Just breathtaking arrangement of Spain by SNIPS Trio.

I had to learn this amazing diminished tapping lick which starts on the root of the F#7 chord and then follows an ascending diminished triad a half step above.  Repeat this up a tritone on the next string up until your done.  Of course you catch the top note of each pattern with your right hand index finger tapping and pulling off.  Something like this:

Cool Concert

The original Kurt Rosenwinkel Lick

I have evolved slowly but surely as a musician but I feel a milestone has been reached and I am finally able to hear/conceive what is going on with this lick (See Fig 1) that has inspired and eluded me for so long.  I transcribed it incorrectly a couple times before and learned a lot trying to reverse engineer it.  I wonder if at times my subconscious was playing a shell game and keeping the loot always just out of sight while other incidental knowledge was revealed.  Kurt is such an amazing guitarist I am often left scratching my head.  This to me sounds like it's in the ball park and is one of several places this lick lives on the guitar.  I suspect he played it on the top three strings starting with a Bb Minor triad (see Fig 2) in the first position but the articulation is essentially the same.   My aim is not to play just like Kurt Rosenwinkel but to shine a light on his prodigious technique and express gratitude that he has inspired guitarists like myself to look deeper into their instrument and coax new music from it.  Like other greats he has found his own voice but his is especially grounded in sound technique and a firm grasp of harmony.  These qualities have enabled him to become a prolific and poetic musician and I really can't overstate the impact his presence has had on my musical development.  I have practiced and transcribed loads and loads searching for scraps of what seems to come so effortlessly to him.  Anyway, this is for me a milestone technique and I'm excited to post it!  Thanks Kurt!  Geek out!

Fig 1 

Fig 2

Strat Setup

This is THE WAY to set up your Floating Tremolo on a Stratocaster.  I am so glad I found these videos.  Why didn't I know this sooner?!  I hope this is as helpful to someone else as it was to me.  The first explains why this is useful musically and the second presents a more scientific approach to the setup.

 

 

Just get to this.

Kurt Rosenwinkel's Magic

This lick appears at about 32 secs into the track Safe Corners from Kurt's Remedy album.  It points to the kind of left hand propulsion that I think is one his trademarks.  These licks that just jump off of the guitar like a Romanian gymnast's tumbling routine.  It's an inspired flourish in the middle of a beautiful improvised intro.   When I met Kurt once and had the opportunity to ask what I should be doing to improve as a guitarist he said simply, "connect your voice to your guitar." This recording is a fine example of how he has done just this.

An exercise to stretch the fingers and the ears.

I recently watched a YouTube video about fourths and realized while trying to fall asleep that the exercise described in the video could be applied to the guitar as a way of teaching position shifts, fingerings and the like in a contextual way.  Like a muscle memory formula.  If then...



So the exercise is this.  Pick a note, pick a finger to play that note and pick a note within one octave of that note to be the upper or lower limit of the octave in which you will play the entire cycle of fourths or fifths ascending or descending.  This forces one to concentrate!  Once you've played through the entire cycle the fingerings will become a pattern and you will repeat the cycle with the same optimum fingering.  Now, change one variable in that equation, be it the starting note, the finger you play it with, the octave in which you play the cycle and go again. This exercise forces you to be conscious of your instrument in a particular way that is useful to improvisation and to sight-reading and because the harmonic component is so void you can focus on the technical challenges that every guitarist must overcome in order to play music fluidly (ie. spatial awareness of the fretboard and the mechanics of your left hand.)  There is more to be said but now that the gist is here I'll write more at another time.