Hispanae Citharae Ars Viva

I haven't thought about my time in Alicante in detail for a long time and I don't recall exactly what we did in the very first lesson. But I do recall that we did not spend time on technical exercises. Instead, one of the first things Tomás did was to have me work on some simple pieces from this collection:

As you can see, it is well worn. I bought this in 1974 when I was in Spain. It was published in 1956 and is a collection of music for vihuela by Valderrábano, Milán, Mudarra and Narváez from the 16th century. One of the first pieces I learned was this one:

I needed to start with something simple because I had not been taught the basics in any organized way. But this is not the kind of piece any other teacher would likely have assigned. José Tomás was unusual in that he had a particularly strong interest in early music: the vihuelistas of the 16th century, the English lutenists of the 16th century, Girolamo Frescobaldi of the 17th century and J. S. Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss, both of the 18th century. He took a scholarly approach and made a number of his own transcriptions of their music for guitar. His fingerings are particularly highly regarded. If I had been with a more conventional teacher I likely would have been put through a hearty list of studies by Aguado, Giuliani and Sor. But instead he had me work on this which cultivates one's sensitivity to counterpoint and voice-leading. One of the things Tomás was known for was playing an eight string guitar so he wouldn't have to leave out those low bass notes in Weiss.

I'm sorry to say that I don't recall every piece that we worked on, but they included the first English Suite by John Duarte, Villa-Lobos Etudes (just nos 1 and 8), the Prelude no. 1 by Villa-Lobos, the first Cello Suite by Bach, studies by Stephen Dodgson and I think some preludes by Manuel Ponce. It is hard to recall because I collected a lot of Tomás' transcriptions while I was there but didn't work on them until much later. These included a Fantasia by John Dowland, La Frescobalda by Frescobaldi, and some Bach.

One week I took the Cello Suite No. 1 to him and played the prelude. This was in the transcription in D major by John Duarte with added bass lines that nearly everyone was playing. Tomás didn't actually say anything, he just picked up his guitar and dug out an edition for cello of the suites. He sight-read through the first suite in the original key of G major, which he could do on his eight string. Then he just said, in this key it sounds full and rich and doesn't need any added bass notes. Very true. And frankly, the problem with adding bass notes to Bach is that they are never as good as what Bach himself might have written.

I didn't get to it when I was in Spain, but years later I took Tomás' advice and figured out how to play the suite as close to the original key as possible. You can do it in A major, just a tone higher, if you tune the sixth string to D. After working on the whole suite for a while, I decided that it worked very well if you also tuned the third string to F#, which we usually did for lute and vihuela music. Here is my recording of the Prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1 played in A major. These are exactly the notes the cello plays, nothing added.

That's enough for one post. Next time I will talk about what it was like living in Alicante, Spain and the other guitar students that were there.

The Journey: Alicante, Spain

How did I end up going to Spain to study guitar? As part of my discovery of classical music I discovered that classical guitar existed. One of the first albums I owned was Christopher Parkening's debut album. which contained a recording of the Chaconne from the Partita no. 2 for solo violin in D minor. This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, probably the longest single movement in the whole Baroque period. When Segovia decided to transcribe it for guitar, that was a moment of sheer genius. It sounds great on guitar and went a long way to win the classical guitar a place on the concert stage.

As I started my classical guitar journey I was surprised to discover that the only people I could go to for lessons were themselves amateurs of limited ability. The classical guitar did not exist in the West Coast Canadian musical scene. So after going to a succession of guitar teachers and leaving them after six months when I had learned everything they had to teach I ended up commuting to Vancouver which involved a four-hour bus and ferry trip. I had discovered a good teacher named Teo Bagchus who had studied in Spain with José Tomás. After a few months with him he suggested that I needed to go to Spain as well. He told me a little about Tomás and I realized that this was the maestro I had been looking for. In some ways the classical guitar world is a little like a medieval guild--you have to go sit at the feet of a master.

So I said to Teo, "what do I do? Phone him? Write a letter?" Teo said, "well, he doesn't answer letters and he doesn't have a phone. You have to go and knock on his door." In order to get ready for this trip I needed some cash so I went to work for the BC Ministry of Education in the data services branch--the only normal job I have ever had. I realized I had to have a proper concert guitar and my research revealed that there was a builder in Madrid, José Ramirez, that had made guitars for Segovia, so I wrote to them and ordered one to be picked up when I arrived in Spain. The cost back then was a mere $650 CAN.

I arrived in Madrid in January of 1974 and spent most of the year there. My visit to the Ramirez store was interesting. They gave me a guitar to try out and after hearing me play a little Manuel Ponce, they escorted me downstairs to a private room. The walls were lined with guitars in glass cases, some once having belonged to Segovia.

I keep mentioning Andrés Segovia assuming you know who I mean. He was born in 1893, played his first concert in 1909 and his last in Los Angeles in 1987 when he was 94. He passed away a few months later. He never retired. He put the classical guitar on the international concert stage almost single-handed. His notable disciples included Alirio Diaz from Venezuela, Oscar Ghiglia from Italy, José Tomás from Spain and a later generation including Michael Lorimer from the US and John Williams from England. I had the good fortune to study with Oscar Ghiglia as well as José Tomás. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I got to choose among three or four Ramirez guitars, all of them first-class concert instruments. Then I jumped on the train to Alicante. The folks in the Ramirez store kindly gave me Tomás' address. I remember it was Taquigrafo Marti something. So I went and, somewhat apprehensively, knocked on his door. He lived in a second floor apartment. A rather large man answered the door and when he heard I was a student of Teo, he was quite friendly. He asked what I was working on and when I mentioned a couple of etudes by Villa-Lobos that seemed to be an adequate audition. He said he was leaving for Japan to give master-classes there and would be back in three weeks and we could start lessons then.

Speaking of auditions, I forgot to mention my audition for UVic. When I first arrived at the music department a few weeks before classes were due to start, they told me I had to audition which I hadn't realized. I didn't even have my guitar with me. The secretary beckoned a tall distinguished gentleman over. This was George Corwin, the conductor of the choir and orchestra. He took me into a little practice room with a piano and had me sing back some high and low notes. Then he played some intervals for me to sing back and finally some chords asking if they were major, minor or diminished. It took about two minutes. As I had been singing in a rock and blues band for a few years, it was not difficult. The truth is, you can actually tell if someone has much musical ability this easily.

Here I have written a whole post and I haven't even gotten to my first lesson with Tomás. Next time! Let's end with one of those etudes by Villa-Lobos. This is no. 8 and sorry I don't have my own recording of it.

This is John Williams:

The Journey: University

 My entry into a music program at university was probably the major turning point of my life. Which university? The University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The only reason this was possible was because we had moved to a smaller town on Vancouver Island in 1965. Prior to that I lived in northern BC and Alberta. No universities up there back then. But UVic was only a two and a half hour drive from where we lived.

It was a major turning point not just for my musical life, but for my intellectual life. For the first time I realized that I was intellectually starved. One look at the million book university library and I realized just how big the world of ideas really was. Living on campus, my pianist roommate and I took out the maximum number of records from the listening library every day: six. I had never seen a listening library before. Recall that this was in 1971, no streaming and even poor selection at record stores. We had hardly heard any of the classical canon.

But so many doors were open: my courses included German, Linguistics, English Literature, Philosophy, Music Theory, Ear-Training, Music History, Choir and private lessons. I was a guitar player and I expected guitar lessons. However, the guitar teacher had moved away and there was no replacement--literally, there was no qualified guitar teacher in Victoria. The university didn't offer a guitar program until 1985 when they hired me to start one. There's an irony for you! So, what they signed me up for were piano lessons. Of course, this was perfectly reasonable from their point of view. Playing piano was a necessity if you wanted to be a music theorist or historian or a conductor and so on. But from my point of view it was absurd. I also was assigned an ensemble: a trio in which I played lute. Yes, they had a lute and they thought I could play it. It wasn't the lute that was the problem--the music we were playing was Machaut. Recall that less than a year prior I had been playing bass in a rock and blues band. I was not ready for medieval rhythms and counterpoint.

But the best part was the whole university context. I was surrounded by people who came from musical families, who were already virtuosos, who studied Greek in private school, who came from wealthy or at least prosperous families. I was so engaged in my studies that I hardly realized that my class background was rather different. Yes, I came from fourteen generations of dirt farmers, mostly on the Canadian prairies. I was the first one to set foot on a university campus.

I solved my personal problem, of needing a real guitar teacher by leaving UVic and going to Alicante, Spain to study with the great maestro José Tomás. But that was in the future. What I really got out of the first couple of years of university was an introduction to music history and theory, a fantastic course in philosophy where I met Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and Plato, a wonderful course in English literature where I met Theodore Roethke, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and others and an entirely new life.

I spent two years at UVic and in 1974 I flew to Spain, my first time out of Canada and I didn't speak a word of Spanish. I will describe my time there in the next post.

Here is a piece by Machaut. It doesn't sound too hard, but for someone who had spent much of his musical life playing B. B. King and The Rolling Stones, it was quite a challenge.

The Journey: Beginnings

It just occurred to me, while I was playing the Sarabande to the 3rd Lute Suite a few minutes ago, that I have been playing guitar for sixty years. Yes, I'm pretty sure I started playing around July 1966 on electric bass. I actually wanted to play drums, but it cost too much to rent a drum kit and, as my mother explained, bass guitar was also in the rhythm section. My favorite music back then was a couple of songs by Eric Burden and the Animals. But I soon discovered The Monkees, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Six months after taking up the bass guitar (on which I had one lesson) I was in a band and soon after that we played our first engagement, a dance in a tiny community hall for which we received the sum of $6.50 each. Something like that, my memory is a little hazy!

As time went on I got a six-string acoustic guitar and finally an electric, an old Gibson Les Paul jr from the 50s. I had a Yamaha amp. We played a lot of little gigs including high-school dances and I doubt we ever made more than 50 bucks. Except New Years when live music was at a premium.

After three or four years of this I discovered classical music and started listening to stacks of old vinyl records of Debussy, Schubert, Dvořák, Beethoven, Bach and others. In the town library I discovered books on music history and ran across names like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. I started buying as many records as I could afford (not many, but cheap vinyl you could get for 90¢ or $1.20. The expensive new issues, like The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky on Columbia might run $2.98.)

After a year or so of this, I realized that I could go to university and study music. I had already taught myself how to read music so I could write down arrangements. I had written some forty songs as well--all lost in the mists of time along with a recording I made of a few of them, plus "The Thrill is Gone" by B. B. King.

The things I recall as having the greatest impact back then were the first time I heard the Mass in B minor by Bach and singing in the university choir--we did the Mozart Requiem and the Te Deum by Bruckner. This was in 1971-72.

This is obviously going to be in a bunch of parts, so let's end here with the Bruckner conducted by Sergiu Celibidache. So I went from Eric Burden and the Animals to Bruckner in five years.

Two Kinds of Guitarists

I played a concert at The Banff Centre once and Oscar Ghiglia, who was holding a master class there that summer that I attended, was in the audience. I had already played for him a few times, but I guess something about my approach puzzled him. He came up to me afterwards and said, "you used to play folk guitar, didn't you?" I had to confess that I had started on bass guitar and steel string, both acoustic and electric. I don't know what he heard that tipped him off, but I didn't play much folk, mostly blues and rock.

In any case, I am learning a pair of gavottes by Bach that I haven't played before and I notice something about the fingering that might be interesting. The editor, much of whose fingering I changed right off the bat, must have been a rhythm guitarist at one point. This might seem an odd claim to make about a classical guitarist, but in North America especially, most of us who end up as classical guitarists actually started out as some variety of pop guitarist playing steel string and electric guitars. Among pop guitarists (meaning just "non-classical") there are two basic kinds of guitarists. Let's call them JL guitarists (after John Lennon) and EC guitarists (after Eric Clapton). John Lennon was a solid, even outstanding, rhythm guitarist; Eric Clapton a really great lead guitarist. In most bands from the "guitar era" there was one of each in each group. Keith Richards, rhythm, Brian Jones, lead; John Lennon, rhythm, George Harrison, lead and so on. In Cream, of course, all three of the players were so busy there was hardly room for a rhythm guitarist--Jack Bruce did some rhythm guitar on the bass when he wasn't doing "lead" bass!

In the classical world, of course, all concert artists are pretty much "lead" guitarists but sometimes a guitar editor might reveal his roots. And so it was with my edition of the Bach. Let me show you what I mean. Here is the first phrase of the gavotte in his fingering:

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The first half of the phrase is all bar chords with no open strings. Here is my fingering:

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That inner voice C is on the third string. I have two things I am aiming for: first of all, to try and connect voices by putting consecutive notes on the same string when possible and connecting by moving a finger along a string. The first two notes of the melody, for example, are on the first string, the next two on the second string, there is one note on the first string open, and then it returns to the second string. The falling fourths are usually going to be on two adjacent strings. The other thing I do is avoid bar chords whenever possible. This is for two reasons: first, they immobilize the left hand and, especially when prolonged, create fatigue. Second, they tend to turn melodies into arpeggiated harmonies. Take the first few beats, for example. I want the E A F G E F to sound melodic, not harmonic. I also want to do the rests as they let air into the line.

If you sit down and play through the two fingerings this will all be clear!

The two kinds of guitarists, rhythm guitarists and lead guitarists, we can see as guitarists who focus on the harmony and ones who focus on the melody. Of course a good classical guitarist is focussing on both, plus rhythm, phrasing, counterpoint and so on.

There are a lot of editions out there by "rhythm" guitarists. One thing I notice is that they are rarely concert artists. As soon as I saw this edition I went to my shelves to find the edition by Oscar Ghiglia, but sadly, that was one score I lost years ago. Ghiglia has an excellent fingering, of course. This gavotte is from the 3rd lute suite published by Suvini Zerboni. Other editors with good fingerings are Leo Brouwer, Andrés Segovia and José Tomas--all also concert artists.

Let's have some music! I had to go through five or six guitarists before I found one who does, pretty much, my fingering. This is Jason Vieaux with both gavottes:

And just for fun, this is the only clip that I know of where we can see John Lennon and Eric Clapton playing together. Bonus: Keith Richards is playing bass. The song starts around the 1:05 mark:

New Strings!

My rare posts on the mechanics of guitar-playing, which include strings, always seem to attract attention, so here is another one. I just put on a new set of strings and these were also a new brand of strings that I have never tried before, Aquila, made in Italy.

They purport to use an entirely new method and material so I was eager to see what they were like. Here is how they describe their new design, on the back of the package:

So, eco-friendly! My first impression was not good, because while I was putting the second string on, the first one snapped right at the bridge. This does happen perhaps 5% of the time because of the radical design of the bridge on my guitar:

As you can see, instead of the usual bridge, which is one piece of bone or plastic, each string goes over an individual tool steel peg. They are held only with a knot in the end and, in the case of the trebles, I melt a little ball on the end. On rare occasions, something happens there and the first string snaps. I just re-do the knot and try again. I have never had it happen twice with the same string and it has never happened after the initial putting on of the string or with any of the other strings, just the first. No breakage in concert, which is why I have never really worried about it! But if anyone out there knows why it happens, I am certainly curious.

Once I got them on, I started to like them right away. They seem a bit denser than other strings and they certainly have a lovely, warm sound and perhaps a bit more sustain. Anyway, I will do another post after a couple of weeks when I have gotten used to them. If you want to try them out, here is the link to the Amazon page.

Oh, these strings are obviously intended for professional players because, instead of each string coming in its own labeled envelope, or with a little label sticker on the string, these come in two bunches so you have to figure out which string is which! Through thick and thin, I'm sure you will figure it out.

Learning the Guitar

I just realized that, while most of my professional career was involved with teaching guitar, I haven't put up much on the subject! So here are a few pointers. I did play electric and acoustic steel string guitar and bass guitar early on, but here I'm just going to talk about learning classical guitar which I have played for the last forty years.

There are three important things you need to learn how to play guitar:

1. A reasonably decent instrument
2. A good teacher
3. Yourself!

Now let's flesh that out a bit. Here in Mexico you can purchase an adequate student guitar for less than $100 USD. But in most places you might have to pay between $100 and $300 for a good student guitar by Yamaha or something similar. The important thing is that the neck be straight and the strings not too high off the fingerboard. If you can find a guitarist to help you pick one out, that will be very helpful. Just for comparison, concert guitars cost from $3000 or $4000 up to $10,000 or more. Still very cheap compared to what you would pay for a concert violin or cello.

The teacher is very important. When I started out there were hardly any knowledgeable classical guitar teachers in Canada. There was one in Vancouver, one in Toronto and perhaps one in Montreal. I had to commute to Vancouver for lessons and after six months he suggested I study with his teacher in Spain, Jose Tomas, one of the great maestros of the guitar. This is what I did, and I have been thankful ever since. A bad teacher can set you back years by affirming bad habits that can take you years to rid yourself of. What are the qualities of a good teacher? One is the ability to play well, but this is not absolutely essential. It is important that the teacher have confidence and be able to encourage it in the student. The teacher needs to have a good understanding of technique, but not be dogmatic about it. Dogmatic teachers in general should be avoided, though they often have charisma. The teacher should be up on where guitar technique is at these days. Probably the most influential teacher of the last twenty years was Abel Carlevaro, who passed away in 2001. He published a series of books on technique. If your teacher has never heard of him, you might wonder about his or her qualifications. Your teacher needs to be patient, though some of the best are sometimes moody and impatient! Probably it is more important that you be patient with yourself.

Ah yes, yourself, the last necessity. By this I mean that you have to approach study of the instrument with the right attitude. You have to be disciplined, persevere, not be discouraged and seek to improve your playing and, even more important, your understanding of music, at every opportunity. Perhaps the biggest block to learning how to play is yourself. Students limit themselves in various ways. The most important thing is to practice every day, building on what you did the day before. Do warm-up and technical exercises every day to start, then move on to the music. Practice slowly! Sometimes I have been tempted to hand out to my students a big sheet of paper with PRACTICE SLOWLY written on it a thousand times! Because students nearly always practice too fast. If you want to play something well, you have to go over it very slowly. Even the greatest of guitarists practice slowly. I have had reports from reliable sources that both Pepe Romero and John Williams have been heard playing through the Concierto de Aranjuez in their dressing room before a concert at one-half or one-quarter speed. In fact, one reason they may have gotten to the level of virtuosity they have is because they practice slowly.

That should get you started!

The Fingernails of a Guitarist

There is a post up on NPR's Deceptive Cadence in which Jason Vieaux talks about the correct use of a ping-pong ball. Yes, it's true, the best replacement for a missing thumbnail is a crescent-shaped piece cut from a ping-pong ball. Though I think he is incorrect when he says you glue it under the actual nail. It is much better glued, with Krazy Glue, on top of the nail. Oh yes, this is the only solution to the loss of a nail. It also works on the other fingers too. The sound is not quite the same, but you can get used to it.

Few non-guitarists know how crucial the fingernails are to the sound. They perform a function roughly similar to that of a clarinet or oboe reed (oboists, by the way, spend about half their waking hours making reeds). This is where the sound originates! So the shaping and care of the right hand fingernails is of the utmost importance. As I discovered as a young guitarist, the speed of your nail growth also can limit how much you can play. If you play more than six hours a day, your nails wear away faster than they can grow. When I was learning the Concierto de Aranjuez, which puts a lot of wear on your thumb and index nails, I had to find a solution. Turns out the best is to wrap a bit of scotch tape around the playing edge of the nail. It doesn't sound very good, but it prevents wear. Just remember to take it off when you play the concert!

Typical guitarist nightmares include breaking your thumbnail opening the stage door on your way to the concert and, one that has happened to me, opening your case just as you are being announced to the audience and finding your fourth string has snapped! You should always have an old, pre-stretched set handy. Luckily that didn't happen when I was playing a concerto, but at a private gathering of cast and crew at the Shaw Festival in Canada. I quickly replaced the string and went on to play, discreetly correcting the tuning from time to time.

Strings are the other big problem for guitarists. I hear that big-time rock guitarists have guitar technicians that replace strings and tune them up as needed. But I have always done that myself. If you are playing on a heavy schedule a set of strings will only last a couple of weeks so you can go through twenty-five sets in a year. The problem is the frets, which cut through the winding on the bass strings. Bowed string instruments don't have this problem!

I'm sure this is all terribly boring to non-guitarists, but all instruments have their secret lore. I once was trapped in a car driving from Vancouver to Seattle to play a concert and had to listen to two flute players discuss C# trill keys for hours and hours! Here is the first movement of a lovely Sonatina for flute and guitar by Castelnuovo-Tedesco that we played in that concert.

George Harrison Reconsidered

There is a lot about George Harrison in the news these days as a documentary by Martin Scorsese hits the air commemorating the tenth anniversary of George's death. Here is an article on George in the Weekly Standard. I haven't seen the documentary, but I found the article flawed and missing the point. It is perfectly all right to point out warts and all--I have done it in this blog a few times--but if all you talk about is non-musical aspects of a musician's life, it is safe to say you have missed the point. Sure, George may have been a bit of a split personality, as the writer says, "a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other", but the whole reason we are interested in George is that he was a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other who was in one of the most important musical groups in history and who made a significant contribution both as a guitarist and song-writer. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be paying a lot of attention. Andrew Ferguson, the writer of the Weekly Standard article, does at least mention George's music in one brief paragraph:

One of George Harrison’s most appealing traits was self-awareness. He would have seen (and said) how absurd such talk was. “I was never a real guitarist,” he once told his friend Klaus Voormann. And he wasn’t; he couldn’t launch the fireworks like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, and the disciplined technique of Andrés Segovia or Julian Bream never interested him. About his songwriting, he told an interviewer: “There’s no comparison between me and someone who sits and writes music. What I do is really simple.” Right again. He compared himself to a pastry chef, able to combine musical ingredients nicked from others to make a pleasing presentation of songcraft. He made many marvelous records, but as a source of fresh musical ideas, he said, “I’m not really that good.”

You could say the same for pretty much anyone who ever wrote a rock song, which is an extremely forgiving art form, but you can’t imagine anyone else who ever wrote a rock song admitting it.

Like most journalists, even ones who write about music, Ferguson's musical understanding is, uh, limited. I have no idea what George meant if he said "I was never a real guitarist", but he most certainly was. He got into the Beatles in the first place because he could play stuff John and Paul couldn't. It took him a long time to develop as a songwriter; being in the same group as Lennon and McCartney caused his songwriting to be seen as insignificant in comparison. But he wrote better and better songs as time went on including "Taxman", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something"--to name three outstanding ones. As a guitarist he is also an outstanding musician. Comparisons with Eric Clapton or Julian Bream are simply inane. Most rock guitarists from Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Page come from the blues traditions of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. George comes from another tradition, the rock and roll one of Carl Perkins:

As for Segovia and Bream, why would anyone want to compare a rock guitarist with a classical one? But have a listen to this clip from A Hard Day's Night where George does some nice solos on a classical guitar by Jose Ramirez--the builder of some of Segovia's guitars:

If you have a look at the movie, you can see George playing on the Ramirez. Now you might say, oh, big deal, he plays on a classical guitar, so what? But let's dig into it a little bit, shall we? This is Paul's song, but a lot of the unique sound of it comes from George. That opening lick is by George and it is a motif that starts and ends the song. In the second verse George contributes a nice classical-sounding arpeggio. Around 1'30 we have the guitar solo. You might say, yeah right, he just plays the melody. But here's the thing: the song is in C# minor, but it jumps, most radically, to D minor for the guitar solo and stays in D minor until the final chord: D major. The relationship of D minor to C# minor is called the Neapolitan or flat II and it is both extreme and very popular with composers since the 18th century. Who came up with it? Either Paul or George. But it gives the song a unique twist.

Ferguson's sneer at rock songs and their composers is really just ignorance. Sure, there are hundreds if not thousands of boring, repetitive rock songs based on the most rudimentary of chord progressions, but it is very hard to find a Beatles song that is not a truly unique composition. Lennon, McCartney, yes and Harrison, wrote some of the finest songs in the English language and are legitimate heirs to the long tradition from John Dowland, to Henry Purcell, to Benjamin Britten.

Back to George's guitar playing. One of the things that stands out about his solos is that they, almost unique in the rock world, are not prolix. Take my favorite Harrison guitar solo:

Where is it? Exactly at 2'58. It consists of nine notes. After a long pause, there is a little trill. That's it. But I think it is exactly the right solo in exactly the right spot. Most virtuoso rock guitarists cannot resist playing a lot of notes. That's ok, but pretty much every blues-based extended rock guitar solo sounds exactly the same. Each of George's solos was created specifically for the song and sounds different from other solos in other songs. Lots of them were on electric six string, but he did a lot with twelve string too:

And of course, he is well known for being the first rock musician to take up the Indian sitar:

But he didn't stop being a rock and roll guitarist:

There is a great solo at 1'15 that is only about ten seconds long and sounds like no other rock guitarist. Yes, and it is also George's song. The only rock song that is about tax policy that I can recall...