Holdsworth technique

hiya

here's a part of an interview
of allan holdsworth

Guitar Extra, Summer 1992
Interview by Andy Aledort
Q: How di you go about finding things on guitar and building up the language that makes up your playing? Did you think of your playing as being different from other guitarists?

Allan: It wasn't intentional. I didn't say, "He does that so I'm not going to do that." Basically, I always wanted to be, and always dreamed of, being really good at improvising, so I knew if I really wanted to be good, I had to know how to play over chords. But I wanted to play over chords and not sound like anyone else. I thought, well I don;t want to learn what other people do when they play all their chords, I want to figure it out for myself. So I figured that I needed to know about harmony, and I need to know about scales and chords, and I devised a system of working out everything and catologing it, using math to figure it out. I knew that if I used math I could figure anything out.

Q: When you say math, what exactly do you mean?

Allan: Say, for example, I wanted to find out how many seven note or eight note scales there are in one octave. It's easy with math, you keep number one constant, keeping it in the same key, and then you permutate the other notes until you've got every combination, and that's what I did. I wrote them all down and catalogued them. I'd take four notes, five notes, six notes, seven notes, and then i'd go up to nine note scales. Then I'd spread them out over two octaves, playing however many notes I wanted the scale to contain.

cud someone plz explain wat the hell is he talkin abt :)