The Times of London, WILL HODGKINSON, the electric guitar and the Rock Riff. The London Guitar Festival 2-5 May 2008 is at the Southbank Centre London SE1. The Monster Riffs Guitar Lesson is at 11h00 on Saturday 3 May 2008. Grammar-Teds harked the lark but Riffs and Delta was the untold story.
09h08-BST Sunday 27 April 2008-CE
Let me quote from The Times (of London) for Friday 25 April 2008:
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Sounds
timesonline.co.uk/music
May the riff be with you
It may be no more than a repeated series of notes, but the guitar riff is the cornerstone of rock -and WILL HODGKINSON would sell his soul for one
…The rock riff is the product of a misuse of the electric guitar. The instrument was invented as a way of making the acoustic guitar sound louder so that jazz and country players were not drowned out by their fellow band members.
But when a generation of Southern blues guitarists such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf moved to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s to perform in night clubs they frequently used small amplifiers turned up too loud, producing distortion as a result.
The only way to stop the guitar from making white noise was to play it simply, usually harmonising only two notes at a time, and the riff was born…
[The Monster-Riffs-Guitar-Lesson begins at 11h00, on Saturday 3 May 2008, as part of the London-Guitar-Festival, 2 to 5 May 2008, at the Southbank-Centre in London South-East-1.]
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Will Hodgkinson has answered half of the Great Question that has haunted me since I first heard Frankie Lymon sing his OO-AH SONG. Everything grew from there for me: Elvis and his ‘Do Not Be Cruel’ up until the present day. It took me ages to catch up with the Delta-Chicago electric continuum because BBC did not play that stuff during the 1950s and 1960s. It was in the control of guys who had been teens and twenties in the 1930s and 1940s and they only liked Jazz and Swing.
Nor did Caroline and Big-L play Blues, at least not in the hours of darkness during which I in Plymouth could resolve a signal from the far away coast of East Anglia. The other half of the Great Question, now that I know about riffs, is uncertain but I will know it when I see it, when it occurs to me. Oh, I know: Why were the school songs I sang 1945 to 1957 watery soup, and yet, using the same physics, Blues, Rock and some Pop is something else?
The teachers in Music period, Pragnell then Porter, at Nunthorpe in York, gave us “hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings, and Phoebus ’gins a rise, his steeds to water at those springs on chaliced flowers that lies” or something, but not until today have I got the need-to-know griff. So I thank thee, Guru Hodgkinson, mate -sensational!
FIN 10h13
