Feeling Good

Here's a list which I think is really important, especially for us jazz musicians who can tend to be a pretty negative and self critical bunch. It comes directly and exactly from the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns.


Definitions of Cognitive Distortions

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolours the entire beaker of water.

4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
            a. Mind Reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
            b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. LABELLING AND MISLABELLING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddamn louse." Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

A Certain Slash Chord on Stella

The chord Gaug/A makes a great A7 substitute, implying Lydian #5. The chord itself implies Gmaj7#5.

But wait, that mode, the third mode of melodic minor, can be transposed to numerous places to imply an A7 chord, because the 4th 5th and 7th modes of melodic minor are all dominant scales.

So Gmaj7#5, Fmaj7#5, Dbmaj7#5 (or Gaug/A, Faug/G, Dbaug/Eb) all very cool sounding chords, all imply some kind of A7 chord.

And as for the ii chord? Em7b5? We're going to use the sixth mode of melodic minor, but play the chord of the 3rd or 5th mode: Bbmaj7#5 or D9b13 (or related slash chords).


I'm going to start out for now by being very strict about chord tones because if I start using substitutions for the substitutions things get too far out too fast. Except of course for the aforementioned TBNII.

Here's a chorus on Stella

The Importance of Lists

At the moment, it is not possible to buy the Mr. Goodchord Voice Leading Almanacs. I would like to propose that, although I do find them useful (especially vol. iii), this can be viewed as an opportunity rather than a calamity.

What are the almanacs? They are lists. If you've read through the Advancing Guitarist or any of Mick Goodrick's magazine articles, then you know might be familiar with the following kind of proposition.

First take a look at pages 57-61 of the Advancing Guitarist. Nice list, right? The Goodchord Almanac Vol. I consists almost entirely of writing out all those chord voicings note by note and in every possible inversion and chord type (1st inversion, drop 3 etc). More nice lists.

Why would a person bother to do all that work? Well to help us out. But maybe we could make our own lists to help ourselves out. Maybe the most important lesson Mick Goodrick teaches us through all his books is not to use his lists, but the value in creating our own. There are an infinite amount of ways to present this kind of information.

Let's take a look at an excerpt from pages 41-42 of the Advancing Guitarist. Mick is suggesting we create random sequences of the 48 triads and then voice lead through them. But wait. Don't stop there.
***
Things To Do:
1. Now go back to the "triad row" and voice-lead through the entire progression.
2. Now play it backwards.
3. Start with a different inversion of the very first chord and go through the sequence again.
4. Play it backwards.
5. Start the sequence with a spread triad voicing.
6. Guess what now?
7. Can you see other things to do?
***

So, like you, upon reading that, I think alright let's rock and roll. Maybe I get through it once, maybe I start on number 5, maybe I will read them in columns instead of rows, or read every second or third triad etc.

There are lots of possibilities. Now here's a little experiment. Try doing it without the list or "triad row". WTF? is the proper reaction. It can't be done. There's no way you could retain all 48 triads and which one's you'd already played, let alone systematically juggle their order or anything like that.

Mentally writing and maintaining the triad row while you do the exercise is way too complicated. Without the list, it becomes impossible to do this kind of work thoroughly.

So let's make our own custom lists, tailored to our own needs, in addition to whatever other ones we might have in the Advancing Guitarist, Chord Chemistry, Voice Leading Almanacs, Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony etc. (All great books full of many lists worth considering).

In fact, I just made a list of books which I might open up when I start practicing.
Making a list of all the songs you know is also a great idea. Arranging them into a binder, your own custom fake book, is an even better idea.
Mick talks about the Chinese Menu approach to practising. When there are simply too many things to do, arrange them in a numbered list, and in categories: Warm-ups (appetizers), Theory (soup), Application in Songs (entrée). Every time you sit down to a meal... I mean to practice, order the dishes that you feel like eating. And try to order every dish at least once a week or every few days or whatever makes the most sense to you. 

Recently with a saxophonist, I made a list of everything he knew how to do while soloing, the point being that when you see how huge it is, and then consider how many tunes and keys and changes there are, there is never an excuse to run out of work.