11 September 2009 — Spoon and the Art of Rock Counterpoint
I've always listened to rock music, but, for a few years while I was studying jazz guitar at University, I stopped paying that much attention to it. I wasn't listening to the radio that much, and I'd never really gotten into the indie music scene beforehand anyway, barring a couple of random bands I'd heard on RRR and made sure to seek out.
When I got sick of trying to be the guitarist I wasn't going to be, I joined Plastic Palace Alice, after having only played in the odd cover band and jazz group. I'd never stopped listening to my favourites like Dylan or Radiohead, but I hadn't really spent the time learning new tricks, or thinking in terms of what rock guitarists did. Instead, I'd been focussing on jazz players. It may surprise non-musicians, but learning one style of music isn't necessarily useful when it comes to playing other styles. Jazz is generally considered to be a technically demanding style to come to grips with, and it is, but improving as a jazz player meant developing a style that wasn't very suited to rock music (as an example: in a lot of jazz you are encouraged to play all your notes slightly before the beat lands, in order to give a good forward momentum to the rhythm. In rock music, this tends to sound like you're rushing, and it's still a problem I deal with today: too often, especially when recording, I get ahead of the beat, rather than sit back on it).
So when I joined a rock band, I not only had very little experience of playing that music, I also had techniques that weren't particularly useful, and a limited vocabulary to draw on: no one really wanted to hear my jazz lines, and there's only so much of Johnny Greenwood's style you can ape in any one song. My solution to this was to start listening to new music, obviously. The number of bands who I "discovered" in the first year of being in the band is huge, and most of them had been popular so long they were on their way out before I found them, but that's not really something I minded. One band who had a new album out that got a lot of radio play right when I was paying the most attention (I've already eased off, partly due to my car's lack of stereo at the moment) was Spoon.
Spoon's album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga hit me immediately as having something I wanted. The first track, "Don't Make Me a Target" exemplified the kind of guitar playing I wanted to do more of, and it still sits with me as a great example of a particular style of rock: it's quite a taut song, with a riff that lasts practically the entire tune. The guitar line is a kind of intervallic playing that I still try to use a lot, and I teach it as a useful way of approaching lead guitar. It's a simple riff, but that's as it should be.
A basic transcription of the riff from Spoon's "Don't Make Me a Target"
As you can see, it's a two note line, in which the top note stays on a G natural for the most part, before moving up to an A natural for the last two bars of the line, while the lower note descends chromatically from E natural to a B natural, before the last chord which is basically just a strummed E minor chord. The last bar of the line (before the E minor) suddenly adds a third note – the D# – which serves to ensure that this last bar is heard as a B7 chord, with the 1, 3 and b7 all present. As for the rest of it, well, it's easy to go through and work out what chords are implied by each interval – particularly once we include the rest of the band –, but what makes this sort of playing so effective is that they're still just intervals, rather than whole chords. Punk bands like Greenday have made a career out of playing power chords, which is when you simply play the 1 and the 5 for each chord, leaving out the 3 that gives a chord its tonality, but this is both more sophisticated and more melodic, while still being a very simple part. Instead of hearing just a chord progression, or a series of root notes, there are a couple of other things going on.
For a start, we hear the chromatic descending line, which is commonly used both by guitarists and bass players. It's a smooth motion, obviously, and it's an easy way to give listeners some non-diatonic notes that don't sound too dissonant: we immediately pick up on where the line is going, and so the dissonances aren't as surprising as they might otherwise be (even today, the fourth bar can sound harsh if played in isolation, but within the context of the riff sounds completely normal). Secondly, we hear the top note drone. It doesn't function as an independent melody because it's too static, but it does have an element of the sound of basic counterpoint: two or more notes moving against each other. And, in the manner of counterpoint, these two lines combine to create intervals that suggest harmony. For so long people have written popular songs by starting with a chord progression that it's worth remembering that in the days of counterpoint, the chords were created through combining melodic strands. This is what happens in this riff, and it's something I think is a very important part of good writing. Strumming one chord after another has its place, but it can get a bit boring. Equally, or course, you can go too far in the other direction, which I used to do as a hangover from my jazz days. If you create fuller chords, and still try the same tactic (called voice-leading, because of the idea of writing vocal lines that moved smoothly from chord to chord) it can get a little too floral and pretty. This use of two notes is a perfect middle ground, especially when combined with the heavy muted downstrokes of an overdriven electric guitar. I had been practising voice leading for several years in a jazz setting, but listening to Spoon use a similar, stripped-back version of the same idea got me hooked. If I'm ever struggling for inspiration when trying to write a lead guitar part in any of my bands, this is one of the ideas I'll try out first. The other one is, of course, just turning on all my distortion pedals and trying to make the guitar play itself.