Re: What is considered good chord chops?

>I missed the argument, and am having trouble imagining on what grounds
>someone might have disagreed with this.  

I think it started the other way - I made a statement that may have implied
something different from the meaning that was taken.

What I meant was something like how this incident unfolded:  one time last year
I went out to hear a friend of mine play solo ( he's a folk and ragtime
fingerpicker) and he asked me to sit in.  As soon as I got up there, some drunk
at the bar yelled out for Okie From Muskogee.

Well, I doubt I'd ever played it instrumentally before, but whathehell, I knew
the melody, so why not?.

  What I do in events like that is what I guess a band or a piano player would
do. 

 I silently gave myself a tempo, laid down a G in bass, played maybe a Gsub2
type sound, and after that was laid down, then played the melody, accompanying
it with a bass line from root to fifth and chord stabs and harmony here and
there.

To me,  doing it that way would be laying down bass and rhythm *first*, over
which I played the melody or whatever line I did. 

 At that time, the chords are secondary to melody or top line, but they're
*also* secondary to the bass line which is really defining the harmony. 

If I'm playing a passage where I'm not stating a bass or bass-chord rhythm like
that, I still know where it is - I don't just dump all that and try to
reharmonize a melody - it stays in my mind whether I'm playing it or not.

So I don't know how that interfaces with those of you who say you build from
the top - I don't know if my instincts are any different from other people's on
this, but to me, the guitar's always an orchestra, whether or not you happen to
be playing like that at the time, and that makes bass and top note kind of
equal for consideration.

I wasn't trying to advocate it to the exclusion of some other way of thinking,
just explain it.  Any way somebody gets it done is obviously ok.  But there are
those among you who think there's only one acceptable way to think.  I don't
share that philosophy, obviously. 

Clif