were a main method of transportation for musicians, entertainers, and bands. Many songs have been composed about the subject of trains—inspiring musicians to sing songs about them and the places that either took them somewhere or took their “baby” away. The blues was a natural inspiration for a train song—Jimmie Rodgers as a case in point. I love those songs.
It seemed to me a natural connection from the guitar to a musician to a train. The next progression would be the inspiration of the train to a luthier. I could easily see how certain elements of design could be incorporated into the guitar design. The danger is, of course, to exaggerate and allow the design to get out of hand. Keeping a balance of design and allowing the guitar to be the vehicle is the challenge at hand. At all costs, it has to be a guitar that plays up to optimum standards, first and foremost. After that, we can proceed to embellish.
I leave it up to the observer to decide what he or she sees in the designs. One can, however, see on the headstock that I use the front of the train for inspiration. There is an interpretation of the headlight mounted in a bronze casting of deco design that might be seen on some of these trains.
The trains that I have
chosen as my subjects for
inspiration of guitar design
so far are the [Central
Railroad of New Jersey]
Blue Comet, the [Atchison,
Topeka and] Santa
Fe Super Chief, the [London
and North Eastern
Railway] Flying Scotsman,
the [New York Central
Railroad] 20th Century
Limited, and the [Seaboard
Air Line Railroad]
Orange Blossom Special.
There are, of course,
other models under consideration
but these train
guitars are presently in the
works and they are each
intended as one-of-a-kind
presentation pieces.
—John Monteleone
LEFT: The Blue Comet’s soundboard was carved from Adirondack red spruce, and the inlay is made of turquoise stone with mother of pearl. RIGHT: The guitars in John Monteleone’s Train series are inspired by various design appointments on famous locomotives from the golden age of passenger trains. Note the intricate details on the Blue Comet model, including the headstock’s aerodynamic shape and deco inlays.
Learning Curves
Like many luthiers,
Monteleone’s first
guitars were flattops,
mostly because of his
background of working
on them during
his teens and early 20s.
“Somehow I never
moved away from those,”
he admits. “I always
keep a flattop with me
to play myself. When I
got interested in archtop
guitars, I had that experience
behind me, knowing
what a flattop could
do, and I quickly learned
what an archtop could
do differently.”
Monteleone noticed
that flattop players had
difficulty adapting to
archtops. For starters,
archtops often seem
heavy or cumbersome
compared to standard
flattop. So Monteleone
decided to try to make
archtops more accessible—
but also more
intimate, with a more
expressive, responsive,
and immediate kind of
sensitivity.
“Archtops have a particular character of enveloping all of the notes— all the notes are put into bubbles. They’re very clear and precise. You can hear them, they’re easy to identify. Flattop guitars have that, but they’re more dragged, one over the other, and it comes at you in a different way.” Monteleone decided he wanted to bring a bit of the flattop into the archtop, response-wise. “The flattop guitar has a very adaptive kind of looseness to it. It’s easy to play in many styles, and the archtop guitar really hadn’t known too much of that in the past. I don’t think it was developed beyond a certain point.”
Monteleone realizes, of course, that art, science, and craftsmanship must work together, and that instruments must be subservient to what their owners intend to play on them. He says that the guitar-building philosophy for an instrument intended to entertain a crowd of thousands is different than the philosophy behind a guitar that will be playing to 100 people or less. And the more you reduce the size of the crowd, he says, the more the design becomes acoustic oriented.
The Teardrop guitar is Monteleone’s
homage to John D’Angelico and Jimmy
D’Aquisto (Monteleone’s close friend and
mentor), who both designed teardrop
guitars during their careers.
“The one-on-one relationship is what really interested me,” he says. “That’s what led me to build a guitar with side soundholes. The musician was going to be the first one to be satisfied in the chain. I wanted to take the ‘me guitar’ and, through experimentation, turn that into the ‘us guitar.’
“I made my first guitar when I was around 14 or 15, and I would play that guitar, fool around with it, and the sound was okay. But if I laid my head on the side of the guitar, my ear right on the side, there was a sound in there that I wanted to hear. It was beautiful, rich, syrupy, live, crisp, clean, and lush. From that day on, my curiosity led me down a path to getting that.”
Monteleone’s Teardrop guitar was part of Guitar Heroes, a 2011 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrating the work of luthiers Monteleone, John D’Angelico, and James D’Aquisto.
Function Meets
Expression
For some archtop builders,
tailpieces aren’t
necessarily high on the
list of design considerations—
at least when it
comes to innovation and
time investment. But
Monteleone’s is remarkably
functional, and it
has a huge impact on the
playability of the instrument.
The bracket that
holds the tailpiece is a
one-piece casting that
allows one to change
the rise of the tailpiece
by removing material.
A piece of ebony block
sits in a tray over which
the tailpiece anchor
strap will pass, so you
can reduce or raise it
simply by making different
pieces and changing
them out to arrive at
something that’s going
to be the best for that
set up. The tailpieces
are also horizontally
adjustable. Monteleone
likes having the option
of shortening it up
tight to the bracket, or
extending it out closer
to the bridge in order to
slightly alter the tension
of a string.
But though he dedicates a lot of attention to tailpieces, Monteleone says the bridge is what really drives everything. “The bridge mechanically transfers information from the strings out onto the soundboard. So with mandolins and archtop guitars, I focused on how to keep that energy alive, with the most efficiency possible, for the longest duration of time that I could get from it. And just for the power of tone and separation, and dynamic separation that is the complete spectrum from lowest to highest— how to smooth that all out from one end to the other was a particular objective of mine.”
His experience working with violins gave him an understanding about the connection between the bridge and an archtop’s tone bars, and how to move sound out to the soundboard. “This is one of the reasons I began to use an elliptical soundhole, and to rotate it to increase the real estate on the bass side of the guitar. And then on the treble side it was a little shorter. To have an efficient soundboard and resonator, that relationship needs to be coupled together.”
Archtops are heftier than flattops by design, but Monteleone doesn’t want his guitars to have the clunky feel that some archtops have. “There are those who are firm believers in weight reduction clear across the board when making the instrument—to make them as light as they can be—and they’re highly responsive, and that’s a fine approach. It’s not mine in particular. I don’t consider weight my enemy. I want to use it in a friendly way, put it in the right places, because I think you have things to gain in terms of tone and resonance.” After a pause, he continues. “There’s probably some scientific way to explain all that, but mine is more empirical— from that experience of having played with this and played with that, and knowing what works and what doesn’t work. And also with what the musicians would like to have. So I’ve chosen to bear that in mind. You can build an instrument totally to your own liking, but if someone else doesn’t like it … .”
Drool-Worthy
Details
One of the most interesting
of Monteleone’s
guitars is his Grand
Artist model, which
has a beautiful scroll
on the bass-side bout.
The Grand Artist began
as an extension of his
mandolin making—he’d
always wanted to make
a guitar based on mandolin
construction. It
required a neck joint
different from a normal
archtop guitar’s and,
once again, Monteleone
pulled innovation out of
deeply rooted tradition:
He’d seen an example of
a scroll-body, O guitar
from the early Gibson
years, and others from
his years repairing mandolins,
but he didn’t find
them terribly interesting.
Each of Monteleone’s Four Seasons guitars is made of wood expressive of the season it represents (left to right): All of the perimeter lines on the quilted-maple
Autumn are influenced by leaves. The natural-finish Winter uses contrasting ebony, maple, and alpine spruce. The wild tiger maple and blue hue of
Spring is to represent “the wonderful sky, sunshine, and things that come exploding out of the ground.” Summer’s scroll body and fiery colors are meant
to invoke that season’s “hot, sweaty, steamy” essence.
“They looked cool, they looked different, but they didn’t play well,” he explains. “They didn’t give the expected tone and response we were looking for.” So he steered away from that type of design and followed his intuition. He’d also built mandocellos and mandolas by this point, and with that experience, he says it wasn’t too difficult to conceptualize a guitar based on those designs. Monteleone now makes 17" and 18" versions, as well as a Teardrop model. He says the guitar’s response and tone is hard to explain. “One of my clients calls it ‘the Terminator,’” he says with a laugh. “It can be very aggressive, but yet it can be as mild as you want it to be.”
Photographer and guitarist Vincent Ricardel has worked extensively with Monteleone and co-authored Archtop Guitars with Rudy Pensa. Ricardel says there are only three guitars like the Teardrop in the world, with the first one being by John D’Angelico in 1957. “It was so unique at the time—with a lower bow that dipped and curved—and it had that ’50s sunburst color we all identify with guitars of that period,” Ricardel says. In the early ’90s, Jimmy D’Aquisto built the second known Teardrop, one with a reddish finish, in homage to D’Angelico. It was only natural that Monteleone followed suit with an homage to his mentor and friend D’Aquisto. He built his in 2008, and it features a scroll and elaborate inlay work.
Ricardel photographed all three Teardrop guitars, as well as many of Monteleone’s intimate building sessions. “If you look really closely, it says ‘In homage to John and Jimmy’ on the inside of the guitar,” says Ricardel of Monteleone’s Teardrop. “You couldn’t pay a higher compliment to somebody.”
But Monteleone is accustomed to getting compliments, too, and few could be more flattering than being invited to have his guitars displayed alongside many instruments by D’Aquisto and D’Angelico at the 2011 Guitar Heroes exhibition at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Monteleone’s markings on the insides of his instruments were made possible through his use of side soundholes. “I thought, ‘Hey, here’s a whole new canvas. Why not?’” The first guitars he decorated this way were the Four Seasons guitars, a collection he built starting in 2002. Now in a private collection, these guitars were featured in a recording by guitarist Anthony Wilson, who was commissioned by Monteleone to write a suite of music for the guitars, Seasons: A Song Cycle for Guitar Quartet (Live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). The recording features Wilson, Steve Cardenas, Chico Pinheiro, and Julian Lage, and it was performed at the Guitar Heroes exhibit. One of the Seasons guitars, Summer, is a scrollbody model, and on the recording you can hear a range of Monteleone’s options, including f-hole and elliptical-hole guitars. Each of the Four Seasons guitars has elaborate sketch and inlay work on the interior, including genuine precious gemstones such as diamonds, rubies, and even emeralds.
Despite the unique, forward-looking aesthetics of his guitars, Monteleone is a player himself, so his designs always take into account how unique appointments will affect tone, ergonomics, and playability. “The bigger the guitar, the more shallow it’s going to be, and the smaller the guitar, the deeper it’ll be, in contrast,” he says. He even pays close attention to things as small as putting a radius on the edges of the binding so it doesn’t press uncomfortably into the player’s arm or leg.
Above all, Monteleone treasures the close relationships he forms with individual clients—he loves building each guitar to suit a unique person. “I’ve been blessed with a clientele that allows me a pretty free range of experimentation to develop ideas,” he says, “but it always comes back to hanging those ideas of design on a functioning body that will play as expected, at the least. Otherwise what good is it?”
Well-designed pickups. Extremely comfortable contours. Smooth, playable neck.
Middle position could use a bit more mids. Price could scare off some.
$2,999
Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay II
A surprise 6-string collaboration with Cory Wong moves effortlessly between ’70s George Benson and Blink-182 tones.
Announced at the 2025 NAMM show, Cory Wong’s new collaboration with Ernie Ball Music Man scratched an itch—namely, the itch for a humbucker-loaded guitar that could appease Wong’s rock-and-R&B alter ego and serve as complement to his signature Fender Strat. Inspiration came from no further than a bandmate’s namesake instrument. Vulfpeck bassist Joe Dart has a line of signature model EBMM basses, one of which uses the classic StingRay bass body profile. So, when Wong went looking for something distinctive, he wondered if EBMM could create a 6-string guitar using the classic StingRay bass body and headstock profile.
Double the Fun
Wong is, by his own admission, a single-coil devotee. That’s where the core of his sound lives and it feels like home to him. However, Wong is as inspired by classic Earth, Wind & Fire tones and the pop-punk of the early ’90s as he is by Prince and the Minneapolis funk that he grew up with. The StingRay II is a guitar that can cover all those bases.
Ernie Ball has a history of designing fast-feeling, comfortable necks. And I can’t remember ever struggling to move around an EBMM fretboard. The roasted maple C-shaped neck here is slightly thicker in profile than I expected, but still very comfortable. (I must also mention that the back of the neck has a dazzling, almost holographic look to the grain that morphs in the light). By any measure, the StingRay II’s curves seemed designed for comfort and speed. Now, let’s talk about those pickups.Hot or Not?
A few years ago EBMM introduced a line of HT (heat-treated) pickups. The pickups are built with technology the company used to develop their Cobalt and M-Series strings. A fair amount of the process is shrouded in secrecy and must be taken on faith, but EBMM says treating elements of the pickup with heat increases clarity and dynamic response.
To find out for myself, I plugged the StingRay II into a Fender Vibroverb, Mesa/Boogie Mark VII, and a Neural DSP Quad Cortex (Wong’s preferred live rig). Right away, it was easy to hear the tight low end and warm highs. Often, I feel like the low end from neck humbuckers can feel too loose or lack definition. Neither was the case here. The HT pickup is beautifully balanced with a bounce that’s rich with ES-335 vibes. Clean tones are punchy and bright—especially with the Vibroverb—and dirty tones have more room for air. Individual notes were clear and articulate, too.
Any guitar associated with Wong needs a strong middle-position or combined pickup tone, and the StingRay II delivers. I never felt any significant signal loss in the blended signal from the two humbuckers, even if I could use a bit more midrange presence in the voicing. The midrange gap is nothing an EQ or Tube Screamer couldn’t fix, though. And not surprisingly, very Strat-like sounds were easy to achieve for having less midrange bump.
Knowing Wong’s love for ’90s alt-rock, I expected the bridge pickup to have real bite, and it does, demonstrating exceptional dynamic range and exceptional high-end response that never approached shrill. Nearly every type of distortion and overdrive I threw at it sounded great, but especially anything with a scooped-mid flavor and plenty of low end.
The Verdict
By any measure, the StingRay II is a top-notch, professional instrument. The fit and finish are immaculate and the feel of the neck makes me wonder if EBMM stashes some kind of secret sandpaper, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt a smoother, more playable neck. Kudos are also due to EBMM and Wong for finding an instrument that can move between ’70s George Benson tones and the hammering power chords of ’90s Blink-182. Admittedly, the nearly $3K price could give some players pause, but considering the overall quality of the instrument, it’s not out of line. Wong’s involvement and search for distinct sounds makes the StingRay II more than a tired redux of a classic model—an admirable accomplishment considering EBMM’s long and storied history.
Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay II Cory Wong Signature Electric Guitar - Charcoal Blue with Rosewood Fingerboard
StingRay II Cory Wong - Charcoal BlueThe Melvins' Buzz Osborne joins the party to talk about how he helped Kurt Cobain find the right sounds.
Growing up in the small town of Montesano, Washington, Kurt Cobain turned to his older pal Buzz Osborne for musical direction. So on this episode, we’re talking with the Melvins leader about their friendship, from taking Cobain to see Black Flag in ’84 to their shared guitar journey and how they both thought about gear. And in case you’ve heard otherwise, Kurt was never a Melvins roadie!
Osborne’s latest project is Thunderball from Melvins 1983, something of a side trajectory for the band, which harkens back to this time in Osborne’s life. We dig into that and how it all relates and much more.
In challenging times, sometimes elemental music, like the late Jessie Mae Hemphill’s raucous Mississippi hill country blues, is the best salve. It reminds us of what’s truly essential––musically, culturally, and emotionally. And provides a restorative and safe place, where we can open up, listen, and experience without judgement. And smile.
I’ve been prowling the backroads, juke joints, urban canyons, and VFW halls for more than 40 years, in search of the rawest, most powerful and authentic American music. And among the many things I’ve learned is that what’s more interesting than the music itself is the people who make it.
One of the most interesting people I’ve met is the late Jessie Mae Hemphill. By the time my wife, Laurie Hoffma, and I met Jessie Mae, on a visit to her trailer in Senatobia, Mississippi, she’d had a stroke and retired from performing, but we’d been fortunate to see her years before at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival, where she brought a blues style that was like quiet thunder, rumbling with portent and joy and ache, and all the other stuff that makes us human, sung to her own droning, rocking accompaniment on an old Gibson ES-120T.
To say she was from a musical family is an understatement. Her grandfather, Sid, was twice recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. While Sid played fiddle, banjo, guitar, harmonica, keyboards, and more, he was best known as the leader of a fife-and-drum band that made music that spilled directly from Africa’s main artery. Sid was Jessie Mae’s teacher, and she learned well. In fact, you can see her leading her own fife-and-drum group in Robert Mugge’s wonderful documentary Deep Blues(with the late musician and journalist Robert Palmer as on-screen narrator), where she also performs a mournful-but-hypnotic song about betrayal—solo, on guitar—in Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint.
That movie, a 1982 episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (on YouTube) where she appears as part of Othar Turner’s Gravel Springs fife-and-drum band, and worldwide festival appearances are as close as Jessie Mae ever got to fame, although that was enough to make her important and influential to Bonnie Raitt, Cat Power, and others. And she made two exceptional albums during her lifetime: 1981’s She-Wolf and 1990’s Feelin’ Good. If you’re unfamiliar with North Mississippi blues, their sound will be a revelation. The style, as Jessie Mae essayed it, is a droning, hypnotic joy that bumps along like a freight train full of happily rattling box cars populated by carefree hobos. Often the songs ride on one chord, but that chord is the only one that’s needed to put the music’s joy and conviction across. Feelin’ Good, in particular, is essential Jessie Mae. Even the songs about heartbreak, like “Go Back To Your Used To Be” and “Shame on You,” have a propulsion dappled with little bends and other 6-string inflections that wrap the listener in a hypnotic web. Listening to Feelin’ Good, it’s easy to disappear in the music and to have all your troubles vanish as well—for at least as long as its 14 songs last.“She made it clear that she had a gun—a .44 with a pearl handle that took up the entire length of her handbag.”
The challenge I’ve long issued to people unfamiliar with Jessie Mae’s music is: “Listen to Feelin’ Good and then tell me if you’re not feeling happier, more cheerful, and relaxed.” It truly does, as the old cliché would have it, make your backbone slip and your troubles along with it. Especially uptempo songs like the scrappy title track and the charging “Streamline Train.” There’s also an appealing live 1984 performance of the latter on YouTube, with Jessie Mae decked out in leopard-print pants and vest, playing a tambourine wedged onto her left high-heel shoe––one of her stylish signatures.
Jessie Mae was a complex person, caught between the old-school dilemma of playing “the Devil’s music” and yearning for a spiritual life, sweet as pecan pie with extra molasses but quick to turn mean at any perceived slight. She also spent much of her later years in poverty, in a small trailer with a hole in the floor where mice and other critters got in. And she was as mistrustful of strangers as she was warm once she accepted you into her heart. But watch your step before she did. On our first visit to her home, she made it clear that she had a gun—a .44 with a pearl handle that took up the entire length of her handbag and would make Dirty Harry envious.
Happily, she took us into her heart and we took her into ours, helping as much as we could and talking often. She was inspiring, and I wrote a song about her, and even got to perform it for her in her trailer, which was just a little terrifying, since I knew she would not hold back her criticism if she didn't like it. Instead, she giggled like a kid and blushed, and asked if I’d write one more verse about the artifacts she’d gathered while touring around the world.
Jessie Mae died in 2006, at age 82, and, as happens when every great folk artist dies, we lost many songs and stories, and the wisdom of her experience. But you can still get a whiff of all that––if you listen to Feelin’ Good.
Intermediate
Intermediate
How David Gilmour masterully employs target notes to make his solos sing.
When I was an undergraduate jazz performance major struggling to get a handle on bebop improvisation, I remember my professor Dave LaLama admonishing me, “If you think playing over the fast tunes is hard, wait until you try playing over the ballads. What Dr. Lalama was trying to impart was that playing fast scales over fast changes could get you by, but playing melodically over slow tempos, when your note choices are much more exposed, would really test how well you could create meaningful phrases.
Although getting past the “this scale works over these chords” approach to improvisation generally requires hours of shedding, aiming for particular target notes (specific notes over specific chords) is an optimum strategy to maximize your practice time. In the realm of rock guitar, I can think of no greater master of the melodic target note technique while playing ballads than David Gilmour.
For the unfamiliar few, Gilmour was first enlisted by fledgling psychedelic rockers Pink Floyd in 1967, when original guitarist/vocalist Syd Barrett began having drug-induced struggles with mental health. The band experimented with various artistic approaches for several years before refining them into a cohesive “art rock” sound by the early ’70s. The result was an unbroken streak of classic, genre-defining conceptual albums that included Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. Although bassist/vocalist Roger Waters assumed the role of de facto bandleader and primary songwriter, Gilmour was a significant contributor who was praised for his soulful singing and expertly phrased lead playing that seemed to magically rework pedestrian blues phrases into sublimely evocative melodies. His focus on musicality over excessive displays of technique made him a musician’s musician of sorts and earned him a stellar reputation in guitar circles. When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in the mid ’80s, Gilmour surprised many by calmly assuming the leadership mantle, leading the band through another decade of chart-topping albums and stadium tours. Although Pink Floyd are not officially broken up (keyboardist and founding member Richard Wright died in 2008 while Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason joined forces with Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk on the one-off single “Hey Hey Rise Up” in 2022), Gilmour has mostly spent the last few decades concentrating on his solo career. His latest release, Luck and Strange, features his wife, novelist Polly Sampson, as primary lyricist and daughter Romany Gilmour as vocalist on several tracks. His recent tour filled arenas around the world.
Let’s take a page from Gilmour’s hallowed playbook and see how incorporating a few well-chosen target notes can give our playing more melody and structure.
For the sake of simplicity, all the examples use the Gm/Bb major pentatonic scale forms. In my experience as a teacher, I find that most students can get a pretty solid handle on the root-position, Form-I minor pentatonic scale but struggle to incorporate the other four shapes while playing lead. One suggestion I give them is to work on playing the scales from the top notes down and focus on the four highest strings only. I believe this is a more logical and useful approach to incorporating these forms into your vocabulary. Try playing through Ex. 1, Ex. 2, Ex. 3, and Ex. 4, which are based on the top-down approach of the Form I, Form II, Form IV, and Form I (up an octave) shapes respectively.
Ex. 1
Ex. 2
Ex. 3
Ex. 4
Once you’ve gotten a handle on the scales, try playing Ex. 5, which is loosely based on the extended introduction to Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” We begin by soloing over a static Gm chord for four measures. As target notes, I’ve chosen the root and 5th of the G minor chord ( the notes G and D, respectively). In the first measure, we’re starting in a minor pentatonic Form I with a bend up to the root of the Gm chord. A flurry of notes on beat 4 sets us up for the bend to the D in the second measure. The D note is again targeted in measure three—this time up an octave via a shift into the minor pentatonic Form II shape. Measure four aims for the G tonic up an octave, but ends with a bend that targets a C—the root of the IVm (Cm) chord in the final measure. By focusing on target notes and connecting them with embellishing licks, your lead lines will have a much better sense of direction and melodic narrative. Also, by only targeting the root and 5th of the chord, the target note approach will be easily transferrable to songs in a G blues context (G pentatonic minor over a G major or G dominant tonality).
Ex. 5
A further exploration of this approach, Ex. 6 begins with a two-beat pickup that resolves to the scale tonic G. This time however, the G isn’t serving as the root of the Im chord. Instead, it’s the 5th of Cm—the IVm chord. Employing the root of the pentatonic scale as the fifth of the IVm chord is a textbook Gilmour-ism and you can hear him use it to good effect on the extended intro to “Echoes” from Live in Gdansk. When approaching the C on beat 2 of the second full measure, bend up from the Bb on the 6th fret of the 1st string then slide up to the C on the 8th fret without releasing the bend or picking again. In the final measure, I’ve introduced two Db notes, which serve as the b5 “blue note” of the scale and provide melodically compelling passing tones on the way to the G target note on beat 4.
Ex. 6
Exclusively positioned in the Form-IV G minor pentatonic shape, Ex. 7 is based on a bluesy lick over the I chord in the first and third measures that alternately targets a resolution to the root of the IV chord (C ) and the root of the V chord (D7#9) in the second and fourth measures. Being able to resolve your lead phrases to the roots of the I, IV, and V chords on the fly is an essential skill ace improvisers like Gilmour have mastered.
Ex. 7
Now let’s turn our attention to the Bb major pentatonic scale, which is the relative major of G minor. Play through the Form I and Form II shapes detailed in Ex. 8 and Ex. 9 below. You’ll see I’ve added an Eb to the scale (technically making them hexatonic scales). This allows us a bit more melodic freedom and—most importantly—gives us the root note of the IV chord.
Ex. 8
Ex. 9
Channeling the melodic mojo of Gilmour’s lead jaunts on Pink Floyd’s “Mother” and “Comfortably Numb,” Ex. 10 targets chord tones from the I, IV, and V (Bb, Eb, and F) chords.
The muted-string rake in first measure helps “sting” the F note, which is the 5th of the Bb. Measure two targets a G note which is the 3rd of the Eb. This same chord/target note pairing is repeated in the third and fourth measures, although the G is now down an octave. For the F and Eb chords of measures five and six, I’ve mirrored a favorite Gilmour go-to: bending up to the 3rd of a chord then releasing and resolving to the root (an A resolving to an F for the F chord and a G resolving to an Eb for the Eb chord.) The final measure follows a melodic run down the Bb scale that ultimately resolves on the tonic. Be sure to pay attention to the intonation of all your bends, especially the half-step bend on the first beat of measure seven.
As a takeaway from this lesson, let’s strive to “Be Like Dave” and pay closer attention to target notes when soloing. Identify the roots of all the chords you’re playing over in your scales and aim for them as the beginning and/or ending notes of your phrases. Think of these target notes as support beams that will provide structure to your lead lines and ultimately make them more melodically compelling.