Book - Bass - The Rhythm Method - Down Funk Tutorial.pdf - Dla Basisty i gitarzysty - benuman

unk is not an easily defined commodity. Sure, your

The two latter definitions certainly aren’t wrong, but that “earthy”

handy-dandy dictionary may offer a few expla-

quality needs to be coupled with a danceable beat to qualify as

nations for funk or funky: “having a musty smell,”

“funk.” Add “sensual” and “syncopated” to our definition, and

“earthy and uncomplicated,” or “relating to music

we’re starting to get a little warmer—though maybe the dictionary

that has an earthy quality reminiscent of the blues.” But

would best serve its readers by just reproducing a photo of Nile

do these phrases get anywhere near the crux of the biscuit?

Rodgers next to the f-word.

ä ä ä

When it comes to defining funk rhythms for

the guitar, there are several schools of thought:

Rodgers’ slick chord moves, the salty grooves

laid down by Funkadelic’s many guitarists (in-

cluding Tawl Ross and Phelps “Catfish” Collins),

the skin-tight chanks of James Brown vet Jimmy

Nolen, and Prince’s downright nasty strumming.

And these days, funk is almost inescapable—it

permeates rock (dig the Red Hot Chili Peppers),

folk (check out Ani DiFranco), jazz ( John

Scofield), and jam bands (Galactic), and launch-

es all sorts of hyphenated, hybrid musical strains.

So if you’re looking to put a little funk in

whatever style of music you play, we’re here to

throw down a few essential tips on funkification

with a little help from Avi Bortnick, who has been

working in San Francisco funk bands since the

genre’s late-’70s heyday. Early last year, his profile

was raised considerably when he began touring

with John Scofield’s band in support of the

leader’s groovacious Bump [Verve].

“Initially, I hired Avi to cover the rhythm parts

I overdubbed on Bump ,” says Scofield, who has

never before toured with a rhythm guitarist. “I

wasn’t looking for another soloist, but someone

who lives in the rhythm guitar world. Avi does—he

has that perfect, snapping groove with a relentless

pulse, and he’s funky . He also understands how

Ex. 1

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etc.

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HEAVY HITTERS

That helps you internalize the sounds, the common voicings

and riff vocabulary, the rhythmic feel, and so on.”

So who should you listen to? That’s a subjective question.

“It’s pointless to try to say who’s ‘the best,’” Bortnick offers.

“There are so many great players and several different strains of

funk.” Still, you’ve got to start someplace, and Bortnick is happy

to offer his personal “essential listening” recommendations:

With funk—as with any other style of music—one of the

best ways to develop your craft is to transcribe things off

records and figure out what your favorite players are up to.

“Even without transcribing, per se,” says Avi Bortnick, “it’s im-

portant to listen to records that feature funky rhythm guitar.

• NILE RODGERS :“Rodgers’ flawless

rhythm playing gave an immediately

identifiable bounce to Chic hits of the

1970s and early ’80s. Most well

known is the hit ‘Le Freak,’ on which he

employed triads, single-note lines, and

double-stops. His feel and direct-to-the-

board tone on ‘Le Freak’ are elusive—

as evidenced by the difficulty most cov-

er-band guitarists have at truly captur-

ing the supreme groovaciousness of the

original track.”

• AL MCKAY “Earth, Wind & Fire’s super-

happening Al McKay helped set the

standard for what guitar could mean

for the groove of a tune. Check out

how seamlessly his part locks with the

percussion on ‘Getaway’ [from Spirit].

He was also masterful at creating dual-

guitar funk grooves, as heard on the

intro to ‘Shining Star’ [That’s the Way

of the World].”

• TONY MAIDEN AND AL CINER “With his

deep-in-the-pocket rhythms, Tony Maid-

en had an inspired freedom and spirit in

his playing. Check out his super-funky

single-note grooves on the intro and

choruses of Rufus’ ‘Dance Wit Me’ [from

Rufus Featuring Chaka Kahn], and how

he combines single-note lines and domi-

nant-7th chords in the verses. Also out-

standing is Maiden’s work on ‘Once You

Get Started’ [Rufusized].

“Al Ciner was another excellent Ru-

fus guitarist, who appeared on their

first records. Standout tracks: ‘Tell Me

Something Good’ and ‘You Got the

Love’ [Rags to Rufus], which has a re-

lentless groove featuring skanky, bent

double-stops.”

• PRINCE “‘Lady Cab Driver’ from 1999is

one track I like a lot— though anytime

Prince plays rhythm, it’s a glorious ex-

perience. He has also had some very

funky guitarists in his bands over the

years—including Wendy Melvoin,

Miko, and Levi Seacer, Jr.”

• BO DIDDLEY “You don’t how happening

the ‘Bo Diddley Beat’ is until you check

out how the inventor himself played it

on his recordings from the 1950s—

when the groove was all goosed-up

with amp reverb and tremolo, and

maracas shaking in the background.

The Bo Diddley groove is the core of

many funk grooves that came later.”

• ROGER TROUTMAN “The leader of the

great ’70s and ’80s funk band, Zapp,

Troutman played skin-tight, high-

voiced rhythm guitar on hits such as

‘More Bounce to the Ounce’ [Zapp].

Who needs an amp when a mixing

board can sound so good?”

—AL

all of the parts of a band work together—that’s

how he’s able to do his thing so right.”

strings are being struck that hard, you really feel

it in your fretting hand, and one big thing about

rhythm playing—that I think most people don’t

really get—is half of it comes from your fretting

hand. That hand is not just forming the chords,

it’s doing a lot of muting. Without muting, funk

guitar just wouldn’t happen.”

Now that we’ve got the basic right- and left-

hand techniques cooking, let’s put them to work

in some real grooves. Check out Ex. 3a , a single-

note line with a D7 flavor. (As the line has no

defining major 3 or minor 3, it could just as well

serve as a Dm7 phrase.) On its own, it’s just

dandy, but we can flesh it out with scratches—

voilá—in Ex. 3b .

“Deciding when to play it straight or when

to add scratches,” says Bortnick, “is a question

of what kind of vibe you’re going for at the mo-

ment, what’s going on around you, and how

much drive you want to give the music. Do you

want to take charge and drive the groove home,

or just play a little part that fits in?”

Offering another example to illustrate the

muting/scratching technique, Bortnick plays

Ex. 4a —a two-bar cousin of Ex. 3a that fits

hand-in-glove with A7

Picking Points

Before digging into the nuts and bolts of funk

guitar, let’s take a minute to look at picking-hand

technique—specifically the way you hold the

pick. Not that there’s any one “right” grip, but

funk rhythm playing is a very different activity

from lead playing, so it follows that a different

sort of technique might be appropriate.

“For any funky sort of rhythm playing,” says

Bortnick, “I hold the pick between my thumb

and my index and middle fingers, and my wrist

is a little closer to the floor than usual. This grip

lets your wrist move more freely and with a wider

range of motion than the common down-up

picking position. You get a little more power and

snap. Also, gripping the pick with two fingers

helps me hold onto it while I’m playing

rhythm—I strum pretty hard.”

So hard, in fact, that Bortnick installed Graph

Tech String Saver saddles on his Strat to cut

down on the inevitable string breakage. “I still

break some strings,” he says, “but that comes

with the territory. There’s a sound you get from

hitting the strings that hard—the whole guitar

pops , and that’s what you want. Also, when the

Main Squeeze

Fretting-hand muting is an essential skill for

funksters at any level. We’ll see how muting tech-

nique works in a musical context in some up-

coming examples, but before we do, let’s get our

muting muscles warmed up.

“I’ll often warm up with something like this

[plays Ex. 1 ],” says Bortnick. “My picking hand

is just going up and down in a sixteenth-note

rhythm, and my other hand is squeezing a chord

every sixteenth note. That helps develop the re-

lationship between your fretting-hand thumb

and fingers—that pressing on and off action.

This isn’t the most musical exercise—you could

do the same thing with triads or small chords,

if you like, or even a simple Caribbean groove

like this [plays Ex. 2 ], which features muted

‘scratches’ on beats 1, 2, 3, and 4.”

9 . (Note the subtle vari-

ation between the two measures. Hint: Check

out beat four in each bar.) Adds Bortnick: “In

something like this [plays Ex. 4b ], all the funk

is in the fretting hand. If I played the same thing

and left my hand off the neck, I’d just be strum-

ming away, with four or five open strings going

jang-a-lang-a-lang-a .”

Getting Down to Business

Bo Knows Funk

“When you distill things down to the ba-

sics,” says Bortnick, “you find a lot of funk

rhythms come out of the Afro-Cuban clave

rhythm most of us know as the ‘Bo Diddley

Beat.’ Check this elementary one-bar Em7

rhythm pattern [plays Ex. 5a ].”

Remember—even though Ex. 5a’s rhythm is

somewhat sparse, your picking hand should be

moving up and down at a sixteenth-note clip.

This helps keep your groove rock-solid. Simply

move your picking hand ever-so-slightly away

from the strings when you don’t want them to

sound. The upstroke and downstroke indica-

Ex. 2

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Ex. 3a

Ex. 3b

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7 7

5 5 5

Ex. 4a

= 100

A7 9

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grad.

B1/4

grad.

B1/4

7 5 5

7 7

5 5

7 7

3 3

tions should help clarify matters. As with Exam-

ples 3a and 4a, you can dress up Ex. 5a with

scratches, as illustrated in Ex. 5b .

“You can take that basic phrase,” Bortnick

says, “and move it over one sixteenth to get this

cool variation [plays Ex. 5c ]. And you can move

it over another sixteenth—now an eighth later

than Ex. 5a—to get this [plays Ex. 5d ], and so

on. Each variation is equally funky. Deciding

which variation to use depends on how you

want to interact with the bass line. You can ac-

cent the same beats, or play something that

bounces off the bass line—something that fills

in the holes, or ‘answers’ it.

“If you displace the start of our original

phrase [Ex. 5a] far enough, eventually the two

halves of the bar switch places, giving you this

[plays Ex. 5e ]—which feels pretty different. In

Afro-Cuban circles, they’d call that a ‘2-3 clave’

because there are two attacks in the first half of

the rhythm, and three in the second half. In con-

trast, our starting figure would be considered

a ‘3-2 clave.’ Though funk is not nearly as cod-

ified as Afro-Cuban music, there is a lot of over-

lap, and the 3-2/2-3 concept is a neat distinction

that can help you understand different types of

funk rhythms.”

plings—all of which can be plugged into Ex. 6a’s

rhythmic formula. The final voicing pair is ac-

tually a single chord form that can stand in for

Bm11 or E9 . Ex. 6c —in the style of Prince’s “Kiss”

riff—shows the voicing in action.

Modal Funk

“Dorian harmonies are very common in

funk,” says Bortnick, “so they’re worth getting

to know. Something like this [plays Ex. 6a ] is a

standard Dorian-based riff you might play over

a Bm7 - E9 vamp. You could even superimpose

this figure over a static Bm7 vamp—or when you

just have E9 —to add some subtle harmonic

movement.”

What makes it a Dorian progression? If we

take the two chords involved— Bm7 ( B - D - F

9 colors. “Even though the flavor of the

chord changes as the top note moves,” says Bort-

nick, “I think of this as basically a one-chord

vamp.” Ex. 7b is a greasy variation on Ex. 7a’s

first bar, with a chordal slide on beat one.

Though funk rhythm guitar is more about

rhythmic repetition than variety (the aim is to

create a danceable, hypnotic groove— not to im-

press drummers with how many hip syncopa-

tions you can squeeze out of a chord), there’s

usually some room for an occasional fill or turn-

around at the end of a phrase. Ex. 7c shows how

Ex. 7a could be tweaked to add a little harmonic

9 and

- A )

)—and string together the

tones of both chords, we get B , D , E , F

-B - D - F

, A .

With just six degrees, that’s an incomplete scale,

but it looks more like B Dorian ( B , C

, G

, D , E , F

, A ) than any other common B -minor scale

or mode. (Note the relationship of the chords:

Im7-IV7. Anytime you see a progression like this,

it’s safe to assume Dorian.)

Ex. 6b offers several alternate voicing cou-

Ex. 4b

= 100

A7 9

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5 7

grad.

B1/4

5 7

grad.

B1/4

Ex. 5a

Ex. 5b

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Em7

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Em7

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Ex. 5c

Ex. 5d

= 80-90

Em7

= 80-90

Em7

K ö

J ö

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Å ö

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Hypno-Funk Fills

Now that our funk muscles are getting

stronger, it’s time to stretch out into more ad-

venturous rhythmic territory. Ex. 7a is a two-

bar funk phrase based on D7 , and incorporating

and E9 ( E-G

and rhythmic spice.

Examples 7d and 7e —either of which could

supplant Ex. 7c’s bar 4—offer even more options.

“Both fills start with descending triads that I ‘bor-

rowed’ from [keyboardist] Billy Preston’s signa-

ture riff on ‘Will It Go Round in Circles,’” admits

Bortnick. Ex. 7d is the skankier of the two—with

beats three and four suggesting something in

the style of Rufus guitarist, Al Ciner. Ex. 7e is clos-

er to Preston’s vibey original.

Funk to the Future

This cache of riffs should give you plenty of

food for funk thought, and if you want to keep

the disco ball rolling, here are a few final words

of funk wisdom from our guide:

• “There’s a huge tonal difference between

playing hard with your volume rolled back a

little, or playing gently with your volume wide

open. As I may play any given passage harder

or softer for timbral reasons, I’m always ad-

justing my Strat’s volume knob to keep the

overall volume about the same.”

• “Experiment with effects—including tried-

and-true funk tools such as wah-wah, envelope

filter (auto-wah), phaser, and delay. Each of these

has many uses, from cliché to novel.”

• “You must have solid rhythm to play funk.

One thing I’ve done to practice rhythm is to pro-

gram a drum machine so that it randomly drops

some beats. That helps you develop your inter-

nal clock—rather than having the metronome

beating the time into your head.”

• “Play with musicians who have a solid, funky

time feel—especially bassists and drummers.”

Ex. 5e

Ex. 6a

= 90-100

Bm7

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Em7

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Ex. 6b

# ö

Bm11 E9

Bm7

Bmadd11 E9

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Ex. 6c

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Ex. 7a

D9 D7 9

= 90-100

D9 D7 9

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let ring

l.r. - - -

4 5

Bm7

6 6 6

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