Have you ever found yourself on the edge of a musical cliff, looking into the unknown depths of a genre that feels worlds away from your own? That's where I stood, guitar in hand, as I prepared to leap into the intricate world of jazz fusion. In a tale of unexpected turns, I recount the thrilling saga of channeling my rock and metal-honed skills into the sophisticated melodies and rhythms of the Brecker Brothers. Alongside my narrative, I peel away the layers of what it takes to internalize and execute music that's not just new but complex to the core. It's a journey that's as much about self-discovery as it is about musical mastery.
Through the lens of my own experiences, this episode illuminates the artistry involved in transforming horn-driven compositions to the guitar's strings, all while diving into the delicate ecosystem of a new band. We'll explore the essential elements of paying homage to the original pieces while injecting a dose of personal style that reflects the unique qualities every musician brings to the stage. Whether you're a music aficionado or an artist on the lookout for your next creative adventure, this episode promises to inspire and embolden you to step beyond the boundaries of the familiar and into the exhilarating expanse of artistic growth and transformation.
Have you ever found yourself on the edge of a musical cliff, looking into the unknown depths of a genre that feels worlds away from your own? That's where I stood, guitar in hand, as I prepared to leap into the intricate world of jazz fusion. In a tale of unexpected turns, I recount the thrilling saga of channeling my rock and metal-honed skills into the sophisticated melodies and rhythms of the Brecker Brothers. Alongside my narrative, I peel away the layers of what it takes to internalize and execute music that's not just new but complex to the core. It's a journey that's as much about self-discovery as it is about musical mastery.
Through the lens of my own experiences, this episode illuminates the artistry involved in transforming horn-driven compositions to the guitar's strings, all while diving into the delicate ecosystem of a new band. We'll explore the essential elements of paying homage to the original pieces while injecting a dose of personal style that reflects the unique qualities every musician brings to the stage. Whether you're a music aficionado or an artist on the lookout for your next creative adventure, this episode promises to inspire and embolden you to step beyond the boundaries of the familiar and into the exhilarating expanse of artistic growth and transformation.
Hey, steve, here and I just want to take a few minutes to talk to you about getting out of your comfort zone if it's something you're interested in doing. We all strive to get really good at whatever it is that we're interested in. For me, I've always been more of a rock, metal, blues rock kind of guitar players. I've got a lot of amazing friends, a lot of amazing musicians that I get to play with on a regular basis in different formats, be it church, be it metal stuff, be it rock stuff, instrumental stuff, all kinds of different things. A friend of mine asked me if I would fill in for this jazz fusion thing that he had. He needed a guitar player for it. The music was from a band called the Brecker Brothers. If you've never heard of them, it's certainly worth checking out. It's jazz fusion stuff, and the live stuff that I've been watching most of the time has Mike Stern playing guitar, who's an absolutely amazing jazz fusion style guitar player. That is not my comfort zone. I had two choices Either I could say no, I'm not interested, or I could say yeah, I'm interested, knowing that stepping outside my comfort zone was going to require some work on my part. I'm going to explain to you a little bit about my journey with this, simply because it takes time. If I was doing something within my comfort zone, it takes a lot less time. It isn't about whether I'm getting reciprocated financially for the amount of time. It has more to do with is it going to be a good experience for me musically or just a life experience, that sort of thing? I said, heck, yeah, I'll do it. What we were doing were these four songs by the Brecker Brothers. The way I learn and the way a lot of my friends that play more jazzy stuff learn sometimes overlap and sometimes they don't. The first thing I got were some live videos to watch of these songs. Then I've got some charts. The charts were not the same as the live performances, obviously, and that's okay. I'm just telling you my experience and what it is that I had to do.
Steve:
Try and make this all come together, because, if you're like me, the way I grew up I listened to things and then figure them out by ear. If there's certain elements I can't figure out by ear, then I'll go to either notation or tab or maybe even a video and try and kind of fill in the parts that I can't get on my own. Well, because of the the thickness of some of this music, it isn't guitar based, you know. It is more based on trumpet and saxophone and the guitar is an instrument in the background filling space. And then there'll be these amazing guitar solos by Mike Stern or whoever it might be that is doing the guitar playing at that point, and then they'll step back into the rhythm section.
Steve:
And so, watching the videos, you know, I can get a sense of some things, but harmonically there's a lot going on there that I'm just not used to doing. It's not like I can hear the chord and go oh, that's an E, you know, seven flat, nine sharp, 13, with a B flat in the bass or something like that. My ears isn't accustomed to hearing that. That would be something that the sheet music or the charts would give me. And so you know I'm watching these videos kind of get in the sense of how I normally think of things. You know, here's an intro and then there's a, you know, a melody idea here, and then it goes into this section and there's a breakdown or whatever. So I would start writing on a piece of paper kind of my thoughts on what it is that I'm hearing and that sort of thing, not in terms of pitch but in terms of structure. And then I would go to the charts and start trying make sense of what that's trying to say relative to what I've just been seeing.
Steve:
Now it'd be great if I had the skills to just look at the chart and play exactly what's on there. There's two problems with that. Number one I can't do that. Number two even if I could do that, some of these charts, the guitar parts may or may not reflect what the guitar really should have been doing at that point in time. You know, maybe the chart doesn't have the guitar part, maybe it's only got some other parts to reference off of. Or you know, maybe the chart has a guitar part that's really following just the lead line all the way through, which is fine. But then you might be stepping on the trumpet and the saxophone part when you're really not supposed to be there in the first place. At least the videos that I was watching, that isn't what Mike Stern was doing. So then I'm left with well, I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be doing there, because the chart isn't showing me and the video isn't showing Mike Stern the whole time. It's showing all these people and stuff going on.
Steve:
So what do I do? Well, then I start trying to do some research. I go on YouTube see if anybody's got anything out there. Well, the Brecker Brothers are really popular in some circles, but not so much in the guitar circle. There just wasn't a lot of stuff out there to try and reference. And then I would find, you know, a video of somebody just jamming over something, which, again, isn't really what I'm looking for. We'll get to the solos and stuff in just a second.
Steve:
But what I'm looking for is the framework. What I'm looking for are the chords, and I'm not fighting anything. So then I'm looking for maybe stuff off Guitar Pro or stuff off Ultimate Guitars. Is there anything out there that I can use to help kind of reference this? Well, I really didn't come up with much. A little bit here, a little bit there, but really not much.
Steve:
So then I started digging, trying to find scores Like can I buy, you know, a full score of one of these songs? And then I would have the guitar parts, and maybe they don't again directly reference the chart that we're gonna be doing, but at least it would give me some more insight. Not really not much going on there, so I just compiled a lot of stuff. So, understand, I've already spent a lot of time trying to watch the videos, trying to make sense of the charts that I did have. But then trying to fill in the gaps was near impossible because I couldn't figure out what it was from the video or the audio and the charts weren't really giving me what I was trying to figure out for information. Some of it I would fill in, some of it I just couldn't fill those spaces, so it became very difficult. Then I started looking at there's, what is it called? Scribb-something, scribb-d, s-c-r-i-b-d. Found an app called Scribb. Did I subscribe to that 10 bucks a month or whatever trying to find maybe there was some charts in there that I could use.
Steve:
And basically, through all of the stuff that I did, what I ultimately came up with was some stuff I could play. There were some parts of the song I had no idea what I was supposed to play and that's where I was. That's because for me again you might be like I don't want to show up for a rehearsal and not know what I'm doing and then waste everybody's time asking questions when I'm supposed to show up and already have my parts prepared. But there were just questions I had. So I got a hold of the guys. I said look what I'm going to do when we rehearse, because we had two rehearsals where we ran the songs one time a night. If we had to run the song twice, I don't remember if we did, but I think we just ran them one night and then ran them the second night and then we performed the next night and then we performed again one more time. So I brought in a phone and I recorded them playing the songs and that way I had the structure.
Steve:
And then it still doesn't necessarily fit in all of the elements that I'm looking for, but at least I have something to work off of. I can listen to the bass or listen to the keyboard part or something like that, and start trying to formulate an idea of what might be there that I could fill in. So at the end of the day it was a lot of work. It was a lot of research and a lot of preparation trying to plan this out and figure out what I was doing.
Steve:
And then on top of that, really the reason why I wound up doing this anyway, was the solos that are in some of these songs where they're long or they're interactive with other instruments or whatever it might be. And so the big thing there was should I be using Dorian or should I be using major or something like that? And then, of course, what elements of fusion might I add into these as well? Some of them were a little more groove oriented, almost more Santana-ish in nature, and some of them weren't. Some of them were more jazzy, jazz fusion. So I had to step outside a little bit for some of those using a little more chromatics and things like that, but still not trying to completely revamp the way I play, because then it's just a waste of time. Like, if I can integrate that idea into the way I'm already playing, then it's just an added bonus.
Steve:
So that was the great part about that is, all of that was pretty easy. All I had to do was figure out what's the overall key of this jam right here that I'm soloing over, and then does it change key or modulate to something else or whatever, and make a plan for that. So then I did that and figured all that out, and then I wrote them all out, which I don't have the charts right here, but I wrote them all out in shorthand instead of having five pages that I have to flip through while I'm standing there, the wind's blowing or whatever if it's outside. I always make smaller charts of everything with kind of a cheat shorthand. That makes sense to me. That probably wouldn't make sense to anybody else, but I like to make those that way. It's very easy for me just to look at one page. I don't have to turn a bunch of stuff and I can watch that if I can fit it all on one page. If I can't, then maybe two pages or something like that, but definitely rewriting things in terms of shorthand, which is what I did.
Steve:
And then I always take that and take a photo of those. So if I do lose the papers, I do have the pictures. Now the problem is is the pictures will get sucked into seven million other pictures that my family takes and all goes on the cloud and whatever. So then what I do is I take those pictures and I convert them into PDFs, which you can find an app that does it very easily and then I add them into. I have this app called Gigbook that I keep all of my music from all of my bands and all that stuff. So it's always there for reference. So, yes, it takes three minutes to take the picture, convert it to PDF, put it in Gigbook and literally I can do that in two or three minutes. So I did that that way. I always have that. In case I ever need to come back to this, I have it.
Steve:
And then those videos that I took of our practices I keep all of those on a hard drive on my computer as well, where I keep all of my band files. So that way, if this is completely out of my brain, I have to come back to it someday. I come back to those videos, I can come back to the charts that I made for myself and even sometimes, most of the time, I make videos of me jamming although I didn't do that to these because I think the rehearsal practice videos and the charts that I created are enough. But if I needed to, I would make those too and I would put those in the band folder on my computer and keep those as well. That way, again, I do that with everything that I do right now. As a matter of fact, I'm working on For the Love of God just now. I was just working on For the Love of God by Steve Vai, and we're going to be doing that in one of the bands I planned. So I've learned about half of it right now.
Steve:
So, instead of coming back tomorrow and hoping that I can remember what I did, what I do is I record a video of myself playing all of this up to the point where I left off, and that way, when I come back tomorrow, when I start up again, I can watch myself a couple of times ago. Oh, okay, so that's what was happening there and that's my approach to whatever this thing is gonna be right there. So now I got an overall plan, so I don't have to start all over again and go well, what was I doing there? I already know what I was doing. I can change it, and if I decide to change things about it, then I'll just make a new video. So it's literally me just turning it on, like I'm doing right now, and videotaping or recording me right, and then I save it and if I make a different version, I can throw the other one away and just make a new one. So it's not requiring a lot of time or anything like that.
Steve:
So my point is is sometimes in your life it is really worth stepping outside your comfort zone and doing different things, but also understanding that in doing that, it's gonna take some time, some quality time from something else you could be doing to develop this new thing. Sometimes it's not worth it. Sometimes it's way too much work, or if it's way outside your comfort zone, it might be a real struggle. Or if you don't have any kind of resources which is why I wanted to make this, just so you understood that there are a lot of resources out there Sometimes what you're playing might be very obscure and you'll have a hard time finding some of those things. If it's popular songs, you can find them all over the place.
Steve:
Not only is it the song, it's the style developing stylistically. What might be those things where maybe a more confident and what's the word I'm looking for, you know, a jazz guitar player with a lot of history, would be able to listen to something like this and go okay, they'd have different ideas in their head of what to play, which is amazing. You know, we're all different that way. Again, that's the thing about music is our approaches are different, our styles are different, the way we think about music is different, the way we play. Things are obviously very different. So it was really cool to step into that world and kind of try and figure out how to accommodate the songs yet accommodate the band, not be in the way yet shine when it's needed and then step back out of the way when it's not and try and compile this information and maybe someday I'll actually do something with it where I could post it and nobody's gonna watch it except somebody like me out there that's going, hey, I get this Brecker Brothers situation I'm in and I've got to play. So anyway, I thought it'd be fun to just talk to you about that a little bit and encourage you to do that Everyone's so well.
Steve:
Stepped outside your comfort zone. You might find that it's really quite enjoyable to do something that's different than what you do all the time. You know, if you play a certain style of music or play with a certain band or whatever it is, and that's all you do all the time, it might be amazing, but you might still from that inner musician or whatever it might be that might be calling out to you to go hey, try something else. You know, what would it be like if we did this? What would it be like if we played with these people that play a different kind of music or something like that, and you really might wind up enjoying that. All right, so take care and stay positive, and I'll talk to you soon, okay?