Days of Wine and Roses

[Slim]

Improvising over a slow Days of Wine and Roses backing. Annoyingly, I forgot to mute the click track, sorry. It's a bit rough, there are mistakes.. what I'm trying to do is practice smooth and natural transitions from one scale to another, something I do find really hard. You may notice that often, I'm playing a phrase over one bar, then a different, disconnected phrase from a different scale over the next.

Finally, notice how I resort to playing the blues over it toward the end, at which point I decide it's time to give up. Still, it was really enjoyable to do.

[Thenop]

Nice, the tone suits this very well I find. i like the string bends just around the 2 minute mark, it all sounds and feels very smooth.

The click track prompted the wife to look around because she heard a tap leaking 

[Slim]

Well if I do say so myself, I do have a pretty natural string bending technique. I practised this a lot in my teens, mainly to annoy my dad.

I well remember being on holiday in Spain in 1977, and playing my acoustic guitar, probably quite badly. My dad, who was sitting on a camp chair a few feet away, noticed that I was bending a string every now and then and asserted quite matter-of-factly that this was "wrong". You weren't supposed to bend the strings. This despite the fact that he never played a note on a musical instrument his entire life.

This prompted me to develop my playing style to make string-bending as prominent as humanly possible in it, and although I've hopefully toned it down a bit since then, every time I stretch (say) a D up to E on the G string, there's a small voice in the back of my head saying "FUCK YOU, Dad".

It is a very important technique for guitar players, one that's underused in jazz (and to be fair it does tend to sound "wrong" over a jazz standard, as I proved here).

One important thing about the guitar is that it has notes that you can't find on a piano. The microtones. You can only unlock those by bending.

[Thenop]

Fathers are important like that