Frank Gambale and his keyboardish music

I was thinking these last days about a particular topic: guitar players that studied music with keyboard players. Here I think about two guys. Two, because nobody else comes to my mind at this point. I am thinking of Frank Gambale and Joe Satriani.

Frank Gambale is quite famous for his strange way (I would call it) of playing riffs. I know, he plays fusion jazz or whatever you want to call that music and to a metal head or at least to a rock addict or even to a blues guitar player, it may seem strange, because in all the above enumerated styles, patters are more obvious, while in fusion/jazz, well, not quite.

Do I make any sense so far? Judging by my standards, Frank Gambale, which I like, by the way, plays strange. At least to my ears and this is exactly what makes his music interesting.

I asked myself at one point why and how could he think of those patterns and lick. The answer came from himself: he studied music by listening to keyboard players! He said it, not me! This is a very interesting way of learning to play the guitar, don’t you think? When you study guitar music to play it on guitar, patterns are more likely to match your finger possibilities, you can easily stretch your fingers to reach those notes, because the original song is played that way, but when you try to match keyboard music on your guitar, man, I can only imagine how difficult should be to play the licks, because they are not designed for guitar!! They are designer for 10 fingers reaching notes in particular fixed positions.

I had a class mate who used to play piano since he was a child and I remember him saying about guitar that it is a strange instrument. Why? Because I can not imagine why you can find the same note in more than one place! On piano I always know where that note is, he said! Guitar is a very stupid instrument! Right!

Ok, we could use this to our advantage, right? When you can’t play a note in one position, you can always play it in an other position, there is the same note. It may have a different flavor depending where you play it and how, but it is the same note in the end.

Personally I have tried only once to play some piano music on guitar, OK, twice, and actually just a few arpeggios, because I liked how they sounded, but this can not be called playing the guitar by piano music. What can be called like this is Frank Gambale’s music. I can not tell if the way he sounds is only because of his piano music education or because his further education in fusion/jazz, but it does sound strange.

Also, if you have the curiosity to study his picking style, you will see he does it differently, he even has a guitar method oriented towards this, but that is an other story, not related to his piano music background, but does contribute a lot to the way he sounds.

On the other hand, when I listen to Satriani, if I wouldn’t have seen it on Wikipedia, I would have said he always studied guitar by listening to guitar, which is not true.

So, do you know other guitar players that studied music by listening to players of other instruments? Frankly I can not think of anybody else right now? How about you?

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