Like the guy in this video, I used to focus so much on my speed/alternate picking technique, that it almost killed my soulful bends...
Shred has it's place, and this is not an insult to the awesome shred player above, but very few (shred based players) can bend like a bluesman...
There are days with exceptions but now I focus more on making my instrument sing rather than throwing a thousand gnat notes around as Frank Zappa called them.
Still, in heavy metal gnat notes are the king, and I've been guilty of them myself,
However, I'll admit that I miss the SRV/Hendrix licks of old.
Yeah, those shameless shredders are intolerable......
(wink wink)
I hear ya. I can do all the blues/SRV/Hendrix technique, and I started out learning a lot of the minor pentatonic/blues scales. I’ve seen so many players gravitate to that space, and maybe never really explore their own direction that might have evolved, had they learned more ways to express themselves. The flip side to that is that everyone recognizes the way Hendrix mastered bends, slides, trills, picking techniques, tremolo bar work, and phrasing (with a lot of blues framework), was a very radical and free excursion from anything prior to that. Because he could make a guitar talk, a lot of people find his approach enticing from a perspective of expression.
The main reason I did that video was to show the freedom of maneuver that exists on the 8-string, as almost every 8-string video is a younger player chunking in the low region, without really exploring the range and how you can connect your modal sequences, scalar motifs shifted through the wide tonal range, and being able to show accents on the lower strings in fast scalar runs, even with a more saturated tone.
Almost everyone I’ve seen so far basically tries to play an 8-string like a 6 or 7, taking advantage of the lower range when needed, then playing the high range like a 6. What really interests me about 7 and 8-string guitars is the ability to blend the low tonal range with the rest of the guitar holistically. One of the guys I really appreciate who doesn’t do this is Tosin Abasi. He’s a lot more eclectic than I, and can shred with the best of them, but he also departs from the expected in a lot of interesting ways.
The tuning approach I use really helps me personally do that. I started out using it on 7-string after I talked with a player who tuned his 7 with standard interval (4ths) in the 2-7th strings, then droned his 1st string with the 2nd at the same note. I don’t do that, but I really liked how he tuned 2-7 standard (high B through low B), so you don’t have to learn new fingerings for all your chord structures, scales, modes, arpeggios, and inversions.
I do just as much clean work on the 8 string, which has a wonderfully-rich and deep tone to it. I’ll have to record some of that as well. I use a lot of movable Minor and Major 3rd chords with open strings and an octave on the 3rd...as well as inversions, suspensions, diminished, augmentations, 4ths with octaves, etc., which really resonate in ways a 6 just can’t. It’s a very powerful instrument that feels more like an artist’s canvas to me.
Feels like playing a banjo when I get on a 6.
No
They’re nice guitars! Had an Epiphone les Paul and sold it several years back.
