Backing Out Of A Rut

Right now, Premier Guitar is my favorite music magazine. Not only does it meet or exceed the high level of gear reviews and instructional content of Guitar Player, but it also has a great web presence, both in it's website and it's connections to other guitar websites. It's almost like another site in my blogroll.

Part of this is their Web Exclusives. The guy I normally read most is John Bohlinger, who gives you a tour through his life as a gigging musician. But I want to point out another WE column, this time with Steve Ouimette.

Playing Backwards Forward is his suggestion for breaking out of ruts:

So, we’ve all heard examples of backward guitars. When I say “backward,” I mean back in the day when people recorded on analog tape (some still do, god bless them!), they would flip the tape backward and record against the tracks going the opposite direction, then flip the tape back to its correct path of travel. This created a reverse guitar effect that was incredibly cool and totally unpredictable. Songs like “Magic Man” from Heart and many, many songs from Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles made incredible use of this trick/technique. Aside from the cool psychedelic vibe and enveloping sound it created, we can learn a lot from this if we put it to good use.

Remember a few posts back, when I started Explain The Effect? I used the reverse tool to make forward a backward-tracked guitar solo. And while doing so, I had this exact thought.

But I never wrote it down.

Excuse me while I kick this guy....

....

Ahem.

So, record your playing on the computer, reverse it, and learn how to play the reversed lick forward. You may still need to invest in a Slow Gear clone in order to make it sound really trippy and backwards, but without that, you might come up with new cool stuff, which you can now play backwards and forwards.