Two of my tracks are in the top ten and top 25 for jazz fusion and world fusion respectively on Soundclick. That’s happened before. Here are some representative pieces of what I would like to someday play on the Stick. Later I can get a midi pickup and also do synth with the guitar chords and switch the lead guitar sound to an electric violin sample, and the atavachron patch. In which case I would only need myself and a drummer.

Maybe I should trickle in 2 or 3 tracks at a time and milk the glory for all it’s worth over days and weeks but I’m just going to go ahead and blow all my cookies.

Guitaristic:
Maha Maya http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11894440

Avatar http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11827247

Ashoka http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11761845

Dakini http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11761808

Undertow http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11701214

Oracle http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11701199

All Browns http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11084715


Violinish:

Thunderstorm http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11539538

The Waterfall http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11626728

Rainbow http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11539543

The Akash http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11626769

Holy lord you are good. Insane first track here, haha yaes! You are great, indeed your fusion astounds me.

With your harmonic skill you should be able to play stick well! Wow, great dissonant playing

The palette of chord voicings I used was limited to only two kinds of major chords, one kind of minor chord and one kind of diminished chord but to develop the music as the songs progress, I would alter them giving Major chords the sharp four or flat five, flat six or some combination for example. I'm going to start using a wider palette of chord voicings on my next works. Another limitation I'm discovering is that the kind of romantic era chord progressions ala pre-debussy that Chick Corea uses are not as conducive to a Holdsworthian atmosphere which would need modal structures based on esoteric modes or be atonal. I've got about 30 compositions in my backlog so won't get around to doing that for a while but I WILL get around to it eventually.

The lines I make are based on an article I read on how Wayne Shorter does his thing. I don't have the same genius as Allan Holdsworth and probably never will but I feel satisfied with the quality of my lines these days. But Holdsworth is truly genius.

I keep thinking about you Oceans because you said you were going for a Fusion Sound. I think I can help you out if you're interested. I already talked about how the progressions are important and how that's achieved at least in a very global manner without going into the details. If you need assistance with creating those I might be able to steer you in the right direction although you may be surprised at my methods.

But I thought I'd talk about the importance of chord voicings. Allan plays non-third chords having to stretch his hand and rotate the guitar nearly perpendicular to the ground in order to be able to play them with the guitar's fourths tuning. Many people would love to be able to play them, know how to play them but don't play them because of the sheer difficulty.

I attended a clinic with Greg Howard in Las Vegas when I was first learning the stick and started to notice then and afterwards the concessions stick players have to make to play jazz. The stick is not a guitar and most people aren't Holdsworth. I feel, at least for the style of fusion we're talking about, you CAN'T afford to make concessions with chord voicings which are CRITICAL for this style we're talking about. Unfortunately, the stick is tuned in fourths like a guitar and playing stylistically closed position voicings with clusters is not feasible on the stick in a fourths tuning.

Try playing basic non-third chords in closed position voiced CFGA or CGABb. Frigging impossible on a steel string or a classical...or a stick and only just possible on electric. Keyboardists are so lucky. The first thing the average stick player is going to want to do with those chords is to play them in open position but in my opinion they can't afford to do that because, unless they're on a midi patch trying to sound like an electric piano, the sticks guitar sound wouldn't be stylistic in open voicings.

If you're trying to hold down the rhythm guitar part the vocings MUST be closed. If you want to play those chords in the left hand this means a retuning of the treble strings on the bass side. If you want to play them on the melody side of the stick then you have to retune those.

My preferred tuning would be to have two bass strings starting with the 5-string bass' low A and the next bass string be a Gb above like on the 4th string of a 4string bass. The bass sides treble strings would be tuned DBEF resulting in the VERY strange tuning AGbDBEF. But now all those wonderful clusters of adjacent diatonic notes easily become available to the fingers.

It doesn't come without a drawback though. The logic of the fretboard doesn't easily come to the mind, naturally. So, I accept that I'm just going to have to memorize fingerings by rote. More later on how those interesting melodic lines are put together.

I read an article about Wayne Shorter just after I started making my Guitarisitic compositions and I immediately started to put what I learned to use because it was so effective. The author talked about how there's a background, a middle ground and a foreground.

The guide tones <the thirds and sevenths of chords> are the background. In 4/4 time signature you can connect the guide tones in a ii V I progression using quarter notes. Let's say the guide tone for Dm7 is F<the chord's third>, the guide tone for G7 is Bb <the chord's 7th>, and the guide tone for CMaj7 is Eb <a bluesy bebop alteration of the chord's third>.

Connecting the guide tones in 4/4 using only quarter notes one might arrive at FGAB/ BbCDE/ EbF#GAb// That's the middle ground.

Next we're going to play anything at all the pops into your head that starts on the first F for the duration of that beat. You've only really got time for an interval, an arpeggio, 4 or so notes of a pentatonic,or a tetrachord before you'll have to play the next note G. At that time you'll repeat the process. Doing all of this is the foreground.

As you go along make the ideas you played over the middle ground notes "rhyme" with some of the later ideas that come out. A good rule for beginners is to play something twice then play an answer. Later, you can get more complex with rhyming your motifs perhaps with structures such as aabb, aaba, abab, abac, abca, abcb, etc...

The nice thing about this method is that you don't need to know if your arpeggio is in key or how it's spelled. it's better if it isn't in key anyway. If you alternate a few measures of this with variations on the main melody of the tune you'll end up with something very musical which is a good thing to end up with.

Oh my ! Well this is way beyond me then. I thank you and will attempt to reply after giving this some thought. I like your style, and you seem cool.

Wait, so how do you tune the stick? Also, I am a pretty hell bent on keeping my baritone melody. I am certain in this tuning, although I like your tuning concepts. Please tell me we can work with the classic 5ths and 4ths tuning. Cheers

Ok, 1 thing to try and tackle. Closed voicings: could we get around the fingering issue/problem by using the r.h thumb on highest 2 bass strings. Kinda like 'the claw technique?

Are you in Indonesia? If so that is amazing, they have the best death metal bands over there!

My stick concept is to have an NS stick for bass and guitar <all for the left hand> with another mono stick with 8 strings for the right hand. The bass side of the NS is for the bass of course, the other side of the NS is for guitar chords and the 8 string mono stick is for Baritone melody each with their own effects chain. <Holdsworth plays Baritone guitars which is one reason why they have become so popular.> On the bass side of the NS finds the lowest bass string in one of the middle locations and not on the exterior so I can simultaneously play that string and reach across to the other side to finger the rest of the chord without having to stretch too far.

There are three reasons for the approach I'm about to share. One is so that the processing on the bass and guitar are not the same. Yuck! The second is to be able to play clusters found in non-third chords, and the third reason is so that it will be easier to play moving bass scales while holding chords or moving chords while holding the bass. This tuning was planned for playing the instrument in the horizontal position like on a table top, not in the normal crossed or uncrossed hands position. The thumb is an unused finger behind the neck and we're going to need it. When at home you can sit on the ground with both sticks on your knees or on a keyboard stand and live you could choose to wear and play them like those electric keyboard controllers you wear like a guitar.

The tuning is: * *AGbDBEF. The two asterisks represent the high bass strings which can be tuned any way you wish but not below the low A. A is the low A on a 5-string bass. The Gb is the same as the 4th string, 2nd fret of a four string bass. The other side of the NS has a D the same as the guitar's D. Counterintuitively, the next string is the B below D, the next strings are the E above the D and the F above the E.

On the other stick routed through the lead guitar effects chain is an 8 string Baritone stick tuned in minor thirds. One reason is that playing non-third chords through distortion for a beat or two as part of your lead line is cool and minor thirds gives you a hope in hell of being able to finger them. Since you don't have to move the bass note of chords around which are fingered in the guitar register like you would on bass, a symmetrical situation of ascending minor thirds is acceptable. Another reason is because you're not going to be running up and down scales for more than a beat and only the middle ground will be played in a scalar fashion for any length of time and that will be played all on one string in the middle of the group. Having all those extra strings on both sides above and below that middle string allows you to ascend or descend away and return without getting boxed in.

Let's say you play an ascending three note quartal arpeggio on C and then play it again ascending from D, then play a descending tetra chord on Eb, the next note is F on that one string we're climbing up. Another reason is because Allan talked about how guitarists always think in terms of 3 notes per string (tripla tripla tripla) because of the tuning. Saxophonists would never dream of limiting themselves that severely.When you play a tetra chord that's 4 notes not 3. On the minor thirds tuning you play two notes on the first string and two notes on the second string to play a tetra chord alternating the first and second or third fingers.

The last reason is that it's more difficult to play quartal arpeggios all on one fret and with the strings right next to each other: cramped to say the least.