FREE Course: How to Play Ambient Guitar

i'm really excited about today's video it'll be the first in a series that i'm calling how to play ambient guitar we'll be looking at both basic and advanced concepts things that i've learned over the years in terms of how to play ambient guitar in today's episode we're going to be looking at how to set up your rig for ambient swells so grab your guitar let's get down to it okay in order to follow along with this tutorial you're going to need several things first thing will be an amp either a real guitar amp or if you're like me an amp simulator or some kind of amp modeling unit your choice next thing you'll need is actually optional it's a compressor and what you'll do is plug your guitar directly into the compressor second in the lineup is another optional effect pedal and that would be an overdrive unit i suggest an overdrive unit not a fuzz not a high gain metal kind of pedal anyhow connect the compressor to the input of the overdrive unit the third item is critical and that is a volume pedal i use a morally little alligator you can use whatever brand you you prefer could be an ernie ball whatever it might be take the output of the overdrive into the input of the volume pedal the fourth pedal is some type of delay unit what you see here is a strymon dig unit but if you don't want to use something that elaborate you could certainly use something simpler like a boss digital delay again your choice connect the input of the delay to the output of the volume pedal and then take the output of your delay directly into the guitar amp or the amp simulator unit all right now that you've got everything set up hooked up ready to roll let's get ourselves a guitar tone to start off with first use your amp or your amp simulator your amp modeler to dial in a nice clean tone something like this great the next thing you'll want to do is dial in some delay this is where we're going next so if you recall the delay is at the end of the chain right before your signal goes into the amp i would suggest setting up a delay at least initially about five six seven hundred milliseconds if you do have a couple of delays you could hook them both together and set them to slightly different times we'll look at that more on another episode and then what you'll want to do is maybe set the mix up to about halfway so half dry half delay and then set up your repeats start out slow but set up your repeats fairly high so you get a nice long delay tail here's the way i've got mine set up let me play just a couple of single notes so you can hear it a little better [Music] now you might be thinking hey wait a minute you have two delays and i do because it's the dig let me turn down the second one so you can hear just the one delay [Music] sorry for the out of tune there okay so you get the you get the picture next thing we're going to want to do is start playing around with our volume pedal this is going to give us the swelling sound so i'm going to pull the volume pedal down and i'm going to play a chord and just bring up the volume pedal [Music] if you've never done that before if you don't have experience with a volume pillow you'll want to spend a little time practicing that to coordinate the strumming of the chord with the bringing up the volume and each volume pedal is a little bit different in terms of the taper of the volume control in other words the ramping up from zero to a hundred so you'll need to play around with that get something that feels good to you in terms of uh you know just working with a volume pedal [Music] once you've got that down that that's really the basics what i like to do is very quickly show you a couple of options that can really kind of enhance the the volume swell itself so the first one is the compressor i mentioned before that compressor is good to have it's it is optional but it's good to have the reason why is it will a compressor can give your clean tone additional sustain so if i just play a note without the compressor whoop there we go you know it's not bad but if i bring in the compressor and by the way this compressor is set about halfway in terms of sustain listen to this [Music] hear how much fuller the note sounds for a longer period of time so when you add in the delay and then do the volume pedal swell [Music] the whole tone gets a lot more sustain and body to it you know i said that was optional but you know i feel like it's almost required it really does enhance the sound of your volume swells quite a bit [Music] okay finally the distortion that truly is optional you may not want a distorted tone in your volume swell but if you do want something like that it's pretty easy to add in i suggest as i suggested earlier i i don't think a fuzz pedal or some heavy duty um you know full-on distortion pedal is necessarily the best choice i prefer something that has a more subtle overdrive like this uh j rocket allen holdsworth uh overdrive that i have on the floor here but you may not have that model you could use whatever you wish just listen listen to the tone i have dialed up let me turn off the compressor for a moment so it's just a little bit of grit [Music] and it's almost something that you could dial up on your amp the problem with that is that the amp distortion would then be after the delay so your whole delay tone would be distorted you may not want that i typically like a clean delay tone so it's good to have the distortion earlier in the chain let me add in the compressor [Music] and you can hear there again there's a little more body a little more sustained to the tone [Music] now let's add in the delay and see what we get yeah so you can hear there's quite a bit of a tail the fullness of that tone really kind of adds to the delay and when we bring in the volume pedal swell [Music] [Music] i think someday i'm going to learn how to play guitar sorry for that chord there we go all right again a slightly distorted tone is also good for playing lead lines with a volume pedal [Music] so you get a little more oomph a little more body again uh to the to the tone all right that that's a brief overview of how to get nice sounding volume swells i have a little homework for you in anticipation of my next episode if if you're not if this is new to you i would suggest just doing a little practice with some chords if you want to prepare for part two of this series just practice with an e minor to a d to a g to a c very simple chord progression [Music] and what we're going to do on the next episode is take that chord progression and work with it and see how it can be used to create even nicer sounding ambient swells so you've seen episode one you know we cover the basics of ambient swells what i'd like to do today is take the homework that i gave you on episode one and expand it a little bit and look into voicing ambient swell guitar chords did i say that right guitar chords we use with ambient swells all right so the homework basically i had you play an e minor d g major to c major just bar chords and by the way if you look at my foot here you'll see that i've got the same basic setup as on episode one i'm going into a compressor this is a wompler ego then going into a morley little alligator volume pedal and then going into my dig my strymon dig delay you can use whichever compressor volume pedal and delay you have available to achieve a similar sound so anyhow let me show you the homework i gave you on episode one just to review [Music] okay it's a nice chord progression as a matter of fact it's off of one of my songs that are on the uh chords of orion slumber album anyhow i'll include a link to that song uh in the video and in the description below what we're gonna do today though is kind of break down that chord progression and try to uh make it a little bit nicer i mean it sounds nice the way it is [Music] but it's a little plain and if you're like me and you may use multiple delays or maybe you've got a chorus involved or a reverb involved in addition to the delay things can get quite muddy uh when you're playing full bar chords so how how do we clean that up a little bit well the key is in my view not to play all six notes the key is to play just a few notes from each chord to uh to kind of accentuate the specific intervals that you're looking for so let's do a quick review of chords many of you already know this but just bear with me two minutes just let me review this so let's look at a c just a standard c chord okay you probably know that a c major chord is c e g right three notes uh what you may or may not be aware of is that you can change the order of those three notes you may have a root grouping of the notes which is but you can also invert the intervals and as a matter of fact they're called inversions so for example in a c chord if i want to start the chord on the e note i'm playing a first inversion chord let me give you an example okay so here's the root chord first inversion and then if i want to take that fifth which would be the g and put that in the bottom of the chord that would be a second inversion all right so why am i telling you this well the reason is that you can take advantage of these chord inversions and intervals to play partial chords as you're doing your volume swells and really kind of clean up again the overall tone and again accentuate exactly what you're looking for so let's take the the chord progression and let's clean it up i'll add my delay back in let's take a look at the e minor okay so if we look at the e minor chord the standard bar chord you know we've got all six notes involved but what if we took just the e [Music] okay so that would be the fifth string on the seventh fret and then took a g on the second string on the eighth fret so that would be e and g let's try that [Music] that's kind of nice isn't it it's very clear sounding too so i've got an e and then i've got a g which is again the eighth fret on the second string [Music] all right so that's again that's a lot cleaner than this again they're both nice sounding but if you want less notes and accentuated notes playing two notes instead of six [Music] is a nice option now what about that d chord well you know if we just slide these two notes down to the d on the fifth fret of the fifth string and then the f sharp which would be the seventh fret of the second string we get a d major chord [Music] pretty nice huh let's try that again e minor [Laughter] to d major and now now we've got to deal with the g major again here's the full bar chord you may like that you may want it for your song but in this case i didn't want that full chord so maybe if i just play the sixth string on the third fret which is a g right and then the third fret on the second string which is a d so that would be a g and a d it leaves out the b so it's neither major or minor it's just kind of a modal sounding g let's try that [Music] i like it you could also just leave that second string open and have the b which will give you a distinct g major very clear sounding finally we have the c c major now on the song on my song i don't play a standard c major i play a c9 so that would actually be if you played a full chord it would be c e g d so d would be the ninth an octave plus two above the lower c in this case though i'm just going to play a c and a d so that would be the c which would be the third fret on the fifth string and the d which would be the third fret on the second string let's listen to that i'm a big fan of ninth chords if you listen to much chords sorry chords of orion music you'll hear a lot of ninths hanging around because i really like the tonality of ninths so let's try that whole chord progression together e minor d g and then c add nine [Music] all right i'm going to show you now another way to play the g chord and the c chord to kind of keep it in line with what we're doing with the e minor and the d major so this is an alteration or an alternet version so let's try this g i can actually play with a b in the bass so that would be first inversion so this would be your a string your fifth string on the second fret and still the the second fret on the the uh i'm sorry the second string on the third fret let's listen to that [Music] you hear that you don't get that low g you get the it's kind of it's an unresolved kind of sound now for the c chord what we can do is simply kind of move up so i'm going to play the c which would be that third fret on the fifth string and i'm going to play an e so that would be the major right which would be the second string on the fifth fret [Music] all right now let's listen to the entire chord progression with this version of the g and the uh c chords [Music] isn't that nice i would encourage you to play around with this practice it a little bit if you're not used to playing different inversion chords try this out now what about the right hand i do need to discuss that a little bit so some of you are used to simply an entire chord and if i only want to play two notes out of the chord i've got a problem you may have noticed over the last few minutes that i'm actually holding the pick sorry i'm looking at my camera monitor here i'm holding the pick with two fingers but i'm also using another finger to pick a string we'll get into this a little bit more in future episodes but this is really the beginning of what i call hybrid picking so it's kind of a combination of flat picking and finger picking so you've got a couple of options you can use the thumb and a finger [Music] okay so that works pretty cool if you're like me or if you want to learn this you can use the hybrid picking so let me hold my guitar up here so i don't know how well you can see this but i've got the pick on the fifth string and my my middle finger on the second string and i'm going to kind of pull them together to play the two notes okay all right so you can practice that you've got a choice thumb and whichever finger is comfortable or pick and whichever finger is comfortable your choice give it a try though and and see how you can do see how you do with that if you're not used to this if you're already a finger picker finger style guitar player piece of kick you already know how to do this let me show you one other thing here before we close out this episode once you've got this chord progression down with these chord inversions you can begin to extend them and again if you listen to the song off of slumber again i'll include the link you'll hear some of the things that i do let me give you just a couple of examples to consider on the e minor chord what if i played the e and the g as i have but then added in a high c with my little pinky finger on the eighth fret of the high e string so that would be a c so let's try that but i'm not going to play them all three together i'm going to play the two and then together and then bring in that high c check this out [Music] [Laughter] let me do that again [Music] all right now what if i brought in a b which would be that uh e string on the seventh fret in on the d major chord [Music] and what if i brought a high g in on my g chord so that would be the third fret [Music] all right you kind of get the picture of what's going on here you've got a lot of options for extending these types of cords after you practice a little bit you can go a little faster and [Music] you can really begin to play around with a lot of partial chords again we'll we'll be looking at some more examples as we move along through different episodes but this is i think a good first start at working with chord inversions and different chord voicings as you're looking to play ambient swells today's episode is all about layering chords so we've looked at creating different types of chords and swells and you know some really you know created some really great sounding things today i'd like to take it another step further and start adding different chordal structures on top of each other to create more complex ambient guitar swells all right the the example that i'm going to start out with actually comes from aaron copeland's appalachian spring if you're not familiar with it it's a beautiful orchestral piece that originally was a ballet the opening uh chords actually arpeggios of appalachian spring or spring sorry i have to learn how to say that are very famous they essentially are an a major chord followed by an e major chord the e major placed on top of the a major chord so it creates a very complex tonality i've transposed it into a different key just for my convenience today i'm going to play in the key of d so that will be a d chord which is the root or the tonic and then i'm going to play an a major chord or the dominant chord over top of the d chord let's listen to it uh just with a clean guitar [Music] okay so you kind of get a feel for it you heard uh also on my clean guitar a little bit of reverb what i'm gonna do now is kick in a delay i have the strymon dig that i've had on the other episodes of this series let me pull up the settings for the dig you'll see that the time is set all the way up that is to the right that's about 1.6 seconds i do recommend for this exercise a little bit longer of delay you'll also see that the repeats are set at about three o'clock so we'll have a very long tail to the delay let me just play a chord for you real quick so you can hear that let me turn on the delay sorry about that here we go [Music] okay you can hear that it's not self-oscillating but the the delay tail is quite long this is going to help me out as i play this arpeggio from appalachian spring let me go ahead and do that and i think you'll like the results here we go [Music] i don't know what i don't know what you think but i think that's a rather beautiful complex chordal structure as it just kind of fades into the distance and hopefully your mind is going now to places um different places where you might be able to use this type of thing let's try the same chord progression but let's try it with minor chords so d minor to a minor here we go [Music] all right still very simple but very complex in the overall tonality let me try one other chord combination while we're on the subject let's go from d add 9 to c add nine so let me turn off the delay for just a minute so what i mean by that is we're gonna go g i said d didn't i sorry about that g add nine to c add nine so we're gonna play i'm gonna play a g [Music] [Laughter] [Music] with the ninth added so that would be uh six three six string third fret sorry i can't talk today the d string and then the g string fretted on the second fret so that would make it an a obviously and then we'll play c add nine which would just be the fifth fret uh fifth string on the third fret followed by the second string or the b string on the third fret okay let's listen to that with a delay and i'll make sure that they're layered here we go [Music] that's nice too it's a totally different tonality you'll also notice that i didn't play arpeggios i just played the chords i used my hybrid picking technique that we talked about earlier we'll talk about that some more in future episodes [Music] and i just play the the chords quickly one after the other to layer the chordal structure one on top of the other all right is your mind now really going i hope it is when i play around with these types of things i i always come up with some combination that really just kind of speaks to me in terms of the chord structure let me let me spend a few minutes just playing around here with a few different combinations and let's see what happens i'm going to start with a b minor and we'll go up to an f sharp minor and let's see where we go from there [Music] bye [Music] [Music] on today's episode we're going to begin exploring the very large topic of playing melody lines and leads in the context of ambient guitar so let's let's get right down to it so let's talk ambient guitar lead playing what i'd like to do on today's episode is just cover setting up and starting with clean ambient guitar lead tones and lines let's check out the setup first if you look at the inset where wherever i've got it in the video you'll see that i'm using the same three effects that i've been using throughout the series i've got a wampler ego compressor followed by a morley little alligator volume pedal followed finally by a strymon dig and my tone is a clean fender tone so check this out [Music] [Applause] not too crazy and if you listen to a single note [Music] you can hear the compressor working to give me a little bit more a little bit more sustain i've got the guitar set on the bridge pickup i could set it in between that might be nice [Music] but i'll leave it on the bridge the other thing um this is my personal preference is that i never run for for leads i never ever run the tone control all the way up because to my ear things always get too tinny i prefer a more mellow setting so i actually roll the tone control off back to about four or so this is going to vary depending on your guitar but i encourage you to play around with the tone control to get a sound that you like finally the dig is set up to about a one second delay whatever kind of delay you have just set it up set it up in that area you'll be fairly close to what i've got going on the dig does have that second delay line and i do have that set up to a dotted quarter follow-on so let me uh let me let you hear that [Music] okay so yeah it's a little bit rhythmic if you don't have the kind of the dotted eighth dotted quarter kind of capability on your delay no worries just tap in about a one second delay crank up the repeats until you like the sound and you're going to be somewhere in the same ballpark of what i've got going on here what i like to do is just start out with a very simple line and it's based around the e minor chord we're going to be playing the d string on the second fret that's an e the g string on the fourth fret for b and then the g string on the second fret a and then the b string on the third fret d and then an e which is the fifth string on that uh b string and here's what it sounds like [Music] so we're going to be doing the e [Music] and you can probably rip that off really quickly but let's go ahead and add the delay and the volume pedal into the mix and try just at a very slow tempo [Music] all right if you don't have a lot of experience with playing ambient lead lines you'll want to just kind of practice that over and over again with a couple of variations maybe just to get the foot hand coordination so you're not chopping off notes or you're not allowing the pick attack to come through when you play the guitar [Music] and this is ambient guitar so we're not going to be playing you know you know that kind of stuff and i don't know how to shred but if you know how to shred you know we're not going to be shredding or anything like that we're going to be playing slow but in order to really work on that foot hand coordination i'd encourage you to take it a little bit faster so something like this [Music] and just work on that different tempos until you you've got it nice and smooth that's going to set you up to play all types of clean lead melodies all right now next and i think really the final topic for this episode is intervals so again we're not we're not pl we're not treading obviously and and we're not playing the same types of scale or intervals you might find in other genres of music [Music] yeah we're not going to be doing that kind of stuff [Music] right so part of the reason why we're not other than the fast tempo not really fitting the style of the music is when you've got a lot of chords going on dense echo delayed chords [Music] if you're playing lead lines with very close intervals it can actually get lost in the overall texture of the soundscape or the drone so i find adding space between the intervals of the melody can be very helpful let me show you what i mean [Music] and if i go to the upper register of the guitar it's it works really well there too [Music] [Applause] [Music] and if i crank up the repeats a little bit and add in a drone [Music] um [Music] [Music] okay so those wider interval intervals i can't speak today leave a lot of space for what's going on within the cord or the drone or in particular the lower tones of whatever you've got going on on today's video we're going to see how to set up a distorted guitar tone and then we're going to look at some ways to practice using that distorted guitar tone let's get right to work the first thing you're going to want to do is set up a good clean tone so let me show let me let you hear my tone you can pretty much use any kind of amp or if you've got an amp modeler like i do whatever your preference is maybe it's a fender style marshall style vox you know whatever uh you know whatever you prefer i would set up a clean tone with possibly just a little bit of grit you can hear there's there's just a little bit of dirt in there okay the next thing you'll want to think about is a compressor i've got my wampler ego compressor set to a a pretty low level of compression just enough to squeeze the sound a little bit and give me a little bit more sustain so let me uh here here's what it sounds like [Music] so you can hear that the compressor is squishing the sound next in line would be a distortion pedal again you can use pretty much whatever distortion you have i would just give a couple of caveats the scooped mids kind of more metally type of distortion pedal may not be as effective for lead playing because it does de-emphasize the mids the mid-range of your tone and that's actually where a lot of definition comes for single string playing what i've got down on the floor here is a radial tone bone i selected that distortion pedal for this video because it's got a wide tonal range let me let me go ahead and engage it let and just listen to the basic tone and then i'll tell you about how i got it [Music] [Music] if you've got a full-on marshall amp you may be able to get a tone similar to this just from the amp so it's a fairly amp like kind of overdrive and the way i've got the tone bone set up is the tone bone has a top end switch so you can think about it as kind of the treble section it's actually set to a dark mode to de-emphasize the treble and then i've balanced it out a little bit but it's not a real trebly sound [Music] there's a little bit of you know you can hear the definition but it's not uber trebley the other thing the tone bone has is a very flexible mid-range section so what i've done is actually bump up the mid-range quite a bit so it's pretty mid-rangey sounding okay again i do that because i feel that i get better definition in single string playing and then in terms of the low end it's about in the mid on the tone bone you want to watch it don't get it too bassy again that will lose definition i do have a fair amount of gain dialed in but again this is more of an amp-like uh distortion and if i roll off the volume control it does clean up now your distortion pedal may react a little bit differently but you'll need to kind of figure out where you like the distortion level for what you're going to be playing all right if we add in the wampler the compressor you'll hear that the sustain level kind of goes up [Music] okay so it's just a little bit of compression don't go overboard but just kind of compress it a little bit to even out your tone the next thing i want to just mention is for me i for lead playing i actually turn the tone knob on this guitar almost all the way off i'll typically run it at about two and that would be uh for both the uh bridge pickup and sometimes the bridge and the neck pickup together [Music] okay again your guitar is going to vary wildly or widely maybe you have a telecaster or a stratocaster very very different from this guitar with two humbuckers but i would encourage you to play around with the tone knob and don't be afraid to turn it down that's going to roll off the top end and again give you a nice definition to the string by reducing some of the overtones in the string sound all right so next thing you'll need is a volume pedal um if you've been following this series you'll know that the volume pedal is a core element of the ambient guitar setup i'm using a morley little alligator what you'll see next in my signal chain is a ditto looper i'll be using that in a few minutes so we'll get to that and finally a delay as i've used in all the other videos in this series i've got a strymon dig on the floor and i've got it set to about us a one second delay or so the strymon does have the two delay lines totally optional if you want to run two two delays or something like that but i do have a little bit of a a dotted eighth thing going let me engage the delay and you can hear what it sounds like clean and i do have a fair amount of repeats so it does delay quite a bit all right so that's the basic those are the basic components for the sound let me put it all together and let's hear what it sounds like i'm going to be using the volume pedal again to kind of chop off the attack of the string i'm going to start on the bridge pickup with the tone on tone control on about two so here we go [Music] all right the alternate tone that i use is both the bridge and the neck pickups and i do many times roll the tone all the way off so let's listen to that [Music] [Laughter] [Music] it's interesting on this guitar and again it may vary depending on your guitar when i've got the tone control rolled all the way down and both pickups on i actually get more high end uh more higher order overtones to the sound kind of cranking through that distortion i think it's really interesting and it's very mid-rangey i actually think of as kind of a mid-range honk if you will i like it a lot so i you'll if you listen to much of my music you'll hear it kind of all over the place in the lead tones all right so that's the lead tone let me play it just a little bit just a little bit more [Music] me [Music] okay great so i've got my tone but how am i going to practice well that's what the ditto the looper is for i've found a way that i really like to practice is use a looper or maybe on my recording software set up a loop of something very simple and just kind of jam to it i get a lot of ideas that way so let me go ahead and do that and let's let me knock that out here okay and uh let me go ahead and set up a loop and i'll start playing to it and you'll kind of hopefully hear what i mean [Music] uh me uh [Music] all right you can i can do that for like a long time you know kind of get your head in a place and just kind of go with it i really recommend though something like that to just work up some ideas one of the things you may have heard me doing is not playing a lot of notes right next to each other and this kind of is in keeping with um episode four of how to play ambient guitar where i mentioned in clean lead playing it's kind of interesting to use wider intervals so again you know [Music] okay sorry about that but you get the picture so i'm using octaves fifths ninths wider intervals mixed in with notes that are right next to each other more scalar types of elements and again i think that helps can be very helpful in providing space in what you're playing we've got a lot of delay going on a lot of reverb things can get really muddy if we're not careful in this video we'll be taking a simple ambient guitar lead line and personalizing it by applying various phrasing techniques i've got a simple melody here for us to begin working with in terms of applying phrasing techniques so he let me just play it for you real quick with just a simple clean tone we're going to be applying effects from our lead guitar tone but let's just try the melody first so here let me let me just play it real quick and then talk about it [Music] okay the melody is based around a so it's in the key of a and we're going to be starting this melody on the seventh fret of the d string which is the a we're going to go up a fifth which would be the g string on the ninth fret [Music] right so that's an e and then we're gonna go up to a a g which would be the uh what is that the eighth fret right ninth eighth eighth whatever eighth fret sorry on the b string and then up to an a on the uh also on the b string so that's the tenth fret fret i'm gonna learn how to talk today and then we're gonna play on the e string the seventh fret so b and a d tenth fret and a c sharp [Music] okay so that's the basic melody i won't go through the rest you can figure it out it's pretty simple if you don't like that pick your own melody just something nice and simple like that all right i'm going to go ahead and set up with the distorted ambient guitar tone and i'm going to add some delay in here's my overall tone [Music] and with the volume pedal all right so you go ahead and set yours up like that and let's keep moving forward um the first thing let's do is just check out the melody i'm going to play it straight with no phrasing techniques [Music] and you know that doesn't sound bad but it is really plain jane isn't it i mean there's not much emotion or feeling to it so let's talk about tone first i've got my guitar wide open on the last episode i talked about rolling off the tone control to mellow out the sound so let me go ahead and do that and let's see what we get i'm actually going to roll it all the way down to zero here we go [Music] [Applause] i personally like that a lot better it feels nicer to me a rounder type of tone you'll want to play again with your guitar and your setup alright so let's move on to some other phrasing techniques the first place i want to go is vibrato okay so in terms of personalizing the tone actually personalizing the melody there are three kinds of vibrato that we need to consider the first kind and let me go ahead and turn this stuff off here bring up the tone temporarily the first kind is if you have a guitar like mine where you've got fairly high frets you can simply push down on the string as you're playing it with a little more pressure and actually get a very very subtle vibrato let me let me play that for you you probably can't see in the video but i'm actually just varying the pressure of my finger on the string okay and it is it is subtle but if you add delay and distortion check this out [Music] can you hear that little modulation going on that wasn't there if i just play it straight [Music] all right second type of vibrato is the more kind of classical type of vibrato right kind of like a violin so we're doing up and down the neck third type is the rock vibrato right so bb king all right sorry i don't play like bb he's the he was the master okay so let me roll down the tone again engage the distortion and let me play it with just vibrato added and let's see what we get [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all of a sudden the melody begins to come alive it's got a little more variation it's a little more unpredictable because of the vibrato i really like that if you don't play with vibrato a lot i would encourage you to really kind of practice with it and see what you can do with it all right the the next phrasing technique i'd like to talk about actually involves a pick so a couple things about picks one is i see a lot of guys and gals using very thin picks and while that might sound good for an acoustic strumming kind of song on electric guitar for playing lead it's in my view it's not as helpful so i'd encourage you to get if you're not playing with a thicker guitar pick get one that's at least one millimeter and maybe like mine this is a 1.4 millimeter it's actually a bluegrass uh style pick that i really like and i also notice a lot of people playing holding the pick so a lot of it shows up actually a lot of it hangs down let me hold this way below your fingers and you know that's okay [Music] but it doesn't give you as much control over the tone so i would also encourage you to kind of choke up on the pick so very little of it shows let me get camera right here shows beneath your fingers okay let me uh let me play that again [Music] okay you once you get used to you'll find that you've got a lot more control over the pick and then that will allow you to do a lot of things in terms of varying the tone just by changing the angle of the pick so let me show you what i mean here this is just a clean tone bring up the tone here now if i change the angle of the pick a little bit i'm going to exaggerate [Music] can you hear how i'm i'm changing the tone slightly also if you get a little flesh from your thumb to touch the string with the pick you can actually do pinch harmonics okay now when you add in distortion and delay and play the melody whoops [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay that was way exaggerated let me play that again i'm going to turn the tone control down too [Music] [Applause] [Music] so i added some variation by throwing in some slight pinch harmonics on certain notes in particular the the g here and i'm not going crazy with it but it does add a little more variation a little bit of you know personalization to the phrasing here so if you're not familiar with that technique again just hold the pixel very little of it shows beneath the flesh of your thumb and then pick with both the material of the pick and the flesh of your thumb kind of touching the string at close to the same time and very a little bit up and down the fretboard you'll find some sweet spots where the harmonics occur a little more readily than other areas all right so we've got vibrato we've got kind of pick manipulation now let's talk about slurring so this is another way you can phrase um instead of just playing the notes kind of up and down we can slur the notes by actually sliding up and down the fretboard let me show you what i mean [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so you can emphasize certain parts of the phrase emphasize certain notes by slurring a little bit just by sliding up and down now i give you a hint to where i'm going to next and that is hammer-ons and pull-offs i actually did one inadvertently there but this is another way to really kind of personalize the phrasing of your melody line let me show you what i mean [Music] okay so that's a hammer on right we can also do pull-offs [Music] and especially with a distorted tone you don't actually need to pick every note you can use hammer-ons and pull-offs to actually pick the note for you [Music] so using the pick and the hammer on and the pull-offs you can get something like this [Music] try that again [Music] [Applause] [Music] pretty cool huh there's a lot you can do with that now finally let's throw the volume pedal in and we'll really get some interesting personalized phrasing to the to the melody [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] on today's video we're going to be looking at delays yes long delays and how we can use them to create amazing chordal and melodic textures a technique better known as frippertronics let's get to work yeah frippertronics so what what is frippertronics it is a technique that was popularized by robert fripp the guitarist and founder of a prog rock band called king crimson robert fripp also did a lot of work with brian eno so if you're into ambient music you'll know who he is as a pioneer of what we consider modern ambient music and what fripp did was he actually put two reel to reel tape decks together so that he could get long delay times using the distance between the playhead i'm sorry the record head and the playhead he would actually put them together i will include some examples of frippertronics by robert fripp in the video description below so you can check them out the upshot of his experiments was that he was able to get delay times of between 4 and 16 seconds now mind you this was before digital delays this is back in the late 60s through the 70s so a good long time ago i remember as a younger guitar player when i heard robert fripp man it just blew me away so how do we get this with our digital equipment today well first of all you're going to need a delay unit that can create long delays turn some stuff off here i've got the boss dd500 pretty new device and it it can create delays of up to 10 seconds so that's pretty cool i've got a delay set up here of four seconds let me let you just listen to it here [Music] all right kind of painfully slow isn't it yeah that's going to keep going here for a second because i've got tails set on the delay it's a four second delay so you might be thinking man shut up what can i do with that well actually there's all kinds of things you can do with it if you're playing longer lines longer notes in chords or melodies now what i'd like you to do if you haven't already done so is go back and watch how to play ambient guitar episode 5 in which i describe a way to set up distorted lead guitar tones and that's what i've got set up here today and we're going to work with some distorted tones to create chords and melodic textures so here's my tone this is just plain uh no delay effects [Music] okay so if you watched episode five hope you did you'll learn how to create that type of tone i've got two delays actually set up on the floor i talked about the dd500 i've also got the strymon timeline set up with kind of an yeah kind of an ambient washy kind of delay just for some background instead of reverb [Music] which is you know that's actually pretty cool sounding it's in and of itself isn't it all right so i'm going to go ahead and turn that timeline on again it's for that ambient background totally optional if you don't have two delays but you do have a reverb you can use a reverb instead of the timeline or some other delay now what i'm going to do is turn on the four second delay coming off of the dd500 and i'm going to play a basically the notes of a chord so i'm going to play this i'm going to play a g actually let me turn off the distortion for a minute i'm going to play g i'm going to play an a and i'm going to play a d so it's it's basically going to be a g add 9. okay but i'm only going to play one note at a time with the delay on so let's see what it sounds like [Music] all right pretty cool huh uh actually it's very cool so by playing one note at a time you with a distorted tone you actually get a clean cord because each note of the chord is played separately so you're not getting you know your typical you know you know you're not getting your typical uh distorted kind of power cord kind of thing you're getting a [Music] you're getting a clean cord it's three distorted tones they're they're being held out and sustained by the delay itself huh well let's think about that what could we do with that what if we changed chords so what if we played a g chord and then moved to a c chord using that same technique so let me go ahead and play these notes for you just clean with no delay so you can hear what i'm going to play again we're going to do the g a and a d okay so there's our g chord [Music] and then i'm going to play a c e and also d so that's a c nine right okay and let's hear what that sounds like with all the goodies turned on here we go [Music] so pretty cool isn't it you can by using the longer delay you can have your cords kind of blend in to one another and create this wash of cords over time now i did i do have my delay set pretty high on the repeats or the feedback and you'll want to adjust that taste a little more a little less whatever you're trying to accomplish as you're playing around with this technique all right so what else can we do with this well if you've got a delay that has a freeze um button or a hold button that allows you to kind of freeze the delay in place you can create a cord through this frippertronics effect and play lead over top of it now the boss dd500 does indeed have a hold effect so that you can place it you can play a little bit have the delays kick in and then you can hit the hold button and it will just repeat the delays forever okay so i'm going to go ahead and create a chord background and then i'm going to play some delay play some leads not delays play some leads over top of it and i'm going to turn the timeline back on so we've got that ambience going so let's check that out i'm going to i'm going to kind of play an e minor here we go [Music] me bed [Music] um [Music] [Music] on today's episode it's just going to be short and sweet i want to share with you a practice technique that i use that really feels helped me over the years and that is playing with your eyes closed so how many of you are addicted to either looking at your left hand or your right hand when you play hmm and if you can't look at either hand whichever one you're addicted to how often is it that your playing suffers well there's a cure for that that is simply to not look at your guitar when you play think about the great blind musicians like stevie wonder for example they don't have the benefit of sight and yet they play incredibly so those of us who have sight can do the same if we practice a little bit here's my secret to practice yep a hat here's all you need to do put it on over your eyes let's check it out [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] whoop here we go don't have hat head do i anyhow try it i know it's really stupid right but give it a try and see if it doesn't improve your playing now it's going to be a little hard at first if you're not used to it but just persevere give it a couple of weeks and i guarantee your playing will improve your phrasing will be more natural your hands will fall on the fretboard where they should your right hand will know where the strings are [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in today's episode we're going to look at a picking technique called hybrid picking it's it's pretty cool you'll be using a flat pick and your fingers together you if you're like me you probably grew up using a flat pick for strumming [Music] or playing leads but hybrid picking combines that capability along with your fingers one of the things that's really nice about hybrid picking is that it allows you to isolate different strings in a way that you just can't do with a plain old flat pick and this works out really well when you're playing ambient guitar let me show you what i mean here [Music] [Music] all right kind of nice isn't it and again yep how do you play this [Music] with just a flat pick it's pretty hard to do i end up playing all the strings not just the two i want all right so let's learn how to get started with hybrid picking it's pretty easy just to get going on it like you to focus on just a plain old c major chord and in particular we're going to look at the two c's so the low c that would be the fifth string on the third fret and the high c which would be the second string on the first fret all you need to do is take your flat pick and your middle finger and you're just gonna put the middle finger on the high c the flat pick on low c and squeeze them together to play those two strings only together and you can kind of move up and down the scale if you wish [Music] all right if you've never tried this before it's probably going to feel kind of weird so you'll need to just kind of take what i would recommend take 10 15 minutes a day just practice away you can get your volume pedal in there like me if you wish until you feel comfortable after you've got that down what i would next suggest is alternating the flat pick and the middle finger just in playing the notes and again you can still use this plain old c chord let me show you what i mean start slow not too bad right it won't take you too long to kind of get that down what you can do after that is then work in the ring finger as that third string now what i'm going to do is stick with the c major chord but i'm going to add that ring finger in on the high e that would be the open first string here we go [Music] [Music] after you get that down you can iterate between the three uh picking things the flat pick and the two string the two fingers what i'm going to do is play the flat pick the ring finger and the middle finger in just a triplet pattern here we go oh isn't that nice uh i know it's kind of dumb sounding but it's a good it's a good uh pattern just to start with and start slow once you've got either two fingers or three fingers down you're ready to throw in some delay and start playing some volume swells so i'm what i'm going to do here is kind of go up and down the scale i'm going to play an open ninth chord okay so that would be like c major but instead of having the uh e in there i'm gonna just have an open ninth with a d okay so i'm just gonna play that chord shape up and down the neck [Music] um and i'm going to play the fifth string the third string and the second string together with some delay [Music] me [Music] you can play whatever chord progression you wish but try and find some chords that allow you to just pick certain strings out of the chord instead of just strumming the whole chord you know all the six notes so again if you recall from an earlier how to play ambient guitar those little uh chord inversions that we looked at the uh the e the d the c and the g sound really nice with some delay and this hybrid picking technique [Laughter] and you can kind of go up the scale there and even then hop strings let me show you what i mean [Music] really nice i there's a lot of textures that you can get using the hybrid picking technique if you do want to kind of leave the realm of ambient guitar playing you can get a lot more rhythmic with it [Music] too you know the mind kind of boggles here [Music] [Laughter] [Music] sorry about the sloppy playing but you get the picture you can take this hybrid picking in a lot of different ways i've got some friends that do the travis picking style [Music] they do it really well with a flat pick and using hybrid picking i'm not that great at it but if you want to go that direction you can the sky's the limit you can really develop it today we're going to be looking at how to leverage polyphonic pitch shifters to create interesting and complex ambient guitar chords so grab your pitch shifter and let's get to work in this episode i'm going to be using the electro harmonix pitchfork which as i mentioned earlier is a polyphonic pitch shifter you're not limited to the pitchfork there are a bunch of other similar devices out on the market today there's the eventide pitch factor the boss ps6 harmonist and the earthquaker pitch bay just to mention a few and what i'll do is include links in the video notes below to several different pitch shifting devices that will essentially do the types of things that we're going to review in this video all right next let's just review briefly the signal chain i'm using the same basic signal path as in the earlier episodes of how to play ambient guitar if you haven't checked out the series go ahead and check it out there's a lot of interesting information there so what i've got is my guitar going into compressor and then i've got the signal going through the electro harmonics pitch fork into my volume pedal and then finally into a delay and in my case i'm using the strymon dig all right so what we're going to do is check out the use of pitch shifting in several different ways we're going to examine octaves in use with chords we're going to examine the use of perfect fifths also with chords and then also finally perfect fourths and what i'm going to do is use the chord progression that i've reviewed with uh everyone in in earlier episodes of how to play ambient guitar so let me go ahead and play that without the pitch shifter so you can just hear what it is i am going to leave the compressor and the delay on and do some ambient guitar swells i'm gonna be playing e minor to g to c here we go [Music] all right pretty straightforward i'm not going to review the chord structure again if you want to check that out in particular look at episode 2 of how to play ambient guitar all right so how can we spice this chord structure up the first thing we can do is use our pitch shifter to add in an octave so i've got my pitchfork set up for an octave right now so let me go ahead and turn it on and what we're going to hear when i play the chord structure is one octave above each note in the chord along with the original note here we go [Music] okay that's kind of nice now the chord structure is still the basic chord structure right but i've got that nice kind of angelic airy high end on top the pitchfork along with many other devices allows you also to create an interval below the original note so let me go ahead and switch it over and let's try that out again this will be one octave below [Music] now that's really nice too um with the lower tone you almost get like an organ type of effect into the chord progression the pitchfork again just about everybody else does this too allows you in addition to the pitch above and the pitch below it allows you to add both the pitch above and below to the original note let me switch this to do just that here we go let's check this out so we're going to be hearing the original note octave above and octave below [Music] [Music] okay so you know i i hear that um effect a lot in many different uh types of ambient guitar music i won't mention any particular artist but if you listen to an array of ambient guitar players you've probably heard the octave effect quite often and it it's very nice no doubt but with these polyphonic pitch shifting devices you can do a lot more than just dividing octaves so what i'd like to do now is look at using perfect fifths to create more complex chords what is a perfect fifth if you if you know about music theory this is old hat so you can tune out for five seconds but for those of you who may not be familiar with a perfect fifth it's basically this whatever note you have in this case an e just take that note and play on the seventh fret so it's seven half steps above and that's a perfect fifth so that would be essentially uh you know five notes if you will five you know regular notes above or seven uh semi pitches above okay so here and when you play them together uh here's the e and then the b which would be the perfect fifth above an e so the interesting thing is when you play a chord with a an interval of a perfect fifth in essence you're playing a chord one fifth above your original chord if i'm playing say an e major and then i have the pitch shifter on and i'm playing a full e major chord i'm gonna also hear a b major oops sorry let me do that again e major and i'm going to hear that b major on top of it at the same time so let me show you what i mean i'm going to go ahead and turn the pitch shifter on and then i'm going to set it to a perfect fifth we should hear the e major with the b major on top [Music] can you hear that it's let me bring up the blend here a little bit you can you can kind of hear it it's all blended together you'll hear that chord with this chord and let me go ahead and play just play one note there you can really hear it the e and the b above all right so when we add that to our ambient chord progression okay so we'll add it to that and let's see what we get [Music] wow i i really like that and if you listen to much chords of orion music you will hear some pitch shifting with perfect fifths in some of the ambient guitar swells in some of my songs i like that a lot in this particular chord progression you almost get a major seventh feel when you add in the fifth above um this this chord right here right so that is a c right okay so let me add in that fifth it's really nice and the great thing is i am still only playing two notes when i add in the pitch shifting i get four notes [Music] which is really great so you still get that note separation that you want for use and delays but you get a lot more complexity now what i'd like to do now is add in the the lower note which will be an octave below the pitch shift note so what i'm going to end up with at least with the electro harmonics device is a fifth above the original note and a perfect fourth below [Music] all right that that is very nice it's very beautiful and it's quite complex with uh three notes essentially being played for each note in the chord um along the along of the chord progression so there's a lot you can do with that and the the nice thing about the perfect fifth interval is that you still maintain the basic uh feel for the chord for example an e chord it with a with the perfect fifth above and the perfect fourth below is still going to feel like an e chord [Music] so it doesn't really change the tonality of your chords in terms of what they actually are it's still in this case it's an e to a g to a c but a much more complex version of them all right so let's move on to the perfect fourth interval now so we said that the perfect fifth was the seventh fret interval perfect fourth is a little bit closer it's the fifth fret interval so four tones above so if we were to play two together that would be an e and an a all right so let's hear what that sounds like [Music] ah now that is different isn't it i've by adding in that perfect fourth above i've just really changed the tonal root of the chord so let's check that out without the pitch shifter and without the delay here's my e minor let's add in the perfect fourth all of a sudden the tonality kind of shifted to a instead of e check that out again so it's more like an a minor even though i'm playing an e minor [Music] that's pretty cool so you can use the same chord shapes and by using something like the perfect fourth interval shift the whole tonality the center of the tonality of your chord progression let's hear that again [Music] and now let's hear it with the pitch shifter with the lower tone brought in [Music] [Music] all right that's very complex to my mind and it's really interesting to play around with as you're building an ambient guitar song because you can you can build your chord structure maybe for the first part of the song kick in the pitch shifter with a perfect fourth interval play the same chord structure same progression and entirely shift the tonal center so just briefly let's review what we've looked at we've looked at perfect fourths [Music] perfect fifths [Music] and one octave [Music] same chords three different tonalities well today we're going to be using pitch shifters to help us in our ambient guitar lead playing let's get to work all right i'm all set up ready to go if you haven't already done so you might want to check out how to play ambient guitar episodes five and six in those two episodes i focus on how to set up and play distorted ambient guitar leads i'm using the same basic setup today and that is a compressor into a moderate gain distortion pedal into a volume pedal into a delay and then what i'm going to do today in terms of demoing the pitch shifters i'm going to place that pitch shifter both before and after the distortion pedal because as you'll hear there are significant differences to the sound depending on the placement of the pitch shifter i'm also going to use the same pitches that same pitch shifting settings as i used in episode 10 so that would be a perfect fourth a perfect fifth and an octave all right so i'm gonna shut up and start playing i'll let you know as we go along what the settings are check out all these different [Music] sounds hey [Music] [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] on today's video we're going to be looking at alternate tunings specifically two of my favorite alternate tunings that i use with both acoustic and ambient guitars let's get to work all right what i'd like to do first is just briefly review my signal chain just so you know what's going on this is my carbon hf2 guitar and uh from the guitar i'm going directly into a wompler ego compressor from the wampler ego i'm going into my 11 rack amp modeling unit which you can't see on screen i'm taking the effects send and running it into my morley little alligator volume pedal from the volume pedal the signal goes directly into my strymon dig dual digital delay and then that goes right back into the effects return of the 11 rack i've got the 11 rack set up to a fender amp model and here's what the relatively unaffected sound sounds like [Music] okay just threw a little reverb on there for grins and the compressors kicked in all right so let's get down to tunings first review of standard tuning e a d g b e we all know this [Music] right okay let's move right into some some alternate tunings the first one i'd like to review is a very popular alternate tuning that's used for celtic style guitar likely many of you have either heard this or used it maybe with acoustic guitar it is d-a-d-g-a-d that's dad gad for short very easy to get dad gad let me move the guitar here so you can see it in the screen i'm just going to take the sixth string move it down to a d [Music] okay the b string string number two i'm going to move down to an a [Music] and then the high e string will become a d let me just play the open strings intervals that's what it sounds like again you may have already used this one it's a pretty common alternate tuning maybe the most common and it's really good for ambient guitar one of the things i like about it is that if you're hanging out in the key of d [Music] you can pretty much play a d in root position all you have to do is instead of your third finger on the third fret put that third finger on the fifth fret [Music] and you've got a standard d or you can simply put your third or second finger on the g string on the second fret and that becomes an open d one of the things i like about this tuning again if you're hanging out in d is that you can very easily play melodies over top of the low d so let me show you what i mean i'm gonna go ahead and throw some delay on uh since this is an ambient guitar youtube channel and let's check it out [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] all right that's pretty nice uh again that's d-a-d-g-a-d so let's take it one step further this is my second favorite tuning if you're in dadgad like i am right right now all you have to do is take what is now the low d and take that down a whole tone in other words two more frets down to a c so let me do that [Music] okay and then you're going to take that fifth string which is currently a and you're going to move that down to g [Music] so this so this becomes then c g d g a d and i don't know how to pronounce that c g d g a d and it's great for playing in the key of g it's also good for playing in the key of c and even occasionally the key of d if you don't mind kind of fretting that low c [Music] you know on the second fret but there's some nice things you can do with it let me show you here just in key of g so the key g major now becomes third string second fret second string second fret and a c and uh c sorry becomes the fourth string on the second fret and the second string on the third fret [Music] so lots of nice things you can do let me go ahead and play around with this a little bit [Music] um [Music] [Music] all right i actually really like that a lot in my acoustic guitar playing i actually leave one of my acoustic guitars tuned to c g d g a d almost all the time so i can just kind of pick it up and go with it all right so why why would you use either one of these alternate tunings well one thing is it gives you a nice low uh low note that you you don't get with standard tuning so i can either go for a low c in this case or in dadgad i can go for a low d you can also take advantage of the kind of the fifths the tuning of the fifths here [Music] especially in cgd for a wider interval chords [Music] so that's you can do that with the standard tuning obviously you can't get a low c you can do wider intervals but it's easier if your strings are tuned to fifth apart dadgad also has that fifth between the low d and then the a string so that's that's really nice one of the things you do lose i feel is the ability to play kind of your standard you know lead guitar kind of lines with the wider intervals down down below and then in some cases the very very small interval between the g and the a i think it makes it a little less amenable to complex lead playing i do think standard tuning is a little bit better for that now don't get me wrong you can play league guitar with either one of these tunings it's just not as lead friendly if you will anyhow that's just a quick look at two of my favorite tunings there are tons and tons of two more you know more tunings than you can shake a stick at that you may want to try to see if you can find some that really suit your music and your style of playing what i'll do is include some links in the video description below so if you never check out the description below go ahead and check it out i'll include some links to different sites that have chord charts for dadgad for cgd gad and then sites that just have general information about alternate tunings on today's episode we're going to be looking at how to use drones pedal points and pedal tones let's get to work drones and pedal points are not new they're not unique to ambient music or ambient guitar playing drones and pedal points have been around for hundreds probably thousands of years so i'm going to include some links in the video description below to some wikipedia articles and such that kind of discuss the history of drones pedal tones and pedal points and for the purposes of the discussion here i'm going to use the term pedal point and by that i mean a single note that kind of just runs on while other parts of the music are playing over top under it wherever it might live okay so if you've used drones and pedal points pedal tones if you use a different nomenclature different name for what this is let me know in the comments below definitely interested in your experience and what you've learned about this technique all right so first let's just check out what i've got going on here in terms of pedals i'm basically using the same setup as how to play ambient guitar episode one so if you haven't seen that one check it out i did add one additional delay and that is the earthquaker devices avalanche run and the reason for that is just so i can get a little more complexity in the delays for this demonstration and also the dig has a nice freeze function with a delay that i'm going to use to create the drone or the pedal point and by having the avalanche run active i can still have delay going on the rest of the playing so you probably have different equipment than i have and that is totally cool you'll be able to yeah i think as i go through the demo you'll see how you can leverage your equipment for similar results all right so the first thing i'd like to look at is the classic pedal point and that simply is a low note typically the lowest note in an arrangement that underlies everything else it kind of undergirds everything and it's a great way to set a mood in your music so what i'm going to do is play just a low e on this guitar and i'm going to use the dig to create a drone out of it and then i'm going to play some chords just some e minor to c to d chords and then a little bit of lead over top of that just so you can get a feel for what kind of mood you can create with a low pedal point here we go [Music] let me try that again see if i can get a little smoother of a of a drone [Music] all right let's try some lead now [Music] [Music] [Music] all right really nice way to use that low drone to set a mood if you listen to any of my chords of orion music you'll you'll hear the use of low pedal points on more than one of my songs okay so let's kind of move ahead what if i created a a petal point in the middle of the note range well that's called an interior or an internal pedal point so i'm going to do the same thing here um except in instead of the low e i'm going to use the open g string and create a pedal point out of that and then play around that let's see what happens [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] um [Music] [Music] all right you still you still get the mood right it's prob different mood i was playing a g instead of an e this time to my ear it feels a little less resolved because you don't have that low foundation of the low low drone but it's pretty cool it to me it adds a little more tension into the mix also all right so that was the interior or internal pedal point yep where are we going next yep high notes that actually is called an inverted pedal point and uh let's let's see what that sounds like i'm going to go ahead and play a high g up on the neck here here we go [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] i like that a lot too and and i do use high inverted pedal points from time to time one of the things you do need to i think you need to be a little careful with with the the higher pedal points is if you've got a really sharp kind of tone it can sound a little annoying in my to my mind but if you've got a nice mellow high tone like that you can really set a nice elevated sorry there's my hand going up elevated mood in the music that kind of run it kind of brings everything up so it's pretty cool finally what happens if you combine a couple of these pedal point types together so let's try an inverted pedal point and then the standard low pedal point together see what we get i'm going to play the the low e and then the high g [Music] [Music] um [Music] on today's video i'd like to look at some ways that you can leverage the interval of a ninth to add depth and complexity to your chordal structures in your ambient guitar songs so let's get right down to work i guess first of all what is the interval of a ninth let's just start with the basics it's simply one note [Music] like that delay with a second note one octave and one whole step above okay if you put both of those together you will get this and obviously the octave would sound like this all right and if you haven't already noticed that was a c in the as the lower note and a d is the higher note all right so why would you use the interval of a ninth well there's there's a bunch of reasons one is because i really like them so you should use no that's not the reason no uh ninths are very useful for creating tension in your music you can have a regular major chord which is really pleasant sounding but there's not much tension in a c major chord all right so using the knife then can allow you to interject some tension so you could do it in a couple of ways you could play a full c major chord and just add the interval of the ninth in other words the d into that chord [Music] and you can hear the tension there that d wants to go somewhere so maybe it wants to go up to the e which would be the third of that chord right so remember c c e g c major chord right okay uh there so there are ways you can use the ninth interval within full chords um what i'd like to focus on today is not a full chord it's actually a dyad okay so a full chord would be composed of at least three different notes like the c major chord c e g a dyad is an interval a set of notes that is less than three and more than one so die so two right so it's a grouping of two notes and it's used to imply chords so you can do that in a couple of ways so maybe i just have a c and a g and that's not a full chord but it implies a full c chord either a c major or a c minor so either one it could imply depending on the rest of your arrangement but a a diad with a ninth implies a chord but with a lot more tension so let me play again that c with the d on top just the two notes uh and then i'm going to follow with a c major chord and listen to how it implies the c major chord but it's radically different in a lot of ways here we go [Music] okay a lot of tension in there there's no fifth interval there's no third interval there's just the first the c and the ninth the d now what if this is the way my mind works what if you played a chord progression composed strictly of dyads what would you get so let me try that uh for you real quick just to give you a taste of that i'm going to play first an e minor to g to a just real simple again these are just simple triad chords triad meaning three notes to a chord here we go [Music] all right pretty standard kind of chord progression right let's listen to the dyad version of that using the interval of the ninth so this will be the fifth string on the seventh fret that'll give me an e and the second string on the seventh fret that will give me the f sharp right so which would be a ninth above the e here we go and then i'll just move it up three frets to the g two frets to the a [Music] very very different feel from and yet if you were playing with other musicians playing that chord progression you could likely fit in that dyad into the overall arrangement of the song and it would work but on its own it's very different sounding let's try one more very common progression c d e minor so six seven and then one minor very very famous common chord progression [Music] or if you've watched the rest of my how to play ambient guitar series you'll know that you can use some other chord voicings to get the implied chords [Music] right that was a dyad with the first and the third actually the first and the third above the octave so now let's try it instead of [Music] let's try it with the ninth so that would be a c with a d on top and then a d with an e on top and an e did i say that right with an f sharp on top here we go try the other one [Music] are you getting the impression i like a lot of tension in my music the answer is yes but i would encourage you to try some of these out to see if you can inject tension into your arrangements at appropriate points in time now finally where can you find these ninth intervals on the fretboard well there it's very easy simply put if you take the first string on any fret and then just play the fourth string on the same fret [Music] you'll have a ninth interval right so this would be uh an e to an f sharp for example [Applause] and a g to an a okay and then if you go down to the second string on any fret and then fret the fifth string on that same fret you'll get another ninth interval there [Music] okay and then finally if you take the fourth string on any fret and then fret the sixth string on one fret higher so if i've got my finger on the fourth string on the fifth fret put your finger on the sixth string on the sixth fret you'll also have a ninth [Music] so if you practice those fingerings you'll be able to move around pretty quickly to different chords [Music] [Music] talk about distortions i'd like to share with you five things that i've learned about using distortion with ambient guitars let's get to work thing number one don't be afraid to copy your idols your musical idols that is so for me i am smitten have been for many years with alan holdsworth i love his jazz fusion guitar playing i love his lead tone and over the years i've accumulated equipment that either he uses or has endorsed either present or in the past and let me show you just a few things first of all we have here the yamaha dg stump which is a really cool amp modeling unit from the late 90s we have the yamaha magic stomp that alan holdsworth used and still uses as of 2016 late 2015 into 2016. next item up is the j rocket allen holdsworth signature overdrive this is the distortion box i'm going to use for the other four points that i'm going to make the other four things that i've learned pretty cool overdrive and finally i have here in my hot little hands i'm holding it the right way a yamaha an original yamaha dg 1000 amp modeling unit which has all the same great amp models that the dg stomp and the magic stomp has and the thing that's cool about this unit is alan holdsworth actually owned it at one point it's pretty sweet anyhow here's the point while i don't play like allen holdsworth i mean you you can probably hear some of his influence in my playing i'm not i'm not awesome like he is or anything like that but the his sound has really inspired me over the years and it's helped me to kind of ground myself and find where i want to be in terms of a distorted sound in terms of lead tones and whoever your idol is whoever you love to listen to what a great way to kind of get a feel for how to get a good lead tone thing number two you probably need less distortion than you think you need now what do i mean by that well you know when i've been guilty before of getting a distortion box and just cranking the gain all the way up and what i have found over the years is that when you do that you end up with you don't end up with a more exciting sound you end up with a more muddy sound and let me show you what i mean so here's a what i think is a pretty nice distorted sound i've got a little reverb on it but a nice distorted sound um without too much gain so here we go [Music] all right so you're probably you you might be listening thinking man that's not all that much gain and and you're right the reverb's off okay let let me turn the gain all the way up okay gain and this particular pedal also has a boost here we go [Music] all right you know that's pretty cool [Music] let me throw some delay on too yeah it's ambient guitar so let's throw some delay on too [Music] all right yeah yeah that's pretty sweet however let me bring that gain back down with the gain down i feel like you get more definition in the chords with in particular if you have delay and reverb hanging out in your signal chain [Music] in particular if you're recording and you've got a lot of layers of stuff going on if you've got a really nasty gainy guitar uh kind of tone in particular if you've got more than one track going you can just muddy up the whole thing so use a little less gain than you think you need and it will clean up things and clarify the your arrangement your overall tone probably a little more than you think it will thing number three consider using a compressor for more sustain so thing number two i talked about not having quite as much gain but maybe at certain points you need more sustain so instead of pushing the the gain staging in your distortion and the front end of your amp consider adding just a little bit more compression into the front end of your distortion box so let me show you what i mean i've got a compressor going into my distortion box so if i play the distort let me go ahead and play the distortion just by itself no reverb no delay here we go [Music] okay not bad but if i kick in a little bit of compression check this out [Music] [Applause] okay and the great thing is if your compressor is not like totally maxed out you still get more definition in the chords [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] yeah sorry about that note there anyhow you you get that you get the idea so consider that add a little compression in front of your distortion for more sustain but without that massive gain staging kind of thing number four mid-range the mid-range is everything when it comes to distortion all right so if you're of a particular age range um unfortunately i'm not look at my beard you can tell i'm not you might really enjoy heavier types of music with the scooped mid type of thing and that's that's way cool that's i'm not bad mouthing that at all um but it's a really different sound than the non-scooped mid kind of distortion tone which is actually more what i go for [Music] and mids are where clarity and articulation live so again i don't want to i'm not trying to say don't use scooped mid-range not at all because it has its place and in the right context it sounds awesome however keep in mind the mids as you're composing a song as you're arranging your music as you're recording your music and think about where the mids are in your distorted tone let me add some delay here [Music] and what i would suggest is that more mids to a certain point will give you more clarity and articulation if that's what you're looking for in your music so if you've got a distortion pedal with a mid-range control take full advantage of it check out every setting within its range if you don't have mid-range control on the distortion work with the combination of your distortion box and your app to dial up a mid-range tone that really complements and cuts through in the music that you're creating all right mids are everything thing number five use the controls on your guitar to optimize your distorted tone now what what do i mean by that well this is a fairly simple guitar right so you got two pickups i have one three position pickup selector i have one volume and one tone well what can i do with that well let's just check that out so i've got my distorted tone set up got everything wide open i'm on the bridge pickup [Music] it's kind of nasty isn't it let's check out both pickups [Music] not quite as nasty let's try the neck pickup yeah all right now for me where it gets interesting is when i start manipulating the volume and the tone knobs so what i normally do and i've mentioned this on a couple of my other videos is i always roll the tone control down and that's whether i'm running clean a clean tone or distorted tone on this particular guitar with the pickup selector set to both for lead you might freak out here but i run the tone control all the way down to zero [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's pretty sweet isn't it i well maybe i don't know what you think but i like it anyhow if i run my bridge pickup i'll typically run the tone control about two to three [Music] [Music] me [Music] love it and i don't normally run neck pickup only but if i did i'll probably run it about four not bad now if i got the tone control up a little bit more the other thing you can do is really play around with the volume now most modern distortion pedals at least in my experience clean up as you back off on the volume control so here's here's full volume control let me back off to about five let's check that out five on the volume control yeah it really cleaned up a lot [Music] okay [Music] all the way down to three [Music] me so in addition to all the knobs on your your distortion or your overdrive all the knobs on your compressor you have the knobs on your guitar take full advantage of all of those parameters when you're building your distorted tone on today's episode i'd like to explore a technique that i use to help jump start my ambient guitar writing and that technique is using traditional tunes in other words old tunes that are public domain they're not under copyright they're free for all to use the the great thing is there are many different types of traditional tunes if you're here in the u.s you might like for example old timey americana songs from the 1800s if you're from another country you might enjoy the traditional music of that country give you an example i was listening to some syrian traditional music the other day and it blew my mind it was awesome for me one of the traditions that i really enjoy are old time traditional christian hymns okay that's kind of where i come from you may not come from that that's cool but uh you can see i've got a trusty my trusty rusty old presbyterian hymnal and i use it quite a bit to get ideas for different melodies and tunes that i can eventually turn into ambient guitar pieces so what i'd like to do right now is just kind of give you a quick demo on how i do that all right one tune that i've always loved that's actually in that hymn book that i just showed you is called be thou my vision it's an old irish tune an old irish melody set to some beautiful words and uh let me just play you the uh the melody itself actually kind of a a an arrangement that i created for acoustic guitar and that would be kind of step one learn the melody of whatever song you enjoy and kind of want to emulate [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] okay a little sloppy there but you get the get a feel for the melody just kind of mellow flowing a beautiful just a beautiful melody now what can i do with this melody to turn it into an ambient guitar piece or maybe even just take parts of the melody and use it to inspire me to create a new piece all right so first thing i want to do is set up some effects i'm using the same basic effects chain that i've used for this series which is the wampler ego compressor a volume pedal morley the strymon dig i did add in the new neighbor immerse reverb just for grins i demoed that recently if you want to kind of check it out okay so let's listen to the different effects first of all just the compressor okay just a little extra sustain here's what i've got set up on the dig [Music] all right just kind of a long trailing delay and then here's what's going on with the immerse [Music] okay you know typical kind of sound for me if you've listened on this channel all right so let's get to work here on taking beat on my vision and turning it into something different first thing i would suggest when you're approaching a traditional tune is to get your effects chain set up and then just play the melody so let me go ahead and play the melody here i'll just play part of it just kind of plain and simple here we go oh and i'm gonna slow down the tempo a little bit okay now what if i slow that way down um what would that sound like let's try that okay i kind of like where that's going it's pretty plain though i need some more notes involved here to kind of flesh out the overall chordal structure so let me do that that same kind of phrase with i'm just going to use the root notes of each chord so that would be i'm capable on the second fret so that would be e a and b so here we go [Music] [Music] okay that's not bad either that's that's kind of cool now what if i spread the kind of the the total range like you know it's all in the kind of in the low end here right so what if i took that melody up an octave let's see what happens there [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] oh i like that so i've got a little more separation between notes it's not so muddy although sometimes mud is good [Music] yeah that's kind of cool so you can kind of play with the balance there of the intervals of your notes so wide intervals close intervals kind of you know vary it a little bit um you can kind of see where things are going here uh with this melody so as i kind of flesh it out what else could i do with this i've got just the melody with my you know echo and delay [Music] okay and i'm also taking the opportunity to spread out the intervals now what if i played some variations on the melody okay so i'm gonna use this melody as inspiration and for me i'm very improvisational in my playing so i'm gonna kind of keep that melody rolling around in my brain but i'm gonna vary it and play something a little bit different so let me give you an example of some things that i might do if i were improvising against this song [Music] [Laughter] okay you can kind of hear the melody in there you know little motifs from the original melody but i've changed things up so that's pretty cool too so we've got you know playing the melody as is [Music] at different tempos doesn't have to be the original tempo it could be slower could be faster we've got extending um intervals right [Music] to widen out the tone we've got uh playing around with variations on the melody now what if we also did some variations on the chord progression so i'm going to turn off the effects for a minute so the basic chord progression of beat out my vision is [Music] so it really it's a it's basically a three chord progression right so in this case since i'm in the key of e k but on the second fret with a partial capo by the way it's e a and b um nothing too crazy but what if i added in some variations to the chord progression so let's try that [Music] [Laughter] you [Music] yes [Music] so [Music] all right so i did some pretty significant variations on the the melody there but i also did some significant variations on the chord progression itself however if you compare it to the original it still has a that same kind of feel that flowing feel so i haven't deviated from kind of what i would call the spirit of the song on today's video i'd like to look at some tips and tricks for using baritone guitar in the context of ambient guitar so let's get right down to work the first thing i'd like to do is just review what is a baritone guitar i've had a few questions on that so i think that's a good idea basically a baritone guitar is a indeed a guitar but it has number one a longer scale length than a normal guitar so your average gibson for example has a scale length of 24 and three-quarter inches your average fender style guitar typically has a scale length of 25 and a half baritones start at 27 inches which is what this guitar has and can go up to 28 and even 29 inches so quite a bit longer of a neck so what does that mean well it means for one thing you can put heavier gauge strings on the guitar this particular guitar has 0 12 to 0 68 gauge strings on the guitar versus your typical for me like a 10 to 46 standard light gauge string and in addition to heavier gauge strings longer scale length that means you can tune it down down down and in fact a baritone guitar typically sits about halfway between a standard guitar tuning and a standard bass electric bass tuning this guitar for example has a tuning of b e a d f sharp and another b on the first string so it is a perfect fourth below standard tuning another way to think about it is it's basically five frets worth tuned down all right okay so what can you do with a baritone well you can play it just like a regular guitar you can use the same chord shapes if you're in the same tuning i am but there is a difference so if i play for example the e major chord shape uh that's not actually a an e major that is actually a b major and if i play for example a standard a chord shape that actually is an e major so as you can see everything is pushed down by a perfect fourth or again five frets worth of d tuning so that's one thing you need to be careful of as you think about a baritone guitar you're going to be using the same chord shapes but you're not going to be sounding the same chords so you'll need to get used to transposing chord shapes okay in particular that's important if you're playing in a band so but that it does have some interesting advantages in that you're using different chord shapes to sound the chords that you normally do so let me let me play you an example and it's actually going to be it's going to look like i'm playing b minor but i'm actually going to be playing in f sharp minor so let's check that out it's kind of cool isn't it so i you know a standard guitar i would have been playing vastly different chord shapes to get that kind of a chord progression and intervals that's kind of cool but you got to keep that in mind you're going to be transposing the chord shapes you've come to know um all these years the next tip is related to chord shapes um and it has to do with the low register of the baritone guitar so if i'm playing a what would be an e major shape which is actually a b major let me go ahead and play that it sounds pretty nice here's the g major shape which is actually a d [Music] okay you can hear you're kind of down in the basement with this low sixth string and if you don't watch it things can get pretty muddy [Music] okay so the tip here involving the chord shapes is use wider intervals at times to get more clarity in your chords i'm going to be playing in the key of b but i'm going to spread the intervals out so i've got wider intervals i've got more high notes in addition to the low notes here we go [Music] [Laughter] okay so if you if you're careful you can avoid all the mud and still take advantage of the low end of the baritone and in fact that leads me to the next tip take advantage of the low end of the baritone what's really cool is you can play quite high up on the neck and still if you're using finger picking or a hybrid flat picking technique you can get those low notes which sound just great let me give you another example here [Music] pretty sweet isn't it you can really kind of spread things out and get down low in the dungeon and have perfect clarity just by kind of spreading your cords out the next tip is that baritones sound really good with arpeggios in other words instead of just playing you know just you know those kinds of those kinds of chords um they sound just really great in particular with ambient guitar if you're playing arpeggios so let me show you what i mean by way of example [Music] next tip can you use distortion and play leads um on a baritone guitar and the answer is yes you can as a matter of fact a big use of baritone guitars would be in heavier types of music where you're down in the dungeon and you're playing rhythmic patterns i don't really play that style of music but it's very common and a baritone guitar is a very good instrument to get down down low without the strings getting too floppy but in terms of lead playing it's also a great instrument to utilize the thing to note is you can't you know even the strings all the way up here are going to be a lot lower in pitch than a standard guitar but the baritone guitar really excels in what i'll call mid the mid-range of pitch as you're playing lead so let me just i'll play some slow kind of ambient leads and i'll show you what i mean [Music] me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] and you see you can even bend strings so if you're into that sort of thing i i don't bend strings too often but occasionally i do and the tension is not so great even with the heavier gauge strings that you you can't do the occasional bend the other thing you can you can do are pinch harmonics and you know all the same types of things that you do on a standard guitar i demo sweeping but i don't know how to sweep sorry guys uh but if you do know how to sweep sure you could do that too so it's pretty versatile just keep in mind that that's the highest note you're going to get as you're playing lead on today's episode i'd like to discuss the the use of acoustic guitar in ambient guitar music if you're like me you might kind of automatically reach for that old electric guitar plug in a bunch of pedals and have at it and that's awesome but i find it really useful to return from time to time as a matter of fact again and again to acoustic guitar which for me is one of the roots of my guitar playing and i find it really useful to generate ideas and even to generate performances of ambient style music on the acoustic guitar so what i'd like to do today is just provide a few ideas for how to leverage your acoustic guitar in ambient guitar music so idea number one take advantage of either altered tunings or dual capos like i have here and by the way you can check out altered tuning and capo episodes of how to play ambient guitar i'll put the description somewhere for you below but consider the use of that alter tuning or dual capos to achieve a drone if you're like me you may include a lot of drone tones in your electric ambient guitar music you can do the same thing on acoustic guitar easily with an altered tuning such as dadgad or some of the other tunings that really favor a low drone [Music] [Music] so you can get some really nice melodies and chordal structures using the drone okay idea number two don't do a lot of strumming now i don't get me wrong i'm not saying strumming is bad but if we think about ambient music i think one and if you think back kind of in the history back to like brian eno and robert fripp some of the early guys and then how it's progressed through into post-rock concepts and then more modern and modern types of ambient music you know within the last 10 years or so there can be a lot of space in the music and if you're strumming [Music] you're going to reduce the space between the notes you're also going to fill the space with a lot of rhythms and you know while that sounds great for folk for rock for bluegrass celtic etc for ambient music i find it more useful to leave space between the notes so you may want to use the hybrid picking technique that i've outlined before or even perhaps a thumb pick if you know how to use a thumb pick along with you know regular finger picking but leave some space between your notes [Music] [Applause] do [Music] idea number three consider where you are picking in relationship to the bridge and the fingerboard okay so it i find this true on electric guitar but in even more so on acoustic guitar you can really kind of change the tone of your string by where you pick in relationship to the bridge so you know you might find a lot of players picking close to the bridge [Music] and it it provides a more sharp sound more trebly sound i find that's not bad and i'm not saying you shouldn't use it in ambient guitar music but i do find playing closer to the sound hole or even over the sound hole provides a warmer rounder tone which i think can fit in well with ambient style music [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] idea number four think about the type of pick you're using i've got a couple different picks here you probably can't see them too well in this shot let me hold maybe down here so i've got a 1.4 millimeter it's actually a bluegrass pick that i really like i've got a kind of a one point i think about a 1.8 millimeter pick that's pretty cool and then i've got a 1.5 millimeter old old old tortoise shell pick that i've been using now for many many many years it was actually made out of an antique uh comb or brush set that was you know 100 years old made out of actual tortoise shell so you can't get these to you can't get these anymore but it's pretty cool one of the things you might have heard though is that in terms of millimeters it's more than the all of these picks are more than one millimeter thick and as a matter of fact i do have another pick that i use that's actually two millimeters thick these are pretty pretty hefty picks they don't really bend when you use them um i know a lot of guys and gals use very thin picks to uh especially with strumming because they like that kind of floppy kind of feel and kind of you know having this strict the pick sorry flap across the strings but one of the things that happens when you use thinner picks is you get more pick noise against the string and if you're playing slowly and quietly [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and you've got one of those very thin picks you're going to get pick noise like really loud pick noise that's going to be distracting so consider using a thicker guitar pick that will actually be quieter on the strings if you're not used to these thicker guitar picks it'll take a little while to adjust to the thickness but once you do adjust you're going to find that not only do you have less noise on the string [Music] [Applause] you'll also find when you're playing electric guitar and maybe you're playing a lead you know lead line or something like that the the thicker pick allows you to actually play faster which i know is not not an issue for ambient music but if you are playing a faster style of music it does allow you to play faster and it allows you to play faster with less string noise and the pick once again once you get used to it really kind of glides across the strings a lot easier so consider using a thicker guitar pick [Music] [Applause] [Music] next idea consider using hammer-ons and pull-offs in your ambient music okay and you know maybe normally you're thinking of hammer-ons and pull-offs with electric guitar leads or maybe faster bluegrass picking [Music] kind of like that right so you we've all heard that we've all heard hammer ons and pull-offs with electric leads but in slow ambient guitar music a hammer-on or a pull-off can be very expressive [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] really nice you can do a lot with hammer-ons and pull-offs so consider weaving them into your melody or chordal structure with your acoustic ambient guitar piece final idea for today's episode use the same types of chord structure and voicing techniques that we've talked about in some of the other episodes and how to play ambient guitar so the third and fifth are great right [Music] and oh those ninths [Music] and space between the base and treble tones [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] lots of things you can do with chord inversions chord voicings and chord spacing so [Music] welcome to how to play ambient guitar episode 20. on today's video i'd like to show you a really cool effect that combines hybrid picking and the use of a volume pedal all right so if you haven't already done so you may want to check out episode 2 of how to play ambient guitar which focuses on voicing chords for volume swells and you may also want to check out episode 9 which covers hybrid picking and flat picking in the context of ambient guitar alright so you heard the music i played at the beginning kind of cool there's a rhythmic thing going on okay and there's also volume swells going on at the same time so let's break it down and see how i got that effect okay the first thing we uh want to do or maybe you might want to do what i did is i set up my guitar with a clean tone so let's check that out real quick okay and by the way this is a baritone guitar you can do the same exact thing with a standard guitar two or a seven string guitar eight string guitar whatever kind of guitar you play this concept will apply all right so get your clean tone and then throw a little compressor on it just to squash the dynamics and produce a little more sustain okay next you'll want to throw in a just a little bit of overdrive i'm using the strymon riverside again you're not required to use the riverside use whatever you have just make sure it's an overdrive not a fuzz or heavy metal kind of distortion pedal something you can get some mellow distortion with so here's what it sounds like on this guitar and this strymon riverside okay so just a little grit in there okay but not a lot all right that's the basic sound the next thing you'll want to do is set up a volume pedal so again just standard stuff that we've covered here a lot and then after that you'll want to set up a delay and what i've got set up is the source audio nemesis and just listen to this delay okay and this is a stereo ping-pong delay if you're listening on a stereo system you can probably hear the delay going back and forth if you want to use a mono delay that is cool too it's it's all good and if you listen to the delay interval okay so that's going to put each repeat probably at about 300 350 milliseconds because i'm tracking a little bit faster than one beat per second 60 bpm probably tracking at 65 to 70. okay so think about that maybe about a 300 millisecond delay and you can hear that i've got the repeats turned up so we get maybe what seven eight seconds of repeats going with the delay and then finally this is optional if you have one available you may want to throw in a little bit of reverb okay so i've got the new neighbor immerse going you can use whatever reverb pedal you may have could be the boss rv6 could be the strymon blue sky big sky whatever sky whatever clouds whatever it might be okay get a little bit of reverb going and if you do have the option to adjust the pre-delay set it up so there's a there is some delay so listen to this reverb [Music] okay hear how the pre-delay kind of blooms after i pick the note you'll want to try to go for something like that all right so that is a walkthrough of all the effects now let's talk about the playing technique we're going to do some hybrid picking again episode 9 if you haven't seen it yet that we're going to play just your standard 6 7 root chord progression so for you standard guitar players that would be like the classic c d e minor kind of thing i'm doing this in baritone land so it's actually uh g a and then b minor okay so so this would be g and b uh a and b minor [Laughter] and let me turn that delay off okay so okay again if you're in standard guitar tuning that's c d e minor all right now here's where it gets fun hybrid picking what we're going to want to do is pick the base notes in time with the delay so if you've got a standard guitar hit that six string your low e if you've got a baritone like me it's the low b just start picking that um and listen to the repeats of your delay okay so get your tempo going in your mind and imagine that the delay every time you hear a repeat that's an eighth note and what you're going to want to do is pick on the quarter note okay so not too bad okay that's about the rhythm or the tempo i should say now we're going to need some hybrid picking to get that cord in and the goal here is to keep this rhythm on your low string going i got to learn how to play guitar someday so we're going to keep that rhythm going while we begin to pick other strings with our fingers again hybrid picking in effect so let's check it out here i'm going to play the second string on the third fret second string on the fifth fret and second string on the seventh fret while i'm keeping the rhythm on that low six string so the low e for standard low b for baritone here we go [Music] [Music] okay you hear what i'm doing i'm also using a palm mute on that low string otherwise it would be and you know you can do that if that's what you like i kind of prefer the muted so i just kind of put the palm of my hand on the sixth string by the bridge just to mute it a little bit [Music] okay so go ahead and practice that when you get that down until it's kind of smooth you can kind of go from there the next thing we're going to look at is playing more of a chord again while we're keeping that low string rhythm going so what i'm going to do is add in a ninth chord here okay it's it's not a full chord but it's the root and the ninth okay but i'm going to keep that rhythm going so let's see how i do here it'll probably be a little messy [Laughter] [Music] so okay does that make sense so we're just gonna combine those two elements together and that's gonna give us the basis of this chord progression when we begin to add the effects back in and we're going to do that right now let me go ahead and throw the delay in and we'll try i'm going to try just what i played with the delay here we go got to get my rhythm right my tempo right [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] all right that's pretty cool let's throw a little reverb in there and hear what it sounds like with all the effects [Laughter] yeah that's nice all right so there's there's a problem that i hear though and it's annoying me a little bit and that is the high string again if the if you're in standard guitar it's a b a d right that second string on the third fret um if i am just picking like i am doing the repeats of that higher pitch is kind of annoying me a little bit [Laughter] okay it's not bad but as i was kind of putting this together i was thinking i'd like something a little smoother and that's where the volume pedal comes in so this is where things get a little tricky um so i've got the inset there so you're going to want to watch my foot in terms of the volume pedal and basically what i'm going to do is we're still going to do the rhythm let me i'm going to turn off the effects just for a minute here right so i'm still going to do that rhythm but every time i play the chord or the ninth interval instead of just picking it i'm gonna swell it in with a volume pedal but i'm not gonna stop the rhythm on the low string so let me let's check that out without the effects here we go [Music] [Music] [Laughter] okay does that make sense so we're it's actually going to be on that downbeat right beat number one of the measure we're going to be playing [Music] one two three four one two three four one two three four so the volume swell is on beat number one and then the regular pick is gonna be on two three and four okay and once we add in the delay and the reverb it's all gonna mix together and and because of the reverb repeat at the eighth note interval you're not going to miss playing that one low string on the downbeat on the one it's all going to kind of smear together and it'll make sense here we go [Music] [Music] [Laughter] i like that a lot and one of the cool things is that you can drop out the rhythm and go to just volume swells and really kind of change the texture let me show you what i mean here [Music] [Laughter] [Music] i like that a lot so you can really kind of play around with textures and rhythms using the combination of hybrid picking and volume swell petals so there you have it it's kind kind of what i might consider an advanced technique and if you have not really played around with hybrid picking it may take a little while to get the coordination between your flat pick and your fingers by the way if you are a thumb picker now i don't have my thumb pick available you could do the same thing with thumb picking fingers also anyway on today's video what i'd like to really look at and cover are some tips for achieving a good tone in your ambient guitar patch so we're going to kind of walk through several different aspects that i think are important for good tone production and ultimately getting a really nice sound out of your ambient guitar patch so let's go ahead and get started this is where your tone production really starts it's in your hands it's in your hands and so decision point number one is fingers versus pick or perhaps both and i do have an episode on hybrid picking where you use both that's what i'm going to kind of do today it's it's actually very important how you pick here's a guitar pick here's my finger so you can hear the finger is a little less sharp little fuller sounding [Applause] than the pick is and that's a really important factor as you're playing because you can use a combination of fingers and picks you can use all fingers you can all use all picks and really affect your tone [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's number one finger versus fingers versus picks the next factor or tip to consider is if you are using a pick what kind of pick are you using so i've got a few here let's start with a very thin pick so you can see that's very flexible very thin and let's just let me just play with that a little bit [Applause] [Music] so thin picks tend to give you more of that pick slap they also tend to emphasize the highs the treble if you will the upper spectrum of the guitar string if you use a thicker pick let me grab the one i dropped here this one happens to be a 1.4 millimeter bluegrass pick and listen to this here [Music] now let me go back to that thin pick [Music] so you can really hear the difference this one is a little thicker sounding the 1.4 millimeter [Music] okay and finally i have another example it's a 2.5 millimeter pick [Music] okay sloppy playing but you get the picture the pic that you use can greatly affect your tone also where you pick um in the length of the string affects your tone too so i'm back to the medium kind of gauge in my world that's the 1.4 and so let me show you what i mean so if i pick near the bridge [Music] versus near the neck [Music] [Applause] and then even picking over the neck itself [Music] they all produce different tones obviously bridge is you know emphasizing a very sharp kind of sound as you move towards the neck you get a lot mellower okay so those are fingers and picks important first decisions next decision on the guitar itself you've got some controls and those are going to affect your tone you've got bridge versus neck pickups depending on your guitar so here's the neck pickup on my guitar [Music] here's the bridge pickup on my guitar [Music] okay so that's gonna really affect your tone too so choose the correct pickup for the type of song you're playing if you want a sharp sound then pick that you know select the the bridge pickup if you want a mellower sound select the neck pickup also i've mentioned this on a few earlier episodes but the tone control on your guitar can be immensely important i never used to use my tone control i just leave it at 10 all the time and not worry about it i however at some point discovered that if you roll the tone back on any given setting it really mellows your sound out and if you're careful with it you can really use it to your advantage so here's the guitar with the tone control all the way up [Music] okay i'm gonna roll it down to about five or so [Music] isn't that cool i have to tell you i never ever run any of my guitars with the tone control all the way up i always roll it off a little bit because i like the mellowness that it gives me that might not work for you or it may only work for you every now and then be aware though that that tone control can massively affect the overall tone of your guitar all right so i've made a couple of selections i'm using a 1.5 4 millimeter pick i've got my tone control rolled down to about five i'm using both the bridge and the neck pickups and here's my overall tone [Music] um all right so next what i'd like to do is look at how the effects that you use affect the tone of what you're playing so first off if you look down at the pedals that i have arrayed to my right probably your left there is a blue compressor and i've had it turned on the whole time so compressors actually can affect your tone in a fairly significant way so let me play you this basic tone without the compressor and then i'm going to put it back in the in the chain here we go without compressor [Music] all right with compressor [Music] isn't that interesting the compressor in squashing the dynamics a little bit in this case brings up the low mids and the lows a little bit so the overall tone of the guitar is fuller now that works for me again depending on what you're playing it may not work for you so but you should be aware of what a compressor can do to your tone so once again without [Music] and with [Music] okay that's the compressor now what else can affect your tone in terms of pedals distortion if you're going to color this kind of plain vanilla clean sound with a distortion you need to be very aware of the tone controls on your distortion pedal and how they're affecting the overall tone of the signal so let me go ahead and turn it on and this is where i normally keep the distortion settings somewhere in this area and you can hear it works really well if you're doing volume pedal work with the distorted tone [Music] okay now if i start playing around the tone controls let's bring up the treble all the way oh uh i should mention right now the bass and treble controls are about in the middle so i'm going to bring up the treble control all the way [Music] all right so for me that's kind of nasty let's bring it all the way down and see what we have not so nasty but muddy [Music] okay so for me just a little bit past noon is where i like it all right let's do the base base all the way out [Music] now if you've got a if you've got an arrangement with lots of guitars you probably want to drop out some of the base [Music] all right base all the way up here we go [Music] okay so that's a lot there's a lot more beef in the sound and that can actually get a little muddy again if you've got a large arrangement of instruments let me put it back all right so that's distortion uh let's move on to delays so i'm going to go back to my clean tone [Music] nice and i'm going to throw in a delay this is the avalanche run i selected this because it's a nice simple mono delay so let me go ahead and turn it on and here's what we have dialed up [Music] all right so you might be thinking okay bill that's just a le or a delay what about the tone well one of the other reasons i selected the avalanche run is because it does have a tone control and i think this will help you see how different delay tones affect your sound so right now i've got the tone control on the avalanche run at about oh i don't know close to two o'clock and what happens on the avalanche run is you as you begin to bring the tone control up as each delay repeats each repeat of the delay i should say more and more of the low end drops out so let me bring that all the way up and then let me just play something you'll hear what i mean [Music] okay so you can really hear how the bottom end drops out so what does that mean when you play a song with it you're going to hear the delay but not a lot of bottom end and that can keep things from getting muddy [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay yeah pretty cool now if we turn it all the other way on the avalanche run we're gonna each repeat is gonna begin to drop out the treble and just leave you with the bass or the low frequencies here we go yeah you can hear how that just kind of goes but you might think well why would i ever want that well [Music] if you really just want a little wash and you kind of don't even want people to know necessarily you have a delay going on it could be a good choice [Music] okay your delay may have different tone controls if it does have tone controls than the avalanche run but you'll be able to do something similar if you've got a low or high cut filter on that delay so here's where i normally keep it where i'm going to keep it for the rest of this episode [Music] okay so we're dropping out just a little bit of the lows as we repeat and we get plenty of repeats that way all right finally reverbs many reverbs also have tone controls on the petals that you can work with to really adjust how they react so i've got the new neighbor immerse here on the floor and it just happens to have a tone control so let's listen to what i've got dialed up in terms of a reverb this will this is just the guitar and a little compressor in the reverb [Music] yeah i've done other episodes on the immerse it's a great reverb but what the purpose of using it here so you can hear what happens when i crank the tone control up and we end up cutting lows and boosting highs here we go listen to this that is one sharp reverb [Music] all right very sharp reverb there we go and um it may or may not work for what you're looking to accomplish so that tone control can come in handy let's roll it all the way down [Music] [Music] you know i i like i like the tone of that reverb but it doesn't really match the tone of the guitar right it's too mellow for the tone of the guitar so if i bring the tone control up more towards the mid portion it's going to match the guitar a little bit better [Music] okay cool now if i roll down the tone control in the guitar and maybe select the neck pickup let's roll down the tone on the reverb [Music] here now that might be a little muddy for you but hear how the reverb complements the tone of the guitar so that's one thing i think especially with reverbs you can play around with to get the right tone have the reverb decay try to match it to the tone of your guitar let's listen to the delay and the reverb together now that we've got kind of everything dialed in and see what we have [Music] now let's try some distortion i've rolled the tone control all the way down on my guitar i really like playing distorted tones like that so [Music] [Music] hey [Music] [Music] today i'd like to spend a few minutes looking at how to incorporate string bending into your ambient guitar lead playing so let's get right down to work first of all you'll need a lead tone a distorted lead tone and i actually did an entire episode on that check it out if you haven't seen it already here's the tone that i'm using today [Music] it's basically a little bit of a compressor and a strymon overdrive if you don't have the riverside you can use whatever distortion pedal you have and i'm sure you'll get a tone that's somewhat similar in addition to that i'm using some reverb [Music] and that's just a whole room type of reverb and of course some delay [Music] [Applause] [Music] and as you can hear i've got a good bit of delay going and that's because for this demo i'm gonna be using the volume pedal for the lead playing that i'm gonna do and that brings me to tip number one incorporate string bending with your volume pedal so you know if you think about typical maybe blues style string bends [Music] okay that's pretty cool but if you add in some delay and use a volume pedal with it i think it gets kind of cooler [Music] all right so if you use the volume pedal to chop the attack off of your note string bendings turn into in my view kind of like otherworldly sounding whale sounds if you will which can be really cool so uh there are several different different ways you can use string bending with a volume pedal the first one that you just heard is a bend up in pitch [Music] okay and that's pretty typical um if i turn off the delay here's what it sounds like delay on [Music] all right so that's cool tip number two is to bend down and this is a little trickier because before you bring the volume pedal up you've got to get the string bend in position so you can go down so what i mean is let me explain here a little better typically in a string bend you go up and then down right [Music] all right in this case we're going to start in the up position of the pitch and go down [Music] okay and that sounds really cool with delay and a volume pedal [Music] [Applause] [Music] ah [Music] [Applause] and it's kind of nice if you've got a uh say this east this uh e here the uh b string on the fifth fret that is a fixed note right it's just fretted so if i play that note and then the next note is my uh the same e but on the third string bent up you know essentially a whole tone or two frets worth of pitch it's kind of cool in terms of the effect [Music] anyhow that takes a little bit of practice um i don't you know as i play sometimes i'll record and use it sometimes i have to go back and do two or three takes to get it right because it can be a little tricky in particular if you don't if you don't practice that a good bit but give that a try and see what you think tip number three is string bending as you bring the volume petal down to cut off the tone so let me show you what i mean first of all i'm going to play a tone and then quickly cut the tone off with a volume pedal without the delay [Music] okay now what if i add a bend up as i'm lowering the volume pedal so what if i right so maybe a half step bend uh one you know one fret bend so let's try that out turn on the delay [Music] so you hear how the when you bring the volume pedal down quickly as you're bending it chops off the bend [Music] [Applause] that's pretty cool and then that brings me to my last tip for this video and you probably heard it as your string bending up you can bend up to the same note on another string that is the fixed pitch in other words it's not a bent string it's just a fixed pitch so let me show you what i mean with this e string or this e pitch or this e note here okay again this is e fifth fret on the b string and i'm going to start on the g string the third string on the seventh fret that is a d okay and i'm going to bend up to an e and then i'm going to very quickly move the volume pedal down and bring it back up and play the e on the fifth fret of the b string so let's see if i can do that [Music] kind of cool huh and you probably heard the f sharp to the g [Music] and i didn't bring the volume pedal down on that one which is another cool effect [Music] so what i'm doing there is bending up a half a step and then i'm letting go of the bend with my third finger as my fourth finger hits the g hey [Music] [Music] [Music] all right those are my tips for string bending if you work on this technique if you've not already you know kind of played around with it and experimented i highly encourage you to do so um i find that the judicious use of string bending with volume pedal and ambient guitar leads can add a lot of life and expression into your lead playing [Music] welcome to episode 23 of how to play ambient guitar on this episode i'd like to answer a question that i've gotten a lot of over the last few years on the channel and that question is hey bill should i put my volume pedal before or after my distortion pedal in the signal chain and i think that is a great question because where you place your volume pedal in relationship to your distortion pedal really makes a big difference in the sound so let's check it out get to work all right uh on the floor let me review the pedals in use i'm going from my guitar into a compressor the blue wampler ego from there i currently have the compressor feeding right into my distortion pedal which is a strymon riverside from that point i'm actually going into my amp modeling unit and then the signals coming out of the effects send into my volume pedal and then from there it goes on into delay and reverb so in effect whether you have a an effects loop or not in effect the order is compressor distortion volume pedal and here's my clean tone real quick all right and then here is my distorted tone [Music] [Applause] okay now let me play uh that tune with the volume pedal and then let's talk about it [Music] all right so if you think about what you just heard the distortion level is consistent it never changes the volume pedal just increases or reduces the overall volume of the distorted tone but it doesn't change the gain so listen again here [Music] here how the distortion level is consistent even though the volume of that distorted tone is going up and down the actual amount of distortion is not changing and that is what you get when you place the volume pedal after the overdrive or the distortion pedal makes sense so why would you place it in that fashion well one reason that i can think of and and that i normally do this is because it's very good for playing leads with i think for playing leads with echo delay reverb that type of thing let me show you what i mean [Applause] uh [Music] okay so you hear with the with the reverb and the delay actually the two delays it's two delays in a reverb the more ocean machine you can check out a review of that i just did one recently it's cool anyhow with all of that ambience you know between the delay and reverb going on i find it helpful to have a consistent gain that's just moving up and down in volume in other words a consistent level of distortion so the thickness of the tone doesn't change [Music] [Applause] it whoops it just gets louder or softer so it's a nice consistent tonality all through the lead playing so that's the first way that you can do this i'm going to go ahead and rewire this thing and let's check it out in the other order all right through the magic of video i've instantly rewired my setup and as you can see i now i'm going from my wampler ego compressor to the volume pedal to the strymon riverside and here's the clean tone [Music] pretty much the same as the other order and when i add in the delays and reverbs [Music] all right so all good there so let's kick in the overdrive i'm not actually going to kick it in let's turn it on and let's see what we get [Music] now yeah that's a different sound isn't it than the uh the other setup so you can hear that the gain structure actually changes as i increase the volume there's not as much distortion as the sound begins to increase in volume [Music] and if you happen to like i'm doing here a little bit if you happen to use the volume pedal if you rock it back and forth very quickly you can almost get a trumpet kind of a sound [Music] and let me go ahead and put the reverb and the delays in [Music] [Applause] [Music] that actually is a pretty cool sound isn't it now i said i normally have my effects pedals lined up in the other direction with the distortion before the volume pedal but i do occasionally flip the order around into this configuration when i want that more trumpet kind of trumpets kind of sound and you know it's a lot like uh in this configuration it's a lot like just using the volume knob on your guitar right so let me turn let me turn the goodies on here [Music] okay let's try the volume pedal [Music] three [Music] so there you have it there there's a couple a couple different ways to skin this cat and like i said at the beginning of the video they both have very different sounds now which one is right which one should you go with well i think it depends on the sound that you're looking for if you want a more consistent gain structure without the distortion level kind of going up and down then put your volume pedal after the distortion or overdrive if your overdrive reacts well to you know like volume controls and things like that and you want that variable distortion level then you might want to consider putting the volume pedal before your overdrive if you have more than one overdrive here's another idea you might want to put one before the volume pedal and one after the volume pedal so volume pedals in in between the two and that way you have the best of both worlds you can go you know either direction whatever you're feeling like or whatever the song requires if you've not already done so i would love it if you would subscribe to chords of orion i've got ambient guitar related content coming every week tips and tricks equipment demos and performance videos of some of my music speaking of my music if you haven't already done so you can check it out on spotify apple music itunes bandcamp i'll put all the links there for you to uh to click on and as always see all of you on the next video

Channel: Chords Of Orion

Views: 308,112

Keywords: ambient guitar, ambient music, how to play ambient guitar, ambient guitar music, guitar tutorial, guitar tutorial for beginners, ambient guitar course

Id: SkHNF33pmEU

Length: 238min 20sec (14300 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sulphurlove]

Hey i made a drumkit u might like - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvfezBPMyUg