PHI YAAN-ZEK
This month the psychedelic explorer took a minute out of his busy schedule to record six of his favourite jazzrock licks for GT, with Jon Bishop as your guide.
For this special feature we welcome Phi Yaan-Zek. Phi has recorded 11 albums as a composer, guitarist and bandleader and his music often explores advanced concepts and features a Zappa-esque exuberance with liberal doses of psychedelia.
In this month’s video Phi demonstrates all six of the licks with backing tracks and they are included for you to practice. The phrases in the six licks are tasteful and finger twisting, coming from a mixture of patterns and string skipping ideas.
However, Phi starts off by sharing some great sounding chord fingerings/voicings. These are augmented by use of a deep chorus sound, and are reminiscent of the fusion chord voicings of players such as Allan Holdsworth. If you have a volume pedal you could also experiment with swelling into these. Following this Phi treats us to some intricate lead guitar ideas.
All of the licks are played with the plectrum and Phi prefers to pick as many of the notes as possible. That makes for a solid articulation and rhythmic delivery. When he uses fingers they provide good tone and also extra facility for playing chords in a pianistic fashion. The picking-hand digits can also be used to tap extra notes in legato phrases.
The main influences in play here are Frank Zappa and Steve Vai and Phi references these two players on his website. He uses many different techniques and articulations to bring the ideas to life; in addition to legato, alternate picking and finger vibrato, string skipping is utilised and this can be challenging to navigate. As ever with the faster runs like those in Lick 5 we’d recommend taking it slowly at first and then building up the tempo. The whammy bar also comes into play and is used to add an expressive, vocal quality to the ideas in Lick 6. Phi also uses some interesting compositional ideas. For instance we find metric modulation in Lick 3. This is simply a posh name for the pulse staying the same while the time feel (time signature) changes; in this lick you will move between 12/8 and 4/4. In practice we’d recommend just concentrating on keeping a steady eighthnote rhythm and to let the backing track do most of the heavy lifting.
Phi also dips into less common time signatures such as 6/4, as well as tonal frameworks like the Harmonic Minor scale (R-2-b3-4-5-b6-7) and the Lydian mode (R-2-3-4#-5-6-7). Our notation contains all of the articulations and phrasing from Phi’s video performance, so look closely at how he fingers and picks the phrases.
Hopefully there will be a new technique, lick or phrase in here for you to perfect. If you find one you like, then you can memorise it or tweak it for use in your own playing.
See you next time.
