My Music And Song's

One of the basic principles of making guitars work in a recording is part playing. If you have played a lot of rhythm guitar or sung your songs solo, you will be accustomed to strumming chords constantly to get a full sound. If you like jamming lead guitar, you will be accustomed to having the freedom to constantly whack out endless streams of notes. Neither of these approaches will do for arranging songs.

Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music once told me, ”We had a very good producer from the second album onwards, Chris Thomas, who had worked with The Beatles, had done Dark Side Of The Moon and subsequently worked with The Sex Pistols. I learned an incredible amount from him about part playing in recording. With Chris it was: ‘Look for the gap, don’t play over the vocal, less is more.’ You learned how to position things – just as all the great Motown stuff has incredible position and texture. All the parts add up to something greater. It all locks in.”

To understand part playing requires, first, the realization that the overall sound of a mix will generate the harmony, so you don’t have to strum chords all the time. Drums and bass create rhythm, so you don’t have to keep strumming for that reason either. Sometimes all that is needed from a lead guitar during the verses is three or four well-chosen notes to add a little melodic interest between gaps in the singing. If you find your multi-track recordings feature more fragmentary guitar parts, then you’re probably on to the right thing.