FraKctured Performance
In the previous episode of Failure to Fracture, I talked a little about why King Crimson’s “impossible” song Fracture took me 22 years to learn, how my upcoming book came out of the process, and I closed with my performance of the full song. Thank you to all the kind people who offered support, especially those of you who started watching my Fracture work back in 2006! In this video, I want to talk about Fracture’s sibling song, “FraKctured” from the 2000 album “The ConstruKction of Light” and finish the video with a full performance of the song.
A lot of people have asked me, “Which of the two songs is more difficult?” I’ve gone back and forth on this answer. Lately I feel like FraKctured is more difficult. The best way I can put it is that Fracture is like non-stop sprinting a 10K race whereas FraKctured is like high intensity interval sprinting a 25K race. The Fracture perpetual motion section requires about 1,700 notes played without breaks across 3 minutes and 10 seconds whereas FraKctured has about 3,000 notes played faster with several breaks in the span of 7 and a half minutes. The average pace for Fracture is about 8.7 notes per second (or 520 notes per minute) and FraKctured averages 9.3 notes per second (or 560 notes per minute). It’s faster, for sure, but speed is only one aspect of comparing difficulty.
FraKctured was written and performed in what Robert has called “New Standard Tuning (NST),” whereas Fracture was written and performed in what he calls “Original Standard Tuning” or, jokingly, “Old Standard Tuning.” NST is a fifths-based tuning, which offers some challenges for guitarists coming from OST. Fracture relies primarily upon the stronger middle and ring fingers on the left hand whereas FraKctured relies primarily on the pinky, ring, and index fingers. It definitely exercises the weaker aspects of the left hand for guitarists.
The FraKctured moto has three main sections: first is an evolution of the original Fracture moto, second is a section the band called “Fairy Fingers,” and third is a section the band called “Terror.” The evolution section contains many stretches spanning 5 frets and half the notes are played with the pinky, but most of the notes are played across two neighboring strings. The original Fracture has much, much more string skipping or cross-picking. So, in a sense, the evolution section of the FraKctured moto is easier than Fracture, but is complicated by a faster pace and lots of stretching.
The Terror section of FraKctured is truly brutal. There is no trick to playing it. There are several musical sentences in odd time signatures that need to be memorized and played across different parts of the neck. Some phrases take advantage of open strings, but many do not. The fifths-based tuning makes this especially challenging because the left hand fingering is just awkward a lot of the time. It’s fast, furious, and freaking difficult. There’s no easy way to play any of it. If you search for “terror” on Robert’s online diary, you will find many entertaining entries about FraKctured falling flat on its face during the Terror section when performed live on tour.
At my Guitar Circle introductory course, Robert gave me two key pieces of advice that unlocked my ability to play these crazy songs. First, he told me personally, “unless you can do this with your thumb, you will never play Fracture.” There’s a lot more detail on this in my upcoming book. Second, he told our whole class, “Strings are tiny things, so we don’t need to move the pick very far to make a noise. Try playing an open string 8 hours a day for a month and then we can have a conversation.” Well, I don’t have that kind of time, so when I got home, I played an open string for two hours a day across three months. Three months after that, I could play the basic Fracture motifs.
I couldn’t play the Terror section at speed until a year later.
So, brace yourself for this performance of FraKctured in NST. Like my performance of Fracture, I consider it adequate for this video, but not my best. It is close enough that I feel good enough to let it go and try to move on to new musical challenges, even if Robert Fripp himself tells me that this music will never stop biting my ass.
