MENTAL GUITARDATION

SUPER SPY

Here's an animation short I scored for The Electric Company on PBS.

It's all just guitar (with a little loop) recorded with my Tyler Classic Strat and Grosh Electrajet through a %13 FTR37.  I turned the track way up here.

 

 

 

GOODNIGHT ROBOT

 

I scored this episode for The Electric Company's first season on PBSKids.org. The fun part was creating a wacky sound with Logic Audio's orchestral palette and an iMac. The best thing about scoring for this show is the broad styles of music throughout each episode. You'll hear a cappella voices, orchestral music, hip hop, rock, metal and just weirdness in a constantly moving series of animations, live action stories and vignettes, all teaching kids to read. It's the most rewarding place to be for anyone who loves to create and inspire.

Inner Urge

This is a fingerstyle solo guitar arrangement of the Joe Henderson tune Inner Urge.

Here's a video of the body of the tune without the coda.

  

Very Early - solo guitar arrangement

This arrangement is based on a beautiful solo guitar conception written by Ted Greene.  I can't imagine anyone in the near future coming close to his adeptness at conjuring lines and chordal fantasies on the fly, to say nothing of his encyclopedic knowledge of harmony and guitar mechanics.  Shredding is one thing but this genius was on a completely different plane.  Untouchable.  It's a shame he left us so early, very early... oh, sorry.

Anyways, this is a hard tune to improvise over as you will see.  It has a few startling resolutions that are unique in the standard repertoire but the way Bill structured his melody you get a sense that it all belongs.  I took some liberties in my interpretation here but stayed largely true to Ted Greene's original.  

I hope this inspires.

Harmonic Minor Workout

    

Cool Riffage

I ripped this off from the late great Michael Brecker and his beautiful solo on Nightwings written by Claus Ogerman.  The CD is called Cityscapes and you can find an excerpted version on iTunes and other locations.  I strongly recommend this music, first rate soloing over lush LA soundstage full orchestra and a world class rhythm section of Gadd, Gomez and others.

 

Here's a breakdown of the intervallic structure of the idea as permuted through the key of F diatonically.  If you really want to get ambitious you can insert the attending diminished arpeggio between the scale tone centers.  

"Can you give me an intro?"

It's a Bach thing that I learned years ago from my composition teacher Dr. Asher Zlotnick.  Dr. Zlotnick studied the Schillinger system and was a fount of knowledge.  He taught at the Peabody Conservatory and Indiana State University and he has a legion of successful students all over the world.  His big thing was ear training and if I get it together I'll post some of that juicy stuff.

The intro I posted above saved my ass when I was playing with Kristin Chenoweth, at a theater in Santa Fe.  The guy who owns Omaha Steaks threw a shindig and I ended up there with Andrew Lippa, Bill Ellison and Dave Ratachek to play a bunch of stuff like Gershwin and Bernstein and the other guys who wrote Irish drinking songs.  

She asked me to play an intro to "Then there was you" and I pulled this out of my bag of trick (this is it) and she looked at me with steam and whispered to Lippa, "I'll never do a gig without him on guitar." I was fired right after that date and I've never worked with her since.  So if you want to "seal the deal" just play this intro and you'll be back on the couch in no time.