Learning to play rhythm and melody simultaneously Knopfler style

[Zanman777]

Hey!

 

I've been a fan of Mark Knopfler's work for a long time. What I admire the most on his work is his ability to play a melody and the accompaniement at the same time as if he had two brains.

 

On the video, he shows how his playing evolved, detaching from cliché arpeggios from the lowest to the highest note, and turning into his signature fingerpicking of notes blending rhythm and melody.

 

At 3:12, he says "Once the fingers start finding their way around..." as he plays a tune that already mixes rhythm with melody. He makes it all seem so easy. My question is... how does one acquire profficiency at playing and improvising new rhythm + melody combinations without messing it all up? (It requires an insane amount of coordination)

 

From 3:30 onwards, he bursts into a mayhem of different tunes with complex rhythm + melody combinations. He states "then you'll learn to pick out tunes with the lick going on". Easier said than done.

 

I'm a self-taught guitar player, and I've tried to learn to pick out tunes with the lick going on, as Mark Knopfler states. To no avail. I believed it was all about knowing the scales by heart, and bored myself to death trying to learn them... eventually I lost my interest on guitar altogether. Recently the sparkle came back. So I'm asking for help on a new way to approach this. My objective is to be able to play in this... ragtime style? Bluegrass style? How would you categorize this style anyway?

 

"A lot of practice" is what it takes. I know. But I once read someone on the net reccomend "Practice SMART, not HARD". So I ask you: what resources (books, artist albums...) can I gather to pick up this style and keep myself motivated to the point I can play tunes like this without much effort? (Mind that I CAN technically play this fast, that's not the issue. The issue is I have to learn slowly note by note and practice very slowly until my fingers have memorized THAT particular melody + accompaniement pattern). Also, what music genre is closest to this kind of playing / what artists should I check out besides Mark Knopfler?

 

Thanks a lot for any help! Sorry for my english, not a native speaker.

 

Cheers

[Lee Knight]

You'll probably get better response in different sections of the forum here. But? I know what you're talking about.

 

Almost 40 years ago I was confronted with the prospect of singing with passion and playing bass accurately. At the same time.

 

The most obvious first step in the solution is one rarely mastered by people attempting the bigger picture. The first step? Learn each impeccably. Can you play the melody blindfolded inside out and backwards and upside down? Can you play just the accompaniment? Flawlessly? With expression?

 

When the answer is a truthful yes you're ready to begin.

[oldgitplayer]

Knopfler wouldn't have developed his right hand style in week 1 of his picking up a guitar. He would have had his own influences and learned to play their way.

His current abilities have a foundation that began about 50 years ago.

So the question is : Is it possible to do what he can do with his right hand without the same building blocks that he used?

Maybe - maybe not.

 

I am the same vintage as Knopfler, and back then we imitated Hank Marvin, Duane Eddy, Chet Atkins and others. Then we came under the influence of players like Davey Graham and Bert Jansch and other finger style artists. This was before the guitar gods like Page and Clapton came on the scene. (Page says he was greatly influenced by Jansch).

 

So my suggestion is that it may be beneficial for you to work on other right hand techniques before trying to launch into a right hand master like Knopfler.

[Lee Knight]

And what he said ^

[rsadasiv]

Check out Joe Pass doing chord melody. All your practice learning scales and the fretboard is still useful, you just need to relate that understanding to the current chord shape and the rest of the chord progression.

[LeonardScaper]

I first picked up a guitar around 40 years ago. I was never all that good at it but I persisted. It was not until I let go of my pre-conceived notions about flat picking that I slowly started to develop my own style which is much like Knopfler's (only severely dumbed down).

 

I finally realized that I needed flesh on the strings to really become one with the instrument.

 

Play lots and find your own style.

 

 

[nat whilk II]

Hey!

 

 

At 3:12, he says "Once the fingers start finding their way around..." as he plays a tune that already mixes rhythm with melody. He makes it all seem so easy. My question is... how does one acquire profficiency at playing and improvising new rhythm + melody combinations without messing it all up? (It requires an insane amount of coordination)

 

From 3:30 onwards, he bursts into a mayhem of different tunes with complex rhythm + melody combinations. He states "then you'll learn to pick out tunes with the lick going on". Easier said than done.

 

"So I ask you: what resources (books, artist albums...) can I gather to pick up this style and keep myself motivated to the point I can play tunes like this without much effort? The issue is that I have to learn slowly note by note and practice very slowly until my fingers have memorized THAT particular melody + accompaniement pattern). Also, what music genre is closest to this kind of playing / what artists should I check out besides Mark Knopfler?

 

Cheers

 

 

Here's a classic way to get into the game - John Fahey here warms into his tune by setting up the basic thumb pattern, and then bit by bit he starts adding stuff. You can just tell, he does this on the sofa, on the porch chair, by the hour, just riffing out for sheer love of it.

[video=youtube_share;ReW9uUYm-DA]

 

Yes, I've heard the "practice smart" advice for years. My tack has always been this - play for fun about 10 times more than practice "smart". Knopfler talks about falling asleep playing when he was a kid - that's not focused, methodical practicing, that's just playing cause you love it and gradually the speed and the technique becomes second nature. I think a real player, an improvising player or creative songwriter, has to do both, playing for fun and doing the structured practicing thing.

 

The other thing is this - try to make every little thing you learn into something you own by writing a little something using the new trick, whatever it is. I always think of the story John Lennon used to tell about how he learned to fingerpick. When the Beatles were at the Maharishi ashram, Donovan was there, too, and showed Lennon the basic Travis pick pattern. Lennon worked at it, and before they left, he had written Dear Prudence using that very pattern. You can hear how careful, slow, and methodical Lennon plays that pattern on the song - I doubt at that point he could do much anything else more complicated technically. Then he wrote Julia with the same pattern, the same slow careful picking. Most of us would have not had the nerve to write something using a brand new technique just barely learned -

 

The gap between learning technique through structured lessons, and then becoming someone who just sits down and starts throwing out great licks and passages at will - that gap is harder for some people to cross than others. But for me, I placed stones across that gap little stone by little stone, just playing mostly for fun and tinkering, experimenting, one little new trick at a time, and then filling in gaps and refining technique through more structured practice. Never had lessons myself, but I do make myself practice scales and patterns from time to time - but only so I have some new material to have fun with noodling on the sofa.

 

Best of luck - everyone has their own path it seems, for this journey. Don't be in a hurry, have fun, let it come, and it will be yours alone.

 

nat whilk ii

 

[1001gear]

Sounds like counterpoint - or at the very least the counterpoint of melody and accompaniment may be a mystery to some. Take up classical music. It's all there in the piano and guitar lit from the ground up. Once you're grounded in that kind of playing you can very easily substitute your own language.

[nat whilk II]

Sounds like counterpoint - or at the very least the counterpoint of melody and accompaniment may be a mystery to some. Take up classical music. It's all there in the piano and guitar lit from the ground up. Once you're grounded in that kind of playing you can very easily substitute your own language.

 

 

Oddly, I had something of the same thought. Two part counterpoint, bass and soprano, translates well to guitar, Bach's Bouree being the ubiquitous example. And the classical method of working up the bass and soprano first, then filling in with the other voices also translates to some extent to the type of playing we're discussing here.

 

BUT - you know the drill - there's this huge hurdle that most musicians interested in pop/rock and even jazz sometimes just don't care to clear, and that's all those uptight, unforgiving, dogmatic rules of counterpoint. Not that those rules bother me in particular - I just think of them as training wheels to be discarded asap. But I don't expect my peers to have my outlier attitude on this.

 

Most pop/rock types don't think in terms of building up note by note horizontally and vertically and all the intervals involved that must be managed with such painstaking care in counterpoint. They work with chords, a melody, and bass that works with those. More advanced players do concern themselves with chord voicing, but to my knowledge, even most jazz guys don't sweat every little note by any means.

 

Still - it's a great point, and one I'm always working on, trying to think first of all in terms of two melodies, the bass and main melody, and write whatever I write in whatever style stem out from a basic two-voice flow that's managed horizontally and vertically. If not every little note, at least in the anchor notes and other places where it's essential.

 

nat whilk ii