Electric Guitar: Imitation & Call and Response

I am writing this article while sitting at a picnic table in front of a vacant concession stand surrounded by four empty baseball fields. A large blackbird is perched on a telephone wire above me and we are engaged in a sort of "call and response." First, the blackbird makes a noise: "Squawk-eech-eech-eech." Then I try to echo the same sounds back to him. I can see the bird listening to my response, then he pauses for a moment and changes his call to a different one, "Thwack-tee-too tee-too, thwack-tee-too tee-too." The blackbirds in this area of Texas can make a wide range of bizarre calls and sound effects, some of them quite surprising and even a little scary.

(Call and response is usually a type of interaction between a person and a group in which a statement is made and any type of response, verbal or nonverbal, can be sounded back as a kind of "answer" to the initial call. It doesn't have to be an exact echoing of the caller's original words.)

This encounter with the musical blackbird reminds me of an unusual yet effective practice method whereby one tries to imitate noises or sounds with one's guitar - sounds one would normally not even attempt to play. Bird calls, elephant blasts, loud sirens, industrial noises, robotic or computer sounds from old sci-fi movies, death rattles, powerful engines, thumps or clicks, chainsaws rumbling, women or old men screaming, any kind of sound at all can be fruitful for you to imitate on your guitar. Not only will this improve your technique considerably, it may also prod you on to start thinking outside the limited, guitar-based mindset. Many guitarists get wrapped up and pigeonholed into playing only what they have heard other guitar players perform. You should avoid that.

One sound effect I enjoyed trying to replicate on my guitar in the early days was the sound of a bumblebee stinging a person. I would use a lot of exaggerated tremolo bar vibrato on low notes on the G string to imitate the bumblebee buzzing around, then hit a high harmonic and yank it upward with my tremolo bar to represent the bee sting, then I would play an open low E and depress the bar to represent the pain the person felt. Try it out if you like.

You should also listen to many different types or styles of music and attempt to play them; also try to execute some styles that seem very difficult or even impossible, and allow the process to change the way you think about your instrument.

To slightly return to the topic of this article, when playing blues music, you can perform a "question-and-answer" type of phrasing, where you initiate a phrase and end it first in a high pitched manner (the question), then play the same beginning again, but give it a lower pitched ending this time (the answer), which may be considered another form of call and response.

Source:

"Imitation & Call and Response," How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Jason Earls, Pleroma Publications, 2007.