Rhythm guitar is an instrumental role that can found in almost every popular style of music. As well, the approach to rhythm guitar playing is fairly similar across a variety of genres. For example, in bluegrass, the rhythm guitarist mostly strums big open chords on an acoustic guitar; in rock, the rhythm guitar player typically pounds out power chords; and in jazz, rhythm guitarists usually comp chords through an often complicated set of changes. In each case, the rhythm guitar part mainly functions to fill up the sonic space with purely harmonic content.

As basically harmonic filler, some may think that the particular notes played by the rhythm guitar part are not very important as long as those notes fit into the chord. The rhythm guitar’s foremost job, as its name implies, is to simply keep the rhythm. On a lot of country albums, the rhythm guitar is equalized to the point where it almost sounds like someone is playing a washboard; all the bass frequencies are rolled off and only the sound of the pick hitting the strings is what is left to cut through the mix.

The duties of the rhythm guitarist do not always have to be relegated to mere timekeeping, however. In the guitar parts of Freddie Green, for example, we can see rhythm guitar playing transcend its original function as solely a rhythmic and harmonic element. With Freddie Green, the rhythm guitar becomes an integral melodic and contrapuntal thread to the musical fabric.

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Are you familiar with the album The Crane Wife by the Decemberists? The local radio station was playing the last track (”Sons and Daughters”) a lot last year, and I really liked it, so I picked up the album. The song sounded as if it were something by Neutral Milk Hotel, who haven’t yet really followed up on their amazing 1998 release In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, which at this point is almost a decade old.



The Crane Wife has a number of great tracks in addition to that last one. I was struck however, by a certain similarity between track 6 on the album and a tune by Led Zeppelin. The song by the Decemberists in question is called “When The War Came,” and it reminds me of “No Quarter,” which is the penultimate track on the Led Zeppelin album Houses Of The Holy. Here are some excerpts from each song, along with a mash-up of the two that I have created to help make the similarities more obvious (listen with headphones to best appreciate the mash-up since the songs are in separate channels):
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In my previous post, I talked a bit about the Beatles tune “With A Little Help From My Friends,” and I would like to follow up on that post with a look at yet another song by the Fab Four, their early hit from 1965 entitled “Help.” The constructions of these two songs actually share some interesting similarities, which I hope to show in this post.



The structure of the song “Help” is very straightforward. The song has only two main parts: a verse and a chorus. The song alternates between verse and chorus three times, and that’s pretty much the basic form of the tune. The third verse characteristically has the instrumentation stripped down to add some variety and a break. But otherwise, the song is basically just these two short sections.
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Sixty-five years ago today, Charlie Christian died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 25. Despite his short lived career, he left behind some ground-breaking single-string solos for electric guitar.

Many people cite Charlie Christian as the father of jazz guitar. Although his solos perhaps sound fairly complicated on first listen, only a few simple formulas seem to actually make up more than 90-95% of his improvisatory material.

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I’ve been listening to a lot of swing-era Benny Goodman lately, i.e. stuff from the mid- to late-30’s and early 40’s, particularly the small groups recordings (trios, quartets, etc.–not the big band music). It’s surprising to me how similar a lot of the licks and riffs in the solos are to early 50’s rock and roll. There are lots of blues patterns, chromatic runs, and pentatonic scales, features with which most guitar players should be familiar.

As I was transcribing some solos by Benny Goodman’s vibraphone player, Lionel Hampton , I noticed a little trick that he uses which, as opposed to his other soloing techniques, is *not* common in a rock and roll style. It’s a trick that classical composers use all the time, but more as a harmonic tool than a melodic embellishment.
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