Gliss and ghost notes

Not sure on a gliss but a ghost is a note or string still ringing from the note or chord before. You don't play them, they are already ringing.

and a gliss, perhaps, is playing that ringing ghost note.
or raising or lowering that ringing note.

on pedal steel guitar where one has pedals to raise a note. a gliss is plucking the string to play one note and then while it is ringing pushing the pedal to raise the note.

The tab shows

G 5
D 5/7 7p5 (3)

Maybe gliss is just a different term for slide? But I don't know if I play the second note, I still don't understand how to play the 'ghost' :?

I have a video, but of course they don't show Knopfler's fingers during the part I'm having trouble with :roll:

I play time of your life and if you know the song well, there are two base notes in the picking pattern for each chord. Most tabs will show the second one as a ghost note. You can clearly hear it being played. It is just played with less emphasis. That is how I play ghost notes - quite a bit less emphasis than other notes.

I may be wrong about this, but I think a ghost note is a note that was hit on a recording but probably not meant to be hit. Sometimes this comes from missing a string and sometimes from removing a finger to quickly and getting the wrong note to sound inadvertently.

Transcribers try to get every note (because everyone gets on their case if they hear something on the recording that's not in the transcription) and people do make mistakes. Often it's hitting one string instead of another in a pattern. The "ghost note" gets transcribed but is often in "( )" to indicate it being an extraneous note.

Gliss should be sort for "glissando" which is, on the piano at least, what we'd call a slide.

Hope this helps and my apologies in advance should it prove to be in error.

Peace

I agree with David... I think most 'ghost notes' are overzealous tabbers trying to capture every nuance.

Notation of these things vary... they aren't part of standard music notation. Common practice is to use grace notes in the standard notation, and place the tabbed note in parenthesis, but that can be a bit misleading in itself: many tabs you'll find in magazines use parenthesis to indicate the second half of a tied note, and the symbol for a grace note has a specific meaning of its own in standard notation (grace notes are 'ornaments' that decorate the main note; a small note indicates a grace note that begins on the beat or beat division of the main note - so the main note is actually shorter than written... a grace note with a diagonal slash through the stem preceeds the main note, so the note before it is shorter than written).

Glissando is one of the few musical terms that isn't Italian - it's French - and it means 'to slide'. As David notes, this is a keyboard effect produced by sliding across the keys, and you actually hear each note played (although very briefly). There's also a violin technique called portamento, which is a smooth slide from one note to the next - there are no individual notes, just a tone that steadily increases or decreases in pitch. Depending on your technique, a slide on the guitar will lean towards either glissando or portamento - press down harder so you hear the fretted notes in the slide, and it's definately a gliss.

This may have nothing to do with a guitar ghost note, but ghost notes (or hits) when refering to drums are very quiet hits that kind of fill in the beat, you have to listen out for them to realise they are there even but take them away and you do notice they are absent. This would often be something like playing eight's on the hi hat and filling in the sixteenths with tiny hits on the snare.

This is often done on a guitar in the form of palm muting or dead notes especially in funk music but then I suppose that would be tabbed as PM or whatever.

Probably nothing to do with it but thought I'd mention it :)

Lee

Ghost notes