GUITAR MASTER CLASS - The Basics

MARTIN COOPER

Firstly, don’t be put off by the term ‘masterclass’. If you usually see that phrase and assume that there’s no point in reading any further, don’t worry; I’m about to show you that ‘mastering’ the essentials of the guitar, both equipment and playing is as important (in reality, more important) as learning wildly complicated techniques and styles.

It’s a widely held view that simple is easy and complicated is difficult. OK, there is obviously some truth in that, but it’s a big misconception to think that simple=easy. To really get to grips with the more simple points of playing the guitar (open chords, playing in time and in tune etc) takes a lot of hard work and skill to do well. More often than not, ‘simple’ is actually very difficult to pull off well. If you take a listen to any of the old Motown records from decades past, you’ll very often hear seemingly straightforward guitar lines, often just a couple of notes for a whole song. Try playing along to some of this stuff and you’ll find that to do it well is a very difficult task!

What will generally set the great players apart from the good players is how they play straightforward parts. If you scan through CD credits from the past 20 years or so, you’ll find the same names cropping up all the time, Dann Huff, Michael Thompson, Steve Lukather and several others. Often the parts that these guys play on albums are pretty simple. It’s the way that they play them that sets them apart from others. To play simple chord progressions and melodic ideas in time and in tune with a great tone is a difficult thing to do well. So here is a basic guide to some of the things to try out and work on!

Before we get on to the actual playing, here are some vital tips…

Buy a good tuner – There’s no point in learning to play well and then doing it out of tune! Ideally if you’re playing in a worship band, it will probably be in a live situation rather than in the studio. You’re going to need to be in tune all the time, not just start off in tune and then let it slip. Buy a tuner that you can use ‘in line’ rather than one you have to unplug your guitar to use, (i.e. you can step on it at any time, mute the guitar signal and check your tuning, then switch it off again and carry on playing). The Boss TU2 is a good one to go for. It’s pretty accurate and mutes the guitar signal when you step on the pedal, so no one will hear you tuning. The Peterson Strobostomp tuners are fantastic as well, more pricey than the Boss one but extremely accurate. Don’t cut corners in terms of price and quality of tuner; it’ll probably be the most important pedal that you ever buy! If there’s any space in the meeting to check your tuning, make sure you do so. Even if you’re totally in tune, it’s worth checking to make sure if there’s a few seconds free…
Buy good leads– Basically ditto all the above…A lot of people spend a lot of money on a guitar and amp and then buy the cheapest lead possible to connect them together, which is not a good idea! Again, don’t cut corners with leads, a good lead is going to last a long time and help you achieve a great tone. Whirlwind leads are probably the best-known and good quality, as well as Monster cables, Planet Waves and Van Damme leads which are all excellent. I use Van Damme and Planet Waves leads and they’re great. The Planet Waves ones actually have an on-off switch on them which is very handy as it means you can switch your lead off and unplug your acoustic guitar (or electric) without a big bang coming through the PA if the sound engineer hasn’t seen that you’re about to unplug!

Buy good strings - All this probably sounds obvious but it’s a vital lesson to learn and stick to. There are good and bad quality strings out there. Some of the good ones are Elixir, D’addario and Ernie Ball strings. The Elixirs are pricier than the others but last a lot longer before they start to fade. Basically if your strings are getting old, not only will the tone start to go but they won’t stay in tune well either. If you play guitar for an hour a day, you should change your strings at least once a month. I teach guitar quite a bit and you’d be amazed at the amount of times people have said “Do you think I should change my strings, they’ve been on there about 8 months?” If that’s you, hang your head in shame!! Probably once a fortnight is a good time to change your strings, and definitely before you play at a gig or a meeting. Don’t forget though that new strings will need to be played and stretched in before they hold their tuning, so don’t put them on 5 minutes before you need to play somewhere or you’ll have real problems staying in tune. To stretch a string when you first put it on the guitar, get hold of it near the bridge (the opposite end to where the headstock is) and pull it about 4 inches above the guitar. Run your hand along from the bridge to the end of the neck, gently stretching the string all the way. You’ll find that once you do this that it will go flat, so tune it up to pitch again and repeat the process about 4 times. By then the string should start to hold it’s tuning a bit better, and once you’ve played for 10 minutes or so you shouldn’t have too many worries as far as tuning goes.

Maintain your guitar – Taking care of your guitar is kind of the same as taking care of your car. If you don’t keep it clean and properly looked after, you’ll start to have problems with it that can be avoided. Jim Dunlop makes a few different types of fingerboard, fretboard and body treatments and polishes, so it’s worth getting to your local music store and seeing which is best for your guitar. ‘Fast Fret’ will also help keep your strings and guitar neck clean and help the strings last longer. It may not actually help you play faster but buying some of that will make your guitar play better!
Also get your guitar serviced regularly (once a year should do it) by a professional technician. A decent set up and service shouldn’t cost too much and will keep your guitar working in the best order that it can.

While we’re on the subject of maintenance, if you have a valve amplifier you should also get that serviced regularly to make sure that it’s working as well as it can.

Buy all necessary accessories – Always make sure you have spare sets of strings with you. It’s probably worth taking at least 2 full sets of strings with you wherever you go, just in case you have one of those nights where they start breaking. A string winder and string cutters is also vital for when you have to change strings quickly. The Planet Waves pro winder is good because it’s both a winder and cutter. Keep spare leads with you as well just in case a lead goes down while you’re playing live, and spare batteries for pedals and acoustic guitar. In fact it’s probably worth putting new batteries in before each time you play live if you can afford to so you know that there won’t be any problems. You should keep all this kind of stuff in a handy box or bag so you know where it all is. Another useful accessory is an extension lead. You don’t want to set all your gear up and then find you can’t plug it into the wall!

General equipment tips – With guitar equipment, as with most things, you get what you pay for. It’s an expensive business, but if you want to be serious about it you’ll need to bite the bullet and get some cash together. My advice would be to research what kind of gear you want to buy before you waste money on something that you don’t need. Buy the best guitar and amp you can afford to buy. The initial outlay may be more money, but if you end up selling gear fairly quickly, you always lose money on it and end up paying more in the end, (trust me on this I’ve wasted a lot of money!!) A good quality valve amp is always going to be way better than a solid state amp and there are several makes out there that it’s worth checking out, and remember to read up on what style of amp it is – If you going to be playing clean, sparkly guitar parts you probably don’t want a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier!

Fender and Marshall always make good quality valve amps, as do Laney. A couple of manufacturers to check out as well that are coming through now are Cornford Amplification from the UK (www.cornfordamps.com) and Jackson Ampworks, which are made in the USA (www.jacksonampworks.com). They both make great quality all tube amps, they’re at the ‘boutique’ end of the spectrum as opposed to mid-price but well worth looking at. If you have a valve amp, make sure you plug into the correctly wired speaker cabinet. If the cab is wired for 8 ohms, make sure you switch the head to 8 ohms and so on, so as to avoid any problems.

One more thing about valve amps: Generally people assume that to get a good overdriven sound they need to turn the gain dial up a long way and keep the overall volume level down. In fact the opposite is true in most cases. If you turn the gain lower and the overall volume higher, you’ll find that you lose a lot of the ‘fizzy-ness’ from your sound and that the notes will be much more clearly defined and really sing. Even though you’ve got less actual gain from the dial, the way the pre-amp and power-amp valves will be working together (the power section will be working hard as opposed to just the pre-amp) will actually make your amp sound fuller and should also even make it sound like it’s more overdriven and driving harder than with it is with more gain coming purely from the pre-amp stage of the amplifier. Also be careful not to over-do the effects; the sound of a good guitar and a good amp can go a long way, don’t feel that you have to add delay, reverb and various other effects to your sound, just because you can! Pick the right sound for the right moment and for a real masterclass in great guitar playing, arrangement and tones check out Michael Thompson’s latest album ‘M.T. Speaks’ available on iTunes and at his website www.michaelthompson.cc.

If you’re into effect pedals, my advice is to figure out exactly which effects you need (overdrive, delay, chorus etc) and buy individual effects, rather than a multi-effects unit. If you want a good delay sound, you’re always going to find it in a dedicated delay pedal rather than as part of a multi-effects unit. Have a listen to and read up on your favourite players to see what they use in the way of effects. Some manufacturers to look out for that make really high quality pedals are Keeley Electronics (www.robertkeeley.com), T-Rex (www.t-rex-engineering.com), Fulltone (www.fulltone.com) and Dunlop and MXR effects (www.jimdunlop.com). Of course Boss also make all those little compact stompboxes and some of those are really good too.

Effects routing – The order that you run your effects chain is very important to the guitar tone and if you start to place them in the wrong order you’d be surprised at just how much worse your sound will get. There’s a few ways to do it but a general rule of thumb would be as follows:

GUITAR-TUNER-COMPRESSOR-OVERDRIVE-BOOST-FUZZ-TREMOLO-CHORUS-DELAY-REVERB-AMP

If you use that as a starting point, you should do ok. Always keep overdrive/boost type effects away from an effects loop of an amp. Modulation effects do well in loops so you could put your tremolo, chorus, delay and reverb in an effects loop, however Robert Keeley told me recently that he very often finds that all effects sound best in the front end of an amp, rather than in an effects loop. Robert makes what I think are the best pedals in the world today, so he knows about tone!

Playing in a worship band – In essence playing in a worship band is no different to playing in any other type of band. In fact it is probably more challenging than most other situations that you’ll be in, due to the fact that it is quite common for the worship band to have acoustic and electric guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, several backing vocalists and sometimes saxophone or other instruments as well, so a lot of care will need to be taken to avoid taking up space occupied by another instrument.

If the keyboard player is playing arpeggiated parts (chords played one note at a time rather than grouped and played together) then the electric or acoustic guitar player should refrain from doing the same thing, particularly in the same register. By this I mean that if the keyboard player is playing a C major chord one note at a time around middle C on the keyboard, it’ll be a good idea for the guitar players to stay away from the same area and the same arpeggio technique.

One of the main reasons a guitar player should use a capo sometimes is to play chords using different inversions or in a different area of the guitar neck so as to avoid playing something using the same frequency range that another instrument is playing. By the way, a capo shouldn’t just be used instead of learning difficult chord shapes!

It’s also worth mentioning that if you have a stunning arpeggio part worked out to play that really works well in the song, but someone else is occupying the same sonic space, it’s worth chatting it through with whoever it is and try and figure out the best thing for each of you to play, in a diplomatic way!

Basically the keyword really is ‘Listen’. Listen to what each band member is playing or singing and make sure that what you play is necessary to the song. It may be that the most useful thing you can play is nothing at all for a whole song or part of a song. Don’t feel that you should always be playing the whole way through every song, and leave space in what you play to avoid cluttering up the frequencies too much: If one strum at the beginning of a bar is ideal, don’t feel you have to add anything more until the start of the next bar. Generally the role of a guitar in a worship band is going to be that of a harmony instrument rather than a melody instrument, so make sure you don’t overplay melodic lines. Of course there is a time and a place for lead guitar breaks, just not as often as we’d all like them to be!!

Now onto some actual playing…

Open Chords – This may sound obvious and even a bit dull but let’s work on some open chords. First play an open C major chord…play it a few times and you will probably find that if you’re really critical of yourself, it’s not totally in tune, you may be bending one or two strings a bit sharp by accident, you may be catching the top E string so it isn’t ringing open and you may be accidentally hitting the low E string as well, instead of starting with the C note on the A string. These are just a few things that are likely to be happening without you even realising or thinking about it too much. The bottom line is that we all let bad habits go without really sorting them out and playing open chords badly is one of the most common habits.

Play the C chord again and really think about and listen to the frequencies. Can you hear all the strings clearly? Are any of them jumping out as being much louder than the others? Are all the strings in tune? Play the chord 4 times…did it sound equally good all 4 times or did you notice any of the above problems happening? Did you find that 3 times you played the correct strings but once you only hit a few of them? This may sound like kids stuff but if you really focus on what we’re doing now and put some time into it in the next few days and weeks you’ll notice a big difference in your playing.

Let’s play a few chords…C, G, D, A, E, all open position chords. Strum each one 4 times and be very critical with yourself in how each chord sounds. Listen out for muted notes that should be ringing out (and for the opposite as well!), for out of tune chords, too many or too few strings being played and so on. When you really take your playing to task, you’d be surprised at actually how hard it is to go from a D chord to an A chord and make them both sound really good!

I’d recommend that you play through a few simple chord progressions each day for 15 minutes, and I guarantee that you’ll notice a difference inside 2 or 3 weeks if you really work hard at it and be ultra critical of your own playing.

Take some of your favourite songs and play through the chords from them really focusing on making every note of every chord sound good every time. It’s more difficult than you may think but the results will make it worth working on properly…

That’s it for today…Hopefully you’ll take something from this stuff and find it helps you out with your own playing and sound!!