INSTRUMENTAL INQUISITION 8
Guitar instrumentals have supplied some of music’s most evocative moments. Jason Sidwell asks some top guitarists for their take on this iconic movement. This month, a genuine legend of jazz-fusion, Lee Ritenour aka ‘Captain Fingers’.
This issue: Lee Ritenour on his new album.
GT: Is there anything particular about guitar instrumentals that appeals to you?
LR: I have had the chance now to play the guitar for 60 years and 2020, as crazy as last year was, was also a reminder to me, a lifetime spent with the guitar. It’s 60 years I’ve been playing this year, all in Los Angeles, grew up playing the guitar here. So, I was always fascinated by the guitar as a personality. It was my vocal instrument if you will. The great classical guitarist Segovia always called it a mini-orchestra and that’s proven true. Especially after finally, after all these years, I did this solo guitar record, called Dreamcatcher. So, I got constantly reminded as I was making the record and orchestrating the record and arranging the compositions, that the guitar really is that little orchestra. It can do and be anything to anybody and that’s in the hands of a genius of the likes of Segovia, Chet Atkins, BB King, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck or Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell. So, these are all the fellas that I grew up listening to, I heard the personality of each come through the instrument, so I was always loving guitar instrumentals whether it was Hendrix playing a solo in the middle of a vocal song, or Clapton stretching out with Cream, or hearing Wes Montgomery with his trade signature octaves; Joe Pass play his chord melody stuff, or Segovia, it didn’t matter, the guitar instrumentals were always an attraction for me.
GT: What can an instrumental provide a listener that a vocal song can't?
LR: The guitar is the most popular instrument in the world, right behind the drums and the vocals as the big communicator. But since music is available pretty much at the click of a button now, around the world, in any country, in any culture, my music can be heard
anywhere now. So sometimes if you are singing in a particular language, it might not translate so well to another country, but the guitar, the drums is a style that if you have something that is attractive to people around the world it can resonate with a lot pf people. So that’s always nice.
GT: Any playing tendencies that you aim to embrace or avoid?
LR: Going back to my Dreamcatcher album, 90% of it is all newly composed. And definitely a reflection of what I’ve been through personally in life, and with the guitar and the history in Los Angeles all these years. And definitely what we’ve been through as a planet in 2020, the guitar was really a reminder of my whole basis. The name of the album Dreamcatcher and the metaphor on the cover with the seven guitars in a dreamcatcher circle; the guitar really has been my metaphor for catching all the bad dreams and the good ones and there has been plenty in every category.
GT: Is a typical song structure of intro, verse, chorus, middle 8, etc, always relevant for instrumentals?
LR: Doing guitar instrumental records, and you compare it to a vocalist and the way the vocalist with melodies and lyrics can communicate with an audience in general, we have to become the lead instrument. So I always tell the story that I grew up being a sideman and playing on many recordings for many other people and I was always 'in the band'. So in 1976 when I went to do my first solo guitar record, the guys in the rhythm section, the engineers and the studio was already very familiar to me because it was a bunch of people I had already worked with. But this time I was the artist, I was the vocalist if you will, through the guitar. It was up to me to carry the record, so that was a completely new experience and very challenging and that first record was called First Course. I didn’t think I had my own personality; it turns out it was emerging and stronger than I thought.
Throughout my career there have been many styles, from acoustic to electric, to pop to fusion, R&B to jazz, all sorts of different varieties. To have a personality on the guitar, a sound that people will recognise, and a melodic approach that will definitely come through in the compositions, I think writing your own compositions that later become guitar instrumentals, is an important factor for getting your own personality.
GT: How useful is studying a vocalist's approach for creating guitar melodies?
LR: It’s very useful, especially when it comes to phrasing, because the way you phrase on a guitar is very different than the way you would phrase on a vocal. You shouldn’t always necessarily restrict yourself to making the guitar instrumental sound like a vocal, but with phrasing you can learn a lot from great singers and people who can phrase. Guitar players tend to phrase their melodies and improvisation by their technique, the way they pick or put their two fingers together, the way the two hands work together on the guitar, or how the strings fall and what’s easier to play. Sometimes you have to really choose your phrasing to match the melody and sometimes technique can be overrated; all young guitar players, and myself when I was younger, still want to have a lot of technique on show. I think it’s better to have a good technique than a lot of technique. A good technique will last you a lifetime while just being able to play fast often won’t get you very far in most contexts.
GT: How do you start writing one; is there a typical approach or inspiration for you?
LR: If you’re honest with yourself and write a song that’s not a copy of someone else’s song, you begin to think, ah that’s cool, that’s me. You can recognise that that’s where your personality, your heart and head is. It’s the kind of music you want to compose. If you like it, you can go and do a little bit more and pretty soon that becomes your style. So it’s very important to compose for the guitar. That said, you don’t have to write with the guitar in your hands, you can write just singing a melody in your head, on a piano or a different instrument. You can write on different guitars with different tunings. The great thing is there’s not only one approach.
GT: What do you aim for when your performance is centre stage for the whole instrumental?
LR: When I was beginning to compose and record for Dreamcatcher, I wrote a lot of new songs and a lot of them were inspired by last year, 2020. I used a lot of different guitar sounds, there were some songs I did on the baritone guitar tuned down to B and there was one song called Couldn’t Help Myself where I used Logic Audio to put a variety of guitar high strings and baritone and classical guitar, distortion and rhythm guitar. I really had fun just exploring all those sounds and possibilities. One day after the pandemic shut everything down in March, I was on a very busy street to check out what was going on, usually an incredibly busy street with people and stores and cars and it was completely empty. There wasn’t a soul on it. Upstairs in somebody’s apartment above the storefront, I hear somebody playing the guitar turned up to 10 and just rocking away. I was so inspired to hear somebody just letting loose, the sound was bouncing up and down the street, so I went home and recorded the tune About Kinney. So, for me to record a solo distortion Les Paul type song, not normally where I live, I got out the slide because I was very inspired by that moment. So that’s an example of where something can reflect where you’re at.
GT: What type of guitar tone do you prefer for instrumentals?
LR: That’s a really good question because it depends on the kind of music you’re doing. The band, the recording, is it live, are you doing it in your home studio to Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase or are you in a big studio with a full band. What kind of music are you doing? Are you doing a rock piece, an acoustic more intimate type song? The amazing thing about the guitar is that it has a palette of sounds that is just endless. I had a fun time primarily being by myself doing this record. Not even my engineer of 40 years was around. He mixed the record, but as far as recording it, it was me. Fortunately for me, my experience allowed me to get the best out of the guitar, the expression of how you hear it coming back on a recording.
GT: Do you have favourite keys or tempos? Do you find Minor or Major keys easier to write in. Or favourite modes? And what about modulations into new keys?
LR: Haha, do you have two hours so we can talk? After all these years, I have so much experience of playing
“THROUGHOUT MY CAREER THERE HAVE BEEN MANY STYLES, FROM ACOUSTIC TO ELECTRIC, TO POP TO FUSION, R&B TO JAZZ, ALL SORTS OF VARIETIES”
the guitar, composing, writing that I try to forget all those things when writing and recording a tune. You just let the moment take you away, but in order for that moment to arrive you have to prep yourself. When I was a kid, I had this incredible teacher called Duke Miller, who was introduced to me by Barney Kessel. He made me do things like write my own chord book, so he taught me about basic harmony. I was 13 years old and he had me go home and write down in boxes and music paper, every C chord I could think of and he would come back and say, 'Okay, you had the root, the 3rd and the 5th, and it’s a Major and here’s all the C chords.' He’d say, 'What about this one, you missed that one,' and we’d go up and down the neck and then he’d say, 'Okay, now do it in all 12 keys and do Minor and 6th and 7th, 9th, 11th and 13th; flat fives, flat nines, sharp five, sharp nine.' It took close to a year. After I wrote my own chord book I could get around and understood how chords and voicings worked on the guitar. Sometimes two notes will say much more than a full six-string chord and sometimes a powerchord is best, as we learned from rock groups and distortion in the 60s. Just two notes - a root and a 5th - can sometimes be the most powerful. The guitar is such a great instrument to orchestrate and arrange that I can’t emphasise enough that students should always learn about that aspect.
GT: What three instrumentals have inspired you, and why?
LR: When I was a kid growing up, in my early teens and 20s in the 70s, there was every kind of great guitar player at the top of their game. Each of them had their own personality, whether it was Clapton or Beck, Hendrix, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Segovia, all of the county guys, and in the US a lot if it started with the blues. So you’ve got John Lee Hooker, Albert King, BB King. I had a chance to work with a few of those people and know quite a few, and even if it was a guitar solo in a vocal hit tune, it was the ‘right’ guitar solo. So I’m going to refrain from naming three of my favourite iconic instrumental tunes, because I ouldn’t come up with just three!