Jerry Garcia and his guitar 'sound'

And Jerry set his strings pretty high above the fingerboard. . . that contributes. He had a strong left hand!

 

As mentioned earlier in the thread, my favorite technique of his - that always gives me chills - are his descending tritone chromatic slurs in his solos, where he starts above his "home" note and glisses down to it. Reminds me of the musical equivalent of falling water and refracting light.

 

It's funny-I never cared for Garcia's style on electric guitar, it sounds like boring noodling to me. But on acoustic, he was great. The albums he did with David Grisman are wonderful..

 

the notes you don't play are as important as the ones you do. that's often said for jazz but it applies to all music.

 

At 6:28 of this video during "Jack Straw" Jerry is fiddling around with his guitar/pedal and almost misses his little solo, so he fires off that "slick lick".....

Is this what you mean? I LOVE that sound.....

 

That whole message from Kesey is great http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/31/m...y-garcia-the-false-notes-he-never-played.html

I think this is another apropos quote, "It was the false notes you didn't play that kept that lead line so golden pure. It was the words you didn't sing. So this is what we are left with, Jerry: this golden silence. It rings on and on without any hint of letup. And I expect it will still be ringing years from now."

I also like what Billy was saying on his book tour or maybe in his book about Jerry being his best music teacher: "I thank him. He was my best music teacher," Kreutzmann says of Garcia. "He taught me more about music than anybody else. And not necessarily just in words, but how he played. The way he played, you can learn so much from it. Doesn't matter what instrument you play.

"I [was] a senior in high school when he asked me to join the band, when that phone call came in. I knew how to play the drums just a little bit. I had the desire. The thing he said was, 'Bill, play full value. Make four beats be a really full four beats. Don't rush to the end of the bar.' "

 

Do you or anyone else have any examples you could point to for that technique; can someone Archtop it as we like to say on the What GD Are You Listening to Now thread. I would love to learn more by hearing it in practice; I what guess I am saying is as a non-musician fan I am quite sure I have heard it plenty of times, but wouldn't know it was as you described.

 

I wish all those "shredder" guitarists would get that message.

As BB King said "Some guys have to play 100 notes to get one good one".

 

Neil Young is another.

 

I was going to mention Neil and Frank Zappa too, among others, but I thought the post might be end being received as a little off-topic. But now that you mention it...

 

I can easily see how one could get lost in the weeds regarding his style on Grateful Dead music, so this may be a good time to differentiate his GD playing vs. his JGB playing. I am always struck, when hearing him in JGB, with how when he taps into the many musical styles-- and it is downright scary how many styles he has mastered-- these styles seem to come through his playing with greater purity… it floors me sometimes the heightened beauty of his playing every time he tackles lo these many songbooks; he makes the songs his own no doubt about it, but he always knows and transmits the song’s truth through his strings and his voice; it is very different to me than when he plays Grateful Dead music.

 

Christgau from 1977:
I noticed with some disapproval, for instance, that the ripple effect I'd always admired in Garcia's playing was achieved, at least this time, by an improvisationally elementary device. He was running triplets up and down the scale, four at a time, so that when he merely held a note for two beats the contrast was arresting almost by definition. Soon I noticed, however, that into all this repetion he was sneaking a few very attractive melodies. Then, for the final raveup, he suddenly attacked the guitar with a bluesish (almost Jamesian) slash that make all that rippling melody seem a diversion in subliminal retrospect. We'd been set up, and we loved it.

 

Spot on. Also, from a purely equipment standpoint he preferred a relatively clean "hi-fidelity" tone, starting with Fender Twins (which are perhaps the most hi-fi of guitar amps) and eventually preamping with Twins and using Macintosh tube power amps for even more clean headroom. His distorted/fuzz sounds are very idiosyncratic. Blue For Allah tones for example are just downright honky, nasally and nasty, and not in a good way. I couldn't play with those tones but he made them work, possibly because his ears were somewhat compromised and the mid-heavy distortion/fuzz sounded more right to him.

 

Twinkling shards of crystal falling from heaven indeed. His playing in Candyman brings tears to my eyes.

 

I think Doug Irwin should be mentioned - he and Jerry worked closely together in the design of his guitars.

This article has some interesting quotes from Jerry:

“Most guitar players, I’ve noticed, seem to use a flat fingering. I’ve somehow trained myself to come straight down on top of the string. I play mostly on the tips of my fingers, so the high action doesn’t get in my way at all.

“My preference is for the well-spoken tone, and I think coming straight down on the strings with high knuckles makes it. So my little groups of pull-offs are really well-articulated – it’s something I worked on a lot.”

 

Jerry Garcia played many guitars during his career, ranging from Fender Stratocasters and Gibson SGs to custom-made instruments. During his thirty plus years of playing music, Garcia used about twenty-five guitars with some frequency. He was infamous for giving many away once he was ready to move on. These six were the most memorable and important throughout his career.

Luthier Doug Irwin built three of his five custom guitars. When asked about that fact, Jerry replied, "There’s something about the way they feel with my touch—they’re married to each other…I’d never felt anything before or since that my hand likes better."



http://jerrygarcia.com/guitars/#alligator




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Good point. I have been listening to his solos over the past day and I heard one solo where he went down-up-down with the flurry of chromatics and sometimes he does it in steps ...up, up and up like he is out there further and further.

 

Off the top of my head from memory, perhaps Foolish Heart from 7/19/89? No guarantees that I'm right though! He did it all the time though. Next time I hear one, I'll note it. I think of it as a primarily 80s - 90s device when he had that pure crystalline tone especially.

 

"Jamesian"? Elmore James? Henry James?

 

Four and one-third, to be precise.

 

Something I found interesting about Jerry is that he would replace the pickups in his guitar(s) after a certain amount of time to escape the natural decay of the magnetic fields in the poles. The natural decay of the metals is one of the reasons people are drawn to the sound of vintage instruments (vintage PAF pickups being the biggest example).

 

Here is an example but ascending above the home note. At 6:34-6:36 he starts on E which is a step above the home note of D. He goes up chromatically from E...E-F-Gb-G.
He is really out there on this solo.

 

I read he felt the high end was lost because of it.

 

Anytime anyone uses the envelope filter people are going to think of Jerry. He used it quite a bit, not just on Estimated...(right?).

 

Cut the guy some slack, he had to use that Eng Lit major once in a while or he would have been banned from CBGB. I guess he meant Elmore.