Maestro Paul Gilbert discussed his recent Dio tribute album and revealed a few secrets of how you can perform vocal parts more convincingly on electric guitar.
Gilbert’s “The Dio Album” saw him doing an all-instrumental run of Ronnie James Dio’s career. There were songs by Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio’s own band. And apart from having to replicate the sound of Tony Iommi and Ritchie Blackmore, among others, he also performed all of Ronnie’s vocal lines on the electric guitar.
This, obviously, comes with a whole set of challenges. According to what he told Jordi Pinyol in a recent interview, it comes down to implementing a few techniques in a certain way, as well as choosing guitars with the right set of specs.
“One of the main things, technically, was pinch harmonics because we’re trying to imitate the vowel sounds,” he explained (transcribed by Killer Guitar Rigs). “So with the pick harmonics, you can kind of get it. It might not be quite as full range, but you can definitely get much closer.”
“So I started to play guitars that had shorter necks — or, I should say, less frets. I used an Ibanez Roadstar — it has 21 frets, like a Strat. And since it had less frets, I had more room to do the pick harmonics.”
Another approach, as he adds, was trying to look at the fretboard from a different angle and play “horizontally” instead of “vertically.” Paul explained:
“So that, and also just playing horizontally. In some of the songs I’ll do the whole melody on just one string, because that makes it easier to slide. And you don’t have to use the slide on your finger, you can just use your finger as a slide.”
As guitar players, we all find this at least somewhat relatable. When you were just starting out (or if you’re in that situation right now), you might have tried to play a melody with one finger of your fretting hand on just one string. Although a seemingly basic approach, it’s exactly this that helped Paul achieve a more human-like touch in replicating vocal lines. He continued:
“And it was funny because when I first started playing guitar — when I was nine — I only used my second finger. In a lot of this stuff, I’m just using the second finger. [Laughs] I mean, I’ll have the first finger that is supported, but we’re just playing up and down like this because then it’s so easy if you want to slide — it’s right there.”
What’s more, this also comes with its set of challenges, with Gilbert adding:
“But mentally, it’s challenging because, as guitar players, we’re usually trained to play across the strings. We’ve practiced the scales, and if we want to play the five notes of the pentatonic scale, we’ll keep our hand in one spot and play across the strings, where you don’t get slides that way.”
“But if you learn this scale horizontally, it works so much better. It’s so much easier to be expressive, but you have to know where to put your finger, and it’s not the same. Instead of going [vertically], you’re going [horizontally], and everything’s different, so it’s a mental challenge.”
During the interview, Paul also addressed the challenges of doing covers of songs that were initially recorded back in the 1970s and the 1980s. The obvious technological advancements that we have today can, in a way, present an obstacle. This is especially the case if you’re overdubbing and recording individual tracks for songs that were largely played live in the studio.
Paul did exactly that because he played all the guitars and bass parts, as well as keyboard and vocal lines on the guitar. He was only accompanied by Billy Ray on drums. Asking how he approached the songs, the guitarist explained:
“With this one, I did much more overdubbing [of] the parts separately. But fortunately, I had a good map to follow because I’m not creating new music. I’m recreating it with my own kind of style and finger performance fingerprints on it.”
“If it’s new music, sometimes, it’s nice to do it that way because you’ll discover things from the performance that are almost like accidents, but they’re beautiful. But with this, I didn’t really want accidents. I wanted it to very strictly follow that original structure. So I think for this, I could do it that way, and it would still work.”
Photo: Lars Horstmann (GS2019 – Paul Gilbert)
