That world turninglesson is incredible...and I LOVE the nails-remark. Play with the meat...hehe
First part (typed this during my lunch break so plse excuse the typing errors)
from this month's Guitar World
by Andy Aledort
"Mac Daddy"
"I tend to think of myself as a refined musical primitive." Seated in the spacious comfort of his home studio in Brentwood,California,legendary Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham laughs gently at the somewhat derogatory classification."I never learned to read music, and honestly, I don't really know what I'm doing! But I've learned to work within my limitations and try to be true and do the best I can with what I have."
And he has done very well,indeed. Buckingham,59, experienced a meteoric rise to fame when he and singer Stevie Nicks,his partner in the duo Buckingham Nicks, joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974. The band's first release to feature the pair, 1975's "Fleetwood Mac", was an instant hit, yielding the smash singles "Rhiannon", "Landslide", "Over my Head" and "Say You Love Me", as well as Buckingham's blues-infected fingerpicking showcase, "World Turning", the latter offering a prime example of the guitarist's unique approach and virtuosic fingerpicking prowess.
But it was the band's subsequent release, 1977's "Rumours", that gave the group superstar status on the strength of the hit singles "Go Your Own Way", "Don't Stop", "Dreams","You Make Loving Fun" and "The Chain". To date, "Rumours" has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and is one of the best-selling rock albums of all time.
Buckingham took over more control of the songwriting and production for Fleetwood Mac's 1979 followup, "Tusk", while working on what would be his first solo album, 1981's "Law and Order", which featured the hit track "Trouble". His next solo releases were 1984's "Go Insane", 1992's "Out Of The Cradle" and 2006's "Under The Skin".
With Mac, Buckingham contributed to 1981's "Mirage" and 1987's multi-platinum "Tango In The Night", notable for the hit tracks "Big Love", "Little Lies", "Seven Wonders" and "Everywhere". It was followed "Tango", however, that the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter left Fleetwood Mac to work primarily as a solo artist.
In 2002, Buckingham planned to release another solo album, to be titled "Gift Of Screws", but Warner Bros. convinced him to contribute seven of these songs to a new Fleetwood Mac album, released in 2003 as "Say You Will".
Undeterred, Buckingham put together a new group of songs and, on September 15,2008, released his latest solo album, "Gift Of Screws", followed by a 29-city U.S.tour. On the strength of such son-writing/guitar gems as "Time Precious Time", "Bel Air Rain", "The Right Place To Fade" and the title track- hich, along with "Wait For You", features the Fleetwood Mac rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassis John McVie - "Gift Of Screws" is the latest testament to Buckingham's exceptional, one-of-a-kind musical sensibility.
GW: How did you develop your unique,fingerpicking-based approach to the guitar?
LB: I had always,from a very young age, been interested in music, but when my older brother brought home Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" record, it was a life-changing event for me. Suddenly there was music that seemed like it was for us, and not for our parents. I became an obsessive listener of rock and roll.
Elvis' guitaris, Scotty Moore, was someone that not only with a pick but also used his fingers simultaneously (a technique often described as "hybrid picking"), which created a sort of orchestral guitar style. Later on,some of Elvis' records featured (legendary country guitarist and master fingerpicker) Chet Atkins, and both of these players had a very orchestrated , integrated guitar technique in terms of how they defined the records that they were making. Those were my earliest influences that got me thinking about and learning about fingerpicking.
GW: Did the folk revival and acoustic blues resurgence in the early Sixties influence you as well?
LB: Yes,it certainly did. When the first wave of rock and roll started to ebb a little bit,I got very interested in folk music, and, of course, the three-finger Travis picking style is a basic technique that one must learn when playing that type of music. I was also listening to what you might call "classical lite", some pop interpretations of classical music played on nylon-string guitar that include the ring finger in the fingerpicking technique, with melody lines brought within the fingerpicking structure. I also picked up on the banjo,because a lot of folk groups featured the instrument. I bought myself some fingerpicks and learned to play bluegrass banjo. That is also a three-finger technique, and that style of fingerpicking informs some of the things I did later, like "World Turnin".
GW: Did you ever take any formal lessons?
LB: No, and I can't read music. I learned about music and guitar playing from listening to songs and from getting a chord book and playing as many songs as I could, so my approach to playing was always about the song. This also makes it difficult for me to analyze my own playing too deeply or technically.
GW: Did you spend any time learning to play guitar solos with a pick?
LB: No. When I got into a band after high school, I couldn't play lead, so I played the bass. It was only after that band broke up and Stevie Nicks and I became a duo that I began to write songs and add lead guitar into my range. By that time, I was not going to take to the pick very often. Sometimes in the studio, I will use a pick for specific application, but that's about it. The fact that I play lead without a pick is really just an extension of my limitations.
When I joined Fleetwood Mac, Mick tried to get me to start using a pick, but it wasn't going to happen !
GW: A great example of your unique fingerstyle technique is the track "Big love", which has become a very popular and exciting solo acoustic guitar show-piece for you.
LB : "Big Love" is interesting in regard to its subject matter, because it does comment on the way I was living my live a few years ago. I was a bachelor at the time and was living up on a hill in what I call a "post Fleetwood Mac" environment, in which many of the emotional scars and residue remained. I was leading a very narrow life that was focused on music and not much else.
That has changed greatly in the last 10 years, all for the better, having met my wife, had three kids with her and moved off the hill.
Aside from that subject matter and the sense of isolation that the song addresses,the song experienced an interesting evolvement. "Big Love" was the first single from "Tango in the Night", which was the last Fleetwood Mac album that I was involved with and produced before I left.
The band was not in good shape, personally speaking, and it was time for me to reclaim my sanity.It had been an ensemble piece, a band song, and somehow over the years it transformed into a single-guitar-and-voice piece, and as such became the template for many other songs that followed it, such as " Go Insane", which also started as an ensemble piece. The transformation of "Big Love" opened my eyes to the possibilities of what I could present as part of a show onstage with just myself and my guitar.
It also opened my eyes to the possibilty of making an album like last year's "Under the Skin", which was as much about what I didn't do as what I did. It had no lead guitar, no bass or drums to speak of, and it was all one or two guitars doing the work of the whole track. "Big Love" was the start of all of that, and I can't say exactly how it transpired, but it transformed itself into being a very present usage of fingerpicking styles.
GW: How do you play the song?
LB: There is something going on through the whole song that is very different from standard Travis picking: instead of laying down alternating bass figures on two strings with the thumb, it's more about bearing down on one string, in this case either the A string or the low E for the most part, and laying down steady eighth notes with the root notes of the chords. These eighth notes provide the foundation and pulse, and above that I use the index,middle and ring fingers to play the melody. A constant that appears throughout this piece is a bass note and a melody note played simultaneously on the downbeats of beats one and three in each bar;the other parts of the melody are syncopated against the steady-eighths bass figure on the eighth-note upbeats.
The fret-hand fingering is important, too: on the A5/G chord,I fret the low G with the pinkie;on the A5/F, I fret the low F with the thumb.
GW: How far does this acoustic arrangement stray from the original guitar part?
LB: There are things in the solo guitar version that have no analogy in the recorded version, such as the little single-note lead parts and the lighter arpeggiated chordal figures.
I can't say where these things came from;they simply developed over time.
GW: Do you take many liberties with a solo piece like this when playing live?
LB: I'm not big on taking liberties onstage. Certainly with solos sometimes,but when you find a structure that works, you should stick with it. People are there to see something that is working, and to see you do something that you do well, with a certain level of articulation. I'm not a jazz player, and I'm not someone who can go out and improvise a different set every night, and I know that. Nor am I a person who would change the set up from night to night. I used to hang out with Peter Buck, and he would pull songs out of a hat every night. I always felt there was a level of self-indulgence in that, because sometimes you'll come up with a great set, and sometimes you won't, and you're not really up there for yourself. You are up there for the people that are there to see you, and I like to stick with what I do best."
part 2 to follow ......
part 2 :
GW: It seems that you pick mosttly with your fingertips, as opposed to using the fingernails.
LB: That's true. I've tried to keep my nails strong and put strengthener on them, but onstage, when I get to the electric material, the nails just start flying into pieces, and so I decided that it's better to just cut them back and let the calluses do the work. The nails are going to go no matter what, so you're better off strating without them and getting used to playing with the skin.
GW: How did you develop the guitar part for "Landslide" ?
LB: "Landslide3 is a song Stevie wrote, and it was on the first album that she and I did with Fleetwood Mac. It had been sitting around for a while from before we actually met the band, so it was waiting to find a home. On the guitar lever, it's not too mysterious;it's probably the most traditional, in terms of application, and it's something that we wanted to keep very simple, much as we did later with "Never Going Back Again". It's one of the least complex, in terms of a picking style, in that it adheres pretty closely to basic Travis picking through the whole song. On the recorded version, there is an electric guitar solo that goes over it, so when we did it live, the solo became something that I intergrated into the primary acoustic part.
The song is played with a capo at the third fret, and all the chords in the main acoustic guitar part are open "cowbay" chords-C,G/B,Am7,and, on the chorus, G,D/F# and Em. Starting on a standard first-positionC chord, the picking pattern for the intro and verse is thumb-index-thumb-middle throughout, with the thumb providing the standard "aternating bass" pattern on the lower wound strings and the index and middle fingers picking out the higher notes of the chords on the G and B strings. On the C chord, the thumb alternates between the C root note on the A string and the third of the chord, E, on the D string's second fret. The pgysical fingerpicking pattern continues over the G/B and Am7 chords that follow, with the thumb alternating between the A and D strings and the index and middle fingers picking out the notes on G and B strings between the alternating bass notes. For the chorus, a nearly identical pattern is applied to the progression G D/F# Em C G/Am7, with the thumb picking the low bass notes of the first three chords on the low E string instead of the A string.
GW: Your newest release, "Gift Of Screws" features the fingerpicking tour de force "Time Precious Time". What inspired you to create the song's harplike, rolling picking pattern ?
LB: The impetus for the song itself came from a piece by Wagner. I was watching Terrence Malick's film "The New Worl", and there was a piece of music used over and over in the soundtrack that was, in terms of my knowledge of Wagner, atypical of his style. It was a beautiful orchestral piece, with swirling strings building up in an impressionistic way and then moving back down and up again - very liquid, very much like a waterfall. I decided to try, somehow, to state that with a guitar piece, and that's where "Time Precious Time" came from. It was a guitar piece before it was a song, which tends to happen some of the time.
GW: It sounds like the guiter is in a very unusual tuning.
LB: In order to get to what i needed to get to, i had to devise an alternate tuning that would allow me to play as many open strings at a time as possible. I might have been able to get to some of the chord positions in standard tuning, but it would have made it inordinately difficult to play.
I knew i needed a root note on the fifth string, which is tuned to G, one whole step lower than normal, and i needed a fourth, sounded on the low E string, which is tuned down two whole steps to C. As for the other four strings, i tried to find four open-string notes that would work best for the chord types i wanted, and i ended up with the D string tuned up one whole step to E, the G string tuned normally, the B string tuned down to A and the high E tuned down two and a half steps to B, resulting in the top three strings tuned whole steps apart. When picking all of the strings open, it sounds a little bit Asian.
The drill then became to learn chord forms up and down the neck that were basically inversions of that open sound and would go along with either the G root note or the low fourth.
GW: How do you create that harplike sound in the picking patterns?
LB: I basically just arpeggiate each chord from the lowest to the highest note repeatedly, using all four fingers to pick in a successive, rolling manner. It's much like what i do on the song "Not Too Late", from "Under The Skin".
A few weeks ago i playes "Time Precious Time" at a Triple-A convention, and i said to the audience, "i'm going to do this song,bit i may take a mulligan, because all of these chord shapes are really unusual".
I think i'm going to say something like that for the first few shows of the upcoming tour, like, "If i get through this , i deserve extra big applause!"
GW: Like two of your contemporaries, Pete Townsend and Richard Thompson, you are a guitarist that enjoys playing in a band, and also likes to approach the material as a solo acoustic performer.
LB: Well, i'm a fan of all the schizoid guitar players! (laughs) Without singling anyone out, i am a fan of people that use the instrument in service of the bigger picture, who are not necessarily out there trying to purvey their wares just for the sake of that alone. I think there is always a bigger picture, and i'm still trying to do that. I'm still learning. At this point in my life, to still have my motivation so intact, as well as my ideals, is great. It's a good time creatively and a good time personally.
Thank you for typing all that, Suzy!
