photo by Patty AxfordFor Fab Four fan, it gets better all the time
Thursday, April 28, 2011
LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY APRIL 28, 2011, 11:18 AM
BY BRYAN WASSEL
TOWN NEWS
STAFF WRITER
A former Paramus resident has accomplished a series of firsts at Berklee College in Boston: becoming the first woman to graduate the guitar performance program in 1982, the first female faculty member of the guitar department in 1984 and the first female to be promoted to full professor in the department in 2009.
Lauren Passarelli, who was born in Teaneck and grew up in Paramus, developed her interest in guitar at an early age, citing the Beatles as one of her biggest influences. She had a plastic guitar when she was 2, and was truly inspired by music when she saw the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show when she was 4.
“You know, the Beatles never said they were the best musicians or the best writers or anything, but they enjoyed it so much and they just said, ‘If we can do it, anyone can do it,’” Passarelli said. “So I thought, ‘Then I’ll do it too.’”
Nicknamed “George,” after Beatle George Harrison, by her students, Passarelli is not only a professor but the department’s resident expert on the Fab Four. In addition to her standard lessons, she created the Beatles’ Guitar Lab and Beatle’s Ensemble at the college.
Her formal education in guitar began in 1969, when she began taking lessons from Paramus guitar teacher Lou Sabini, who still gives lessons in the borough to this day.
“He’s a great, great guitar teacher and he got me off to an incredible foundation, a great start,” Passarelli said. “I studied with him for five years, from 9 years old to 14, and he got me using the guitar books that Berklee College of Music published, so that’s how I heard about the college.”
Passarelli’s musical talent goes beyond just the guitar, and while attending Paramus High School she played flute in the school’s marching and concert bands, as well as guitar for the stage band. She also sings, plays piano, bass and drums, engineers and mixes her own music, and has been writing and recording her own songs since 1970.
“I love it all,” Passarelli said. “Certainly writing the songs is a giant thrill, because I like sitting there with a blank piece of paper and a blank recording and knowing nothing is there, maybe not even a scratch of an idea, but within an hour there’s a finished song. It’s just the most amazing thing, it’s like playing with magic.”
After graduating from Berklee, Passarelli was immediately invited to join the faculty, but had to wait two years for an opening. She has taught at the college, sharing her love of music with students using a lighthearted approach, ever since.
In addition to teaching, Passarelli has recorded multiple albums, and played with other renowned musicians, including Melissa Etheridge, Leni Stern and Pat Metheny. She also performs live concerts online and has guitar lessons and labs on all aspects of the instrument available online.
“There’s ways for people to reach out, and the Internet brings everybody together these days,” Passarelli said.
E-mail: Wassel@northjersey.com
Blackbird & Bellabye
I’ve always gotten a kick out of learning songs & guitar parts deeply to sound like the recordings that I loved. That was my measure of how well I knew the music & how much attention I paid to the detail that was there.
I have offered to play what’s on the recording, to play the exact guitar parts. It has been this skill that has gotten the attention of many band leaders wanting me to play on their record or join their tour. (All Together Now, Sarah Burrill, Pat Metheny) This helps if the artist is used to it, or loves those guitar parts or they have become part of the composition in a significant way.
This kind of practice has evolved for me over the years so that I have spent time with quite a diverse batch of playing styles, repertoire & accompaniment grooves & have gotten into the nitty gritty of what makes a player sound the way they do.
Far beyond the notes they choose or the rhythms they play are the deeper emotional content of touch, feel, tone, attitude, nuance, how they bend a note, slide, hammer, pull off, the dynamics, the articulation, phrasing, distinguishing effects, anything you can notice to sound like what’s there. This has given me vast options in my own playing & made my art huge. It’s also taught me how to arrange my own guitar parts for my songs & other artist’s original songs.
Often there’s a new to me, sounding riff, guitar effect, or groove or way to finger pick or new voicings that impress me or different string sets involved with the voicings & then I’m inspired to nick a few ideas & write my own song with the goods.
In 2005 Paul McCartney released a song called, Jenny Wren & deliberately revisited his own accompaniment style of playing voicings in tenths as he did on his 1968 song, Blackbird. I thought this was cool & wanted to write my own song with similar voicings. I played with the Blackbird & Jenny Wren voicing shapes & came up with a progression that I liked, added lyrics about my new niece & wrote a lullaby in 2005 adding her nickname, Bella in the title.
I love that it became it’s own song yet has remnants & colors of the inspired ideas from Blackbird & Jenny Wren. I also love that just like playing with words when meaning takes care of itself, so also playing with chord forms, harmony takes care of itself. If you listen to cool progressions & play with them you will write cool progressions if you listen to cool lyrics & melodies & arrangements & productions & horn parts, bass parts, etc. you will naturally, by osmosis by noticing & digesting great stuff in an organic way, create great music. For me it’s about eternal curiosity & allowing myself to explore.
Paul McCartney & George Harrison used to start playing Bach’s Bouree & having never learned the whole thing would stop or go off & play their own bits & that’s how Paul came to write Blackbird with those voicings. He liked the sound of those open chords.
So anything you’re attracted to in the sound of someone’s playing is a great starting point & gives you instant gratification to get something new happening in your playing or writing. I do this with engineering & production as well.
In fact if you listen to the recorded vs. of Bellabye in the headphones you’ll hear this cool spaced pair miking technique.
I used 2 M-Audio Sputniks in the cardioid position one slightly pointing on an angle to the 12th fret, the other by my ear pointing down to the body of the acoustic guitar while I sang into a Neumann U87. Technically all 3 mics were picking up guitar & vocal but the air, the space that was recorded between the 3 mics was delicious! It’s so cool in the headphones.
3 acoustic guitar miking techniques with audio examples
http://www.humbuckermusic.com/acguitrectec.html
Blackbird, Paul McCartney, The Beatles, The White Album http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ERnT1X9HPw
Jenny Wren, Paul McCartney, Chaos & Creation in the Backyard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36dtjxUMWdM
Bellabye, Lauren Passarelli, Playing With the Pieces
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eyShqBIbP4
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