If it sounds good and the player is comfortable with it, who cares?
When I first started playing bass, for various reasons I won't list here, I had a hyper-awareness of the entire scope of the endeavor that didn't allow me to just be a regular beginner, like you probably should be. I was learning a song that was to be performed where the chords were all major, but at one point near the end I kept hearing a certain run in my head which, when I worked it out, turned out to use a note from the minor scale.
This perplexed my extremely rules-oriented and anal brain, so I turned to help from two old friends who were expert guitarists and bassists. I asked them, effectively, if this was "legal"......can I do this or not? The first guy, who I've mentioned here many times, primarily a guitarist with a minor in music theory, explained to me as best as he was able to over the phone about how modes work, good situations where something like I was talking about can be a good idea and other situations where it's probably not a good idea, the relation between chord structure and melodic underpinnings.....you get the idea. It was a bit of information overload. Dizzy, I hung up the phone, and just about that time my other friend called me back, another guy I've also mentioned here before, primarily a bass player.
He knew my other friend well, and listened as I recounted to him the conversation I'd just had. He listened patiently, and at the end he said "That shit is too complicated. If it sounds good, play it. If it doesn't sound good, don't." That was it, that was his advice.
I think in retrospect I didn't want to be responsible for knowing what sounds good when the people I was playing with were so experienced and so proficient on their instruments, and I was so new at bass, that I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I wanted someone to tell me how to do it "right" and not look like a fool in front of the cool kids.
But, the lesson wasn't lost on me. It seemed to have popped into my head because it sounded good, so I went with it, did it in the rehearsal, and nobody batted an eye. Lesson learned.
The moral of the story is that Neal Schon sounds fantastic. I forget how that's the moral of the above rambling, but it is.
