[old man down]

This applies mostly to solo acoustic guitar, and maybe a little impromptu jamming with someone else. The premise is as follows:

1) Acoustic songs involve a little rhythm with leads interspersed and sung lyrics. Nothing more.
2) The songs must be worked over many times to make them fluid and second-nature.
3) The lead lines need to be seamless in their introduction, but then can be loose in terms of structure and melody.
4) The lead lines need to be as tasty as possible, and therefore should be a culmination of the best available.

This then leads to:

1) Deciding what song you want to master.
2) Playing it in generic terms for a long, long time to make it fluid and second-nature.
3) Then, finally, scouring the archives to select exactly which tasty riffs you want to incorporate.

The order of this logic is not important. The concept of distillation by whatever means, however, is.

Much of the really, really tasty stuff Jer did came after the band noodled around for quite a while during a song, trying to get the groove going. Once Jer found the groove he would try to work it around to something tasty he had come upon once before, had glimpsed, and wanted to get back to. For him, it was probably just a feeling that would well up in him, he would see slightly ahead of the moment and will himself to get to higher ground. When it happened, from countless experiences, he knew the odds were good that he might enter into that magical envelope, and once there he could do no wrong. But these moments were fleeting since they were merely “peels of fragile thunder.”

A good example of this is the end of Supplication. Several of them, if you scour them in the archives, don’t catch fire. But a few do. They’re beautiful in their composition: chord riffing triplets all over the place, and then the tastiest lead crescendos imaginable, really stretching the envelope with their reach.

All of the really great Dead songs have jams that involve some element of beautiful composition and “knock your socks off” tasty melodies. But because they involve a band and audience setting, Jer couldn’t keep working the nuclei of the tastiest parts for long since it was slipstream and the tastiest parts, for him most likely, were lost in the clutter, or involved some compromise due to flubs or miscues. Nonetheless, he created them unknowingly, and they did exist, however briefly, and are captured forever in the archives.

From our perspective, we don’t have to noodle incessantly to get to these thin-air regions since we can hone and distill these tasty parts in the comfort of our homes with time on our side. By working them over and over, with only slight variability of nuance and other factors, culling the best of the best out there, putting them all together, and better yet, extend the tasty reach that he, himself, only glimpsed, we can render melodies even better than he had created. And in the final analysis, the melodies are what are all important.

That is the dream of the solo acoustic guitarist who is lured to the guitar-playing magic that Garcia created.

[weirimpressed]

you can play better than jerry = you're shitting yellow daises....

stop dreaming haha. But good post, makes some sense.

[old man down]

yellow daises

Still, I wish more people would dream this way when playing acoustic guitar. So many times I've heard people playing Dead songs on acoustic guitar with little more mastery of the songs than the chords and maybe a Sugar Magnolia sort of base riff. It is as though they feel that they cannot master Jer's stuff, so why bother.

If you don't dream, or don't set dreamlike goals for yourself, your riffs will tend to stay in the mainstream of parking lot excellence. I have yet to come across someone who can really work Garcia's style on acoustic. One of my problems is that I don't find myself in these parking lot settings anymore, but even in the day, those who played would play the chords very nicely, but when they went to lead riffs it was like the song would nosedive and then there would be this incredible struggle to try to raise the song from the Dead, pun intended.

Work on getting the lead riffs to come in powerfully, and then have really tasty, memorized structure that you embellish on. Those who can do this seem to be reliant on other band members in an electric setting, and therefore cannot perform it on acoustic, solo. This is all I do , however, and when you can make it happen without all of the noodling, so that it gets right to the core of the moment, the result is very impressive to hear.

[CaptainTrips]

While I understand where you are going with this, I have to disagree. Playing other people's riffs will not make you a better musician. It may make you a better instrumentalist or a better guitarist or even just a better mimic. But you will not be a better musician for it. I suppose in the end its about what you are in it for. Some people are in it to be what they admire. Im into creating what I hear.

If you had never heard the Dead, I find it unlikely that you would ever emulate Jerry like sounds, point being it isnt YOU. YOU dont hear that, why force yourself to play something that you dont hear or feel? Art is about expression, not duplication. Duplicating things is a skill not an art. I dont like playing dead songs for this reason. When I find myself playing dead songs I almost get disappointed with myself. They have been played to death, what can you bring new to it?

Jerry had people he admired in music but at no time did he emulate them to the point described above. He took bits and pieces and went off on his own. Thats how it should be. Jerry would not have been Jerry, would not have made the great music he made if he had taken the above approach.

[hotasaPistol]

While imatation can be the greatest form of flattery I think that learning something by copying it and learning it well is good. But then make it your own somehow. Unless you want to be a clone and if that's your choice thats cool but then you are just a robot. I like learning some Jer stuff and some Bob stuff and incorporating into my stuff. LOL. I have been a student of the guitar my whole life and am a Bobby fan. I am finally learning to sing and that is another new adventure. I will never be a lead guitar player and don't want to be. Play some licks and play the songs and sing and make them my own.
Playing better than Jerry? I think not....roll me one of what your smoking....I appreciate what you are saying but politely don't agree

[tigerstrat]

Jerry had people he admired in music but at no time did he emulate them to the point described above. He took bits and pieces and went off on his own. Thats how it should be. Jerry would not have been Jerry, would not have made the great music he made if he had taken the above approach.

Not that you don't have a certain valid point (a little out of place on this board which is DEDICATED to a specific tribute music), but that IS the approach Jerry used from about 1958 through the early 60's when he was learning guitar, banjo, etc. He played 45's at 33LP speed, over and over and over, to learn licks and melodies exactly as they were played. Youve gotta build a solid platform before you can jump off into outer space.

[Pete B.]

I think his point is, you may never become a "composer of music" like Jerry if your end-point goal is to play exactly like someone else.
Jerry used those years of developmental research as a jumping off point, not an end point.
For example... how many orignals has Jerry written/recorded/performed?
I think he's just suggesting something like... "point of awareness #23A"... Don't get sidetracked by the "xyz Tribute" thing to the point of losing your own musical identity.

I think the original post is more about, we don't have the luxury of being Jerry, but we can arm ourselves with the ability to bring all our fave bits and pieces together.
He also points out that he wants to do it on Acoustic Guitar.


"You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly — radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music, man. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it. ... Nobody has to fool around with musty old scores, weird notation, and scholarship bullshit: you can just go into a record store and pick a century, pick a country, pick anything, and dig it, make it a part of you, add it to the stuff you carry around, and see that it's all music."
~Jerry Garcia~

[old man down]

Please remember that I know I cannot play exactly like Jerry. But, I keep trying to go in the direction of his examples. However, his examples are so numerous that often enough you no sooner learn something, think you've got it, then move on to the next thing as you let your CD move ahead, and so on, and so on, but when you come back to the first thing you thought you had under your belt, you find you've lost it due to the clutter of sensory overload. Therefore, you have no recourse but to decide up front to select only the tastiest parts and work on them over and over, ad nauseum, hoping that they'll stick a little. These "best" parts form a structure for your lead lines in that you know where you are as you progress through each of them, since they are strung together, these "best" parts.

In terms of trying to play exactly like Jerry, my experience is that if I don't give it a real working over with the CD rewind technique, my own creativity, which pales in comparison to his biting edge level of creativity, comes up way short of the beauty of some of his phrases. Many times when I try to learn his stuff I am in awe of why he chose to start on this note or that. Having worked on his style for so long, many times it is a real pleasure to find myself most likely using the same position on the neck as him, applying his starting note, running the notes a little, and I find that it is almost second nature to play the exact same notes as him. Why? Because they are there. (sounds like the answer to why do people climb mountains) So the creativity thing, Jerry didn't have a lock on it, it is there for all of us to uncover. But his templates of brilliance allow you to keep a focus. Without his templates my playing would just be normal. It is such a good feeling to play some of the same phrases he played and marvel at how they are correctly structured, how they twist and turn from what would be a "regular" approach, but through their twisting and turning the phrases allow you to end up on a much higher note that you would not have gotten to, or would have gotten to clumsily, by taking the "regular" approach.

The other day I found a bootleg CD that had gone missing for almost a year. It had the LL/Supplication jam on it with the "knock your socks off" ending on Supplication. In the Supplication tasty parts, there's only around 30 seconds of stuff to learn. The rest is just overlay technique that he used to allow the band to work their parts to the crescendo. But as I studied it I found that it could have been improved upon, that a solo acoustic version might be able to sustain the high note arpeggios longer, and this notion then led to the creation of this thread.

Hard work studying his style of play. But it's a rainy day here on the East Coast. Perfect for settling in next to the CD player, guitar in hand.

[Billbbill]

I have an entirely different take on this than omd. First I should note that correctly or incorrectly it seems that the learning and incorporating of a tasty lick into ones lead seems to be an end of the creativity rope throwing up of ones hands gesture. If that is the case (and I don't know how long omd has been at it) then it is what it is and more power to you. For those who are more interested in developing their own creativity, albeit through the jg style filter, I couldn't disagree with this approach more.

I could count on one hand the number of jg lead lines (not counting signature riffs and intros) I've at one time or other committed to memory. And when I did it was to analyze the structure for my own education and not to repeat as a performance. As has been pointed out here and in other similar posts, study of the basic melody of given tune is of great value and the root point from which to expand ones phrasing. Again, I can't stress enough that if one feels like they have reached their creative peak and have more to "gain" from playing phrases note for note, than different strokes for different folks but I hope no one sells themselves short.

I remember being at shows and virtually hanging on every note jerry would play, cheering him on in my mind to push the envelope just a little futher and surprise me again and again. Quite a burden to plop on someone when you think about it but such was the lot of the "leader" of GD. He was the somewhat reluctant straw that stirred the drink. But the nature of that stirring, aside from being born out of his talent and musical sensibilities, flowed from his sense of improvisation. And as the quote from jg in Pete's above post notes, he leaned on all sorts of influences for his inspiration. For me, and I imagine many if not most others, this going out on a creative limb (and I should add each member of the band did this in their own way which when magic was found showed that the whole COULD in fact be greater than the sum of it's parts!) is what jg and the dead were (and remaining offshoots are) all about.

If I'm going to go for the jg style, I'm going 'all in' as far as my creativity can take me into as inspired of a realm of improvisation as I can map out. To do less would be to say "Uncle". I give up. That being said, I in no way mean to demean omd's approach, but that it may be a place to find oneself after one has exausted a more faithful approach to the improvisational nature of jg and the grateful d. For me, not doing this would be like ignoring the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.

As far as the title of the thread goes it's relative and subjective and I believe misses the mark. I don't strive to "play better than jerry" as much as I'm trying to play the 'best' that I can. After that let this chips fall where they may. And from a purely objective standpoint they're falling quite a distance from jg.

[CaptainTrips]

I think his point is, you may never become a "composer of music" like Jerry if your end-point goal is to play exactly like someone else.

Precisely.

Also, beautiful post Bill, I couldnt agree more.

[old man down]

Wait a minute...are you guys saying you never try to learn his riffs? Ever?

I have to admit that in trying to get Jerry's style down my music does sound a lot like the Grateful Dead, though played on an acoustic guitar, solo. It is my own style even though it borrows from Jer, Bobby, and even Phil. And when I'm not working at learning the riffs, and relax and just play whatever I want it really becomes my own style. During those moments of playing songs the solos come close to what I play when studying using the CD rewind technique, but they are much more watered down. However, if I hadn't put in the time at all to study, my level of play, today, would be a fraction of what it currently is.

Since I'm not in a band, however, there isn't that give and take between players that opens up new doors to improvising. But, when I do jam on something in the middle of a song I don't think it comes out the same way every time. For me the difficulties are working chords in-between riffs, trying to get the riffs to lead me to chords on different parts of the neck, working on dynamics, soft vs. hard, etc. It is very free form, and just for fun. If someone were to tell me what key they want to play in, I can jam with them easily and it will sound good. But by studying Garcia's technique, just by playing a CD where you listen to a snippet, stop the CD and try to duplicate it, and then move on to the next snippet, and later put it all together to see if you can get the extended phrase to sound like one idea rather than a collection of shorter ideas, you learn a lot about playing guitar. You are forced to work scales and chromaticism--and they are very difficult to get to go hand in hand, that's for sure-- and nimble picking, out of meter to fit in the notes. You learn how to finish a phrase, how to jump up higher on the neck and try other ideas that are inherent to the pattern of notes available there because the notes line up differently for easy fingering. Things like this. A lot of people go to teachers for this sort of training yet Garcia can be your teacher because there is so much stuff out there to be experimented with and it is clearly heard because he played so loud since he was the focal point of the Dead.

You guys never try to learn his riffs? Really?

[Billbbill]

4) The lead lines need to be as tasty as possible, and therefore should be a culmination of the best available.
....
3) Then, finally, scouring the archives to select exactly which tasty riffs you want to incorporate.

From our perspective, we don’t have to noodle incessantly to get to these thin-air regions since we can hone and distill these tasty parts in the comfort of our homes with time on our side. By working them over and over, with only slight variability of nuance and other factors, culling the best of the best out there, putting them all together, and better yet, extend the tasty reach that he, himself, only glimpsed, we can render melodies even better than he had created. And in the final analysis, the melodies are what are all important.

Work on getting the lead riffs to come in powerfully, and then have really tasty, memorized structure that you embellish on.

Maybe I've read too much into this? But these sentiments are what I was referring to in my post. In fairness to you, you do mention "embellish on". I really just listen to myself while playing a song or while playing along with da boys and form scale ideas w/ added notes and chromatic possibilities looking for tonal centers, minor/major accents and work from there.

There are indeed some signature phases that I do copy, both chordal and sing note wise, but I don' think it's a lot. Some of the chord stuff is more noticeable - Eyes and NFA come to mind. That signature 7-4-1 descending chord line comes to mind. I work that one like crazy in a number of ways.