Compositional GPS

How does GPS work? Why do you care? What could that possibly have to do with composing?

There are stories of some composers who simply hear the music in their head and write it down as if music only they can hear is coming from some external place. Perhaps we’ve all had moments in dazed and lucid half-sleep we’ve heard music in our dreams and perhaps also been able to recall it long enough and accurately enough to write it down. But by and large, most of us are probably rarely or never touched by this kind of inspiration. Nevertheless, some of us feel the urge to interpret and reinvent the sounds we are exposed to, to internalize them and then to re-externalize them, to change them and massage them until they are our own. It is our way of coming to terms with the ideas, to make sure we understand them. We are also motivated (hopefully) from a more emotional place inside of ourselves, the need to express some feeling, how it is to experience the world from within ourselves, to connect to other people and make them feel the world the way we feel it, in a way that words leave us constantly falling short, exasperated and unsatisfied.

So we compose to share our view of the world in some deep emotional way that words cannot, and our understanding of musical concepts becomes the medium through which we are able to express these feelings. With that said, if we are composing in a sophisticated language and writing it down for others to play, their is an urgency in getting down the initial kernel of inspiration, the melody or vamp or progression or who knows what that sets the mood, the first puzzle piece, the foundation or seed from which an entire beautiful organism will grow. But once this is done, once we have laid down that portion of ourselves into sound, how do we flesh it out so that it becomes what others recognize as a developed, stimulating and complete experience? Moreover, if we don’t literally hear the music we’re writing played by a band in our minds, but are rather CONCEIVING in a more abstract way what a band might sound like playing what we write, even if we have a computer play it back to us, or if we’re sitting down at the piano and trying to piece it together as well as our keyboard skills will allow for, then how can we break down this process into an explainable and generalized strategy?

GPS stands for Global Positioning System. How does GPS know where we are? Well it works according to a mathematical principal called trilateration. The definition of trilateration according to Wikipedia is: “Trilateration is a method for determining the intersections of three sphere surfaces given the centers and radii of the three spheres.”

What this means is that your GPS device sends out a signal to 3 different satellites, and depending how long it takes for the satellites to receive this information, it can figure out it’s location based on the location of the 3 different reference points. What this means for composing is that while the sound of the whole might be elusive, it can be deduced with a great amount of accuracy based on concrete knowledge of other information. Put another way, let’s suppose that our composition is lost somewhere and we need to find it. We can slowly figure out where it is by sending out signals from various reference points. HUH?! This is a lot easier to explain when I can use my hands.

Let’s divide what we do know about our composition into different categories. There is melody, harmony, and how the two affect each other. There is rhythm and counterlines and orchestration. These are all concrete devices which have been thoroughly analyzed and written about and can be talked about and thought about with great technical precision.

Every song, as mentioned earlier, has to start with something. A melody, a progression, a bassline, a chord. If the first element is weak then the whole thing is doomed to failure. There’s no point in covering up weakness. Still, sometimes a melody only makes sense in the context of a harmonic environment which is why it pays to develop both simultaneously.

Let's imagine a situation. Maybe you discover a rhythm that you want to develop as the central motive of a song. Your first step is probably going to be to put pitches on this rhythm. Perhaps you will realize that it doesn’t work that well, and since you haven’t done a whole ton of work based on this rhythm, you will be more willing to change it. Once the two seem to be mingling effectively, it is time to bring in harmony. At this point you might find a chord which is so beautiful and ALMOST works with the melody, but the melody needs to be tweaked to make the chord work. And so since you love the chord so much you tweak the melody, or perhaps you decide the melody should take precedence and relinquish the chord for another situation at a future date. Now what you end up with is a strong starting point, and you’ve already taken care that each of the three components on your mind at this point in time are mingling in a friendly way before pumping all kinds of effort into them. Who knows if this material belongs in the beginning or middle or end of a piece?

So what next? Time to finish that melody and then move on to the chords? Hell no! Keep repeating this process of inching along every aspect of your song as a unit. You might find you get hit with a brilliant melodic gesture that takes you ahead four bars. Before asking yourself where this will lead, take care to catch up rhythm and harmony.

Of course, I hope I don’t have to point out but will anyways, this is just one of the infinite ways of creating a final product. Starting with rhythm, and then moving on to melody, or any other kind of dogmatic or rigid, routine or overly systematic approach to creation is the worst thing a person can have. I’ve been talking about Rhythm, Melody, Harmony as if they are actually distinct entities, and in some ways they are, but this is an oversimplification for the sake of education.

There are always other ways to go about things. One obvious example of not doing this is when you are putting music to preexisting and fully formed lyrics, which is a very plausible scenario. Or sometimes inspiration does hit and we feel the need to just play a whole bunch of chords and then we’re stuck wondering for days, months or years wondering what to do with them. C’est la vie.

So this is the first step of triangulation that takes place so as to locate your finished product. But in fact, this is only one leg of an even greater triangulation that involves orchestration and emotion. You know have something that looks like a lead sheet.

That’s great, but that’s still not a composition. A composition is a thing of beauty, an interpretation of the material. Jazz musician’s often do this through improvising (although it’s a wonder that so few consciously use compositional tools when doing so). But as a composer/arranger, this means creating a sound, choosing voicings, perhaps inserting countermelodies and dividing up the material between various musicians or sections depending on the size of the group. And so begins a new form of triangulation.

Another example of a possible “satellite” to help you find your finished product, one that probably should take part in the process from the beginning, is if you’re working for a very limiting kind of instrumentation, for instance solo guitar. If your piece is going to be effective, it’s entire conception and execution must obey the guitar and all its complications and quirks. I’ve been quite guilty of working something out on piano and then transforming it into a completely mediocre or just downright bad guitar arrangement because it just didn’t belong on the guitar. No way to learn like the hard way.

Within the act of orchestration, there is another form of triangulation. Do I have a big band in my head? No. But I have things I’ve heard before as reference points. I understand how certain instruments blend, how certain arranging techniques sound, I understand how chords sound, and how certain voicings of even the most basic chords can actually create a fair amount of tension due to their intervallic content. All these things I use to judge the situation while arranging a piece, although how it will truly sound I don’t know until I hear it, I can only approximate using the knowledge I do have. And sometimes I will fail miserably while others will be totally amazing.

But what about modern music? Music which functions more according to timbre and tone and dynamics and who knows what? I’ve already created all kinds of artificial barriers for how my composition will sound by assuming that it will have tempo, rhythm, melody and harmony. There is lots of music, or at this point perhaps sound art is in some ways more accurate, which attempts to challenge these fundamental principles of what we traditionally consider music. Well, perhaps some day when I sit down to compose, I will be at a point where I can cleverly and effectively do so as well. But in the end, I imagine at this point in time that my abstract approach, my thought process about how different elements of a piece of art interact and need to be considered by the artist during the act of composition, will remain unaltered. Although perhaps a time in my life will come when I feel a need even to challenge this. But if I ever get lost, I’ll always have GPS to get me out of it.

The Juggling Act Cont'd a.k.a. Multi-Dimensional Quantum Improvisation

In the Juggling Exercise, I spent some time talking about what it means to improvise. My answer to the question was mostly concerned with remembering to listen and react carefully. I started to make another point that although all the lines and chords we play might seem to pop spontaneously from the sky, they developed slowly over long periods of time to form a network which we constantly attempt to navigate in new ways. Another big part of my point, although I didn’t state it as explicitly as I would have liked, is that a small amount of material can be stretched to fit an enormous amount of different contexts. An old voicing in a new situation can sound totally fresh and exciting. There is an almost exhaustive list of all the many possibilities this kind of thinking can provide in Mick Goodrick’s Voice Leading Almanac Vol. III.

With this said, I’d like to discuss a point which Dave Liebman goes into great detail about in his book, Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony. Once we have a network in place, we know which notes go over which chords, and also which chords don’t go over which chord, and are confident enough in our knowledge and our ears to exploit this relationship to create tension, that’s pretty much the end of the story, right? (Wrong of course. I can’t help think of how it’s taken 8 years to understand in any kind of practical sense the possibilities of triadic voice leading that Mick Goodrick has revealed and I’ve been describing). But supposing that we were going to assume that our harmonic development was as complete as it could ever be. In other words, let’s assume we’re performing.

As mentioned in the other article, when it comes time to perform, there is no time to think about a new chord. When you practice you can work on expanding your vocabulary, but when you perform, any chord or lick that hasn’t been totally internalized seems to never come out at all or come out sounding awkward and out of place. So who hasn’t played a standard after a few days of not practicing or not having looked at that tune or played in that key for a few weeks and felt totally stale, totally bored, like all you can do is the oldest tricks in your book?

Well this is good news, because it means that you have a strong harmonic network that you are able to navigate instinctively. You have chords and scales and arpeggios and know how to weave them together seamlessly to create a more or less continuous stream of sound. This is a big accomplishment. But it’s really only half the story and in some ways could be construed as preliminary work before the real game starts.

The real game at this point in time, not when you’re practicing but when you’re actually playing (to get back to Liebman), is to use compositional devices, most of which end up being rhythmic inside a tonal context (which is outside of Liebman, ironically). Now everybody knows they’re supposed to do this, but maybe they don’t think they’re good enough or smart enough or dumb enough or bad enough or any other kind of enough whether it makes sense or not. All it really boils down to is concentration and intention. Everybody can build up the will power to develop and utilize concentration and intention.

Intention is very simple: you want to do it so you do it. You set out saying that you are going to develop a rhythmic motive, maybe only two beats long, for an entire chorus. So when you play you are very careful to notice what the first thing you play is and then you consciously recognize that this will be the source of all that will follow for the next 32 bars. Now concentration comes into play. You can’t forget what you are doing and just start absentmindedly playing the changes. Of course you will forget at some point in your chorus, or decide intentionally to change strategies momentarily, and that’s okay. In fact, your solo will probably sound better for it. But you must have the concentration to reign your mind back into line and continue to do what you were doing originally, supposing that you still remember what it was.

Now as this game develops the next step is to use the material from those moments of un-intention when your mind wanders as motivic material for the next chorus. In other words, when you play something accidentally but rhythmically distinctive, try and store that idea in the back of your mind so that when you’ve exhausted your first motive you don’t just pick a new one, you draw from some earlier material in your solo (or from another musician playing). Even uneducated listeners pick up on this sort of stuff. They notice the patterns, and therefore notice even more strongly momentary breaks in the patterns. So to finish one pattern and then start creating a new pattern from earlier contrasting material is very effective. Now, if you can make it to the end of 2 choruses while doing this, you’ve come a long way with great intention and concentration. But the true test at this point is if you still remember the first motive, and can then play a 3rd chorus which combines ideas from both of your first two choruses.

By the way, when you’re playing this way it should become obvious that the first thing you play is terribly important because everything else will stem from it. For this reason, when you start thinking this way you might find very little variation in the kinds of rhythms you are able to use regardless of song or style. But you will slowly grow out of this over time as your ability to concentrate deepens and the length of the material you are able to remember increases. Start with a single two beat cell, move up to a bar, then two bars, and then maybe a whole phrase. Imagine being able to play a 4 bar phrase and then play something else with the same rhythm and general contour again over different changes but displaced by an 8th note. How cool would that be?

Supposing anybody ever actually reads all of this, do you notice a parallel between the method of improvising described in this article and the subject matter of all the articles in general. In a way, these articles are like a musical composition and follow the same rules.

Now who thinks that they can do all this and still give a good amount of attention to the rhythm section? This is where you start having to make aesthetic and philosophical decisions. There is no right balance or constant balance, but a push and pull of mental energy and attention. Maybe next time I’ll give an example of how such a constructed solo might look and sound. What kinds of variation are there? How do we take all those stuffy classroom-y terms like diminution and inversion and turn them into things that are actually cool and emotional in a modern jazz context?

In a way this is like the difference between a map and the real three dimensional world. The chords and arpeggios and scales are like a road map, they are the paths that exist to get from one point to another. But once you bring in rhythmic concepts to your playing, this brings depth to the navigation, this brings the material off the page and into the real world, this creates an entirely new dimension to what you play. All the chords and arpeggios are still there, still being used and exploited, but they are now secondary and the real message is something deeper. Of course, none of this is enough if you don’t bring emotion (yet another dimension) to your playing. How to balance our minds and our emotions is the real essence of the jazz game.

More to do with Triads

The fun continues with triads in closed position. Try this line out with your second finger on the 8th fret:

As you can see this line contains a C triad followed by B dim in second inversion which leads into A min triad in 2nd inversion. This line still uses cycle 2, but uses different inversions and octave displacements to create a really cool and different texture.

This is a hard line to sing and hear because although there is a thought process and underlying logic to the line it contains a very strange mix of intervals and avoids enclosing leaps. It’s debatable whether or not anyone who didn’t already know what it is would hear some kind of pattern. But isn’t that the point? To take a mechanical exercise and learn to weave the movements and reflexes it builds up in our ears, hands and minds into new sounds which don’t sound mechanical?

What I do know is that I like the sound of this sort of thing and that eventually if I sing it enough I’m sure it will greatly improve my ability to play with increasing intervallic complexity. Why is it that up until now that triadic sounds or series of triadic sounds in my single note playing have almost always been in root position and in the case of sequences and patterns, ALWAYS the same inversion. There really is no reason to continue being limited by this constraint.

The Really Broken Triad

Many guitar players have spent some time working on playing major or melodic minor modes in broken triads in closed position.

I’ve been working for a few days on playing ideas which essentially deal with the same concept of broken triads but moving the voice-leading in the opposite direction of the progression.

Notice how the progression is ascending but the voicings are descending and changing inversion in a regular pattern. While I’ve come up with some lines that use the very horizontal kind of hand movement that I think it’s natural to use on the guitar when faced with this kind of material, some of the lines I’ve come up with seem to be much more suited to closed (or almost-closed) position. This is where the lightbulb turned on.

Could it be possible to play a mechanical pattern in closed position that differs from the pattern above in that instead of going from C to Dm you would go from C to

Bdim/D?

It is also possible to do this exercise 3 different ways in each position, starting on C as well as Am/C or F/C as the first chord.

How would this sound in all the other modes of major and minor? What kind of new movements and sounds might this unlock during improvisations? Is this the key to connecting all the horizontal work of disjunct voice-leading with position playing?

I personally find it much harder to sing and hear the progression when playing this way. It’s an interesting challenge. One good tip I got from Mitch Haupers at the workshop this summer is to sing the roots while doing exercises like this to help you hear the progression a bit more clearly at first.

Here are a few more licks that involve similar ideas and a video showing a couple of the more horizontal ideas (systems 1 and 5):

The Juggling Act

It was pointed out to me that I had trouble playing basslines. Being a guitarist and having spent little time devoted to coming up with melodic ways to imply chords in my lower register, I wasn’t shocked to find this out. What did shock me, was how shaky my time became when practicing something that I found uncomfortable. The split second required to calculate the truly new motion would gather momentum and create an avalanche until the time was backwards. So I sat down with a buddy and we started to play through a few standards, alternating between bassline and soloing every chorus. After a few days we seemed to get the hang of it. There was still obviously lots of room to improve, but we’d crossed that border from not being very comfortable at all to being able to deliver an average or adequate performance. We would obviously continue to work together in this format, but we also wanted to push ourselves a bit and extend our comfort level to its very limit. So we decided to make things more interesting.

You might say that all my energy right now is devoted to learning how to hear and listen better. This applies to more technical considerations such as recognizing chords, scales, intervals, progressions etc. but also to more nuanced considerations such as how to play with and respond to other musicians. So I sat down with my friend and we decided we were going to do the same exercise again but this time we would trade fours. On top of the fact that our sense of time and comfort with basslines would both be tested, as well keeping track of the form, we were going to make our lives truly difficult by forcing ourselves to stick to very strict motivic development and make as great an effort as possible to hear everything the other was playing.

There was a lot to think about and be conscious of so as not to screw up. All those things mentioned before are fundamentals of performance and cannot be compromised, so how much of our focus could we draw away from them to listen to what the other person was playing? Not only were we required to hear what they were playing, but pick out something significant about their statement and begin formulating an appropriate response, all the while continuing to play basslines which we were not particularly comfortable with.

A few interesting things happened. Firstly, there were definitely multiple four bar stretches over a couple of choruses where we did not hear a single note the other person played. We simply were not comfortable enough with the material and were forced to become totally preoccupied with ourselves in order to maintain the time and form. We also found that we seemed to have a very clear development of only a couple of ideas over a stretch of at least 64 bars, something we both found hard to be disciplined enough to do when soloing alone. One reason is that we could only communicate with very small ideas because we were doing so much, and the other is that at times where we became unable to listen, we would simply fall back on the motive we remembered from an earlier point in the song.

I think of this as the juggling exercise because we are forced to pay attention to so many things and there simply isn’t enough to go around all the time. We are alternating between playing something that makes us slightly uncomfortable, focusing on the metronome, and attempting to create a responsive performance with a fellow musician, and it begins to feel like two people juggling a bunch of balls and that any second they can all come tumbling down with one small glitch in coordination or timing.

In my opinion there are are a couple of lessons to take from doing this exercise. The first is that our level of comfort and familiarity with a tune and how we plan to play over it needs to be very high if we stand a chance of performing musically. The more experimenting we do, the more involved the mental process we have during performance, or in the case of these basslines where it simply boiled down to not having enough experience yet, the less we are able to listen. It becomes unbelievably important to have all tunes memorized to start. But more importantly, perhaps we need to specify what it means to improvise and come up with a definition based on how we can maximize our ability to listen. What we find is that the word improvise takes on different meanings within different contexts.

We’ve talked already about free jazz. Within this context, there is not necessarily a key center, tempo, meter etc. and even if there is you might be inclined to and completely entitled to ignore any of them. In short, there are fewer balls to juggle. It becomes more a game of pitch and catch, of bonding and working up a trust, rhythm, and chemistry. In this context, a person does in fact have much more attention to spread around to both listening to others, and searching out sounds and the motions to execute those sounds which lie outside of their reflexive habits.

Now, if we introduce a more rigid song structure, the juggling game begins. Depending on tempo and other factors, a person has less and less time to think about what to do. Searching for completely new sounds and textures can become unbelievably difficult and if we’re all being honest, it happens most of the time by accident anyways. The point is that all this draws even more attention away from listening to the others. The rhythm section listening to the soloist, as well as the soloist listening to the rhythm section. So how can we define what it means for us to be improvisers in this context in such a way that we maximize our ability to be conscious of the collective sound of all the musicians? The answer is obvious but sometimes it helps to hear it anyways. This is because we often do what we do without actually knowing what it is that we’re doing, and understanding the nature of the activity can help us practice and develop our abilities more efficiently.

What we do in the context of a song as improvisers is build up a network of colors (if you’re thinking more in terms of sound) or shapes (if you’re thinking more in terms of sight, be it on your instrument or sheet music). This can be expressed as all the scales and modes we know and also all the chords we know. What we then proceed to do is combine our palette of colors to form a landscape, to tell a story. It is rare that we accidently discover a new mode in the middle of an improvisation, but much more likely that we accidently play an atypical mode over a chord. In other words, we exploit an unusual cross-relationship. Just the other day this happened to me when I accidentally played C# dorian over an Amaj7. I now love and exploit this chord-scale relationship regularly however the first time it happened it was not something I had consciously set out to do.

When you see an A7b13 on a page, there are only a finite number of things your hand will do. You might know three voicings or thirty, but in the end of the day you can’t escape the fact that if you’d like to discover a new one it will take you at least a few minutes, and then probably lots of practice to integrate it into your playing. There is no way that this can ever happen spontaneously. Much more likely is that you will play a voicing you already know which maybe fits or maybe doesn’t but either way you have never thought of it as an A7b13 before.

Does a painter have a hundred shades of blue on his palette? a hundred shades of yellow? Purple? Green? Of course not. This is totally unrealistic. A painter creates a large range of colors by combining simple colors to create more complicated or subtler ones. Even the most basic jazz harmony can be seen in this way. A Cmaj7 chord can be seen as a C triad and an E minor triad put together. It is the creation of a new color based on the combination of preexisting and more basic colors.

So we see that from an exercise which serves a very practical purpose, that is to help us get better at playing basslines, switching between soloing and walking without fumbling the time, and sharpening our ability to maintain awareness of others while doing so, a much deeper question is raised. What is it we are doing when we sit down to do this thing called improvising? What is more important: playing chops or listening chops? Or is it about finding a balance between the two? What a juggling act!

Summer Band Camp

After a week at the Mr. Goodchord workshop, I’ve come home refreshed and ready to implement certain ideas that I’ve been exposed to. There are three distinct (if not interrelated on some level) areas of practice which I can think of:

1. Group Playing
2. Guitar Duet
3. Individual harmonic development.

1. Group Playing

I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of free music. Although I quite enjoyed much of what I heard at the camp that could be called free music, I probably would never walk into a club because similar sounds were drifting into the street. The difference is that free music is an exercise for musicians to develop certain reflexes that are hard to pinpoint and articulate in more traditional contexts with defined roles, not something to submit a trusting and unsuspecting audience to. I understood the nature of the exercise and to a certain extent the personalities involved which made the experience more meaningful. Talking about the music before and after so as to understand the mindset of the musicians involved also greatly enriched the experience.

I am in a band with seven other people. We have struggled over the past year to find a way to elevate our playing as a whole. It seemed that we were either playing arranged parts or somebody was soloing and people’s ears were turned off because they could rely on their brains to make sure all the right sounds came out. We began our last practice with two hours of free jamming, where we not only changed instruments but also played them together (i.e. one person blowing into a trombone and the other moving the slide), talking along the way about what was successful or not about each piece of music. We were not concerned with aesthetic considerations because we try and suspend such judgements and habits when playing free. We talked more about how people listened and reacted and how certain gestures changed or directed the given piece. We also noticed that it was quite refreshing to watch someone with no experience on an instrument try and make sounds come out of it. Rather than laughing at the drummer who has no idea how to play guitar, we were kind of awed at the creative ways he used the instrument.

After this free jamming, we moved on to a piece which had always been a standard arrangement of a head (form of ABCA) followed by solos over the A section and then BCA to conclude. This time, with open ears, hearts and minds, the piece evolved into a much more organic, interesting, and emotional experience. The first time we played the piece it consisted entirely of the repeated A section. Rather than stick to the arrangement, the horns and rhythm section were feeding off of each other to create a much more dynamic and responsive atmosphere. The horns, feeling liberated from normal considerations of how to harmonize properly, which is why prearranged parts were always necessary, and trusting more in their instincts and intimate knowledge of the material, played the most beautiful contrapuntal development of the melody.

Everyone felt refreshed and invigorated by the experience. This was not free music, but it was free-er music. By entering a more sensitive and careful frame of mind, the horns were able to create a lush arrangement completely spontaneously which then inspired the rhythm section to find new areas of exploration. But we were still missing half the song. It should be noted that the A section of this song is a very relaxing and peaceful D mixolydian pedal in 7/4. The B section is a highly contrasting, dynamic and aggressive chromatic progression of altered chords which explodes into the C section, which then lowers gently back into the A section. Could we try to play the song again, this time steering the energy of the initial vamp in a more energetic direction, culminating in the chaotic B section, at which point the band would revert to the arranged composition before returning to the free approach when the A section returned? We could and it felt and sounded great.

Perhaps this is a new approach. Learn complex and intricate arrangements, and then keep parts, throw out others, and attempt to weave them together in more organic fashions utilizing the musicianship and sensitivity of the players. By having the discarded arranged sections as reference points harmonically and melodically, it firstly gives a group somewhere to fall back on if an experiment is failing, but also gives them material to draw from which is thematically related to the rest of the composition. This allows for possibilities which free playing alone cannot offer because some things can only be done with practice, premeditation and coordination. However it also allows for things which purely composed music doesn’t allow for by creating more organic, spontaneous and contrasting sections of a piece. Furthermore, it is a way to expose an audience to the emotional and creative wonders of free playing without them becoming bored or overwhelmed by placing these moments of freedom in the context of music which they already understand and are therefore more ready to enjoy.

1. Guitar Duet

Much of what is contained in the Mr. Goodchord Almanacs are impossible (at least for me) to play on the guitar. It is fairly easy to play for two or four guitarists in the fashion of a string quartet. Drawing on the repertoire and knowledge of the jazz musician, could it be possible to create an approach to playing with another musician that transcends the basic game of swapping functions at certain benchmarks in a form (i.e. comping and then soloing while the other person does the opposite). Take the song “All The Things You Are”. When moving through Cycle 4 the root (or 9th) of the first chord moves to the fifth of the next chord, and the fifth moves to the root. The same relationship exists between the 7th and 3rd.

If two guitarists played through All The Things You Are, which moves almost exclusively through cycle 4 (cycle means the ascending interval from chord to chord), one beginning on the root and 5th, the other on the 3rd and 7th, they would essentially sound like a single guitar or piano player comping. Once this could be done fairly easily in tempo the question begs: what else can be done? In the end of the day listening to two people do what would be totally uninteresting to hear one person do doesn’t make much sense, so in some way this formula must be enriched or elaborated upon so that it can go beyond what one person could do on their own.

1. Melodic embellishment: In the case of All The Things You Are, one person would have one common tone every time the chord changed, allowing for an easy way to start playing around with melodic embellishment since only one voice at at time really needs to be concentrated on.
2. Extensions: Slowly, and without losing track of the pulse, start integrating extensions into your note selection, but being careful to pick notes which are functionally similar to the guide tones you were originally playing. For instance, a 5th could be replaced with a 13th but not a 9th.
3. Basslines: Could it be possible to play more dynamic basslines because the complexity of the voicing you would grab above it is cut in half with the amount of notes you’re looking to play.
4. Chord Substitutes: Besides the obvious extra side slipping and tonicizations we all do on our own, perhaps the same systematic approach described above could be used while playing All The Things or some other standard completely with TBN 1 or 2(I/V or I/VII), or fourths or clusters. On a song like all the things you are it could even be done without writing the parts in advance because the harmony moves so systematically through the keys, but how hard would that be on other tunes?
5. How would this sound as two people combine all of these things at their own discretion?

Once you’ve finished doing this over a whole bunch of tunes with somebody and then basically remove all restrictions or limitations, how will it sound? How will the way you listen to each other have changed? How will your understanding of how the two instruments combine to create a sound have changed? Will it seem more that instead of having 1+1=2 that you have 0.5+0.5=1? I sure don’t know yet.

1. Individual Harmonic Development

The amount of material in the voice leading books is in fact staggering. For this reason I have decided to concern myself only with the triads from volume I for as long as possible (months, years?). Two days into my new practice routine and the amount of work becomes staggeringly clear but finite and doable, so long as you practice as systematically as the material is laid out.

1. Pick a Cycle. I started with 2.
2. Play through the cycle in all 3 modes.
3. Remember to start playing the cycle on every different inversion of the chord or else you will only be exploring a small portion of the actual possibilities on the guitar neck.
4. Try and come up with multiple places to switch strings/positions.
5. Play the chords in both directions so that you’re practicing cycle 2 and 7 at the same time.
6. Repeat in 11 other keys.
7. Repeat with spread voicings.
8. Move on to next cycle (there are really only 2 others, not 4).

Although according to the rules I laid out for myself I’m not supposed to, I find that after doing cycle two for a while, the other ones are less work. And the melodic ideas add up pretty fast as well, especially in harmonic and melodic minor.

What a week!