PHOTO : MIKE LATSCHISLAW
GUITAR
JUNO-winning singer / songwriter / guitarist Joey Landreth released his debut solo album , Whiskey , in January 2017 on Cadence Music . He is on tour in support of the album . www . joeylandreth . com .
By Joey Landreth
Harmony
I teach a fair amount , and although I ’ m mainly known as a slide guitar player , what I end up talking about the most is harmony . Harmony is something of a passion of mine , and has been since I was really young , going back as far as piano lessons when I got to play my first piece with “ broken chords .”
Introduction to Harmony I started , as so many do , immersed in the blues . Stevie Ray Vaughan was my first hero and I listened to every song on every record and painstakingly learned every note from every minute of his music that I could manage to process . It was everything to me .
I eventually graduated to more complex blues via Robben Ford , and that ’ s where I really started to dig into the harmony . I knew that he was a big fan of sax players , so I started listening to the guys I heard people talk about : Lester Young , Charlie Parker , John Coltrane … Eventually , through jazz , I found a guitar player named Ted Greene and he talked a lot about Bach , so I dug into that . I didn ’ t really ever have one teacher , so I bounced around genres in no particular order and it was really fun .
I began by learning about the construct of diatonic harmony ( harmonizing the major scale ) and how it related to and informed the things that I was playing and listening to . Eventually , I started drilling and memorizing inversions . I inverted everything I could – as many weird arrangements of notes I could come up with . ( I barely scratched the surface but it took forever .)
I was the kind of kid who would lose hours and hours playing guitar . I started to get stuck , though . I couldn ’ t find a way to make music with the things that I had learned . No matter what I did , it always sounded forced and contrived . I was trying too hard to work these concepts into my playing . It wasn ’ t honest .
Incorporating Harmony I eventually got my first set of pro gigs touring in a country band and I worked my way up the ladder playing with higher and higherprofile acts . All the while , I kept working on my chops and writing music . I started messing around with slide guitar and before long , I had ventured into open tuning territory . It was fresh and super exciting , but I was torn because I was losing all this vocabulary that I had in standard tuning in exchange for great and classic slide licks that are much easier to play in an open tuning .
I carted around two guitars for awhile – one in standard tuning and the other in open E . My dilemma then became , “ What if I want to play slide on the other guitar and vice-versa ?” So , I decided that I ’ d start taking the opentuned guitar to all my gigs that were “ just-forfun ” gigs – gigs where it wasn ’ t the end of the world if I clam a bunch throughout the night .
What ended up happening was my knowledge was still there , but none of the fingerings that I so painstakingly memorized were relevant . So , I had to figure it out on the fly . I used simple chord shapes a lot and wound up thinking more in terms of triads and bass notes than chord voicings or , more importantly , chord shapes . The open tuning was forcing me to think about everything I had learned about harmony in a very different way .
Now , let me get to my point here . Guitar players think mostly in fingerings and shapes as a rule . We are taught that this one particular shape equals a chord , when in reality , that ’ s just one of hundreds of different options .
For example , one of my students was learning a song and trying to write a chart for it . They came to me with the chart and asked for my input . I saw a chord that immediately stood out to me . It was F # min # 5 . It looked so strange to me and I couldn ’ t make sense of it – so I played it . Another way of saying F # min # 5 is D / F #. If you ’ re thinking in terms of inversions , it ’ s D major , 1 st inv . If you ’ re a numbers person like me , it ’ s 1 / 3 . But most importantly , it ’ s D major , not F # min !
A Macro Perspective Another interesting thing that I think about is how in my early piano lessons they taught us about “ broken chords ” and not “ arpeggios .” They are pretty much the same thing , but one train of thought doesn ’ t differentiate between the harmonic chord and the melodic chord . We as guitar players spend lots of time playing arpeggios , but I didn ’ t ever look at them like chords , which they are – just melodically . Go listen to any of the Bach solo cello preludes and you ’ ll hear how deep the harmony is in the melodies . By being grid-based , we get trapped very quickly in the idea of fingerings and positions but the freedom is in loosely letting go of that and trying to look at harmony a little more from the macro view .
A very similar approach can be taken with playing over chords . Guitar players get so wrapped up in , “ What scale do I use on this chord ?” I try to take an approach that focuses more on the chord tones , trying to create little pockets of tension and release . I try to create melodies that push the progression along by helping out with the voice leading in the things that I ’ m playing melodically .
I ’ ve definitely spent plenty of time memorizing positions and fingers and all the modes of the scales that I can think of , but at the end of the day , I often find that those kinds of melodies have too much information and sound a little like the friend that goes on and on without ever getting to the point !
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