Re: Guitar good, keyboards bad

[Dave Stagner <dstagner@icarus.net>]

Guitar is the driving instrument of rock music.  If you switch genres,
say to jazz or classical, guitar is not held in the same regard.  In
jazz, the guitarist is the guy who has to switch to a one-chord vamp
for his solo because he can't play changes.  Bleh.

When Bill Frisell is praised in jazz circles, he's compared to
Thelonius Monk, not Jim Hall or Wes Montgomery or Charlie Christian.
Keyboardists and horn players dominate jazz.  Electric guitars just
gave us fusion.

Here's an experiment for all of you who think the guitar is such a
be-all solo intrument... try tuning to EADGCF for a few weeks.
Straight fourths across the fretboard.  You'll soon realize how much
you've been letting the instrument play you, rather than the other way
around.  All those blues licks that infect your vocabulary will fall
apart when they can no longer be played in one position.  Stick with
it, and you'll soon learn the harmonic advantages of this tuning,
advantages the much-maligned keyboardists have always enjoyed.

-dave

By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.
Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly. 
Venus De Milo.
To a child she is ugly.       /* dstagner@icarus.net */
   -Charles Fort