# Charlie Hunter-style funk grooves



## distressed_romeo (Feb 24, 2007)

Gotten heavily into this the past few days, comping chords and rhythmic patterns on the top four strings, whilst adding basslines, plucked with the thumb, on the bottom four. It's wierdly addictive, especially when I got my old phaser pedal out this evening for a faux-leslie cabinet sound.
I've tried the same approach using touch-style playing, which expands it even more.
One wierd thing is that I haven't really felt the need to retune to Drop A; I'm aware that that tuning is meant to be better for this stuff, but I've managed to get everything I want under my fingers just using standard tuning.
I've worked really hard at playing multiple parts together, and it looks like it's finally coming together.

Does anyone else have any ideas like this?


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## MetalMike (Feb 25, 2007)

I'm not particularly good at this, so I've been slowly going through the transcription of the Broderick "jazz-pop" video. Unfortunately, Impellitteri's Speed System has distracted me a bit. Do you have any tips to make this technique really come together?


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## distressed_romeo (Feb 25, 2007)

MetalMike said:


> I'm not particularly good at this, so I've been slowly going through the transcription of the Broderick "jazz-pop" video. Unfortunately, Impellitteri's Speed System has distracted me a bit. Do you have any tips to make this technique really come together?



I'm not a master at it, but the main problem for me when I started trying to play multiple parts at once was timing; I had two seperate internal clocks going, but they were slightly out of sync, so the main thing that cured that was getting each part sorted seperately whilst tapping my foot, so I'd know _exactly_ where the downbeats were supposed to be. After that it's mainly a question of finding ergonomic fingerings.

How's the Impellitteri stuff going by the way? Isn't that the vid he did for Young Guitar?


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## MetalMike (Feb 25, 2007)

distressed_romeo said:


> I'm not a master at it, but the main problem for me when I started trying to play multiple parts at once was timing; I had two seperate internal clocks going, but they were slightly out of sync, so the main thing that cured that was getting each part sorted seperately whilst tapping my foot, so I'd know _exactly_ where the downbeats were supposed to be. After that it's mainly a question of finding ergonomic fingerings.
> 
> How's the Impellitteri stuff going by the way? Isn't that the vid he did for Young Guitar?



That's exactly what I'm having trouble with. I think I'm going to have to take out the old metronome.

The Impellitteri stuff is the video he did for YG. I like it because it's really his only instructional video. I mean, you can't possibly count "speed soloing", except for the couple of nice arpeggio shapes.  This video contains some nice bluesier shred licks and typical Impellitteri licks. However, it's not very long.


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## Shannon (Feb 25, 2007)

I do lots of this, but I go with a Drop A tuning because it's just a bit more user-friendly for this type of playing.


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## distressed_romeo (Feb 25, 2007)

Shannon said:


> I do lots of this, but I go with a Drop A tuning because it's just a bit more user-friendly for this type of playing.



Have you tried ADADGBE for this stuff? I'll bet it would work really well, although my seven has a floyd, and I can't be bothered to twiddle with it to try it out right now...


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## Shannon (Feb 25, 2007)

Briefly, I did. Still prefer the Drop A though.


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## Mikey D (Feb 25, 2007)

Well 'obviously' I am into this sort of thing!  

Over the next week or so I should have a few sheets of random funk/jazz grooves and videos of me playing them on my site. I am sure you could adapt them to the 7 rather than the 8 I have (tuned EADadgbe).

Will let you know.

Regarding playing both simultaniously, I just learn the bass part using only my r/h thumb and l/h index finger then learn the guitar part with the remaining fingers (normally only when parts are really hard), otherwise I try to think of it as one instrument playing both parts like an organ/piano rather than two seperate things.


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## DDDorian (Feb 25, 2007)

^^Your blog = kvltness! I'll be sure to keep an eye on it, there's a lkot of cool stuff there.

I have a lesson from Guitar Player about this very thing from Charlie Hunter, I've tabbed everything out in Guitar Pro but I've been systematically avoiding the laborious task of copying all the text to go along with it, heh. I'll get to it eventually though, I swear.


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## Mikey D (Feb 25, 2007)

DDDorian said:


> ^^Your blog = kvltness! I'll be sure to keep an eye on it, there's a lkot of cool stuff there.
> 
> I have a lesson from Guitar Player about this very thing from Charlie Hunter, I've tabbed everything out in Guitar Pro but I've been systematically avoiding the laborious task of copying all the text to go along with it, heh. I'll get to it eventually though, I swear.



Thanks! 

I've only just started is as I have only been playing 8 string (I was a bassist previously) a few weeks ago, will be good to see how it evolves. If you have any requests for transcriptions chuck em my way (however, I tend to only deal with jazz/funk/fusion type things, I'll leave the  to the more experienced on here!) But I have 4 years at this conservatoire so thought I would share what I can with people while I have the time to sit down and do these things.


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## DDDorian (Feb 25, 2007)

Mikey D said:


> Thanks!
> 
> I've only just started is as I have only been playing 8 string (I was a bassist previously) a few weeks ago, will be good to see how it evolves. If you have any requests for transcriptions chuck em my way (however, I tend to only deal with jazz/funk/fusion type things, I'll leave the  to the more experienced on here!) But I have 4 years at this conservatoire so thought I would share what I can with people while I have the time to sit down and do these things.



Cool playing is cool playing regardless of genre. Although I can't imagine you'll be busting out bowel-shaking Meshuggah-esque riffs anytime soon, there are a lot of different directions in which to take eight-string playing, so it'll be interesting to see your take on it. Are you a Wayne Krantz fan? I'm not big on the funkier side of fusion but I recently heard this guy and he has a cool, unorthadox soloing style that I'm really digging right now.

I was in the middle of transcribing that Charlie Hunter lesson when the power went out, which corrupted the Guitar Pro file, rendering all my work useless. Considering what a bitch it was to tab out, I thought "to hell with it" and just scanned it for all and sundry. Here it is, to do with what you will. Enjoy!


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## Mikey D (Feb 25, 2007)

DDDorian said:


> Cthere are a lot of different directions in which to take eight-string playing, so it'll be interesting to see your take on it. Are you a Wayne Krantz fan? I'm not big on the funkier side of fusion but I recently heard this guy and he has a cool, unorthadox soloing style that I'm really digging right now.
> 
> I was in the middle of transcribing that Charlie Hunter lesson when the power went out, which corrupted the Guitar Pro file, rendering all my work useless. Considering what a bitch it was to tab out, I thought "to hell with it" and just scanned it for all and sundry. Here it is, to do with what you will. Enjoy!



Thats a great lesson, cheers for putting that up. It basically covers a lot of what I thought about charlie's playing anyway, but to see it written out like that is a great help. Along with the more soloistic things at the end (I'm currently only really dealing with using the 8 string beast as a rhythm instrument), they are really gonna help me get a few things down on this.

Re Wayne...a few guys have told me to check him out. I will do shortly no doubt.

I hope to take the 8 away from charlie territory and sound like the bastard son of Scofield, James Brown guitarists and Soulive jamming with Jaco! But we'll have to see how that pans out for me!


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## distressed_romeo (Feb 25, 2007)

DDDorian said:


> Cool playing is cool playing regardless of genre. Although I can't imagine you'll be busting out bowel-shaking Meshuggah-esque riffs anytime soon, there are a lot of different directions in which to take eight-string playing, so it'll be interesting to see your take on it. Are you a Wayne Krantz fan? I'm not big on the funkier side of fusion but I recently heard this guy and he has a cool, unorthadox soloing style that I'm really digging right now.
> 
> I was in the middle of transcribing that Charlie Hunter lesson when the power went out, which corrupted the Guitar Pro file, rendering all my work useless. Considering what a bitch it was to tab out, I thought "to hell with it" and just scanned it for all and sundry. Here it is, to do with what you will. Enjoy!



Wow! Cheers for that lesson! I'll have to sit down with that tomorrow and work through it. E-rep for DDDorian!

Here's a Wayne Krantz vid I just found...I've been meaning to check him out for ages, and this just reminded me to... I'll definitely be investigating him further.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgswhBHPeI8

One thing I've been experimenting with since I started practicing this stuff is adding percussive effects to grooves, as well as the bass and chords. I've already been incorporating this into my acoustic playing for a while (Preston Reed influence y'see!), but started experimenting with mixing it into this style of playing as well. It sounds stunning when it works, but brings in yet another set of coordination issues...

Mikey, good to get your perspective on this. 

Regarding tunings, I got great results on my acoustic tuning the bass strings down. At the moment it's tuned AEDGAD, which worked really well for this stuff. DADGAD (from which I derived the above tuning) is actually suprisingly good for jazz-style comping, as the way the notes on the top four strings are laid out mean a lot of nice inversions fall easily under the fingers, and obviously the DAD tuning in the bass end is taylor made for basslines.


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