THE CROSSROADS PT4 Where blues meets jazz
John Wheatcroft shows you how to tidy up your raking and sweeping in both blues and jazz styles. So grab your broom and get dusting.
Rakes, mini sweeps and musical exclamations are a big part of blues and jazz, especially from genre-hopping musicians such as BB King.
Many young electric guitar players consider ‘sweep’ or ‘economy’ picking to be a relatively modern technique often associated with virtuoso shredders such as Yngwie Malmsteen or the amazing Australian fusion guitarist, Frank Gambale. It often comes as a surprise to discover early jazz, blues and rock and roll guitarists exploiting sweep picking ideas, essentially the concept of using a consecutive follow-through directional sweep of the pick to articulate multiple notes with one movement, a good half a century or so earlier.
Alternate picking is a great technique for achieving a balanced and even tone and for defining a strong rhythmic pulse to your playing. It does have its limitations, however. If you’re not familiar with the idea of sweeping, try the following exercise:
With your fourth finger play the fourth string at the 5th fret (G), and then with your third finger play the third string 4th fret (B). Make sure the notes are distinct and separate; we’re not after a chord. Okay, next up it’s the second string 3rd fret (D) and finally the first string 2nd fret (F#). You’ve just played a G Major 7th arpeggio. If you try to play this with alternate picking, crossing strings can feel a little awkward and clumsy. Rather than using alternating down and upstrokes, try this instead. Use just one continuous downstroke to play all four notes, allowing the pick to fall evenly and in time, once again making sure the notes don’t bleed into each other by lifting the previous finger slightly as each new note sounds. This should hopefully feel a lot easier and allow you, once coordinated, to play much faster arpeggio and chord shape-derived ideas, and plenty more besides.
It’s not just about speed of execution and economy of motion. Players such as BB King, Gary Moore, David Gilmour and Stevie Ray Vaughan have explored the expressive possibilities of raking through consecutive strings with a single pick stroke to add bite, excitement and energy to their single-note ideas. The principle difference between a rake and a sweep is that with the former, you only sound one note and the other strings are muted with a combination of both fretting and picking-hand damping, with the idea being to add a deliberate percussive clicking ‘ghosted’ run up to our chosen note. With a sweep, the intention is for all the other notes to sound, albeit rather quickly. As the techniques are broadly similar, it is possible for there to be some crossover, where notes held in a sweep could be partially muted or raked ghost notes briefly be allowed to take on a discernible pitch.
We begin with a collection of 10 classic phrases, five from the world of blues that mix rakes and sweeps equally to add expressive range and dynamic delivery, before moving toward the jazz and swing end of town. Here we see a greater reliance upon sweeping, allowing the jazz guitarist to get closer to the kinaesthetic fluency and harmonic elegance of a great horn or piano player. We round things off with a pair of studies based around typical blues progressions that typify these ideas in a variety of styles.
These phrases are of course the tip of the iceberg, so make sure you do some serious listening and get comfortable with the concept of creating rhythmic and melodic variations so you can devise ideas of your own. Once you’ve learnt the examples and solos as written, use these ideas with the associated backing tracks to compose, improvise or a combination of the two and come up with some solos of your own. As always, enjoy.
“Just remember that you’re lining up chord shapes, or arpeggio shapes. It takes a little time to get it coordinated” JOE DIORIO