I Transcribed 4,144 Notes from Trey Anastasio's Solos and Discovered This...

[00:00:00]4,144 notes, five solos, everyone transcribed by hand, and somewhere inside of all of that, I found five things Trey does that most players never even notice. That's exactly what this is about. I'm going to walk you through all five discoveries, one per solo, so you can hear it and use it yourself. Have you ever felt like his playing has some kind of quality you can't quite name, some architecture underneath the notes?

[00:00:32]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Some of those notes are different, a couple added right here, but the feeling is completely different. You know, what the second version targets is the notes of the chords in a melodic way, what are called guide tones, what what I call them. You typically they're thought of as just the thirds and the sevenths of a chord, but I think of them a little differently, more like the notes, any notes of the chord, but played in a way that they're linked together as a melody, so that it functions as like a guide for you to improvise around. So, he's You know, he's bending up to this note, then he's playing this one, each one a note from the chord, and it sounds like it's going to go here, but then he he resolves it down to here. So, he's improvising.

[00:01:25]>> [music] >> You can do anything, really.

[00:01:33]And they just [music] fit right around the chords. So, these are the notes that define the chord progression, and when you land on them, the harmony and the melody start to lock in together. It stops sounding like you're just playing over the chords, and it starts sounding like you're playing with the chords. If you want to actually dig into this yourself, I put together a free three-day mini course called Trey's Blueprint. Each day is one concept, one backing track, and then I get out of your way and just let you play. The link to it is in the description below. When I started transcribing you and your own myself, another one from a live one.

[00:02:07]I was expecting, you know, complexity like right out of the gate, but the opening of that jam is just the minor pentatonic scale. It's just you're just way up here. Except occasionally, you know, a blue note in there. But then, after kind of moving around back and forth, we kind of doing the call response blues thing, he starts just playing bright at the scale over and over.

[00:02:34]>> [music] >> Do you hear that? The notes didn't change. The first way was just to me playing in typical way, playing right on the beat, going up scale, sounds just like a minor pentatonic exercise. But what changed was he was just simply playing those offbeats. And by doing that, instead of, you know, it's a scale.

[00:03:02]>> [music] >> You know, and he was really locking with the band, my track. It's it's a little different. We didn't have that exact spot there where everybody's locking right in. But when you do, that's what makes all the difference. It's not about playing crazy fancy stuff all the time.

[00:03:17]Sometimes you don't even need more notes. You just need to know more of what to do with the ones that you've you've already got. So, this one is from Possum, mixing it up this time from Brooklyn 2004. When I was transcribing this solo, I kept seeing sixths, these intervals popping up all the place, and I'd I'd mark them down when I spotted one, and by the end, yeah, there was there was a lot of them. So, pretty often when the chord moved away from home, Trey switched to focusing on sixths. Basically, instead of running up a scale, he'd choose notes that are built around whatever the chord is playing at that moment. So, when the chord moves, his note choices move with it. Let me show you what most players do over the chord changes. You can guess what it is, and then what he's doing with six.

[00:04:03]>> [music] [music] >> The first one works, but notice how it just kind of sits there, you know, it didn't move with the chords. Well, the second one did.

[00:04:33]And you can hear the harmony shift because the intervals are tracking. It's not just a different sound, it's a different relationship to the with the band is doing underneath it. And he was doing that sometimes when he was going from, you know, G to A, or really G7. So, it'd be like this.

[00:04:50]>> [music] >> And sometimes just or sliding.

[00:04:55]>> [music] >> And just outlining the chords with that.

[00:04:59]So, when you start throwing that in there, it just it just changes everything. And And once you hear it and and how Trey's doing it, you start catching it everywhere. And this is one of the concepts in Trey's Blueprints, the free mini course. If you want to hear what it sounds like when you can actually start tracking the chord changes like this, uh that's that's where to go. So, the link to it is in the description down below. Reba was the one that took me the longest to figure out, and this one is from Near Z93.

[00:05:26]The Worcester Centrum, actually the same venue where I caught my first Phish show back in '97 when they played a Runaway Jim for I think was 58 minutes. Quite quite an intro to a a Phish show. And, you know, what I found in this version, you know, it wasn't really in the notes at all. When I was transcribing this solo, I kept hearing these tonal shifts, something changing. Not the notes, not the rhythm, the actual sound. And what I realized is that Reba is just the perfect example of how Trey thinks in levels. Clean, a little dirty, even a little more dirty. He's moving through all those stages deliberately, and the tone is doing as much work as the actual notes.

[00:06:05]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> So, of course he typically has way more levels than that, way more subtlety of how he's shifting between them, but that was just a condensed three three of them so you can kind of really hear how it changes. And by the end, you know, he's somewhere completely different from where he started, and he got there one knob or one pedal at a time. You know, that tonal arc of the solo is itself a setup and a payoff. And he uses how it's his gear in a way it it's not just the gear itself, it's like how he's using it that's doing is just as much work as the notes are. Now, Discovery 5 is the big one. You know that feeling when a Phish jam just lifts off, you know, I always thought it was magic. It's not purely magic.

[00:07:16]There's a little bit, but it's it's architecture, too. So, Harry Hood, this is another one from A Live One, and I can't stop with that album. You know, Trey's got a whole toolkit for building that feeling, going outside the key, climbing registers, pushing the dynamics. But the thing that suddenly occurred was just the simplest thing of all.

[00:07:37]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Here he is building pressure. He was just repeating some simple thing over and over and every, you know, repeat just lands a little harder and just gets a little more intense until he finally releases in that that that payoff, you know, that's it. It's just like pressure and then release rather than just playing randomly and hoping for the best, you know, there's this this architecture underneath it all. And Trey never just shifts gears haphazardly. He kind of earns that shift. There's this this this transition between the setup and the payoff and that tension is what makes the payoff feel like a payoff and repetition is just one example of how he does it. And that's actually the thread running through all five of these discoveries.

[00:08:44]You got guide tones, timing, sixth, a tonal arc, and the transition between setups and payoffs. Now, these are all they're just different tools, but they're all doing the same thing underneath. They're all architecture. If you want to go deeper on three of these concepts yourself, check out that Trey blueprint in the description. Now, I did the same thing with Jerry Garcia except even more, 4,277 notes in 30 solos which were obviously much shorter ones, but the same process overall. And what I found there is just as surprising, maybe more. And that video is right here.