Jonathan Pearce of the Beths joins us in discussing our most beloved acoustic strummers. Plus, musical obsessions!
Q: What’s your favorite song to play on an acoustic and why?
Jonathan Pearce (The Beths) — Guest Picker
Photo by Erza Simmons
A: I love the Kenyan guitarist Henry Makobi, and I’ve tried hard to learn his song “Likuta Bibi.” I’ll never be able to play it just like him; it’s just too idiosyncratic. But I can kind of get the gist of it and it’s a wickedly clever line.
Likuta Bibi
The trick I learned from this song is to harmonize a melody in sixths, with a top line melody that’s nicely “in the chords,” but a bottom line that can sneak out, and back in, harmonically. It’s a finger twister, too—you have to fully commit to have any hope of landing it. I learned about Makobi from an interview with another musical hero of mine, the Newcastle songwriter Richard Dawson.
Jonathan Pearce's Current Obsession:
Uilleann pipe music from Ireland. This segment is making my listening seem way more diverse than it really is, but truthfully this is my current obsession. Uilleann pipes are so rock ’n’ roll to me. Like a heavily distorted electric guitar, they scream, sustain, and squawk, like they’re on the edge of feedback. The drone element is so relevant to guitar music, too, and I’m trying to get my head around the way pipers adorn melodies with grace notes and turns. The repertoire is just so great, full of dexterous and rousing melodies. I’m trying to learn to play the tin whistle, with the hope of graduating to a set of pipes one day.
Mike Blue — Reader of the Month
Mike Blue
A: “Spain” by Chick Corea.
Spain
I worked on learning that song harder than I worked on any song in 50 years. So, I only play it for me.
Mike Blue's Current Obsession:
My obsession is easy: being able to make music. Not just play notes, but make some sort of musical contribution, whatever that may be.
Ted Drozdowski — Senior Editor
A: Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” in open Dm. I came to the song through Big Brother and Cheap Thrills but backtracked to Big Mama—an astounding person.
Big Mama Thornton 1970
She was a great musician, an out gay woman writing hits and leading a band of men around the world in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Powerful! It’s also a gateway. Down a half-step and I’m in Bentonia tuning.
Ted Drozdowski Current Obsession:
My new stereo Carr amp rig blows my mind. See my most recent Love and Sockets column.
Jason Shadrick — Associate Editor
A: I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into learning fiddle tunes and love to use the classic “Blackberry Blossom” as a good warm-up to center my mind with both hands.
Tony Rice ~ Blackberry Blossom
The fact that these tunes are eighth-note based and use pretty strict alternate picking allows me to go into an almost meditative state while working on them.
Jason Shadrick's Current Obsession:
Hands down, it’s The Rehearsal on HBO. It’s one of the most mind-bending shows I’ve ever seen, and Nathan Fielder is an absolute genius. I hesitate to say much more about it, but I guarantee there are at least a half-dozen times in the first episode where I had to pause and go, “WTF?”
Could this be why “serious guitarists” often sound so … boring?
It seems the more passionate you are about an artistic pursuit, the more pressure there is to be not just physically proficient at it, but—especially if you create your own material—to come up with something “new.” I suppose this mindset must go back centuries, if not millennia. That said, the ongoing internet/social-media experiment—still a tiny-ass blip on humanity’s psychosocial evolutionary timeline—has also conditioned us to put those tendencies into blazing overdrive over the course of a single generation.
I’m not here to bemoan our tech-driven, mental-health clusterfuck, though. Instead, I want to remind you that the pressure to “innovate” is completely in our own heads. To be a “serious” guitarist, you do not need to come up with some brilliant new fingering pattern or rhythm. You do not need to invent fancy-ass chords. You do not need to create mind-numbing numerological key-modulation formulas or devise a new post-pseudo-palindrome composition format. If you consistently feel compelled to do the aforementioned when you sit down to write music, ask yourself—am I doing this to be “a good guitarist”? Chances are, a lot of the time it’s insecurity or the need to impress (aka “insecurity”) that’s driving it. My mission here today is to tell you that repetition is our friend.
So go ahead—hit that note or that chord again. And again and again and again … See how cool it feels when you do it with conviction?
More specifically, I contend that a single, insistently repetitive and irresistibly grooving quarter-, eighth-, or 16th-note bass line, done right, pretty much always brings a smile, gets asses moving, or otherwise circulates the blood of those within earshot in ways that have to be good for us. (And, of course, the insistent line doesn’t actually have to be played on a bass.)
There are so many examples of this from the last hundred years of music, you’d think it doesn’t bear, er, repeating. We could all name tunes from across the stylistic spectrum that immediately touch something within us based solely on their hypnotic rhythm. For me, a killer recent example is the opening track off Irish quintet Fontaines D.C.’s new album, Skinty Fia.
With “In ár gCroíthe go deo” (“In our hearts forever”), bassist Conor Deegan III’s undeviating eighth-notes are the restless skeleton around which haunting church-choir harmonies, guitarist Carlos O’Connell’s eerily cycling Mustang noises, Grian Chatten’s thick Dublin-accented pronouncements, and co-guitarist Conor Curley’s alternately chiming and stuttering Jaguar manipulations are able to flesh out the melancholy tale and send it to its beautifully disconcerting climax. Without them, the whole thing would be a wallowing, amorphous mass.
Fontaines D.C. - In ár gCroíthe go deo (Official Lyric Video)
But the power of repetition isn’t confined to bass. Fontaines frontman Chatten uses the technique to mesmerizing, tension-building effect on vocals, as well. So go ahead—hit that note or that chord again. And again and again and again. Repeat that phrase over and over a few times. See how cool it feels when you do it with conviction? The power of repetition is why so much modern music follows the verse-chorus-verse-chorus formula (admittedly, a bit too much for my taste).
Of course, regardless of instrument, mere repetition doesn’t work magic on its own. The core bass work on “In ár gCroíthe go deo” would be just another rock-solid eighth-note line without the rest of the band’s careful additions, all bound together by a vision and attentive listening. But—at least for me—it’s valuable to periodically get slapped awake to the power of lines like this. I doubt I’m the only one who sometimes just can’t see the “forest” (the emotion or mood or message I want to convey) for the endless possible varieties of chords, progressions, scales, tempos, time signatures, etc. that are the “trees.”
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