Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Researchers and performers have long intuited that popular music’s organizational features are linked to the physical-tonal properties of the electric guitar. Yet current evidence is either too broad or too specific to support reliable generalizations. Ongoing corpus studies offer remarkable explanatory power in clarifying stylistic trends from a listener’s perspective but are not currently equipped to address the kinesthetic aspects of instrument performance. In this study I employ statistical methods of corpus analysis to explore how popular-music guitarists navigate the fretboard. I do so via a digital collection of guitar tablature: 257 rhythm-guitar parts sampled from seven decades of songs (1954–2019). An analysis of fretboard transitions reveals a highly idiomatic fretboard profile that aligns best with the minor pentatonic scale. This empirically supports standing intuitions about the relationship between pentatonicism and guitar performance, while underscoring the methodological and potential ethical shortcomings of a strictly harmonic perspective on popular music’s organization.
Source: IASPM Journal
Author: Nicholas Jordan Shea
Institution: Arizona State University
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4389980852