Guitar Geekery (House Spoilers behind cut)
I'm listening to an .AVI of the G3 show in Denver. That would be Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen.
I've never been a big fan of Satriani. I know he's good -- I'm bowled over by his technique -- but I've never been into him. Vai, I've been more into. He played Jack Butler, the devil's own shredder, in the movie Crossroads, and he played the most impressive stunt guitar ever to make it to MTV on David Lee Roth's "Yankee Rose". And Malmsteen? One day when I was 14 or 15, I bought Hanoi Rocks' Two Steps To The Groove (incidently, I still hold a grudge against Vince Neil), Malmsteen's Rising Force and the soundtrack to This Is Spinal Tap. Evidently, I didn't begin to understand irony until much later. Anyway, I loved and still love a few tracks on that album. And I thought the second album sucked because he had absolutely the same licks. This man steals from Richie Blackmore (and Jimi Hendrix, to a far lesser extent than he thinks) the same way that certain XTC songs steal from the Beatles, without touching the heart and soul that make 'em worth stealing from.
G3, if you don't know, is a tour of three hot guitarists, the three being Vai, Satch and a third player to be named later. Eric Johnson, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and John Petrucci are some of the players who have played along. Each guy plays a set and then they jam at the end. On the .AVI I have, there have been (so far) three songs in this final set. Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World" and Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" and "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)". The Hendrix is duh -- the role of guitar hero was invented by Mike Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band, perfected by Eric Clapton (then of the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Cream) and then blasted into space by Hendrix. He's been dead 35 years and he's still the best, and people still try to measure themselves against his work. Of course they jam on Hendrix. What I'm not sure about is the Young.
"Rockin'" is in G. Or E minor. It all depends on how you think of it. You can take verses upon verses of Em-D-C thudrock and have a blast, but Neil plays it on his Black Beauty Les Paul, which comes equipt with a Bigsby. The crucial fact is that Bigsbys never stay in tune. Neil can make it sound like a crying, screaming, in-pain thing, but he always wavers that thing because somewhere between when he pushes down and where he pulls up lives "in tune". He's not playing notes. He's not trying to impress you with technique, because Neil does not have technique. What he has is emotion. Overdriven amps and crying, screaming guitar. Vai and Satch have Ibanez guitars with locking nuts and Floyd Rose tremelos, which always go back in tune, and they're great. Malmsteen plays a Fender Strat with standard tremelos, which are not great with being in tune, but much better than a Bigsby. (Tremelo, strictly speaking, is variation in volume, while vibrato is variation in pitch. So to get vibrato, you use the tremelo bar on your Fender Strat, and to get tremelo, you go to your Fender Twin amp and step on the vibrato switch. Leo, I love you, but you got it bass-ackwards!) It seems like a song-player missmatch to me.
House, in "Who's Your Daddy", had two guitars on his wall. Those being a Dobro (a resonator with a wooden body, with a metal-bodied resonator guitar being called a National, more often than not) and a sunburst Strat. Both would be pretty much be looked at as blues instruments, which follows, more or less, the New Orleans focus of the episode. We've seen him listen to music before, with either "Baba O'Riley" or "Who Are You?" being on his office stereo. And it is certainly not unheard of for non-players to buy expensive instruments to use as Objets d'art and never play them. (Even if Chinery did play, how could you give any one instrument the love it deserves if you have thousands of 'em?) Is there anything establised that House plays?
I've never been a big fan of Satriani. I know he's good -- I'm bowled over by his technique -- but I've never been into him. Vai, I've been more into. He played Jack Butler, the devil's own shredder, in the movie Crossroads, and he played the most impressive stunt guitar ever to make it to MTV on David Lee Roth's "Yankee Rose". And Malmsteen? One day when I was 14 or 15, I bought Hanoi Rocks' Two Steps To The Groove (incidently, I still hold a grudge against Vince Neil), Malmsteen's Rising Force and the soundtrack to This Is Spinal Tap. Evidently, I didn't begin to understand irony until much later. Anyway, I loved and still love a few tracks on that album. And I thought the second album sucked because he had absolutely the same licks. This man steals from Richie Blackmore (and Jimi Hendrix, to a far lesser extent than he thinks) the same way that certain XTC songs steal from the Beatles, without touching the heart and soul that make 'em worth stealing from.
G3, if you don't know, is a tour of three hot guitarists, the three being Vai, Satch and a third player to be named later. Eric Johnson, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and John Petrucci are some of the players who have played along. Each guy plays a set and then they jam at the end. On the .AVI I have, there have been (so far) three songs in this final set. Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World" and Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" and "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)". The Hendrix is duh -- the role of guitar hero was invented by Mike Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band, perfected by Eric Clapton (then of the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Cream) and then blasted into space by Hendrix. He's been dead 35 years and he's still the best, and people still try to measure themselves against his work. Of course they jam on Hendrix. What I'm not sure about is the Young.
"Rockin'" is in G. Or E minor. It all depends on how you think of it. You can take verses upon verses of Em-D-C thudrock and have a blast, but Neil plays it on his Black Beauty Les Paul, which comes equipt with a Bigsby. The crucial fact is that Bigsbys never stay in tune. Neil can make it sound like a crying, screaming, in-pain thing, but he always wavers that thing because somewhere between when he pushes down and where he pulls up lives "in tune". He's not playing notes. He's not trying to impress you with technique, because Neil does not have technique. What he has is emotion. Overdriven amps and crying, screaming guitar. Vai and Satch have Ibanez guitars with locking nuts and Floyd Rose tremelos, which always go back in tune, and they're great. Malmsteen plays a Fender Strat with standard tremelos, which are not great with being in tune, but much better than a Bigsby. (Tremelo, strictly speaking, is variation in volume, while vibrato is variation in pitch. So to get vibrato, you use the tremelo bar on your Fender Strat, and to get tremelo, you go to your Fender Twin amp and step on the vibrato switch. Leo, I love you, but you got it bass-ackwards!) It seems like a song-player missmatch to me.
House, in "Who's Your Daddy", had two guitars on his wall. Those being a Dobro (a resonator with a wooden body, with a metal-bodied resonator guitar being called a National, more often than not) and a sunburst Strat. Both would be pretty much be looked at as blues instruments, which follows, more or less, the New Orleans focus of the episode. We've seen him listen to music before, with either "Baba O'Riley" or "Who Are You?" being on his office stereo. And it is certainly not unheard of for non-players to buy expensive instruments to use as Objets d'art and never play them. (Even if Chinery did play, how could you give any one instrument the love it deserves if you have thousands of 'em?) Is there anything establised that House plays?