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well, if you want to play rawk, you are boxing yourself in to a strict harmonic organization and a riff-based vocabulary. the harmonic organization is easy to violate--the riff-based way of thinking about line is more problematic. personally, i find restricting yourself to riffs (modal patterns at best, but more often just lame scales) means you dont think about development means that you are working in a static form whether you know it or not.
this isnt the only way to do things.
so if you are starting out, it's good to understand the choices you are making.
the easiest way to see the rules of the form clearly is to listen to folk who do not adhere to them. the rules become clearest via their absence.
so check out the folk who do "bad things" to guitars.
keith rowe for example.
(though the only problem with rowe is that everyone and his brother in electronic experrymental music does keith rowe things, often without knowing it...laying the guitar on is back, detuning it, whacking it with things, using delay to structure the results, passing them out into a p.a...)
others who push at what you can do, but from a position of technical mastery:
derek bailey
taku sugimoto
fred frith
there's also 20 years of sonic youth.
robert fripp worked out a system of building lines around 4ths.
it is a hell of a lot more interesting to listen to than straight scales/riffs.
to generate contexts for lines based on 4ths requires that you rethink interior voicings in chords---it's the thirds that are the condition of possibilty for wrong notes--without them, you have a more open environment---but to work in an open environment, you have to think in terms of line, not riffs.
but i dont think in a normal way about this sort of thing.
sometimes i think that follows from being a pianist, not a guitarist.
full disclosure, in order to make this post seem less out of joint: my brother is a bluegrass player (banjo and guitar) and has played since i was maybe 12--so i grew up alongside a much straighter player than i am, and know all too well how the game works if you learn a straight form and take the claims of practitioners of that form seriously. all the above is really saying is take what you want from a teacher and ignore the other stuff.
full disclosure number 2: i used to play in rawk contexts. they made me want to put tacks into my forehead after a while. it is SO boring to play the same thing in the same way over and over again. but i wouldnt say dont learn to do that--i would say the opposite--learn everything, do everything. boredom is a personal space, and you should find your own way to it. chances are what bores me wont bore you. and keep in mind that the only thing worse than being a keyboard player in a rawk band is being second tenor in a ska band--the keyboard parts in a rawk context are basically 1-4-5 all the fucking time, but at least you get to play the occaisional blues cliche as a fill. second tenor in a ska band only gets to play the root.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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