This is an all-new arrangement. I’ve never actually done Jingle Bells before, although it might well be the most arranged of all holiday songs. It’s one of the simpler seasonal tunes, and it’s pretty easy to overwhelm it with harmony substitutions. It seems to me that I’ve seen and heard more arrangements that I considered to be poor than to be good.

Given that it has been arranged so many ways, it wasn’t until the idea for this approach developed that I thought I might have something at least a little bit original — and that also preserves the traditional happy-go-lucky  mood that I think most people associate with the song. Perhaps you can tell me how well the arrangement works.

The arrangement is — as usual nowadays — for guitar, bass and drums. On this recording the guitar is the 1949 L-4C about which I recently posted on the blog.

Here are the links to listen:

Stream

MP3

Yes, I realize that as I post this it is a bit on the early side. However, at least I did wait until after Halloween. I can blame the timing on my wife C., who is a piano teacher and begins working on holiday music with her students once November rolls around. In order for her to be ready, she typically orders new Christmas arrangements over the summer and reviews them in September and October. So the holiday music season starts pretty early around our house.

Anyway, every year she has a surfeit of new arrangements to choose from. Piano pedagogy publishers crank out huge amounts of new stuff constantly. I have a few books of guitar Christmas arrangements, but mainly I am left to make them myself from fake books.

The first two this year are tunes that I’ve done before — I’ll be home for Christmas and We Three Kings — but both get new treatments in keeping with my efforts recently:  guitar/bass/drums trios. The arrangement of We Three Kings is not that much different from the prior version, actually. It’s the same swing feel and I just redid the guitar part so that I could remove the original’s keyboard part.

I’ll be home for Christmas is quite different. It is also a swing trio after a chord melody intro. The prior version is solo finger-style.

Here are the links to listen:

It’s been a while since I wrote and recorded anything, and I thought I’d get back into things with a simple trio tune. It’s called “Take a Seat”. I am continuing to stick to the guitar/bass/drums format which has been my focus for the past few years. However, I thought I’d try to adjust just a little back in the direction of “smooth jazz”, which was my my style for so long.

So, for this tune I tried to combine some of the sponteneity and grit I went for with my “Just the Three of Me” project with a smoother guitar sound and a funk feel that would not be out of place in a smooth jazz context.

As has been my custom for the past couple of years, I play the guitar and bass parts and use edited drums loops. Both the bass and guitar parts were played straight through — so not only is there no overdubbing, there is no “correcting” of stray or misplaced notes. I hope the result is an honest improvisatory feel.

I’m getting a little more comfortable as well with Pro Tools. It’s still an intimidating environment, but I’d have to say I’m glad I have it. I think the results sound better. However, I’m still composing in my old software. It has much better scoring and notation capabilities than Pro Tools. I think the Pro Tools folks want you to buy Sibelius for that.

Here are the links to listen:

Stream “Take a Seat”
MP3 of “Take a Seat”

I have this L4-C that I bought in September, 2004. It’s very cool, and has a clean, well articulated tone that is yet a little darker than my Orchid archtop, though not as dark as my L4-CES. 1949 was the first year for the cutaway L-4. The standard construction for an L-4 (even today) is a carved spruce top, laminated maple back and sides, and a one-piece mahogany neck. This one seems to have mahogany sides, which is interesting.

L4C

This guitar had a Johnny Smith pickup installed — which cannot be original, since the first year for those was 1961, but it had clearly been on there for a long while. It was really a bit too big for the space under the strings near the neck — it actually was digging into the top a bit. In other ways the pickup installation didn’t look professional — the pickguard was cut clumsily to allow room for the pickup, the 1/8″ jack was in a screwy place, and there was a non-functioning endpin jack. The pickguard itself was mounted at a crooked angle.

So when I got the guitar, I got an repro pickguard from Pickguard Heaven who have a great assortment of repro guards available, and a super-slim “2D” Kent Armstrong handmade pickup from archtop.com to put on. It also allowed me to mount the pickup under the “24th” fret, which is usually where they go.

The guitar still sounded good with the new setup, though I kept the Johnny Smith pickup and original pickguard; at some point in the future I may have a use for it.

In the summer of 2009, I decided to address some other issues. Although the guitar sounded very good, the string to string balance was not right. Specifically the 4th and 5th strings were just too loud and notes on those strings really had a tendency to feed back — even at low at-home volumes. Performance volume was impossible.

I have two other Kent Armstrong handmade pickups (on separate pickguards) for my Orchid archtop — a PAF and P-90. These have adjustable pole-pieces, which I knew I would need on this guitar to solve the balance problem. I also decided to have a new installation professionally done. So I ordered an interesting Kent Armstrong handmade single coil pickup that is tappable between 8k DC resistance (like a P-90) and 13k (like a DeArmond Rhythm chief). I delivered this and another Pickguard Heaven pickguard to Mannella Guitars where the work was done.

So far I am very pleased with the results. I have set the polepieces to balance the strings, and I very much like the tone I get from the “Rhythm Chief” position. The switching is accomplished by the small toggle switch just above the volume knob.

Pickup Closeup

Following is a recording I made with this new setup.  This is also a “new” arrangement of sorts. I’ve done “By the Time I get to Phoenix” before, as it’s one of my most favorite  tunes. However, this is a jazzed-up chord melody version, with quite a few additional substitutions beyond what I’ve done before.

I think the guitar sounds pretty good. The recording was through the POD Pro, using the Twin Reverb simulation with the tone controls set “flat” (treble off, mid all the way up, bass off), which is how I run my Allen Accomplice. The POD does a very good job of sounding similar.

stream

MP3

My latest release, Just the Three of Me, is now available on CD Baby.

This is the commercial version of the tunes I have been posting here over the past several months.

This project indulges my fondness the guitar/bass/drums (GBD) “power” trio format as well as a broad range of my guitar influences. The GBD trio is as stripped down as can be while still maintaining the foundations and feel of a band. The primary challenge falls on the guitarist, who must carry both harmony and melody. The bassist must also on occasion be called on to provide more harmonic or rhythmic support that would be necessary in a larger group. At the same time, however, there is considerably greater freedom. The guitarist can play with harmonies and substitutions that would be impossible if playing with a keyboard. The bassist has more rhythmic and melodic latitude as well. Since I play both the guitar and bass parts here, all that freedom was mine.

The other primary characteristic of this project is that it allowed me to honor the many fine guitarists in a wide range of styles who have influenced me over the years. Not coincidentally, all have done considerable work in the GBD trio format: Johnny A, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Kenny Burrell, Pat Metheny, Billy Gibbons, Eric Johnson, and Bill Kirchen.

The tunes here include some I have recorded and released before. These are, of course, redone for the GBD format. The rest are new for this project.

This project also continues along the path I started a few years ago away from heavily produced smooth-jazz. This actually began with a multi-year non-commercial project in which I arranged for GBD trio and recorded over forty classic instrumental and other hits from the late fifties and early sixties. The next was last year’s release (could be) *LIVE* (but isn’t) in which all the arrangements were for a guitar/keys/bass/drums quartet. With this trio recording I have tried very hard to capture some of the energy and spontaneity that is associated with GBD bands.

I have finally gotten on the mainstream digital music production bandwagon. I am in the process of converting my home recording studio to Digidesign’s market-leading Pro Tools.

I have been using various versions of Musicator since I started doing these recordings more than ten years ago. This is largely the work of one or two guys in Norway. I have been having more and more problems with it lately, and cannot get the latest version to work consistently and without glitches on my system. To their credit, the Musicator guys really made a effort to help, but to no avail.

The conversion is not going to be pain-free. Pro Tools is far more powerful and complex than Musicator in every aspect — except conventional score editing. I also am having issues getting my external Yamaha Motif ES Rack sound module to work properly with Pro Tools.

My first completed recording with Pro Tools is a version of the instrumental rock classic, Apache, written by Jerry Lordan and recorded in the early 60’s by the Shadows, Ventures, and Jurgen Ingemann, among others.

This arrangement is essentially the same as offered up on my post about Hank Marvin and the Shadows, but is totally re-done. I played the bass part rather than programming it, the drums are built from real loops & are done via EZDrummer rather than my Yamaha Motif, and the guitar part is also redone using my Guild Starfire. Here are the links to listen:

click to stream
click for mp3

This is the title of my latest tune and recording. As with all of my recent  material, it is a strict guitar, bass drums trio with no overdubs.

click to stream
click for mp3

The first three are tracks from my album, “Just the Three of Us”, which features all trio performances.  I have previously posted all of the tracks as audio here on the blog.

The selections are “Starfire”, “Hoppin” and “Double Nickels”.

The next two are a couple of my Vintage Instrumental arrangements, “Pipeline” and “By the Time I get to Phoenix”.

This next video was  shot a couple of years ago and is a live, “karaoke” style performance of my tune “Barebones”. The sound on this one isn’t the best.

The last video is a track from my last Smooth Jazz CD, “A Step Along the Way”:

(updated 7/18/2009)

A couple of years ago I decided that it would be preferable for me to actually play the bass parts on my recordings instead of simply programming them and letting the computer play them. I purchased at that time a short scale P-Bass from Rondo Music in New Hampshire. This has worked out very well and I played all the bass tracks on my commercial release from last year, (could be) *LIVE* (but isn’t).

For my current project, it occurred to me that some of the numbers would work well with a fretless bass. So I went back to Rondo Music and purchased a short-scale fretless J-Bass.

More on these basses and on fretless in a moment — first here are the links to the songs I redid with the new fretless bass:

Okay, now a bit about these two basses. The “brand” is SX. They are obviously copies of the two classic Fender designs. They are made in China, are of amazing quality, fit & finish, and cost less than $150. Incredible. Both have short 30″ string length scales. Normally a bass has a 34″ scale. I opt for the short scale being a guitarist with small hands. I find these much easier to play. SX also makes full-length scale basses and the cost is the same.

I had always thought that Fretless bass guitars were used mainly in the jazz realm.  However, the Wikipedia article on fretless guitars and basses claims that Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones was the first to actually use one, and that Rick Danko of the Band used one starting back with the classic album Music from Big Pink.

One of the best known early proponents was the incredible Jaco Pastorius. Jaco’s approach was very influential. The sound is very distinctive — people often describe the tone as having a “mwaaa” character to the attack. He was the bassist on Pat Metheny’s original recording of “Bright Size Life”. He is also noted as the bassist of the influential fusion group Weather Report.

Of course, the absence of frets makes playing in tune really challenging. I hope the intonation on these recordings is good enough.