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Frank with his Gibson guitar
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Gibson Guitar, Playing Technique, Recording
Greetings from guitarist Frank Singer:
The guitar
used to make this CD is my guitar of choice for jazz music:
a Gibson 175D hollow-body f-hole style arch-top.
I use .010 guage high E strings, and buy conventional, pre-packaged sets of strings,
which I really should change more often.
In deference to the opposition, I use Fender heavy-guage picks.
I actually have thirty or so left from a box of 144 I bought when I was 13 years old.
After playing for a couple of years, I had decided that they felt right,
and I wanted to make sure I had a consistent supply.
With thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, it seems to have worked!
My Gibson is actually a factory second,
with the word 'second' stamped into the head-stock and everything!
I traded a Marshall cabinet, my student-model violin, and some cash for it
when I was at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
It took a good day or two of looking to figure out just what the problems were,
but at last I found a paint-fleck in the scroll trim,
some flaws under the neck extension by the pickups,
and a chip on the underside of the pickup switch.
Definitely not worth the five-hundred dollar discount, but hey,
I'm not complaining!
There was certainly nothing wrong with the way it played.
As one friend commented, in a rare moment of actually letting someone else
TOUCH it,
it plays like butter (sorry, no, you CAN'T sit in and play my guitar!!).
As to how I play my guitar, my
technique varies with the circumstances.
I began as a strummer and finger-picker,
and really got into the chops thing for a while with the heavy picks.
My workout guitar for this was and is an acoustic
Epiphone 150BL with medium- or heavy-guage strings.
I actually had to get this guitar because the
Penco A12 that I had buckled when I put heavy strings on it.
I wanted to build some muscle, you see.
Once I got to
Berklee and into jazz,
I began to work on the traditional jazz
pick-and-finger style,
where the thumb and forefinger grab the pick and use it for single lines
and for the bass notes in chording,
while the middle, ring, and pinky fingers are picking the higher strings.
This is the primary way
oFF tHE tOP: standards 1
is played.
The pick-and-finger method has a limitation to it,
which began to bother me during my studies with
Charlie Banacos after I graduated from Berklee.
After spending so many years playing lines with a pick,
this method placed my pick in the bass, where, at times,
I needed it the least.
After spending time listening to piano players like
McCoy Tyner, Art Tatum, Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans,
and transcribing their solos for Charlie's lessons and for myself,
I found a desire to chord with fingers and play lines with the pick.
This motivated me to begin a new technique,
which appears in the beginning of All The Things You Are,
and in sections of Maiden Voyage.
It is also used on the
Cat's A Bear albums
Tito In Wonderland and
Tito: In Search of a Revolution,
and in various places in the collective improvisations of
J.D. and the Sons of Rhythm.
What I ended up doing was learning how to place the pinky of the right hand
on the lowest string needed, usually low E or A,
with the ring finger picking the next highest string,
and the middle finger above that.
The thumb and forefinger grip the pick,
and the pick is used to play the higher strings.
This allows me to chord for myself while I play lines.
To pick a three-note voicing with a melody above, for example,
I can place the pinky on A, ring on D, and middle on G,
and then the pick will play whatever I can grab with the left hand on the
B and high E strings.
This turned out to be an incredibly compatible technique with
hexatonics,
with the voicing in fourths playable in the left hand with the index finger.
and the lines played above with the other three fingers,
as well as the bar of the index finger.
It is an incredibly hard style to flow in,
so it took about ten years just to get it up and running.
I still work on it and develop new ideas,
mostly through compositions that force me to use it!
Recording
oFF tHE tOP: standards 1
actually began as an experiment with my AWAI XC-RW 700 CD burner.
I wanted to see if I could record direct to CD-RW.
The first attempt was with my Yorkville Traynor two-ten 40W cabinet,
which made entirely too much noise without a moderated connection.
I tried putting that through the Realistic 32-1200 B Stereo Mixing Console,
but it was still too much, so I set up a patch on my
DOD TEC8 guitar effects pedal and ran that through the Realistic,
and that ended up working!
There was some noise on the beginning tracks which was treated with
Roxio 5's Soundstream Editor,
which was also used to clean the edges of the tracks,
but all-in-all,
it created a pretty true representation of my natural sound in this style.
I also play a Roland-ready Stratocaster (Mexican),
which hooks up to the Roland GR-30 Guitar Synthesiser.
This system is a gas, and spares me the trouble of keeping up a keyboard rig,
and more to the point, carrying it around!
With my new technique,
I can imitate most simple and intermediate keyboard parts,
really simplifying my life!
I use that on recordings with
J.D. and the Sons of Rhythm, and during live shows with
One World Tribe.
More on my music can be found at my website,
Frank Singer.com,
at
Cat's A Bear.com,
and on the World Wide Web.
contact frank
Click here to purchase oFF tHE tOP: standards 1 through CDBaby.com
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