Every time I hear "Penny Lane" lately,

[lysander]

So name some names, folks, please. Who is swinging these days? I'd like to check it out.

FWIW I think of Tommy Ardolino of NRBQ as a rock drummer with a great feel for swing.

I am kind if old (45), but I'm not a curmudgeon, subatomic -- I just like that groove, and wonder where it went as an idiom in our popular music. I like a lot of music that doesn't have that feel, too.

[cgarges]

Owsley, The Pernice Brothers, Bill Lloyd, etc.

All good power pop stuff done within the last ten years.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[lysander]

I've heard the first two -- might add Linus of Hollywood and The Red Button for power poppers that can swing sometimes. "Baby Britain" was a good suggestion too.

I was thinking more about what we might think of as rock acts, too.

[cgarges]

That stuff pretty much rocks to me. I don't know. Are you looking for like Hoobastank shuffles or something?

That Mika tune was a pretty big hit and it has that same kind of swing to it.

Not really rock, but "Trouble" was a kind of a hit for Ray LaMontagne and it swings pretty hard, too.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[lysander]

Man, I don't know -- the more I think about it my original post was sort of a brainfart.

Subatomic, I agree with you that there is a lot of great music being made now. Even with a full-time career, one kid in college and two in daycare, I still make an effort to find it. Denying that lots of great music is being made today wasn't the point of my original post, and that's a pretty ungenerous reading to give it. That said, there is a lot more music being made now, period, and not all of it great.

My observation about "Penny Lane" was that it struck me, it surprised me, how much it swung. I did not register that aspect of the song previously, because "swing" was a more a genre than an idiom to me. "Penny Lane" is not a "swing" song, but it has that musical DNA, just like the Stones's "Midnight Rambler" does, or even Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," though it's punked-up there.

I suppose what happened is that over time rock and roll lost its strong connection to the dance music it originally started as (becoming "rock" in the process), with the consequence that the stronger dance elements of it, that swing DNA, became less prevalent.

[christiannokes]

I hope this isn't further complicating things but I have something to share in regards to not wanting to learn certain things. This is purely for the sake of looking at this topic from many different angles to come to a greater understanding.

I do fear learning certain things. My first love was guitar and I learned to play it completely from my heart. There was no other way I knew how to play it. Then I got into recording and my mind became more focused on capturing clean beautiful sounds and manipulating them; a different type of pleasure. Was it a shift in brain hemispheres or just a distraction from what I was getting good at- playing guitar.

My personality type is that I LOVE learning new things and desire to master different subjects. When I focus on something I focus totally on it and have difficulty multi-tasking with anything else.

For me, if I was to choose guitar as my main priority, I feel that it would be wise to not learn counting or anything technical because I would focus on the technical "left-brain" side of it too much.

So...is this just a character flaw of mine and I am simply not living up to my full potential by avoiding learning certain things I consider to be part of a
"left-brain toolbox" ?
If it is my nature there would be reason not to learn certain things if I valued one thing over others and didn't want to keep having to save myself from wanting to exploring the whole world in great depth.

Maybe I'm just young.

[Z-Plane]

There's more to Ringo's beats than swing/not swing.

[lysander]

I can see where you're coming from -- swing is a little different to me, though, in that it is not just a technique, it's a "feel." I mean, Billy Joel can play reggae if you ask him to, but, you know, come on, there would likely not be much authentic feel in the resulting musical gesture.

Where does "feel" come from? I think it may come from not just "getting it," but really "digging it."

[cgarges]

I do fear learning certain things.

My personality type is that I LOVE learning new things and desire to master different subjects.

I feel that it would be wise to not learn counting or anything technical because I would focus on the technical "left-brain" side of it too much.

If it is my nature there would be reason not to learn certain things if I valued one thing over others and didn't want to keep having to save myself from wanting to exploring the whole world in great depth.

I don't know, man. These things sound kind of contradictory to me. Learning to count and read and tune are all valuable skills to the art of guitar playing. Necessary, no, but definitely valuable. If you don't want to learn that stuff because it's too hard or you're too lazy or it doesn't mean enough to you to take the time, that's fine. But to say that you think one will fuck up the other is just plain wrong. I'm calling bullshit on it.

That's pretty much exactly like saying that you're willing to learn all the chords that you can play from the first fret position, but learning any other chords will fuck up your mastery of those first few.

Just for the record, I laughed at Peter Buck when he started playing lots of mandolin because he had "taken the guitar as far as he could." Now, I'm a Pete Buck fan and had been for years at that time, but let's face it, the guy had not taken the guitar very far. He's a total master at the kind of arpeggio stuff he was doing then, but that's hardly taking the instrument to its maximum potential.

Sorry. I just can't get behind that kind of thinking.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[cgarges]

There's more to Ringo's beats than swing/not swing.

I don't think you'll get much argument on that one.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[cgarges]

I mean, Billy Joel can play reggae if you ask him to, but, you know, come on, there would likely not be much authentic feel in the resulting musical gesture.

Reggae that's swing or not swung? In traditional music circles, swing is definitely a technique. It usually refers to triplet-based phrasing. If you write a big band chart with the phrasing in standard eighth-note phrasing and write "swing" on top of it, a competent band will play all those figures in a swing triplet feel. It's VERY standard terminology.

How someone swings is something entirely different. Art Blakey and Elvin Jones have TOTALLY different feels to their types of swing, even though they were both primarily straight-ahead jazz players making HUGE innovations during the same time period. But I've also heard guys play that same kind of music where it's not swinging at all because they don't have a grip on the triplet feel.

Is "Roxanne" totally swinging while the bad bar-band drummer playing "Radar Love" is not?

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[JGriffin]

I do fear learning certain things.

My personality type is that I LOVE learning new things and desire to master different subjects.

I feel that it would be wise to not learn counting or anything technical because I would focus on the technical "left-brain" side of it too much.

If it is my nature there would be reason not to learn certain things if I valued one thing over others and didn't want to keep having to save myself from wanting to exploring the whole world in great depth.

I don't know, man. These things sound kind of contradictory to me. Learning to count and read and tune are all valuable skills to the art of guitar playing. Necessary, no, but definitely valuable. If you don't want to learn that stuff because it's too hard or you're too lazy or it doesn't mean enough to you to take the time, that's fine. But to say that you think one will fuck up the other is just plain wrong. I'm calling bullshit on it.

That's pretty much excatly like saying that you're willing to learn all the chords that you can play from the first fret position, but learning any other chords will fuck up your mastery of those first few.

Just for the record, I laughed at Peter Buck when he started playing lots of mandolin because he had "taken the guitar as far as he could." Now, I'm a Pete Buck fan and had been for years at that time, but let's face it, the guy had not taken the guitar very far. He's a total master at the kind of arpeggio stuff he was doing then, but that's hardly taking the instrument to its maximum potential.

Sorry. I just can't get behind that kind of thinking.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

I know it's a semantic nudge, but Peter Buck saying he'd taken the guitar as far as HE could is different than saying he'd taken the guitar as far as it can be taken. I don't think it's the guitar's potential he was talking about.

And even as a Peter Buck fan, I don't suspect he's far wrong.


I, too, call bullshit on christiannokes's reasoning. First off, christian, you're saying two different things: first you say you don't want the technical stuff to make you too left-brained about it, then you say you don't want to spend too much time on it because there's too much else you want to learn. Which is it? They're not contradictory, but neither is a particularly good reason.

To address the first part, though: anything I've ever learned about theory, or counting, or scales, etc. --and I don't know all that much by comparison to some musicians I know-- I learned, I absorbed, and then I put it in the back of my brain along with stuff like the third string gets tuned to a G most times and the octave is the 12th fret. I pull it out when I need it, and the rest of the time it works subconsciously. Not to get too hifalutin' but it's like what the kung fu guys call "no mind," where they just respond with the appropriate block or strike without thinking about it. I'm executing theory but I'm not sitting there thinking about theory. you learned a certain amount of technical crap to get to wherever you are musically now--what's the problem with learning a little more? Hell, I wish I knew as much as the guy I'm co-arranging a musical with right now; when I sit down with him I feel like a complete nimrod by comparison. And believe me, his creativity is seriously not lacking.

To the second: it either means you're a renaissance man or a flighty dilettante. It depends on how deep you get into the subjects you choose to learn about.

[cgarges]

I know it's a semantic nudge, but Peter Buck saying he'd taken the guitar as far as HE could is different than saying he'd taken the guitar as far as it can be taken. I don't think it's the guitar's potential he was talking about.

I still think it's pretty lame. Complete mastery of arpeggiating the first two pages of the Mel Bay books doens't qualify as taking your instrument very far in my opinion. That's sort of like saying you're gonna go get a glasss of water, putting your hands on the edge of the couch, pushing lightly, then saying, "Oh, I've failed."

In either case, I'm going to laugh at you.

Not to get too hifalutin' but it's like what the kung fu guys call "no mind," where they just respond with the appropriate block or strike without thinking about it.

Well-put. I like that!

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[lysander]

I mean, Billy Joel can play reggae if you ask him to, but, you know, come on, there would likely not be much authentic feel in the resulting musical gesture.

Reggae that's swing or not swung? In traditional music circles, swing is definitely a technique. It usually refers to triplet-based phrasing. If you write a big band chart with the phrasing in standard eighth-note phrasing and write "swing" on top of it, a competent band will play all those figures in a swing triplet feel. It's VERY standard teminology.

How someone swings is something entirely different. Art Blakey and Elvin Jones have TOTALLY different feels to their types of swing, even though they were both primarily straight-ahead jazz players making HUGE innovations during the same time period. Bit I've also heard guys play that same kind of music where it's not swinging at all because they don't have a grip on the triplet feel.

Is "Roxanne" totally swinging while the bad bar-band drummer playing "Radar Love" is not?

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

Sorry, the reggae thing was an unrelated reference for christiannokes, just an example of a different kind of technique that is also a feel.

"Radar Love" is a great swinging groove! "Roxanne" not so much, though it is a great groove, and a dance groove at that.

It's helpful to me how you described the swing groove as a triplet thing -- I'm a literary scholar by trade, and so tend to think of it more as an iambic meter (ta TA, ta TA, ta TA, ta TA), but I guess what I'm doing is just eliding the last note of each triplet.

[cgarges]

It's helpful to me how you described the swing groove as a triplet thing -- I'm a literary scholar by trade, and so tend to think of it more as an iambic meter (ta TA, ta TA, ta TA, ta TA), but I guess what I'm doing is just eliding the last note of each triplet.

Exactly! The iambic meter is a good example. If you write out eight eighth notes in a measure of 4/4, the traditionally-accepted "swing" version of that is a series of triplet figures with the first two partials of each tied together (or dotted eighth, eighth, under the triplet marking). It's also common in classical music (or orchestral charts) to write that feel in 12/8, as classical players are more likely to interpret that stuff literally.

Of course, really it's just a communication thing. I remember being on a jazz gig several years ago with a somewhat incompetent bassist and we played "Footprints" or something. The next tune he called was some kind of waltz and I said, "Hey man, we just played something in three. Would you rather do something in four next?" And he then said to me, "No man, 'Footprints' is in six."



Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC