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[ Sunday, March 09, 2008 ]

Sassy Tab

NOTE: Jerry Reed’s health is very bad and declining, and this video goes out to him with love for changing, and probably even saving my life with his music.

On that note, wish Jerry a Happy Birthday here.

Okay, so I dragged myself to SPBGMA last month and it was great fun, with tons of jamming. But there is only so much bluegrass and banjo playing a person can stand, even me. Someone there had asked me if I had tab for Jerry Reed’s Sassy, a great newer guitar tune of Jerry’s, and I said I had always been too lazy to figure it out, and that I just played the Craig Dobbins version of it. I was never satisfied with Craig’s version though. I don’t know why he wrote it out the way he did, though I’m sure he had a reason (see note below). He is ten times the guitar player that I am.

But once I got to thinking about it, I decided I’d better figure out a version of my own that is closer to my ear to what Jerry does with the tune. So, one afternoon at SPBGMA, I took refuge in my room, put my banjo to bed, and sat down with my guitar and Reed’s recording of Sassy and transcribed it as well as I could. I found some cool stuff he does in there!

Note: Craig Dobbins was kind enough to contact me about his transcription, and it turns out he had not been satisfied with it either. He had re-thought it some time ago and includes a different page with some changes in new copies of his book. The subject of perfectionism reminds me, by the way, that I took some liberties in my transcription of adding a few notes that Jerry doesn’t play. In measures 82 and 83 there are three bass notes that are played by the bass in the recording, but I threw them in because they fill out a solo version and are easy to play. Also, in the part beginning in measure 37, I use several three finger pulls to get the chords, but it just sounds best to me that way for solo guitar. I think Jerry probably does it with the two finger (right hand) chording that Craig notates in his version. Okay, those are my disclaimers.

People ask me all the time if I can really play any of this music that I transcribe, so I practiced this one up for a few weeks and made a video just for the heck of it. There’s also an mp3, if you like it enough to want to hear it again.

Like the previous transcription, this one too is in swing time, but in this case, since I have a video for you, I just wrote it out in straight eighth notes (I guess they’re really sixteenth notes) which makes it a lot easier to read, but you get the idea, about swingin’ it up a bit. I think I play the notes (not the timing) pretty close to the transcription in the video, but there’s a little noodling around at the beginning and end - and probably some other minor departures.

Here’s an mp3 of the video - it will probably have better quality sound than the video, if you’re interested:

So, that’s Sassy, the way I hear it. I hope you enjoy the video and the mp3, and if you play guitar, I hope you’ll download the tab and take this one on. It’s really not hard to play, and it’s a blast. How does Jerry write this stuff??

Download: Sassy tab here     (Note: If you have not downloaded this tab since 3/9/08, you do not have the latest version)

(in TablEdit Format, which you can download a free viewer for)

Enjoy!

[ Sunday, October 28, 2007 ]

A Little Bit Of Blues Tab

So, I’m at the 2007 IBMA in Nashville, and I’m sitting in the Bishline Banjos booth, where I am discovering that not only is Rob is a great banjo player and a super guy, but he is also building gorgeous and great sounding banjos. I covet them. Anyway, there was a woman there doing the same thing who turns out to be my new friend, Kat Duke. Kat and I seem to have precisely the same musical tastes. She loves everything from Earl Scruggs to Delbert McClinton, but she loves nothing more than Atkins/Reed style guitar, of course. She told me about this young man, on YouTube to your left, named Gareth Pearson and his great version of the Jerry Reed tune, A Little Bit Of Blues. Check it out yourself. She’s not wrong, right?

I have always thought this was one of Jerry’s great tunes, but I never learned it, in part because I didn’t think it would be easy to play well on steel string guitar. Guess I’m wrong about that. At least for Gareth. After Kat told me about Gareth, I decided to order his CD, called Adrenaline Rush EP, and I’m glad I did. There is some great great guitar playing on there! I did this transcription of A Little Bit Of Blues from the cut on that CD, and it is almost identical to the YouTube clip embedded here.

A few words about the tab. For one thing, it is in swing time, and in order to get it sounding right and to capture the feel of Gareth’s performance, I notated it as precisely as I could, rather than using straight eighth notes. This makes for a very ungainly looking tab, but don’t let it intimidate you - it’s all pretty obvious once you get going on it. Also, some of the slides and rhythms will sound funny on the MIDI here since the TablEdit generated MIDI’s don’t capture the subtlety of guitar slides. But, for practical purposes, almost all of Gareth’s slides fall right out of the chord changes, so they will be as easy to play as anything else about this tune, FWIW. Also, I tried to capture some of Gareth’s more complicated rhythmic adventures, like the measure of 12/8, and I think I have done it fairly well, but it’s best to listen to the real thing while learning this.

If you download the tab, be sure to check out the Notes section where I have tried to offer a few hints on playing this beast. A couple of things right off the bat. The first is that Gareth uses a lot of percussive effects in this tune, and it sounds great. I did not notate that in the tab. Once you learn it, you can throw those in fairly easily if you like. He also does a sort of reverse rasqueado on parts of the up-the-neck variations which I also did not notate - but once you learn the tune, you can think about adding that if you like.

There is one very important technique, that I should mention. You have probably noticed that this tune is built around what Dr. John calls The Famous Lick, to wit:

Or at least that’s how I hear it. The Famous Lick feel was co-opted for guitar long ago by Chet and especially Jerry, but it seems to be enjoying a rising and recent popularity in bluegrass in the playing of Bryan Sutton on guitar and also in the playing of Noam Pikelny on banjo - both great players, btw. Of course, Bill Keith has been doing this on banjo for more than thirty years. Suffice to say, great musicians just love The Famous Lick, and so do I. This is the long way around to saying that to get it on the guitar, such as in the first two measures of A Little Bit Of Blues, you have to drag your first finger across the strings, sometimes using a pull-off - to get the deedle-lit-DUM - be thankful I’m note there singing it for you. Anyway, you’ll get the idea, and that’s enough technical notes.

Play MIDI of the tab


Download: A Little Bit Of Blues tab here     (Note: If you have not downloaded this tab since 10/28/07, you do not have the latest version)

(in TablEdit Format, which you can download a free viewer for)

Enjoy!

[ Thursday, September 20, 2007 ]

Access All Areas Banjo Tab

There’s an old banjo joke that goes, “Q: How can you tell one banjo tune from another? A: By their names!” True enough most of the time, but not in this case. You’ve probably never heard anything quite like this on the banjo. And no banjo jokes apply to Jens Kruger. I wish I had the time to learn every note he ever played.

As I’ve probably said before, I am happy to have lived long enough for Jens Kruger and Alison Brown to have brought their respective geniuses to the banjo, and tunes like this one by Jens are the reason for that.

He’s not just kidding about Access All Areas. Any time I think I’m accessing a new area on the banjo, I discover that Jens has already been there, and been there better. I wish I had written this tune, but I had to settle for tabbing it out instead, enough of a challenge in its own right, I might add. It is not easy to play, and you will have to work at the fingerings. It is in G Modal tuning (brought up to A with the capo), also known as Sawmill tuning, or Mountain Minor. Believe me, it is worth the effort to learn! I think it was the Jerry Reed-like “C-Part” that got me going on it - I still think that’s just the coolest thing ever, knuckle-buster that it is.

As I have said in the past, I try not to tab out contemporary music for copyright reasons, but with tunes like this, I can’t believe many people will want to try it, and those who do will want to buy the CD. I would hope that, if anything, it will advertise further for the Kruger Brothers, but, of course, if they object to it here, I will remove it. To me, though, banjo playing is a labor of love, and I’m hoping people will share. This tune is just too great to resist. If you play the banjo, you owe it to yourself to buy every recorded thing by the Kruger Brothers, including their stuff from the Kaufman Kamps, and to download every YouTube!

I have included an exported MIDI of the tab below. It sounds better than when the tab is played directly in TablEdit, but again, it is still nowhere near the actual sounds of acoustic instruments played by people, and especially not by Jens who is as good as it’s possible to get. I have not included the guitar part - maybe I’ll add it when I catch my breath, or if anyone really wants it (this ain’t exactly a jam tune, unless you are the Kruger Brothers!)

Play MIDI of the tab


Download: Access All Areas tab here     (Note: If you have not downloaded this tab since 9/24/07, you do not have the latest version)

(in TablEdit Format, which you can download a free viewer for)

Enjoy!

[ Saturday, February 17, 2007 ]

Professors of Bluegrass At This Year’s ROMP!

The Professors of Bluegrass



Professors of Bluegrass MySpace Site


Update: July 1, 2007: YouTube Videos of The Professors Of Bluegrass At ROMP 2007 - Check out banjo Dixie Breakdown

[ Wednesday, January 31, 2007 ]

Early Times Guitar Tab

Progressive Pickin’ was released in 1964 and for some reason, it was kicking around the house when I was a kid in those years. I didn’t know of Chet Atkins or Jerry Reed at the time, but I loved that album, and I vowed I would learn to play guitar like that one day. Every tune on it is great! I must have listened to it a thousand times, and not only did it leave an indelible impression, but it changed the course of my life as I became determined to play guitar like that.

Even then, though, I noticed that there were two tunes, Kicky and Early Times, that had a different quality from the rest. They were new and imaginative in a way that said they were written on and for the guitar, by some kind of genius. I could tell that then, and I only knew how to strum a few chords on the guitar, but some things you just know. This is to say that I loved Jerry Reed long before I knew he was Jerry Reed or anything else about his music. Over the years, I learned to play most of the tunes on this great Chet record, but in none too disciplined a way, to which my old recording of Early Times here on the website will testify.

A couple of die-hard Reed fans over the last year, however, have been asking me for tab for Early Times, and it would have been embarrassing to tab out what I have hitherto passed off as Early Times. So, I finally caught a little break and had a chance to sit down and figure this thing out properly. What a great tune! It will probably bore the non-guitarist to listen to the MIDI, but it is a true thrill to play and to watch and hear being played. The voicings and lines are totally cool, and the whole thing ... well, who thinks of stuff like this?!? Jerry Reed is who. Don’t pass this one up. Download it and learn it. If you like fingerstyle at all, you won’t regret it. I find it a complete gem of a guitar tune, and I have learned subtleties I hadn’t noticed before in the process of transcribing it, only increasing my love for the thing.

I have included an exported MIDI of the tab below. It sounds better than when the tab is played directly in TablEdit, but again, it is still nowhere near the actual sounds of acoustic instruments played by people, and especially not by Chet or Jerry (arguably not people at all).

Play MIDI of the tab


Download: Early Times tab here     (Note: If you have not downloaded this tab since 1/31/07, you do not have the latest version)

(in TablEdit Format, which you can download a free viewer for)

Enjoy!

[ Sunday, November 05, 2006 ]

Return To Pelican Bay Banjo Tab

A couple of years ago, when I began playing a little more banjo than I had for a long time, I started listening to what people had been doing with the banjo since I last paid much attention, two decades earlier. I tend to gravitate toward the progressive stuff, but honestly, as truly great as some of it is, most of the time I still feel like “who really wants to listen to this?” The players I like the best are Jens Kruger, Tony Furtado, Dennis Caplinger, Noam Pikelny, and of course, Bela. That’s just me, of course.

But, then, there’s GODDESS Alison Brown. Now, I know many people say she plays too much guitar-like cocktail jazz, but I don’t see it that way. I guess what I like are little compositional gems, like Jerry Reed’s great guitar tunes. Very few banjo players manage even one of these. I think maybe Tony Furtado has the most of them, to my ear. But this one of Alison Brown’s, Return to Pelican Bay is just a masterpiece. I can’t even begin to articulate why I like it so much, but I think it’s a work of banjo genius (it’s a reprise of her earlier Pelican Bay, also great). Alison manages to create something that remains completely true to bluegrass banjo picking at its core, and yet draws upon the best of “cocktail jazz” with complete musicality. On top of this, it lays great on the instrument, just written on and for it alone. This is the mark of a Platonic Form of a tune, IMHO, of course .  Anyway, I just love this tune, and for that matter, its composer. The head is easy to play, so there’s just no excuse not to learn it!

I know how people are getting about free tab these days. I usually don’t post stuff that’s not in the public domain, and in the rare instance that I do, I hope it’ll sell more CD’s than whatever harm it does, but there’s always the chance I’ll be asked to take it down (or worse). Anyway, here is the transcription of Return To Pelican Bay. I have included the head and first solo, as well as the reprise at the end. There is also some guitar chording to help contextualize the thing. There is other great stuff on the tune on the CD, like a piano solo and some trading fours, but this is enough to get you started! Note 0n 8/8/07: I have played around a little more with this tune and I noticed a few careless tab errors that I fixed. Also, I have now included the final B part and A part from the original Pelican Bay from the Twilight Motel CD (another gorgeous variation).

I have included an exported MIDI of the tab below. It sounds better than when the tab is played directly in TablEdit, but again, it is still nowhere near the actual sounds of acoustic instruments played by people, or a goddess in this case. The fictitious rhythm guitar track is just to put the melody in context, as I said.

Play MIDI of the tab


Download: Return To Pelican Bay tab here     (Note: If you have not downloaded this tab since 8/8/07, you do not have the latest version)

(in TablEdit Format, which you can download a free viewer for)

Enjoy!