Author: Toni Pfau

Awhile back I put up a piece about multi-track recording. It included a modern adaptation of a solo cello piece written in about 1715 by Johann Sebastion Bach, probably, of all things, as a practice piece for his students. Having heard the fancy new version, I thought it would be interesting to hear how the original version sounded.

And by “original” I mean original. The cello in this recording was constructed in Bach’s lifetime, only 20 or so years after he finished this composition. It’s over 280 years old.

If you go back and listen to the modern version, you’ll notice that the modern cello sounds very different.

The modern cello emphasizes higher tones or harmonics of the instrument – it sounds “brighter.” This is, in part, because the more modern instrument has metal strings as opposed to the natural gut strings – made from animal sinews – of the older “baroque” cello.

The effect is to make the older instrument sound much less bright, with a much more assertive bass sound. I really prefer the sound of the baroque cello, especially for this kind of music. Hearing the depth of that sound, it’s amazing what these instrument makers were able to achieve 300 years ago with simple hand tools and pieces of wood hauled out of the forest.

Of course, the greatest cello is nothing without an equally great cellist like Ophelie Gaillard. It’s interesting to see her level of concentration. Clearly she is listening to what she is playing, occasionally correcting to obtain the sound she wants. Sometimes we can see her pulling or “bending” the string sideways to raise the pitch if she fingers the note just slightly wrong. Here is a real talent.

(Bending strings is often done with electric guitars too, but for a different reason. With a reasonably skilled player, the frets on the guitar insure the tone will be right when the note is fingered. Guitar strings are usually bent for dramatic effect rather than to correct the tone as it is on the cello or other stringed instrument without frets. To hear the effect of bending the strings on an electric guitar, checkout my post Wonderful Tonight: Three Guitars, One Song.)

People who see this video are usually surprised to see the cellist, Ophelie Gaillard, holding the instrument with her lower legs – there is no spike or endpin on the bottom. Why is this?

Well, in the baroque period luthiers (the people who make stringed instruments) hadn’t yet invented the metal spike that is a familiar part of modern cellos. In all likelihood this is simply because Home Depot hadn’t been invented yet, either.

Remember, this was well before the industrial revolution, when everything was made by hand, and metals were difficult and expensive to obtain. One did not just run down to Home Depot and buy some files, saws, and chunks of steel. The tools required to work the metal were even more expensive and rare, so musicians simply held the cello as though it were a giant violin, which it very much was. It wasn’t until many years after this cello was made that endpins became common.

One effect of holding and playing the cello without an endpin is that the instrument isn’t as stable. This makes it harder to do that thing where the player wiggles her fingers back and forth, called “vibrato.” Or, put another way, the spike makes it easier for modern players to get carried away with vibrato. Again, if you compare the modern version and this version of the piece, you’ll see that Steven Sharp Nelson uses far more vibrato than does Ophelie Gaillard.

More isn’t necessarily better. Leopold Mozart, father of the more famous Wolfgang Mozart, wrote a best-selling book on violin technique in which he complained about musicians getting carried away with vibrato. He ridicules violinists “who tremble constantly on every note as if they had the permanent fever.”

Wolfgang Mozart once wrote to his father describing vibrato as a natural and beautiful part of music, just as it is in the nature of the human voice. So long as it was used discreetly to emphasize a phrase or note, he was fine with it.

We don’t get to see how this video was recorded, but it seems likely that it too, just like the modern version, is a multi-track recording. There are good reasons for making a multi-track recording even, sometimes especially with, a single instrument.

During a live musical performance, sound bounces around the room, creating reverberation that adds a fullness to the sound. Reverb, as it’s commonly known, is so important to our perception of the sound that it’s very common to add this reverberation electronically to movies scores and electric guitars. Without the reverb electric guitars can have a lifeless sound that doesn’t work with certain types of music.

In any case, if the microphones are placed close to the cello, the reverb will be lost. If the microphone is placed too far away, there will be too much reverb and certain subtle sounds from the instrument may be lost. The way to avoid these problems is to record several tracks at the same time, with microphones in different positions, then mix the tracks to obtain the desired final sound.

Finally, I should probably explain the term “baroque.”

The term came into somewhat common use in the 1800s to describe the music of such composers as Bach and Handel. At the time, critics thought their music was too complex, too ornate, and calling it “baroque” was intended to be an insult.

Today the negative meaning is gone, and the term is simply used to describe the work of Western composers from about 1600 until about 1750, beginning with an Italian composer named Claudio Monteverdi, and ending, roughly, with the German Johann Sebastion Bach.

Copyright 2018 — 2021 by Toni Pfau. All rights reserved.

Contact Toni Pfau at:
503-358-5359
13530 N.W. Cornell Road
Portland, OR 97229
Toni.L.Pfau@gmail.com

I encourage students to listen to a variety of styles of music so they develop a feel for what makes a song “work”. When students become proficient at reading music, it’s fun and tempting to buy the sheet music for a song, sit down, and play the notes. But in my experience, students find it more rewarding to say “I heard a version that’s good, but I think I can do better,” then work out that better version.

That’s what I suspect happened with this version of Bruce Springsteen’s Jungleland.

Normally we would expect an unaccompanied piano piece to incorporate the song’s melody in some respect. This version doesn’t do that.

Instead, with a minor exception at the beginning (where the piano plays the opening violin part) this seems to be the piano accompaniment lifted right out of the original Jungleland recording from Springsteen’s 1974 album Born To Run. This was almost certainly orchestrated by Springsteen’s long-time piano player, Roy Bittan, and it turns out to be a beautiful piece in its own right. (No, this isn’t me playing. I don’t have the audio or video recording equipment to make good videos.)

Something I think students and non-musicians will find interesting about this video is that, with the close-up shot of the piano keyboard, we can actually see in detail how the music is “assembled”, if you will.

As the left hand plays the bass parts, we can see the pianist periodically switch back and forth between several chords (this is easier to see in the reflection off the face of the piano, visible in the upper right hand corner of the video).

In the original version those chords match or complement or “double” the guitar parts, especially the bass guitar part. This coordination of the bass guitar and the piano bass line give the original song a fuller, more complex sound that is consistent with the rest of the songs on Born To Run.

Perhaps more interesting is the reason this rendition works so well as a solo piece: it has an unusual musical form. While it would be classified as popular music, it’s definitely not written in the form of the vast majority of popular pieces.

Most popular music has three or four verses, each perhaps 30 seconds long, followed by a chorus of perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s well-known Sweet Home Alabama is an example. (One relatively well-known song that doesn’t use the structured Sweet Home Alabama approach is Roy Orbison’s Oh Pretty Woman.)

Almost all popular music is of this Sweet Home Alabama form. Jungleland is not.

Instead Jungleland runs straight through its nine minutes or so with little repetition, telling the story of survival in a sort of idealized life in a ghetto through a series of vignettes.

One way to think about it is as a sort of combination or three or four short, related melodies, all building on a single story. As you might imagine, this is a much more difficult way to write music, as it is both more complex and requires a lot more creative development.

Oddly, though Born To Run is widely regarded as one of the great popular rock and roll albums of all time, three of the songs on the album (Jungleland, Thunder Road, and Meeting Across The River) have this unconventional form.

In addition, the title track has four verses, but one has a completely different melody, and there is no chorus. What’s more, through the first three verses, the lyrics “Born To Run” only occur once. The familiar punch line of the song, “tramps like us, baby we were Born to Run,” is concentrated at the end of the song.

In any case, there is a lot happening musically on the Born to Run album. I’m always intrigued to find a such a beautiful piece as Jungleland that can stand alone when the lyrics and the rest of the accompaniment is stripped away.

Copyright 2018 — 2021 by Toni Pfau. All rights reserved.

Contact Toni Pfau at:
503-358-5359
13530 N.W. Cornell Road
Portland, OR 97229
Toni.L.Pfau@gmail.com

What are the differences between Classical, Acoustic, and electric guitars? People ask me. Through the magic of YouTube videos I’ve found a nice way to see and hear the differences.

I searched out three performances of the same song, one performed with an Acoustic guitar, another with a Classical guitar, and another with the song played, as written, on an electric guitar. The song is Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” Three guitars, one song.

But before we look at the videos, it will help to understand the differences if we take a quick look at how the guitar developed over time. Then we can compare how they look, sound, and are played, and the differences will make more sense.

What we now recognize as the “Classical guitar” was essentially fully developed by the famous C.F. Martin & Company by the time of the American Civil War (1861 — 1865), though guitars of the time tended to be quite a bit smaller than they are today.

Guitars were often played in the parlor (the home theater of its day) for entertainment on Sunday evenings, back in the days before cars, radios, TV, movies, or the internet. But professional musicians asked luthiers (the people who make stringed instruments) for instruments that were loud enough to be heard in larger venues.

Luthiers experimented with larger bodies and, eventually, steel strings. Combining the larger bodies and steel strings with different production methods allowed by industrialization brought about, by the 1930s, what we now recognize as a conventional Acoustic guitar.

But professional musicians wanted still more volume. In the 1930s musicians experimented with putting microphones in guitars. They wanted to play with the “Big Bands” of the era and not be drowned out.

Microphones were problematic in light, hollow wooden instruments and have been largely abandoned. In the 1950s guitars with solid wood bodies and specially designed electro-magnetic “pickups” hit the market, and the electric guitar was here to stay.

Each of these changes, to steel strings and larger bodies, to solid wood bodies and electronic pickups, has changed the sound of the guitar and how it is played. Let’s check out the differences.

First up, the Acoustic guitar. (Hint: take a close look at the headstock of the Acoustic guitar. Later, we’ll see that it is very different from the headstock on the Classical guitar.)

This is a fairly conventional, though very well made, Acoustic guitar. Plucking the strings gives a strong percussive sound, with a distinct bass and strong clear highs — the sort of sound we would expect from a high-quality guitar of this type.

The neck and headstock are conventional, and the yellowish color of the top of the body tells us that it is spruce, the usual light, strong wood used for guitar tops.

Normally the sides and back of the body are made of mahogany or rosewood. Mahogany and rosewood are dense and hard. They are used because they don’t absorb the vibrations of the strings, helping project the sound out the soundhole in the front of the guitar.

This Acoustic guitar has a large, somewhat squarish body, with a wide waist. This larger body, refered to as a “Dreadnought” body, makes the guitar louder and provides a stronger bass sound.

Not all Acoustic guitars have the large Dreadnought body, but it’s pretty common. It makes a nice-sounding guitar, but it’s usually too big for anybody except adults.

Finally, notice that the player holds the guitar by laying the guitar’s waist over his right leg. Not all Acoustic guitarists do this when seated, but it’s very common.

Now let’s check out the Classical guitar, grandfather of the Acoustic guitar. Again, take a close look at the headstock.

The dead give away on whether we are looking at an Acoustic guitar or a Classical guitar is in the head stock. Where the headstock on the Acoustic guitar is a solid piece of wood, the headstock on the Classical guitar is always distinctly slotted.

The slots are there because the Classical guitar uses a different type of tiny, geared, “tuning machine” to tighten the strings. This is a holdover from when there were no tuning machines, and guitars had tuning pegs the way violins do.

In any case, when we see a guitar with a slotted headstock, we are looking at a classical guitar.

There are other differences.

The neck is distinctly wider and less tapered than on any other type of guitar. This works well ergonomically because of the way the Classical guitar is held and played. The Classical guitarist always plays seated, with the guitar held diagonally across the body, with the left foot upon a small stand and the waist of the guitar laid across the left leg.

The Classical guitar doesn’t have quite the same distinctive percussive sound when strings are plucked, and it doesn’t have the deep base and ringing highs of the Acoustic guitar. There are several factors which contribute to this.

First, a big part of this difference comes from the strings. The Classical guitar uses nylon strings rather than the steel strings for which the Acoustic guitar is designed. The nylon strings simply can’t generate and transmit enough energy to the thin wooden top to produce the deep bass and those ringing highs that steel strings can. (You should never put steel strings on a Classical guitar. Steel strings require much more tension, and putting them on a Classical guitar will damage the guitar.)

Second, the body of the Classical guitar is smaller, which means bass notes can’t be as dominant.

Finally, the reddish wood on the top is cedar, which is very common — though not universal — in Classical guitars (spruce tops are also common). The cedar contributes to the distinct Classical sound.

Now, the electric guitar, played by the man who wrote “Wonderful Tonight”:

The guitar body is quite small because it is a solid piece of wood — hard, dense, heavy wood. It’s hard, dense, and heavy so it doesn’t absorb energy from the strings, which is exactly the opposite of the non-electric (that is, lower-case-“a” acoustic) guitars.

Since the strings can’t transmit vibrational energy to the wood, the strings will ring for a long time after they are plucked. This allows the musician to make all sorts of sounds that are very difficult or impossible to make on any acoustic guitar.

This sustain is what allows, for example, Eric Clapton to bend the strings sideways to vary their pitch, giving the song it’s distinctive little riff. Because the strings on an acoustic guitar can’t sustain that sound, bending the strings to get that effect generally won’t work well, and the player must use a different technique to get the same sort of effect.

The electric guitar neck is quite narrow. Again, this is an ergonomic thing. Electric guitars are generally played in a much more horizontal position than other types of guitars, and wrapping the hand around a wide Classical-style neck would be very difficult.

Electric guitars are not naturally musical sounding the way acoustic guitars are. As with the acoustic guitars, the wood of which the body is constructed makes a significant contribution to how the guitar sounds, but the many harmonics and overtones that give the acoustic guitars their complex melodic sound can’t be captured by conventional electro-magnetic pickups. The result is that there are innumerable electronic devices for changing the sound quality of electric guitars.

One final note: the electric guitar is generally played with a pick. The Acoustic guitar is played with either a pick or, as we saw here, using just the finger tips (“fingerstyle”). The Classical guitar is always played fingerstyle.

I figure that, after our little trip through Guitarland, you know more about guitars than 99 percent of the population. Now you can impress your friends and frustrate your enemies with your seemingly immense knowledge of music!

Copyright 2018 — 2121 by Toni Pfau. All rights reserved.

Contact Toni Pfau at:
503-358-5359
13530 N.W. Cornell Road
Portland, OR 97229
Toni.L.Pfau@gmail.com