I'm The Guy!
A few years back, I had the good fortune to attend a guitar master's class given by the inimitable Frank Gambale, whom I have come to consider one of my favorite overall guitarists, as well as a significant musical influence.
In the course of the session, he spoke jokingly of being approached by a person who claimed to have been playing for over forty years. They arranged to get together and jam, and, as Gambale told the story, "the guy really sucked!" There's a big difference, Gambale concluded, between owning a guitar for forty years, and picking it up for a half hour every couple of months, and really playing...
As soon as he said it, it dawned on me that: "shit! that's me!" I had, indeed, owned one guitar or other for over forty years, had played sporadically, but never really reached any kind of pinnacle (or even a satisfying plateau) in my playing.
A year or so ago I was recruited by WJFF to manage their "Live From Big Twig" concert series. When I first got involved with managing the Big Twig concert series, it awoke within me a yearning to dive back into making music, after – well, let’s just say decades of neglect. At this juncture in life, I was really reluctant to end up in the kind of slow-start cycle I’d experienced long ago in prior bands: “I don’t know, what songs do you know?” “I don’t know – you know any Stones? . . . .”
I went out and bought myself a cheap electric, plugged in, and . . . ughhh! The reason I had given up so many times in the past came immediately back to me: My playing was boring!
In the past, my approach to the instrument has always been improvisational. I would record myself a nice bluesy chord progression, and noodle away using my familiar pentatonic, Dorian, and blues scales. Yeah, I know thousands of great classics are the result of precisely this approach, but I suddenly realized that what I was hearing in my head was far too complex to yield to that technique.
From a collection of hundreds of pieces of vintage sheet music, acquired over the years from Ebay, I had segregated several dozen that really intrigued me, with the intention of one day performing them in one form or another. I decided that working out guitar solos around these songs might provide a fresh focus and interest for getting back into playing .
I began to actually analyze the harmonic structure of each song, and design guitar parts in advance, in stead of simply making stuff up as I went along. After the first couple of songs, I realized that I had finally found an approach that really works for me.
When the idea occurred to me to record a CD, my first resolution was that it should not turn into yet another self-indulgent guitar fest! No lengthy, meandering guitar solos, no hooky riff-driven grooves -- I wanted to produce something with real, complex arrangements, and solid contributions by all of the instruments, and a lively conversation between them.
First I had to decide on the composition of "my band." I settled on a quintet format, consisting of guitar, piano, organ, bass, and percussion. (I've liked that combination ever since seeing Procol Harum perform in the early 1970s.) Then I set about studying keyboard transcriptions in order to familiarize myself with how the sounds I was looking for appeared in actual notation. I actually neglected (or procrastinated) diving into guitar playing for over six months while I worked in Cakewalk Sonar, writing and rewriting parts for piano, organ, then bass and drums.
By time I actually blew the dust off my guitar, I had a complete, detailed transcription of what this was all going to sound like, and as a result, it was easy to get totally pumped over the effort.
Unlike the cases when I've played in the past, I now had in front of me written music of exactly what I had to learn to play. (I never had the patience to learn transcriptions off of other players records -- just seemed kind of pointless -- but now it was my own music that I was learning . . . a whole different mind set!
The most difficult challenge was laying down the vocals. I've always avoided singing in all of the bands I've been in, and have never been real comfortable with the sound of my own recorded voice. However, since at this stage of the game I'm pretty much limited to my own resources, there wasn't anyone else to do it, so I bit the bullet, grimaced, and set to the task.
The first result was that I had to throw out a half dozen songs I had arranged because I just didn't have the vocal apparatus to put them over. Back to the sheet-music bin, new selections to replace the old, more keyboard arranging, drum parts, bass . . . then start the whole operation over again.
In the end, I wound up with the sixteen songs presented on I'm The Guy!
In the course of this adventure, I've come to accept that I'll never have the kind of voice I've admired in others . . . Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Steve Perry (Journey), Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, etc., etc., etc. However, I've realized that it's the only one I've got, so I might as well get used to using it to the best effect I can. I've reached a point where I can actually listen to my recording without cringing, so I guess that's a good start.
My guitar playing, however, is a different story entirely, and I really am unreservedly pleased with that turn my musicianship has taken as a result of this project, and I think my approach to the instrument has finally reached the next level, but ultimately, that's for you, the listener, to decide.
As of right now, this is a one-man effort, but I am actively looking for musicians in the Northeastern Pennsylvania region or the Catskill area of New York to form a band for live performance of this (and similar) material. Specifically, I'm looking for piano, organ, bass, and drums. Vocals would be a plus. If you think you might be interested, please drop me an email
joe @ rootwerx.com
(remove the spaces, which are inserted to prevent web crawlers from harvesting my address for use by insidious spammers.)
Feel free to download the individual MP3s from the pages linked in the left hand column. If you prefer higher audio quality, you can order an actual CD from my record label: Pleasant Mount Records.
enjoy.