I actually created this file yesterday, but then I didn’t write anything. Let me pick up today where I might have left off yesterday.

I just watched some great interviews with Joe Walsh and Bill Szymczyc (sp?) talking about some of the albums they worked on together, and Tony Levin talking about his approach to playing on sessions. Levin is a truly humble guy who reads charts but is also adept at crafting both his sound and his parts to fit the composition at hand. Very cool that he started as a classical bassist at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, playing upright gigs with Steve Gadd. Levin is also a compulsive blogger, so his website is particularly fascinating. What a great creative guy.

Joe Walsh is one of my all time guitar heroes, probably for many of the same reasons his playing appeals to anyone. I love that he is able to combine finesse and virtuosity with the same sort of “hit the instrument” ethic of a punk guitarist. What a fantastic musician. Great ears, great chops. Definitely a player to emulate, in the broadest sense of that word.

I have a tendency to not listen carefully to other guitarists, something I should be doing often. I don’t like playing along with albums, while this is exactly the kind of instrumental ear training I ought to be doing regularly. I ought to get back to transcribing music, even if I don’t write most of it down. Being able to play a part as it was originally played on record should really be the cornerstone of my practice as a guitarist. In fact, I can easily qualify that as both ear training and instrumental technique as well as building repertoire and working on my timing and musical memory. Too often when I play with others I am searching my brain to come up with parts when I really should be listening to and emulating the great musicians who came before me. I’ve been too focused on not focusing on anything in particular. This needs to stop. I need to be able to play within certain specific genres.

So here is a list of players and/or groups I think I should be practicing along with:

  1. The Meters
  2. Wes Montgomery
  3. Freddie King
  4. Booker T and the MGs

It’s a short list for now, but deep stuff. This is in addition to the chord solo stuff I already have under my fingers. It also means that, for the most part, I need to work on my flat picking chops. I have gotten increasingly comfortable with fingerstyle playing, but that really doesn’t cover the extent to which I want to play the instrument. Even just returning to practicing scales and arpeggios will help. This time around, though, I should intersperse legato playing with the more rhythmic strict-alternate picking.

In any event, I need to fire up the Strat and wail away. The guitar is beginning to call to me.