In pursuit of the tone - namely the sound of Wes Montgomery - I abandoned using a pick several years ago. While it has is drawbacks when I'm looking to strum (especially in say a funk context) I'm a convert otherwise: It's fine for comping, and great for chord soloing and single-note octave lines. I find it affords a much greater range of tonal colours and expression: Virtually never use the volume knob anymore, except to set an initial level, any volume modulations I need can be accomplished in a "tactile" manner. For that matter, I never end up touching the tone knob, as a wide range of tonal colours are a literally at ones fingertips when playing without a pick. While Wes only used his thumb while resting his fingers on the guitar, I've found using my index, middle and (on occasional) ring fingers - in a sort of hybrid classical guitar technique, though without any nails - is what's working for me.

At the time I became interested in choosing not to pick, I was also looking for a way to more readily execute wide intervallic leaps, and integrate right-handed tapping techniques. Not so much in the interest of being the next Van Halen, but actually in pursuit of certain Coltrane/Dolphy-type possibilities. Conventionally cross-picking a line of wider intervals that alternate between, say, the low E/A strings with the top strings always struck me as a lot of work (a job best left to the John McLaughlins of the world). Finger-picking these types of intervals is comparatively simple, however.

So, though I certainly can't recommend ditching the pick for guitarists across the board - I'd definitely in the camp that it has it's merits for the jazz player in search of a warmer, more pliable tone, and perhaps the opening of other some doors leading to different shapes in your lines.

Influenced by the chord voicings employed by McCoy Tyner and the harmonic patterns used by John Coltrane, I began tuning his guitar in fourths (E-A-D-G-C-F, low to high) in 1990. Initially, this was intended as an experiment to explore the possibilities it opened up for more symmetrical scalar patterns and chord voicings than the conventional guitar tuning.

One of the immediate (and lasting) effects of this change is that standard bar chord voicings and open position chords are no longer workable options. As it turns out, many guitar cliches one takes for granted become significantly altered - making one realize that these phrases have become cliches due to how readily they fall under the fingers in conventional tuning — a convenience which is often not the case when tuning in fourths.

By the same token, the 4ths tuning lends itself to its own set of cliches spawned from certain types of more easily executed phrases and voicings. For example: Any chord voicing spanning 4 strings can be transposed by simply moving to any other set of strings without changing the fingering. Octaves, for instance, use the same fingering regardless of the string pairs being played. The same holds true for any scalar patterns - gone are the asymmetries resulting from the third between the G-B strings in standard tuning.

So, while tradeoffs include some oddities — say trying to cop a Wes Montgomery line or chord solo note-for-note — the symmetrical nature of the fourths guitar tuning greatly simplifies playing one of Wes' signature octave runs. Similarly, Coltrane's pentatonic and sheets of sound patterns are readily transposed anywhere on the fretboard without changing the fingerings.

As an aside, I've recently embarked upon a side project to archive my thoughts and reflections on jazz albums that have influenced my over the years. As I say, I've just embarked upon this - and it promises to be a long-term project at the rate it's going thusfar- and have posted some initial musings at jazzophile.blogspot.com. By all means jazzophile is (and will remain) a work in progress - and improvisation of sorts in its own right, a fluid archive of words inspired by the music.

I qualify the jazzophile blog with these caveats, as I've never really been a proponent of jazz criticism (or any music criticism, for that matter, with the exception of the writings of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, namely Black Music). General speaking, I've been critical of jazz reviews and related writings for several reasons: the critics aren't musicians (you do the math) - and secondly, I feel there's a significant component to music - probably the most important - that eludes capture by the written word, and cannot readily be quantified in writing - at least not by any but the most gifted writers. (Actually, the same holds true for the other arts - Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Kerouac, Langston Hughes and Baraka are on the short list of those who pull it off, at least for this humble reader...) This more intangible, "unspeakable" aspect of the music may not be apparent to non-musicians, but when you're actually playing music, you're hearing it much differently than someone who doesn't play. Using writing to quantify music seems rather shaky to me on other grounds as well, as it amounts to trying to shoehorn one art form into the confines of another. Look at it this way: Would you consider sculpture a viable vehicle for criticism of literature? Personally, I wouldn't rule it out, but I'd be hard to convince that anyone but fellow sculptors would have the possess vocabulary to appreciate what was being communicated.

So, in light of all this, what I'm really striving to accomplish with jazzophile is to write about the music from the perspective of a musician (one who does not profess to be much of a writer), and do so not from a particularly technical (i.e. harmonically analytical) standpoint, just as a musician listening to the music. To try to convey some of what the vocabulary of the music conjures up in me.