Music Book Review: The Subversive Guitarist by Joe Gore

The Subversive Guitarist
by Joe Gore (Music 787.872 Gor)

The Subversive Guitarist by Joe Gore is hot off the presses, and I’ve been reading through it with a copy of my own at home for the last couple of months. The idea behind this book is to help players get through those periods that occasionally crop up when you feel like your playing is getting stale, falling back on the same old habits. There’s also a tendency I’ve often seen among guitarists to get fixated on “guitar music,” which of course leaves out what can be done studying what other instruments can do, or other styles of music. Author Joe Gore has an incredibly diverse and creative musical background: he studied classical music at UCLA and was into early music as a late teenager, then got his masters in composition at U.C. Berkeley, and went on to play in a wide range of bands in all kinds of styles, from afrobeat to indie rock. He’s played on tons of Tom Waits albums and my favorite PJ Harvey albums, and was also the editor at Guitar Player magazine. He’s worked extensively with Digidesign and Apple Logic, and has a deep knowledge of digital tone-shaping for guitar, and has also been hand-making his own fully analog guitar pedals as Joe Gore Pedals. This is a guy who knows how to avoid musical boredom, and “The Subversive Guitarist” is his prescription for intermediate and advanced players to shake off those cobwebs.

 

Each chapter is its own lesson, with stated goals at the beginning. After a couple of quick introductory chapters, which include a discussion about whether or not it’s worth learning to read sheet music (Gore ultimately thinks that it is, and I’d agree, especially when it comes to situations like breaking old habits by learning new music), he dives into three main subject areas: rhythm, technique, and notes. In the rhythm section, pardon the pun, lessons focus on interesting rhythmic displacements, found more often in Latin or African musical styles, but there is even a great list of popular rock and pop classics that have introductions with deceptive rhythms that lead to surprise when drums come in. There’s a great combination of rhythmic displacement and fingerpicking technique, using common fingerpicking patterns in ways they’re not usually deployed rhythmically. And there’s a great deep dive into emulating the phrasing of great vocalists.

 

In the Techniques section, the deep-dive concept continues, with Gore looking at the expressive subtleties possible within techniques most guitarists already use, like vibrato and fingerpicking. There are even some exercises designed to get players using their fretboard-hand pinky finger more, since many players stop using it especially higher on the neck. And he gets us thinking about an important area of music that electric guitarists often neglect: the use of dynamics.

 

The final Subversive Notes section looks at melodic concepts from several perspectives, including wide intervallic leaps, octave displacement, dissonances, and considering scales. Of all the things in this book, I’m especially drawn to his chapters on considering sequences instead of scales and reconsidering the way guitarists are often taught to conceive of the modal system. For non-guitarists, you might not be aware of this, but many rock guitarists spend an inordinate amount of their youth running through all of the church modes on guitar. Gore points out the monophonic history of the church modes, and their more modern use with sophisticated chord structures like those often found in jazz, and then basically suggests that we just start thinking about basic key signature structures, and what scale intervals might be flexible within a basic major and minor scale. This is a pretty liberating way of looking at these things that gets you thinking about music rather than various incarcerations in scale-jails.

 

My only slight complaint with this book is the layout — it looks like the pages were prepared for a smaller print size then the book was ultimately printed at, and as a result, there is a lot of unused space all around the margins. If the book ever gets reprinted or updated, I’d love to see a slightly larger font that makes some use of that space. But all told, The Subversive Guitarist is a great supplemental book for most guitarists. When you’re feeling stuck, it’s great to have a skilled creative catalyst like Joe Gore at your side to get out of the box.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick or The Unorthodox Guitar by Mike Frengel.)

 

( official The Subversive Guitarist page on the official Joe Gore web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

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