INSTRUMENTAL INQUISITION!
Guitar instrumentals have supplied some of music’s most evocative moments. Jason Sidwell asks top guitarists for their take on this iconic movement. This month: the multi-cultural prog-rock and fusion titan talks to GT.
GT: What is it about guitar instrumentals that appeals to you?
PY-Z: It’s the ability to tell a story without the use of lyrics, taking the listener on a journey using the expressiveness of the guitar to conjure different musical pictures or moods. Also, it gives me the creative freedom to step outside the confines of a conventional vocal song structure and experiment with different ways of conveying a narrative instrumentally. In addition, it’s a relatively new musical form historically, so there’s loads of musical potential here still to be explored, especially in terms of combining the guitar with new genres/sounds as well as expanding the instrument’s sonic palette.
GT: What can an instrumental provide a listener that a vocal song can't?
PY-Z: Without the use of sung lyrics a lot is then left to the listener’s own imagination in terms of the story that an instrumental can tell. Furthermore, melodically and tonally you can do things on a guitar that are way outside the scope of a singer.
GT: Any tendencies with instrumentals that you aim to embrace or avoid?
PY-Z: I try to avoid guitar clichés, or if I do use them I place them in a strange musical context that's outside its normal use. I’m always trying to be inventive and take different approaches to avoid repeating myself, or falling in a creative rut. So that might involve trying new harmonic concepts or rhythmic ideas, or experimenting with new guitar sounds. Sometimes I’ll even write a guitar instrumental without the guitar, such as using a keyboard as that helps me avoid falling back on familiar fretboard patterns and focus just on the music wanting to be expressed. Then it can be a rewarding challenge of taking a non guitar-like musical phrase and making it sound like it was meant to be played on guitar. It’s a good way of coming up with unusual riffs and phrases.
GT: Is a typical song structure of intro, verse, chorus, middle eight, etc, always relevant for composing an instrumental?
PY-Z: It can be a useful starting point sometimes, but it could also be a musical crutch if it is solely relied on. There’s a vast amount of different structures that can be used to yield many different and exciting creative results. Anything from a throughcomposed form to just having an infectious hypnotic groove as the basis for the whole song; that can be just what's needed. You can even take a drum solo or voice recording and use that to generate a structure, which is something I’ve done before. My 2010 album, Dance With The Anima was composed around a live 52-minute Marco Minnemann drum solo. On Eleven Wandering Mystics, from my 2018 Reali
