PlayJazzGuitar.com Forum

[darylcd]

I've been playing guitar for 42 years, 20 of that spent on the road playing professionally. I've recently got back into it but my tastes over the last 20 years is jazz and that's what I'm playing now.

Long overdue, I've been working on playing octaves fluently and although the scales and patterns are coming cleaner and smoother all the time, I do encounter the following issues. My muted strings make more "click" through my amp than I would like. And when I'm muting the strings at the 12th fret, the harmonics tend to play.

Is there an electronic trick, such as compression, that will clean up what comes through the amp so that the octaves are clean. How the heck does Lee Ritenour do that so well? I never hear extraneous noise fom Lee's amp, just clean octaves, and that applies to most jazz guitarist I hear (Of course Lee does everything well, one of my heroes.)

Thanks for any advice.

Daryl Crowley

[dkaplowitz]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

Before you buy any compressors or noise gates, I'm just curious are you sure it's not the way you're executing the octaves?

You've got a lot of experience, so pardon me if some if this is passe' to you, but are you sure your fret hand (or more specifically the finger that is holding the low note) is muting the string in the middle of the octave? How are you strumming the octaves, thumb? pick? Are you using quick attacks with either almost pretending as if the middle string doesn't exist? That's what I do and I have never noticed any undue noise coming from the muted string, though I'll give a closer listen next time I'm plugged in to see if I can detect anything. I've noticed a couple times sounding the harmonics with the muting finger, but it too hasn't seemed to be a problem.

Just curious. Good luck either way. I'd like to hear how you solve this one.

Cheers,

Dave

P.S. What kind of amp and guitar(s) are you using (and what kind of EQ settings), and what kind of strings (flat or round)?

[marco]

hi,here`s marco from amsterdam,
i`ve been playing octaves for quit some years now(after my first
cd`s of wes montgomery ,10 years or so)
played trough the years on all differend kind off guitars/amps
never had this problem
Play the octaves ALWAYS with my thumb
the action as low as posible
strum them like cords
and the sound of my guitar/amp not to clean

groeten marco