So when I first joined Guns N Roses it was in April of 2006 and we jammed seven times and then hit the road for three months.
No time to prepare, no time to get my gear or my brain in order or anything to wrap my head around
it was just jam three songs in one night, did it the next night, the next night, did it seven times and hit the road.
I was supposed to take a guitar solo, you know everybody during the show they have their moment where they take their solo and just yeah.
I always hated doing that kind of stuff that's not really my thing.
I like playing songs and especially if I'm playing in Guns N Roses I know that people especially at the beginning were not there to see me.
They were there to hear Guns songs and I just felt like I was providing them with a needed bathroom break from my solo or a chance to get a
beer or something but I wanted to do something that had value for the show and I knew a lot of people wanted the song "Don't Cry."
We weren't doing it in the set and I remember it was in Lisbon, Portugal.
There were one hundred and fifty thousand people watching and it was being streamed on AOL
and millions of people watching and it was time for me to take my solo and I just didn't want to do it.
I didn't want to go up there and just wank, that's what I felt like I was doing, I was just wanking.
I was just doing nonsense that had no musical value or anything of substance and I guess that was my own fault.
I should have really worked things out and I should have and if it didn't have substance that was on me.
But I felt like I just wanted to do something more, so I just started playing the song "Don't Cry" by myself
and I was just bringing in the melody and the chords and everything and just did it spontaneously.
The audience started singing along and for the next year it was a major part of, it was a nice part of the show where we all got to connect.
The audience it was, it was this moment where everyone was singing together, so that was my solo and you want to be able to do that.
You want to be able to take a song, think about it in your head and be able to play it.
It's storytelling.
You want to tell the story of the song and the way to do that is you have to be able to multitask mentally.
You have to able to say ok, here's the chords, here's the melody and here's how they go together and now I'm going to play them together.
You don't want to have just one singular thing, one linear line going.
You want to have a lot of stuff going on when you're telling this musical story of a song to people.
Just as an example, I won't do that song I'll just make something up on the spot.
A little piece of music, let me see hmm, hmm, hmm.
Doesn't really mean much until you put the chords behind it you know and make it.
It's something you do in classical and jazz, doesn't happen much in rock and that's probably because in rock we have such driven amps that
it would dirty up too much when you have all these chords and things that are just going to make it clash but you want to be able to do that.
In order to do that you have to be able to divide your brain and think about a few things at once and mental multitask.
So I want to show you a couple of exercises to do that.
First we're just going to start off with just simple banging on the neck kind of stuff.
Just to get different rhythms going, that's the first part of it just sort of breaking apart the pieces of your brain into two or more.
So, alright, we have a beat
and a high G note I'm just going to hit it, I'm just going to tap it
and a low G.
What I'm doing here also you should notice I'm resting my first finger across it to mute everything so that it stays clean.
If I don't you're going to hear stuff.
So use this finger as a mute and hit with this and this.
So we have one.
Now I'm going to make it to where this is going on one and this is going to go two beats for every one.
Just like that. Easy.
Then we'll reverse it.
Good.
Now let's make it triplets, so it will be three for one.
Let's make it go.
Then reverse it.
When you do this don't look at your hands, try and talk, try and have a conversation, don't even think about it.
Just have it some other background process going on that's doing this.
Alright then we're going to go four, so it will go.
One, two, three, four, one two, three, four.
And reverse it.
And back.
Let's go five.
So now we have five on this hand, one on this hand and reverse it.
And then back.
Very nice. Back to one.
Now let's do two beats.
And we're going to go two and three so go like that.
For every stamp of the foot, triplets.
And reverse it, like that.
So right now I've got one foot, two fingers and one mouth going.
That's mental multitasking.
And then let's do two and four.
And reverse it.
Easy one, they're divisions of each other so it's easy, it's nothing.
So now let's do two and five so it's going to go, we got one, two, one, two. One, two, one, two.
One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. Put them together.
Like that.
Still don't look at your hands, don't think about it, just let it happen.
Then reverse it.
Nice.
And go back.
Now let's go five and three.
It's tricky.
Keep your foot going.
Yeah, mental multitasking.
Blah!!
These kinds of exercises are not necessarily beautiful music going on.
It's more to exercise your mind and you apply these concepts to making music so that you can just do more and it is going to help open you up.
Start experimenting with that and we're going to continue and work on more of this in future lessons coming up.
Cool.