Private Lesson
Rising Young Guitarist Charlie Hunter Holds Forth on the Virtues of Digital Independence and Eight Strings
By Mac Randall

Sitting on a comfortable maroon couch in the living room of the airy Brooklyn apartment where he's lived for the past three months (his first residence ever outside California's Bay Area), guitarist Charlie Hunter launches into a solo rendition of "Enter the Dragon," a tune off his latest album, The Return of the Candyman (Blue Note). After a rhythmically staggered intro featuring a thorny rising chord progression and judicious use of the open high E string, the fun really begins: Hunter backs his single-note lead work with a figured bass line that seems almost entirely independent, to the point where, if you closed your eyes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there was another musician cutting loose in the room. And not a guitarist either - definitely a bassist.

Aiding significantly in this aural illusion is Hunter's choice of instrument, an eight-string Novax electric, with the top five strings tuned (low to high) A-D-G-B-E like a regular guitar, and the noticeable heavier-gauge bottom three strings tuned E-A-D, inhabiting the usual range of a bass. For further jollies, the Novax's signal is split in two: Hunter plugs the bass strings' output into a bass amp, and the guitar strings' output into - logically - a guitar amp, with different processing for each.

"Separate but equal" is a fair description of Hunter's philosophy regarding the guitar's two sections: His right-hand (picking) thumb always handles the bass lines while the other fingers always handle the chords and soloing, and neither part of the hand ever strays into the other's territory. "Playing this way can be strangely limiting," he acknowledges. "The more soloing I do, the less complex the bass lines become, and vice-versa. But I know that eventually I'll find a common ground that's satisfying to me. I've only been playing eight-string for six years now; I've got a ways to go yet."

Hunter's interest in playing a guitar with extra low end came out of his love for players like Hoe Pass and Tuck Andress, especially the way they incorporated bass lines into their comping and soloing. "First I had a seven-string made out of an old Vega six-string," he recalls. "I played that for about three years, and then I decided I wanted to get a little more bass happening, so I had Ralph Novak build me an eight-string, the first one he'd made. That opened up a lot of doors for me; it's a real full-service instrument.

If you're a regular six-string plectrist, you may be asking yourself what relevance all this has to your own playing. True, you're probably not going to rush out to buy an eight-string any time soon, but the techniques that Hunter has had a to develop to master his instrument are both applicable and helpful to players of guitars with any number of strings. Principal among these is digital independence- in other words, the ability to move the fingers of both hands out of tight rhythmic lockstep with one another and get them to perform a number of separate tasks at the same time.

Beginning with the left hand, Hunter says, "You should try and familiarize yourself with all the possible combinations of notes that your hand can perform. Start by picking a bass note and putting your first finger on it. Let's say you pick a B [seventh fret on the sixth string]. Now see how many voicings of a B chord you can play in that position, and then see how many variations you can play on those voicings - augmenting, diminishing, flatting the fifth or the seventh, and so on. Then pick another chord over the same note, and find all its voicings and variations. Then pick another bass note, and do the same thing as you did with the B. You'll find there are lots of possibilities without even moving your hand. The next thing to do is work out a bass line and find chords you want to put on top of it. Start with one inversion for each bass note and multiply from there. Find out what chords work where. Eventually, when you've got it down, you'll know which combinations work and which ones don't.

"It's important to know all these combinations," Hunter continues, "because knowing them gets you out of that mindset that's the main problem of guitarists, which is that they can play certain licks in a certain position and that's it; they never trained their ears to hear the other ways things could go, and so they're stuck in on place. When you're trying to hold down a bass line while comping or soloing, it changes your objectives. You might not want the bass line to move out of a certain position, so you've got to know what you can play that'll work in that particular position. And if you work on finding that out, you realize, boom - there are 35 chords right there in one note."

For the right hand, Hunter recommends working on music that will get your fingers to move independently of one another, preferably in between the notes of a thumb-plucked bass line. "Try to work on more complex rhythmic combinations that you can divide up between the fingers," he says, illustrating with a heavily syncopated Latin groove; through the pattern is tricky, thumb and fingers never land never land on a string at the same time. "Another good thing, again, is to practice walking bass lines with chords on top of them. You know your bass line is always going to be four beats to the bar, so you can play chords in whatever rhythmic permutation you can think of over that bass line. Even working with a single inversion of a single chord - say C minor - there are so many possible rhythms that you can go for a couple of hours and even crack the tip of the iceberg."

For advanced study, Hunter recommends checking out the work of past masters. " The best thing to do for building up your fingers' independence is to pick any James Brown tune, learn both the bass and guitar parts, and practice them until you can play them at the same time. Another great thing is to listen to jazz organists and transcribe what they're doing for guitar. It can be done: I've transcribed almost every solo Larry Young ever recorded. He's especially good for guitarists, because he liked to play in fourths, which I think came from listening to McCoy Tyner, and that kind of voicing is perfect for guitar because it's a great shape." He plays an example, barring his first finger across the fourth and third strings at the seventh fret and adding his second finger on the second string at the eighth fret. If you like naming things, call it a Dsus4, but it could easily be related to any number of chords, and the form is eminently movable."

"Learning and transcribing other stuff is important because if you're able to hear someone play something and play along with it, it makes more sense," Hunter says. "It's always better to try to play music rather than an exercise when you practice. Playing real music is more challenging than any exercise you could make up, and it's more interesting and fun too."

Hunter stresses that this kind of separating skill doesn't come easily. "The hardest thing is when you're doing something a little more complex, and you've got to get both the bass feel and the guitar feel right, and get them right at the same time. You're playing two things, but you're always trying to make it one thing. Classical guitarists have to deal with a similar technique of playing independent lines, but I think it's easier for them because what they play is usually less rhythmically taxing - there isn't as much syncopation. It's still tough for me," he confesses. "Every day I'm trying to get better, trying to evolve what I'm doing on the instrument. Sometimes I wonder why I'm doing it, because it's so hard. But when you get it right, that's all the reward you need."