Why Great Blues Players Leave MORE Space - 471

The importance of musical silence

0:00Welcome, friends, to the Play Guitar Podcast. I am Lee, and I'm here to help you become the guitar player that you've always wanted to be. Today we're going to be talking about something that most guitar players completely overlook, and that's silence. More accurately, the intentional use of rests, of space. Some of the most musical moments in a blues solo, or any solo for that matter, happen when you're not playing. It's setting something up, or adding tension.

0:33So, space is, you know, something that I never thought of until I was in a band. And I'd start playing all the time, and, you know, you're playing and playing and playing, and then the bass player looks over at you. So, the drummer, you know, looks over at you, and they're like, are you ever going to stop and get to the rest of the song, right? So, playing, playing, playing all the time. So, there's a couple reasons why I did, and a lot of people, they tend to overplay and try and fill something up.

1:14There's a fear in it. When you hear that there's nothing going on, you're afraid it sounds empty. Or maybe it sounds like you don't know what you're doing, so you don't want to seem that way. You want to seem like, hey, everything I do, I want to show what I can do here. So, that fear of not playing can put you in a little bit of a trap.

1:44And another reason is, it might be because you're in a habit of playing all the time, constant playing. When we practice, a lot of times when we practice scales and chords, we do all 8th notes, all 16th notes, triplets, all those things. So, we don't really practice the rests enough. The rests are extremely important. So, getting in that habit is pretty bad. But also, we have another problem, is that a lot of people equate playing a lot with quality.

2:19And I did for a long time when I was young. I thought, man, if I could play fast and have all these ideas and string them together, everybody will think it's great. And I've told this story a few times on the podcast, but I'm going to tell it again. There was a July 4th concert on the mall in Washington, D.C., and the band I was playing with at the time was playing there. And we had some gear that we had to use. I had my pedals, but that was it. I had to use someone else's amp, and it was a great amp.

2:52It was a twin reverb.

2:55It's like the 65 reissue, I think it was. It was the Blackface reissue. And it was great. Whoever had it took care of it, and I was playing, and I was playing everything I knew there. And then, you know, no one was really paying attention, so I thought, okay, well, let's try something else. And I hit a little harmonic there, a little feedback, and I just let it roll for a while. And just, woo, you know, while the band heard it, they kind of got quiet, and then people started to pay attention.

3:29Like, whoa, what's that? What's going on there? So this one note that I'm playing was getting a little bit more attention than everything else that I played. All of the years of learning that I did went out the window, and this one note was really happening. So I figured, well, hey, I got nothing to lose. Let's ride this thing as long as it can go, you know. So it kept going and going and going, and people were clapping, standing up, standing ovation, right? And it was cool because it was live on XM Radio.

4:02I remember that. So I was all nervous about that. But it showed me that my conventional way of thinking of lots of things going on all the time didn't get the point across, okay? So I'm going to use that example. Now, this was one long note, but I'm going to say space is another way of getting some ideas across without having to string 10 million notes together.

4:34So what does space actually do? It creates anticipation. We hear it. We think something should be there, right? Hmm. I wonder what's going to go. Is something wrong? It gets attention. And then when finally you kick in after leaving some strategic space, ah, okay, it creates a release. Oh, that was planned the whole time. I wasn't sure what was going on, but now it makes sense. That's what you get in your listener with these things.

5:06So adding a little bit of space in there, it's almost like waving to the, hey, look at me, listen to me, right? So space also clarifies phrases. You can, if you stop after a phrase, it has a distinct ending. You give a little bit of time before the next one comes in. So it allows people to reset. It makes the ideas that you play a little bit more memorable, too. So if you add a little bit of space in there, it sweetens it a little bit to me.

5:38So there's a lot of different ways that you could do it.

Demonstrating rests with guitar tabs

5:42I'm going to go over to the tab for this week here. I didn't have this set up, but just bear with me for a second. I'm going to go over some of the different. So the first lick that I played was.

6:02So that was the kind of the test. That was the one that's just got straight notes in it and 16th notes and all that stuff. But then the next one I played was taking the idea and adding in some strategic rests.

6:20So it starts off the same with a triplet. But instead of going into all that kind of stuff, I have a little bend that's quick and it has a rest. All of a sudden, that idea now is chopped off. One idea. And then I'm going to do it again.

6:43This was going up from the 14th to the 15th bend. So we have the first one.

6:52One. And then when we finally resolve it, we have to hesitate for that too. It doesn't happen right on one. It's on the end of one. One, two, three, four.

7:04One.

7:06Those little eighth note rests mean everything.

7:12There I am. I'm back. They mean everything. They separate the phrases. They make it sound like a statement. Right? And it also makes you wonder what the next thing is that's going to be said. Pretty impressive. How do you develop something like that? How do you go from being someone who just plays pentatonic scales up and down? And there's nothing wrong with that. Pentatonic scales, remember, when you just play the scale, it's mostly, you know, scale-wise going up and going down.

7:48It sounds like movement. Lots of whole steps in these things. Minor thirds and whole steps in pentatonic. Even if you do it on the full scale. Lots of whole steps on that. That sounds like movement. It sounds like it's going up or sounds like it's going down. But when you start to get away from that, how do you develop using space in your phrases? Well, the first way you can do is think like a conversation. Think conversationally. Right? So this one.

8:19What was it? It was.

8:23That's almost like a question and answer. Right?

8:28Bam. I like this. It's like a question, another question, and then an answer there. You know, it's not a real conversation. I don't have, like, words in mind with that. But it sounds like something I've heard before when people are talking back and forth. You can also practice this kind of call and response thing. So you might go down low and then go play a pipe. So that distance, the separating the octave there, is also a call and response.

9:19It sounds like there's two voices there. You have, like, maybe a man's voice and a woman's voice.

9:27Back and forth. Back and forth. Call and response. So separating. Using space as well, too. Can do that, too. So here's, I'll stay in the same octave and use space. So. Could be two people talking back and forth. Steve Vai is fantastic at that. All of those wah-wah sounds and, you know, all the little fake conversations that he puts as kind of ear candy in the beginning of his songs.

9:59They're fantastic. He probably went and recorded some people talking and then figured out the pitches and all. You know, he went for it. It works, though. So, and another thing you can do, and this is good for anything, really, listen longer, play less. Use your ears a little bit. Start to develop your ears. We're having some huge gains in coaching with ear training. So, I'm a little sneaky with coaching.

10:31Coaching is guitar, and it's guitar lessons, but really underneath it all, it's ear training. It's musician lessons. We're starting to hear how these scales and these chords fit together. How caged chords and scales, diatonic chord progressions all work together. How the outside notes work. I'm having a lot of students, like, really getting a bunch of light bulb moments for that. So, working on hearing your scales. Working on listening to do they sound good or not.

11:03Maybe recording yourself a little bit more. That always works there. So, we have the lesson this week. I highly suggest that you go over and check the companion lesson out. I think it'll be, once all of these videos are out, at the end of the video, on each of them, the podcast and the lesson video, the video that pops up at the end will take you to the other one. But this companion lesson demonstrates three practical phrase exams.

11:34I played one of them for you. And it changes the way you perceive the licks, didn't it? When we've done two of those examples today, I could hear voices when I was doing it. I heard something that sounds like conversations I've heard before. Silence strengthens the phrase. So, if you're working on phrasing, if this is something that, or you're not sure what to do, if your phrasing is less than you would like it to be, and you're not sure what to do,

12:08start separating ideas a little bit more. A great person to listen to as far as someone who puts a lot of space in his solos and creates a lot of tension by drawing out each lick is Eric Clapton. If you listen to the song Old Love, for example, it's filled with that. But in any song that he plays, even Layla, it starts off with a lick, but it's little, little strategically placed rests are in there.

Practical exercises for leaving space

12:38So, how can you perform these? I like to do like eighth note exercises. So, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three. So, practice leaving a note out. If you're not used to doing it, so if we're playing, let's do quarter notes first. So, one, two, three, let's leave the first one. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. Second, one, two, three, four.

13:11One, two, three. Third, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Fourth, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. We can do it with a chord. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. Let's do two. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, three. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

13:42One, two, three, four. So I'm picking a beat to leave out on purpose. Now, those are quarter notes. You should be able to do those pretty easy. But this is something that you could try in your practice that I think will help you get control of when you play and when you don't play. Something people don't think about very often. The players that we admire, they're not great because they know the most notes. We know the same amount of notes that they do. They're great because they know which notes are the important ones and which ones matter at a certain time.

14:16And just as importantly, they know when to stop. Space gives your phrases room to breathe. It gives your ideas room to connect to each other. And it gives your listeners something worth remembering. Great to spend time with you today. Like I said last week, we have some really exciting things coming up for the podcast and for the lesson. Video, we're going to be practicing together. I'm going to have ideas that you can use in your practices each week.

14:47This is going to be a lot of fun. I'm having a lot of really good ideas to bring to you. And so I hope it to be something where each week when you're going to practice your guitar, you tune in. And this is going to help you give you something new to practice each week. Okay. So until I see you in the next video, have a great practice. And I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.