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This week, it's all about making the guitar sound as beautiful as possible.
This week, it's all about making the guitar sound as beautiful as possible.
For me, the masters of this are Eric Johnson and Tim Miller (who was actually a teacher of mine at one point). We'll get to what they both do that sounds very unique. We'll also go over ways I like to doll up some otherwise normal-sounding guitar parts. The first and easiest way is to open up your chords. I mean use spread triads.
This is super helpful in creating a clear sound—the kind of sound a lot of people get surprised by.
EXAMPLE 1 is an normal yet mildly crowded way to play D–A–G. Here we have five notes played in this D chord and six played in the A and G chords. This sounds nice and full and very familiar as a “guitar” sound.
In EXAMPLE 2, we break down the chords to three notes. It's still a full chord (triad, the root-third-fifth), just arranged in a fun way. Here we have the D chord spelled out root-fifth-third low to high D-A-F#, the A chord A-E-C# and the G chord G-D-B. As you'll be able to hear, it makes for a much clearer representation of the chords. At the end I go through all the D inversions. An inversion is just a different order of the same notes. The orders go 1-5-3, 3-1-5, 5-3-1 then 1-5-3 again.
EXAMPLE 3 goes through inversions of all the chords and makes a nice melody on the high strings. Spread triads make an ignorable guitar part stand out dramatically.
Tim Miller is a great example of someone using spread triads and very clear chord voicings in general. I'd highly suggest listening to his