Musical Experience

Very Early

2011-07-31T12:49:00.001-04:00

This is the first new study in a quite a while. What's interesting about the melody of this piece and how it ties into all this open chord work I've been doing has to do with all the octave jumps. This study uses less voicings than many of the others and a smaller variety of colours on each chord. What it does well
is show how to create space with large intervals and how the effect isn't spoiled even when the melody tends to consistently fill in those gaps.

The upper staff shows the exact notes, the lower staff the chords played. Note how often the lower staff contains a 3 note chord where the upper staff outlines an easily playable 4 note chord. This is done intentionally to emphasize the difference between spaced out harmonization and melodic dips into the lower register.

Meditation

2011-05-08T02:14:00.003-04:00

When I started this blog I was itching to get out seven years worth of thoughts on insight on just about every aspect of music that I could imagine. I felt like I was discovering a whole new harmonic and melodic language and that it would be firstly beneficial to myself to document that journey and explore in a public forum the ideas that were occurring to me even though most have gone unread. I think there are some genuine insights in these pages and articles, some of a more technical nature, some more philosophical or pedagogical.

My output began to taper about the same time I left music school, realizing that I was not a classical composer or an academic musician, that I was not enjoying myself, that I didn't particularly have an urge to play anything typically labelled jazz although the music has informed my style. For a few months I barely played. For a few more I dabbled, working on the odd idea, writing songs but feeling largely uninspired. A couple of months ago the flood let loose at the same time that I came back to the acoustic guitar. I have become engrossed in the process of songwriting and recording. Yet I also find myself returning to the guitar purely as a musician when I'm alone. It seems my priorities have shifted.

I've tried meditating but my mind is scattered and I can only very weakly adhere to a regular routine. It is a struggle that I tend to lose. But when I am alone and I pick up the guitar, I sink into it. Ideas that are days or years old flutter up and interweave, the drone of the bass serves as an agent of self-hypnosis, and I find myself sink into a place that is very peaceful and cathartic.

What comes out is a bit aimless, returning to some themes and abandoning others, going through sections of clearly driving rhythm and others that meander.

I often get into playful arguments with people who have a largely electronic relationship with music or more generally those who are overly preoccupied with either non-improvisational performance or composition, because it is this direct and therapeutic musical experience which I have a hard time creating through a more structured process, which seems to me inherently filtered. I wonder if they are achieving this state of mind as well, if they are aware of its existence or are even interested in pursuing it. Although I may very well be wrong. I think much of the more philosophical articles I have written boil down to this notion, of how to eliminate filters in one's musical experience, how to have the most direct relationship possible with what is in this very moment flowing out of you, how to enjoy the culmination of years of study and introspection and bonding with your instrument.

So, I've decided to share such a moment. And I've decided to explain what it means to me. What does the very moment when you hold an instrument mean to you?

Popping and Bopping

2010-11-13T19:51:00.000-05:00

There are two things that make developing compound lines on the guitar easier than on other instruments. Especially sequenced compound lines. The first, is that while as guitarists we may generally not have the same control over the decay and sustain of our notes as other instruments (noted exception), we do have a tremendous amount of control over the articulation of our attack. A sensitive execution in terms of individual note volume can really bring a line to life.

If a lot of your experience involving the kinds of lines I'm referring to come mainly from bop heads and Bach inventions then you've probably felt that the guitar is not well suited for this kind of line formation or improvisation. While I've spent a lot of time writing about how to unlock the intervalic possibilities of the guitar, as has this brilliant man, and any decent and popular jazz guitarist today makes use of some sort of contrapuntal or angular and disjointed approach to melody, this notion of compound melody is one worth investigating more closely.

This brings me to the second things that make the guitar a well suited instrument for this kind of melodic exploration. Two many guitarists, myself and my work in these blogs included, tend to become very vertical when they start to explore more interesting intervals melodically. This definitely has its advantages and welcome outcomes and I don't want to seem dismissive about this approach. It's just not what this column is about. As jazz players, we could learn a lot from sitar players and the tapping of metal guitarists in terms of how to unlock the possibilities inherent in the layout of the guitar and take advantage of the obvious fact that the guitar has six strings.

I've sometimes talked about escape lines instead of escape tones, about how once you've learned to delay a resolution, you can postpone it indefinitely so long as you keep enough concentration to remember your intention. Take a look:

I've included video so I don't have to mark fingerings and positions, and here's what to look for.
The first system is a simple demonstration of the idea that you can delay your resolutions by much more than an eighth note without losing its coherence or effect. First there is a simple line and then the line again with a little melodic embellishment of the escape tone.

The second system shows a line a bit more complex, with a hanging dissonance at the top and the bottom of the line. Notice how each of the dissonances is created and resolved on the same string. Using this as a device can allow you to keep track of a complex idea much more easily. It's a way to keep things organized so you don't get lost in the infinite possibilities of sliding your hand around the neck.

The third system is just a neat line that uses a more interesting contrapuntal texture as a resolution.

The fourth system onward are simple exercises which can help you get into this mode of thinking. Hopefully you can fill in the blanks because I've implied more than I've explained in this article but I'm starting to enjoy that much more these days. I've spent a lot of time writing about how to take an exercise like that and extrapolate from it whatever you need to accomplish your goals at a given moment in time. Good luck!

All The Things Solo

2010-06-21T17:16:00.000-04:00

This is an old one I meant to finish but maybe you could.

Raising Awareness/Twinkle Twinkle

2010-06-21T17:04:00.001-04:00

If I had to boil down the job description of a teacher to one brief statement it would probably be: to raise awareness in others. I can think of two recent examples which will help to explain what I mean.

One student I have was learning the song Blackbird by the Beatles. It was a song he had already learnt long ago with another teacher well before he was ready to play it. He thought it would be a breeze to learn because he’d already learnt it before. He already knew where to place his fingers for the most part and the basic structure of the song. This was perfect because it allowed me to focus from the beginning on awareness, not having to deal with issues of notes and rhythm and memorization, and helped me isolate the concept with the student. He needed to become more aware of tempo, of the sound of his attack, the consistency of his right hand to pluck the notes and his left hand to apply the exact right amount of pressure. He needed to become more aware of all the things that made the recorded song sound so good and to hear the difference between what he was doing and what Paul McCartney was doing. Otherwise he could never fix it.

But what I really want to point out in terms of awareness is the following experience. I had taught this student a small portion of the song that he had forgotten where it modulated to G Dorian. Not that he knows what that means but that’s alright. The story of how to grow patience as a teacher for what must be told to a student you know you’re going to have for a long time is another story. Anyhow, before teaching the boy the section in question I asked him to sit at his computer and see if he could figure it out by ear. I gave him many clues. I told him only to listen to the lower note and that he could play it entirely on the A string. But he could not here the note. He could literally not distinguish the sound of the lowest note on the guitar from the rest of the sounds that were happening on the recording. He couldn’t isolate the low guitar note from the vocals. So I taught him the line and he played it a few times and then I made him listen again. And still he could not here the line even once he know what he was listening for. So this is what awareness is. One way to help someone make leaps in awareness is to let them return to something they thought they understood after a period where they had not thought about it for a long time and then show them what they had missed the first time, assuming that you as a teacher are aware of something that they were not. Once they see that they missed something, they are open to further suggestions. The shock of realizing that they had failed to understand something that they thought they were sure of beforehand is often a very useful tool to gain the trust of a student and help them evolve.

There is an eight year old girl I started teaching a few months ago. She is a very energetic and positive child and she was taking up guitar after giving up a few other instruments. So I sit down with this young lady who has not had good experiences with music teachers and who wants to be entertained and who has no preconceptions about what is cool or interesting or childish in regards to guitar playing. She can’t hold the guitar straight. It sits flat on her lap with the sound hole facing up. But she can sing a note back to me that I play and she is very enthusiastic.

I’d like to point out to anybody teaching a student how much about her I had sized up within the span of 2 minutes. The guitar kept slipping down, chords were out of the question, good attitude, no musical knowledge, relatively strong but completely untrained ear, no technical ease whatsoever. I walked in without a lesson plan, noticed these qualities, and then reacted instinctively. I think this is a strong way to approach any private lesson.

So we played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the high E string. It took two weeks to learn. I never wrote anything down, never told her the names of any notes, never asked her to hold her guitar upright. I only asked her to remember what I showed her. And I did show her using visual information. It was enough for her to be able to look at my hand and discern what fret I was playing and then to confirm what her eyes taught her with the confirmation of the sound of the note.

Next came Happy Birthday. Although we played in a different key, still on the E string but in A major instead of E major, there was only one note different and for the most part all the notes were the same as in the other song. I tried to explain this to her but she obviously didn’t understand so I let it drop. Where progress was being made was in the fact that this song contains larger leaps, forcing her to increase her spatial awareness of the fretboard and the fact that it was a longer song and therefore a greater test of memory. This song took almost a month to learn and still there were no note names, no chords, no scales, only the sounds and her gradual and mostly unconscious heightening of awareness and development of a methodology to figure out the sounds. I was allowing her to look at my hand less and forcing her to use her ear to find the sound and her own brain to discover where it was located on the guitar. It was slow and to many people perhaps she could have learned it better or faster. They might also say of many of my students that their comprehension of theory is surprisingly limited considering my own obsession. But I would say that to train a horse the best way you have to let it learn at its own pace and come to you when it feels ready. And so it also is with guitar players. And when they are ready they excel because they have been taught how to think for themselves, how to solve a problem, how to use their ear, how to be confident.

The third song was the Itsy Bitsy Spider. In some respects an easier song, but still tricky. For people starting to learn how to listen and recognize notes, repeated notes are very hard to recognize. They sing the song with the words in their head and hear and feel slight differences in intonation and imagine that the note has changed when in fact it didn’t or only did so very slightly but they were fooled by their perception. So this was a good exercise for the recognition of repeated notes. More importantly, since it was easier and shorter than Happy Birthday, it allowed for this young student to learn the notes almost entirely by ear and to memorize it with noticeably more ease. Still there was no concept of a scale, no names for notes, only a relationship developing with the sounds and their relative location on the neck of the guitar on a single string. But was that entirely true?

We are now about two months into lessons and it is time to learn Oh Canada. But first, this young student had to learn what a scale was. She learned very fast. All I had to do was play it for her once and she played it back to me perfectly. It was clear that our two months of building fundamentals, even if she still didn’t even hold the guitar properly, which I was about to finally address as well, had payed off. Then I had her sing the scale degrees while she played the scale. Then I had her go back and play the Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle while also singing the song in scale degrees at the same time. And then I sung to her our Canadian National Anthem in scale degrees and she played it back to me perfectly and had no trouble remembering it. And because I had waited for the right moment I was able to do all of this in a half hour. And this little girl was able to feel as if she discovered the scale and therefore understood it and appreciated it on a level which many adults I meet don’t necessarily possess, let alone 8 year old girls. Undoubtedly when I return she will be worse off then that during our one extremely lucid session. But we will build back up to that moment where she caught sight of all that she was unaware of and then surpass it many times over on the way to the next breaking of the dam of her awareness.

Feeling Good

2010-04-13T13:43:00.001-04:00

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

2010-04-12T00:27:00.001-04:00

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

2010-04-12T00:23:00.000-04:00

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.

More Things On All The Things

2010-03-19T23:37:00.000-04:00

What are the circles with the letters and arrows for? Here’s a second study on all the things you are which will attempt to demonstrate. Every 8 bars makes use of a different circle as well as a different type of voicing.

Bars 1-8: A=3, B=5, C=7
***
Bars 9-16: A=1,B=5,C=7
hmm... interesting how the arrow from A to B turns out to be a common tone.

***
17-24: A=1 B=2 C=3
***
24-28: A=1 B=3 C=7
surprisingly normal
***
29-32: A=1 B=3 C=7
why did I switch so soon besides trying to fit all the circles into one chorus?
why would the last circle be hard to finger with the chromatic movement of the bass line harmony?
***
33-36: A= 1 B=4 C=7
Does this break the pattern? Or is there voice crossing? Wouldn’t these voicings sound great sung by a choir?
What's the lesson about following directions (especially your own)?

All The Things (3 notes)

2010-03-14T01:32:00.000-05:00

Makes use of various three note structures. Will make more sense with bass player or on piano with bass note. The whole point, at least for me at the moment, of exploring three note textures, is to assume that they are being played in a group or at least duet setting.

Some 3 Note Ideas

2010-02-28T10:15:00.000-05:00

7 no 5

2010-02-27T13:07:00.001-05:00

A simple enough rock riff... or is it?

An Em7no5 chord spread huge with the 7th in the bass, planed through different chords of A minor. The flat and natural sixth are used. It's a 5 bar pattern. And the pedal tone of A gives it a certain eerie quality. I also always find it interesting when open strings are used and two notes which appear very far away on the guitar are actually quite close together on the music staff.

Or is it in D mixo/dorian?

Three's company

2010-02-27T01:34:00.002-05:00

For the last few months I have been largely preoccupied with finding interesting four note voicings and arranging them in an order which allows for chords and melodies to be played. What I have noticed is that this lends itself much more effectively to playing alone or at the most in a duet situation, perhaps accompanying a singer. But in the context of a band or a jam session, many of these voicings have not fared as well.

For starters, part of the beauty of the open voicings is their openness. This is obscured in a band situation. Their space is overwhelmed by the sound of ride cymbals and saxophones. If there is a piano player there, they are obviously totally ineffective. Smaller shapes with a more sparse and percussive comping style should be used because more often than not it just always sounds like the guitar is stepping on the piano’s toes and not the other way around (speaking generally of course).

I have also recently started to play duets with a bass player. The bass player is there to lay down the harmonic foundation. The chord inversion is completely up to them. And then there’s just the fact that their instrument is so full sounding. Big four note open chords are great because their openness ironically makes them sound fuller as they create a sense of space. With a bass player, the options increase incredibly, because the pressure to create that sense of fulness is largely taken off of our shoulders.

Let’s take a look at the power of three notes. There are the triads, but also spread clusters, three part fourths, as well as 7th chords omitting the 5th or the 3rd (omitting other notes from any other kind of voicings results in a redundant voicing explainable in another way).

Now I need to plane modally, explore inversions and chord types and write arrangements or studies which help me find ways to put things in a traditional context as well as get practice transposing and recycling them. Most of all, the more hard work you do with them in as many different ways as possible, the better you’re going to remember them and be able to find them when you’re looking for them. It seems to be working.

Here’s a chart which clearly resembles the Mick Goodrick chart from the last article. It is interesting because it contains every possible combination of 3 notes without having any note repeated. That means that the chart for any key or mode would look the same, just with a different key signature. I didn’t bother spelling the triads.

Once again, the power of working out this chart as a practice aid before sitting down to experiment with the possibilities cannot be overestimated. You could play a row or a column. You could choose a single box every day and explore it uniquely through different inversions and who knows what else. You could play a standard deciding to go through the voicing type column, cycling through them as the changes go by. If you get confused, you can just breeze on over to the corresponding square to find out exactly what notes you need and apply the appropriate accidentals for the context of the song.

You could find a thousand different ways to use this piece of paper. And it will not be the same as if you practised without it.

What's amazing is that after three volumes of voice-leading almanacs, there's still new ways to present the same material which are not redundant. This is because with every new layout of the same information, due to the complicated nature of the material, I think we tend to see different possibilities based on what the layout suggests. That's probably why Mick bothered rewriting the same thing so many different ways. Every one really does make you think differently.

***

I chose to follow this train of thought before checking to see what existed in Vol. III on the subject of 3 note voicings. Now that I open it up I find that my chart is not there. What is there, is a detailed listing of every possible inversion and order these notes could be in as well as their relationship to four part chords. There is a huge amount of redundancy in those charts and in many ways this chart is more practical in its reductive quality. It does require a certain facility with inverting chords though to be practical.

The charts which appears later on (p. 55-61) are much more interesting in my opinion. They systematically list all the ways in an abstract and generalized form which the collections of 3 notes listed above can be led into each other! There's only six possibilities! Hopefully nobody minds if I put this chart up on this blog because I doubt anybody going out to buy Vol. III would choose not to because of this one chart. And it will answer a lot of questions. Choose any two voicings from the above list and the way in which they lead into each other can be described by the following chart:

From these two charts, every possible movement of 3 notes to another 3 notes without having a doubled note can be extrapolated in a systematic fashion. Rather than working like a computer to work out all the possibilities, how exciting does it seem to dive into the endless and completely unintuitive intellectually (but often easy enough to play) and extremely musical possibilities that these papers unlock?

In an age when jazz composition is rhythmically driven by odd time signatures and polyrhythms, and harmonic progressions are becoming simpler and more modal in nature with an emphasis on bass groove, how could these papers not excite a person to think of all the possibilities that still lie within a major scale?

This is an extremely relevant and new intellectual framework from which sounds can be discovered. In an age when so much has been done, we need to organize our thoughts scientifically or else we will never reach the extreme boundaries of what is mathematically possible while still more or less in the realm of the tonal system, or at the very least the kind of ancient modality dating back thousands of years.

Or screw the whole damned thing and let's go microtonal. But I like this.

Exploring The Possibilities

2010-02-26T14:10:00.002-05:00

What follows below are 3 sheets of paper, one compiled by Mick Goodrick and the other compiled by me for a piano player. They both address the issue of how to come up with new voicings to freshen up your playing. Perhaps the global lesson of all Mick Goodrick's Almanacs is that before even picking up your guitar it can help to lay out a theoretical road map of all the possibilities for whatever you're going to work on. The reason for this is that once you start working, you very quickly get bogged down with possibilities. If you're trying to learn them all you'll never get to the end of the list.

It's much less exhausting to think about the all the possibilities first and write them out then to have to play them all. Suppose that you're trying to learn drop 2&4 voicings. Suppose you decide to go through all the chord types, maj7, then min7 etc. It becomes overwhelming to have to think of all the possibilities and put yourself under the immense pressure to both remember and learn them all on your guitar. So probably you will never get to the vast majority of the mathematical and technically feasible possibilities. But if you make a list, you can hop around.

Take a look at Mick's list below. Mick is trying to come up with minor II V voicings, so he makes a chart. He wants to use the 6th mode of melodic minor for Em7b5 and the altered scale for A7. So he writes out every possible four note chord voicing from the five categories of chords which exist in the mode and he circles all the ones that don't have the note E in them. He's decided that he wants to use rootless voicings. He could have decided otherwise.

Now imagine if you were trying to think of all that while you were also trying to play them on guitar? It's confusing and hard to keep track of everything. Did I do that one yet? What was that last one? This way you can jump around from circle to circle without constantly having to recalculate that information and then see if you find anything you like on the guitar. Having a systematic (maybe even scientific) coding system before you start practising allows for a much less systematic and generally more inspiring and productive practice method.

Then we see all the four note possibilities for the A7. Again, because all the possibilities are mapped out, this frees up a great amount of our imagination and concentration while practising to look for musical and emotional possibilities rather than just systematically running through the list. We can never learn all the possibilities so why even try? But we can reduce them to one handwritten 8.5x11 page. And then just go wherever we are interested in going at that very moment.

I cannot stress enough: without writing out that page, it becomes necessary to memorize it without ever even seeing it, and probably you will be trying to play them at the same time as think of them. For those familiar with the juggling act, this is a few too many balls even within a practice context.

Take a look at the pages I wrote. They essentially recycling the information from the Almanacs. It is just another way of presenting the information on Mick Goodrick's page. Since it is geared for a specific talented piano player who transposes and planes shapes modally quite effortlessly, you'll notice that I spend more time explaining the way voicings are constructed (drop 2 vs drop 3 etc) as opposed to Mick's page which assumes you already have done a lot of work exploring inversions and is more interested in the aspect of modal planing.

Either way, it is a good idea to write down everything that comes to you. You don't want to have to repeat the mental process to get back to it. Thinking is the important first step. But once you've thought your way somewhere interesting it is time to mindlessly memorize it on a totally non-intellectual level.

You'll notice that if you treat the G# minor scale as a vertical scale (and don't mind the crunch of the 5th and 6th occasionally), that any chord from the mode in any inversion and in any substitution (TBN, clusters etc) becomes a possible chord (at least for a few beats if it is extremely tense and feels like it needs to be resolved). You'll also notice at the bottom of the last page there is an equation which shows that there are AT LEAST (and probably more) 1176 easily playing voicings on the piano for a G#m7 chord in a modal context.

Working through them would be pointless. What if one of your all time future favourite voicings is number 1032? What if it's really not obvious to you? I would hate to have to play 1031 to find out what it is. That's why a good road map is essential. Or maybe it's more like the yellow pages. You know what you're looking for but you're not sure who exactly is going to give it to you. You look up the general area you require and then you dial a few numbers to find exactly the right thing you needed. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is indeed like an Almanac.

The Slippery Slope

2010-02-21T17:47:00.001-05:00

This tune is literally a page straight out of Mick Goodrick's Voice Leading Almanac Vol. III.

It is (i)grip-slipping through a (ii)six tonic system in (iii)cycle 7.

(i) The guitar voicings represent grip-slipping although I cheat a bit. Grip-slipping means voice-leading through inversions. I say that I cheat because the first voicing is drop 2&3 and the second chord is drop 3 instead of being another drop 2&3. The third chord is drop 2&4. In fact this creates a 3 voicing cyclical pattern so it's quite an interesting cheat. You might say it's grip slipping cubed. The A section interrupts itself at the tritone before finishing the cycle in the B section.

(ii) It utilizes a six tonic system, which is another way of saying that the roots of the chords are derived from the whole tone scale but the notes of each chord are not related.

(iii) For those who haven't checked out the voice-leading almanacs or read earlier posts of this blog, cycle 7 means that the roots of the chords have a relationship of increasing by a seventh. Cycles are always ascending.

Cycle seven is cycle two backwards. Notice the contrary movement between the root and the voicings which is integral to grip-slipping.

The C section just sounds nice. The tighter voicings as well as the quicker harmonic rhythm provide a nice contrast.

Also intentional is the avoidance of accidentals in the A section melody, despite moving from no flats (or one sharp) to 5 (or 6) flats.

New Band Logo

2010-01-31T17:44:00.001-05:00

Contrepoint 3.0

2010-01-22T13:36:00.004-05:00

Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others - sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on - can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
Excerpt from Drive by Daniel H. Pink

Many of the worlds greatest artists never went to university, dropped out, or were asked to leave. Without resorting to romanticized and poetic discourse about the artist’s fiery and unruly disposition, after three years of CEGEP and five months of university I can’t help but wonder why that is.

We hear repeatedly that the best way to learn about music is to play it, to listen to it, and not only to study scores but to copy them out. Yet most of us know that in this respect we are too negligent and lazy.

Rather than playing and copying out Bach’s manuscripts, gradually raising our own questions and coming to our own conclusions which we could then compare to those of an experienced professor, we are slowly fed an oversimplified and inaccurate formal system to explain his style.

But who else is there to blame except ourselves? As it turns out, scientific evidence suggests that being in school and having to complete assignments for marks decreases our motivation to do extra work independently and decreases our overall productivity in the subject in question.

Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive is about how to motivate ourselves and others in the 21st century. He distinguishes between two kinds of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivations include drawing a salary to do a job or getting good marks in school. Intrinsic motivation is when we want to do things ourselves purely for the enjoyment of the challenge and the satisfaction of achieving a goal.

Consider the following experiment, explained in Pink’s book. A group of school children were divided into three groups. Each group of children was asked to draw pictures. One group was offered a reward beforehand for their cooperation: a certificate with a ribbon and their name on it. The second group was not offered an incentive beforehand but received the same award at the end as a surprise. The third group was not offered a reward beforehand and did not receive one at the end.

The interesting result is that two weeks later when the researchers returned to watch the children during free play, the children from the first group who had received the incentive before drawing now showed much less interest in drawing than before the experiment when compared to children from the other groups.

Offering the children an incentive to participate decreased their future enjoyment and intrinsic motivation to take part in the future. Incentivizing the activity took something that had been enjoyable to the children and, since the activity now felt like work, made it less enjoyable.

Countless other experiments can be found in Pink’s book which show that this fact extends to adults and even monkeys. One study demonstrated that people who were given a financial incentive to solve creative and intellectual problems quickly (fastest time gets $20, for instance), the average time that group took to solve the puzzles actually increased considerably when compared to a control group.

This suggests to me that the studying of music theory in school is seriously flawed. We are constantly confronted with rules and conventions that don’t in reality exist, that are historically inaccurate, and that don’t connect to us emotionally. We are told to play along, to follow the rules, because if we don’t, we will lose marks, maybe fail the class, maybe even be forced to leave the school if too many classes are failed. Follow the rules and you will be rewarded. Don’t and face the consequences.

The unfortunate side effect of this approach for most of the population is that it creates a barrier between what they are learning in school, which is perceived as extrinsically motivated work, and their intrinsically motivated artistic expression, making it harder for the two to reflect each other. So two camps are set up, the self-glorifying academics on one side, all too conscious that their works have a basically non-existent audience, and the free but untrained ‘indie’ artist, all too conscious that their works are unsophisticated and often lack in cleverness, much like their adolescent crowd.

This may also be why the history of classical music seems so reactionary. It always seems to be a move away from the predecessor, always a disdain for the older style and those that continue to practice it, while at the same time glorifying the past as a time when people followed their instincts.

Maybe part of this trend can be explained because, having acquiring a knowledge of the old style through traditional scholastic means, it is only human nature to find something inherently unsatisfying about it. The incentive system in place while we were learning the style makes it much less interesting to us in the present.

What would happen if the presentation and integration of the traditional material was done in a less traditional way? A way which at least provided the possibility for intrinsic motivation to take hold rather than trying to squash it entirely, deliberately asking you to check your own propelling sense of self-motivation at the door? What would happen if the study of theory was an opinionated and creative experience? Maybe the polarization of emotional expression on one side and intellectual complexity on the other would be less of an issue in contemporary classical music? Maybe the products churned out by hard working academic composers would begin to find a larger audience? Maybe the whole educational process would be more enjoyable, more rewarding, and above all, more inspiring?

Heuristic Healing

2010-01-19T14:19:00.003-05:00

A fun little modal tune exploring slash chords and spread voicings.

The Mountain Climber

2010-01-17T19:10:00.000-05:00

Often when people start playing guitar they have serious misconceptions about what they’re going to be doing. They think it’s going to be easier or more fun than some other instrument like piano or violin that they hated playing as a kid. This is especially true of young people around the age of 12. Nowadays, many of them may have become inspired by Guitar Hero or Rock Band to go for the real thing. They don’t understand that as hard as it may be to play on expert mode, it’s a whole lot harder to play the real thing on beginner.

My first goal is to make them excited about music. They will never succeed if they are not self motivated. There can be no external awards, no marks or distinctions, only their own sense of satisfaction at attacking a problem. I want them to see that music is a beautiful and deep thing, that it is more than an iTunes playlist on shuffle, more than the next hit single which sounds like the last one and is deliberately ‘manufactured’ to generate profits. I want them to want to learn.

I give them no theory. They don’t read music. There’s no set game plan. We don’t have to finish what we start. Every consideration is secondary to keeping these young people interested. Months will go by where everybody involved, including myself and the parents, wonder if progress is really being made.

Eventually, the day comes where I realize the child is much more mature than they were before. They are beginning to ask questions, beginning to wonder how and why things work the way they do, beginning to practice more without anybody bothering them because they want to know.

Often, however, their excitement about the questions is followed by a very underwhelming reaction to the answer. This is because the answer is so much huger than they can be made to see in an hour or even a year. If a child who can strum a few chords, barely remembers their name, can find notes by ear but can’t be bothered to know what they’re called, asks you how the G major chord got its name, or how to figure out a tune by ear, the explanation is quite massive. They must be made to understand the major scale, the concept of a triad, the names of the notes, intervals (which is not intuitively represented spatially on the guitar), as well as keys and tonality, to really understand the answer to these questions. And of course, they must understand it in the least abstract sense. They must connect all these concepts to sounds, to the physical act of playing their instruments, or else the whole exercise is completely meaningless.

So when the big questions start rolling in, I like to tell them a story about mountain climbing. They ask me what appears to be a very simple question, and they see me sigh and refuse to answer them. The next week they are learning the major scale, being forced to sing out pitches, and doing all these things that don’t seem to matter. Why am I making them do it?

I tell them that the answer to their question is on the other side of a giant mountain. There is no possible way for them to see the place to which they are heading, and the path there is long, winding, and difficult, and it is very easy to get lost or detoured. It is going to take a long time to climb the mountain to reach a point where they can see their destination. Furthermore, they must be guided by someone who knows the way. I am their guide and they must trust that I know the mountain path because I have travelled it before with someone who taught me how to navigate the treacherous route. If they truly want to reach their destination, they need to have faith in their mountain guide, their musical sherpa, to know how to get to the mountain’s peak. That’s good teaching.

Evening Blue

2010-01-12T03:45:00.000-05:00

Why Do?

2009-12-19T00:39:00.000-05:00

I mean the solfège syllable. Sing the C below middle C. Sing it for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes. Sing it as an act of meditation. Let me know when you hear the note G above middle C resonating inside your head as clear as day. Make sure it’s quiet when you do this. It might take you a while the first time to hear that your voice has layers and you can peel them back and guide your concentration towards aspects of your voice that you may have never noticed before. Just like a piano or guitar string, our voices produce overtones and some of them are more resonant than others. I find myself excited by the realization that after 23 years I’m only starting to become conscious of sounds being produced unconsciously by my own throat. It also makes me think about the beginnings of polyphony and Gregorian chant and how those monks must have heard sound with such clarity, and the order in which harmonic intervals were introduced.

Fun Clusters With Open Strings

2009-12-16T20:27:00.000-05:00

The 5th bar is the most interesting shape to try and find a picking pattern for because there are two separate sets of strings where the note on the higher string is the lower sounding one.

On Green Dolphin Street

2009-12-15T01:59:00.001-05:00

The Song Remains The Same/The Return Of The Almighty Triad/Wish You Were Here

2009-12-14T18:09:00.001-05:00

Once we’re on the topic of teaching, I’d like to point out something that should seem obvious yet also seems to not be reflected in much of jazz education. I’d also like to note right away that this ties into the free jazz conversation dating back to my first blog entry and much thanks to my free jazz guru, Mitch Haupers. The skill of improvisation and listening is a skill which is distinct and separate from the acquisition of a musical vocabulary. But when we improvise, you ask quite rightly, don’t we use a vocabulary? How can you possibly mean that? Well, improvising means to me having a message and a distinct logic in the way ideas are put together in a sequence. In a way this article is not so different from improvisation. I know where I want to be at the end and I know where I’m starting but I have not mapped out how I will proceed in the middle. Yet inside I can feel intuitively that all the points are there and that I can have this discussion logically. Now, I could write this article in French or Italian or Chinese or Hindu or any other language (if I actually knew any of them well enough) but the content would remain the same and my methodology in the way I go about creating my story, my point, my thought process, would also remain the same.

With that said, I find it strange that most beginning jazz students are introduced to the art of improvisation at the same time they are introduced to the vocabulary of jazz, which happens to be more complicated than some other available vocabularies. As I mentioned in my last article, I discuss with student’s in the context of simple songs, triadic in nature with slow moving harmonic progressions, or even pedals, how to create a complex interaction between the different components of music (i.e. using multiple skills at the same time). This might mean playing a continuous melody which involves two or three closed positions and transitioning between them using the skill of playing on one string. This might involve working triadic arpeggios or chordal gestures into our melodic playing or embellishing triads using the knowledge we have acquired through the playing on one string or in closed position. This whole idea of synthesizing concepts which were originally introduced as separate and unrelated lies at the heart of improvisation, in my opinion. If a young student can master complex ideas with a simple vocabulary, to extend these ideas to a more complicated vocabulary will come much more naturally to them. Why are they trying to solo using fourths or chord substitutions or drop 2 voicings if they can’t even solo using triads?

The study that follows serves two purposes for two different skill levels. The first group is the maturing student who I was just describing. They will be pushed to analyze the piece and name all the notes on the neck of the guitar and in doing so they will build stronger fundamentals and have an easier time playing closed positions triads. Although they probably will never play open triads anytime soon, it will be a good exercise to help them with their closed triads. For this reason, tabs have been included.

Oh, I forgot. This exercise is about open triads. A sound which I find very interesting and particularly beautiful on the lower five strings of the guitar. I have already spent much time exploring the possibilities of triads in this blog as either vehicles for melodic inventions or chord substitutions. Perhaps in working on open triads I might unlock new possibilities in both these areas. And just like my students, I think it would be good to start with something simple just to get started. Naturally, since this exercise is much less mind-blowing for an advanced jazz musician than a young and inexperienced rock musician, it should be transposed into all twelve keys.

The Big Jug and the Little Jug

2009-12-11T18:16:00.002-05:00

I like to bombard students with more information than they could ever possibly absorb in the amount of time I say it in. Furthermore, I sum up numerous concepts in an hour and tell them to get them done even though these ideas probably took me years to learn in any kind of meaningful and practical way. I give them a completely impossible task knowing that they are going to fail. Why would I do such a thing? Am I sadistic? Do I like destroying the confidence of children?

Contrary to what some might say, the answer would be no to all those questions. There are a couple of reasons for teaching this way.

The first and most important principle is that a teacher’s job should be to help a student find their voice and understand that this is going to differ from their own voice. With that said, one way to help a student make the decisions which will shape their personality and playing style is to over-inform them. What they are forced to do is to edit the information you provide them and choose to focus on what is important to them and what resonates with them. If I tell a student to work on four things knowing they will only work on one or two of them very well, what I learn the next week is which thing is of the most interest to them and this helps me focus on what they need. They’ve made a selection without being conscious of the fact that they were offered a choice. The student thinks that they have failed to complete all their tasks but that was never the point. The question was not whether they would succeed but how they would choose to fail.

This is the first level of over-information. Once we have discovered and begun to pursue a specific thread in the student's development and found something specific to work on for a given period of time (perhaps two to three weeks of intense focus, always good to change the subject within a month), the next level of over-information begins.

Here’s an example. I might telling the student to work on playing scales in five keys horizontally on a single string, to practice all seven modes in closed position, to work on combining triads with the pentatonic scale to develop cool rhythmic gestures, and to be able to improvise competently on a simple progression (think Wish You Here Here) using all these techniques and combining and interchanging them fluidly. In a week. Even though I know that what I’m asking for is simply not something that happens in a week. But what are they going to do that week and when they come back what will they be playing? What will have been worked more on? What will have been overlooked or considered to be a dead-end? Where did they see the possibilities? And from there we can then dive into the topic of their (unconscious) choice in greater detail and begin the process of over-stimulation again. Suppose they seem to be interested in single string scales. Not only should you do five keys, but practice playing thirds and sixths on all available combinations of strings trying to understand them as either harmonic progressions or as doing the one string exercise but on two strings at the same time. Once you can feel their creativity turning stale and their interest beginning to wane over the following weeks you can slowly pull their focus back to a more global perspective of all the different areas, and then bombard them with the same assignment again and see what they come up with the next time. Maybe they will be interested in triads. Come up with some unbelievably ridiculous task involving triads to be completed in a week and see what they do. This allows them to mould their own voice. You simply point them in a direction and see if they walk there. If they decide to walk somewhere else that is also fine. Whether they choose to follow or not, they are reacting to your guidance and you have positively affected them.

Name a subject and there will be a million things to try, a million different exercises to work, too much for any human being to do. There is always a next level within each little tiny nook of technique and then there is the combination of all techniques which is itself a never ending technique. So we have to choose. Allow the student to make the choices for themselves. Present them with options.

Mick Goodrick talks about the Chinese food menu approach to practicing. Write down all the different things you can work on and then every day pick out an item or two (like ordering from a menu). The menu of practicing and the menu of music period is endless and infinite. You could eat the same meal every day or try something new every day or build up a network of dishes you like and maybe try a different one when you’re feeling adventurous. That’s gone far enough and you get the point. Present students with a menu of their own and allow them to pick their own dishes. Don’t be like an obnoxious parent and tell them what to order.

Finally, we get to the jugs. We have a big jug in the back of our heads and a small jug in front. You, as a teacher, are holding the jug in the back of your brain, which, having more experience, is much fuller than the jug in the back of your student’s brain. Every lesson you pour your entire jug over your student and they catch whatever they can in their small jug. The small jug passes this on to the big jug, and probably spills some stuff along the way. The next lesson you return and poor the whole jug over the student and again they catch what they can in the smaller jug. And again they transfer to the larger jug, which is very slowly getting fuller and again they lose some water along the way. This is the transfer of knowledge.

Even when we teach ourselves, we have to understand this about our capacity to understand. We run to the well of knowledge and become greedy for information. We sometimes ignore the fact that our little jugs are full and continue to poor water into it, watching it overflow but desperately refusing to admit it. We need to stop and allow the little jug to carry itself back to the big jug. We are only wasting our energy. We all know what it feels like to reach the point in our practice when we have gone too long and start to get worse instead of better. We must respect the process of learning, of deep learning, and understand that our little jugs are only so big, not to become too concerned with filling our big jugs. Because there is simply no rushing this process.

So failure is a beautiful and necessary part of learning. As we acquire skills, we must understand that what we seek to learn is most probably massively huge and could never fit in our small jugs. So we must be patient in the way that we practice and adjust our expectations about our results. We must recognize that some things cannot be learned in a single session, that they are a process which takes time and therefore are pointless to rush. And we must embrace failure as an important part of transmitting information because the best way to help a student flourish involves designing tasks for them which they absolutely cannot complete. We must accept and enjoy their failures with mutually felt humour and lightheartedness. The point is exactly not to get things right the first time. The point is to fill up one jug at a time and not be afraid to spill a bit.

The Shadow Of Your Smile

2009-11-24T02:20:00.001-05:00

mp3 on MySpace

Dynamic Duo

2009-11-16T10:21:00.009-05:00

I was recently playing guitar with my friend Aaron Schwarz and we wound up having quite a lengthy discussion about the importance of dynamics and accents in making music beautiful. Open any score dated from the 18th century onward, and we find dynamic markings, slurs and accents amongst other things which help us understand that performance is so much more than just playing notes, and also what the composer’s vision of how all these various other factors should be handled.

Two interesting articles on the subject include http://www.kylegann.com/notation.html, which talks about the dangers of over notation, as well as http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/09/interview-with-keith-jarrett.html, an interview where Keith Jarrett talks a lot about touch, about a lack of sensitivity amongst jazz pianists and I would like to extend his point to many jazz guitarists.

Horn players spend their formative years learning proper technique and reading music with a focus on how to play and phrase and feel it accurately. Most guitarists probably learned music other than jazz and in some combination of reading magazines or books and piecing things together by ear. When we are introduced to jazz, we are presented with lead sheets, sparse papers with little information on them other than the most essential to get a musician started on the process of interpretation. It is still necessary to listen to performances of the song, understand all the harmonic nuance that every good jazz musician brings to a tune, that the changes as they are written are a starting point and should never be considered a destination and that any good group contains both a rhythm section and soloists who are open and flexible enough to go places other than the typical.   Back to the point, guitarists encounter a written form of jazz which does very little justice to the actual performance of jazz. There is so much nuance in any good jazz musician’s tone and use of dynamics, their touch on their instrument, and yet so little time is devoted to developing this consciously with students of jazz. You got it or not, I suppose. Actually, I don’t suppose that at all.

When I started taking guitar lessons formally in school, my wonderful teacher Nick Ditomaso never failed to amaze me week after week. It seemed like there were a million things he knew how to do and I just didn’t have a clue what any of them where. This changed about halfway through our association. Over a year and a half I’d worked furiously to learn all the scales and how to improvise and comp using drop 2 chords and a generally more melodic approach to rhythm playing. As my second year came to a close, I’d succeeded in doing this to some degree. I’d even figured out a couple of voicings that seemed to be all mine. But I still didn’t sound half as good as Nick did.

Now I began to become truly awestruck in a much deeper sense by Nick’s sound. I couldn’t understand how he sounded so amazing and I didn’t. When I watched his hand move, I could finally recognized the voicings and patterns. I’d learned a decent chunk of the standard jazz vocabulary on my instrument (in terms of scales and voicings), and like any other guitarist playing standards, Nick was often referring to this vocabulary in his playing in ways that I could comprehend. But still his sound was lightyears ahead of mine and I didn’t really get why.

Over the next year and a half, I began to bridge the gap in our sounds but never consciously and only very minutely. Nick always told me to work more on my tone but I always felt like what he was really asking me to do was buy a new guitar and that wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t ready to understand what I was missing because I was still too focused on vocabulary. I was fascinated with the idea of altering chords, of playing outside, using chromatic passages, learning tunes and finding voicings which allowed me to play the harmony and melody at the same time. I loved Lenny Breau and Ted Greene but no matter what chords I learned I could never even begin to approach their sound. As I got my hands on all the material I could about them and by them, I was again, much like with Nick, chronically disappointed by the lack of a secret chord or two which would let me sound like them.

Then I met Mick Goodrick. Mick talked very little about touch. But he played in front of me every day for five days and in just sitting and listening to him over the course of a week it hit me. Watching him play, hearing him attack, hearing his careful attention to dynamics and his quiet authority had a big influence on me. When I met him for my lesson I was determined not to try to impress him by overplaying. How many people walk into a room with Mick Goodrick and whip out their best licks in the first chorus of their first solo and accomplish nothing musically and tell no story whatsoever? We played Stella By Starlight and I came in very quietly and delicately. I tried to be melodic, didn’t worry about conveying to Mick that I knew the changes and could play over them. I wanted to build something because I thought that would be more impressive and so accordingly I wasn’t in a rush. Along came my second chorus and I started to lay into the notes a bit more. This is the first time in my life playing jazz that I can remember where I consciously used dynamics as a major factor in the building of my solo. But I went too far too fast. It was too loud for Mick. I’d spoiled our sound with a lack of sensitivity and he stopped me and told me so.

The same day I played a free jazz piece with 3 other guitarists, and 2 very talented and wise musicians named Vardan Ovsepian on piano and Bob Weiner on drums. Minutes into the piece, it still felt like it wasn’t building to me, like the other guitarists were holding back too much or too scared to play with commitment so I took it, quite arrogantly and mistakenly, upon myself to push things in a certain direction. Quite naturally, I once again got very loud very fast. What resulted wasn’t so bad, but it was basically musical premature ejaculation. Things boiled up very fast and cooled off almost instantly after hitting a peak. It was a noisy experience. And I experienced a sensation of extreme heat while playing which left me overwhelmed and flustered and actually drove me to tears a bit later in the day.

To say I came home and went wild about dynamics would be a lie. My first blog entry was a summary of everything I’d taken away from my week with the Mr. Goodchord team and there is no mention of dynamics in that article, nor did I mention either of those very important stories. I was overwhelmed by these events and I wasn’t ready to face them yet. But they were a part of me and they were guiding me. I was scarred and quite unconsciously the way I heard myself began to evolve. When I finally recorded myself almost 5 months later (you can hear that recording of Stella on MySpace), I was pleased to finally hear what I’d been searching for without knowing it for four years: dynamic nuance. Even my most stock phrases, things I’d been playing for most of those four years, suddenly were popping out at me. They had become three dimensional. My foot was in the door.

Can we work on these things consciously? Can we build exercises to help us develop the physical skill of having many different and interchangeable levels of attack?
Here are a few:

Take any ii-V lick and try playing it at a single tempo and see how many different volume levels you can achieve. Try this at different tempos and see which volumes are difficult. The faster you get, the more obviously hard it becomes to play quietly.

Another thing to do is to play a scale up and down at various tempos, placing the accent on a different 16th note every time (1). Also, this can be done with 3 and 5 which displaces the accent (2).

Also, as we get higher we have a tendency to get louder and play harder and there’s something inherently more relaxing and gravitational about playing a descending scale. So try playing a scale getting quieter going up and louder going down (3).

This conversation does not only apply to playing single notes with a pick. Using your fingers to play chord solo types of sounds is infinitely more effective in terms of dynamics as well. I think my studies are actually very good for this exercise. If you see the videos, you’ll notice that I arpeggiate the chords, perhaps add in melodic embellishments, but that none of this was notated. Playing the studies is firstly a very note oriented exercise in learning new and wider voicings. But unconsciously, I was also working on popping out the melody from the overall texture of the rest of the chord, by creating dynamic contrast between the most important note at any given time and all the others (it's hard to tell since the audio quality is so garbage). These studies are good for that because the wide voicings tend to make the melody notes sound more isolated, which can help you start to hear things differently. I think they did that for me.

The Beethoven Blessing

2009-11-15T18:49:00.002-05:00

If you ask most people to choose between having to be deaf or blind they quickly choose deafness. Since my ears are my most important and only constant instrument regardless of what kind of music I am doing, I quickly choose to go blind rather than lose such a critical tool for my art.

Beethoven started going deaf around the age of 30. In his wikipedia article it states that “Over time, his hearing loss became profound: there is a well-attested story that, at the end of the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, he had to be turned around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience; hearing nothing, he began to weep.” Beethoven’s last and unsuccessful attempt at performing his own work was in 1811, sixteen years before his death. So how did a man so profoundly deaf continue to compose new and influential pieces of music for 16 years, especially his ninth symphony and and the late string quartets?

Well, go back to his very first string quartets and you’ll find the exact same harmonic language. In fact, check out his symphonies or piano sonatas, everywhere the same chords follow the same sequences. So what was on Beethoven’s mind?

I would like to hypothesize: everything else. Notes are the most insignificant aspect of music. You either follow the principles and standards of a style or not, and therefore sound one way or another. This takes time to understand and be able to employ, certainly if you have an interest in numerous styles all with different aesthetic principles (or lack thereof) as well as general attitudes and emotional demands. Although it may take years to reach an adequate level of proficiency in simply being able to use the musical vocabulary of a style accurately, this is the first and least important step in the process of making beautiful music.

Once you’ve got your notes in order, it’s time to move on to all the other aspects of composition and improvisation such as dynamics, phrasing, form, motivic relations, etc. that make great music what it is.

So how did Beethoven’s music evolve over his career? Well, I recently read quite a few chunks of a book called “Inside Beethoven's quartets: history, interpretation, performance” by Lewis Lockwood and the Juilliard String Quartet. It helped me understand what was so amazing about Beethoven as well as how he became increasingly sophisticated over time. It had nothing to do with harmonic inventions. Beethoven was an architect. How bits of musical information interacted, how he played with form and structure, with dynamics and pacing, was what made him a master.

So why blessing? Well, for starters, check out Christos Hatzis’ essay called “The Crucible of Contemporary Music.” One thing he talks about is that when we start out as artists, we are, in all honestly, just following an egotistical desire for attention and affection. Over time, if you’re lucky, this urge to create can grow into something more mature, more mystical, and less self-centered.

So why the Beethoven Blessing? Beethoven understood better than any other composer had until that time that we would turn him into something he wasn’t: a caricature and a god. He was the first composer to take very seriously the idea that he was writing music for people who he would never meet, perhaps for off into the future. When people reacted negatively to his middle or late quartets, he responded that they were written for the future, for others who would be able to understand them better (I’d love to be more specific but I returned the book over a month ago and don’t feel like doing the research, but this fact is based on an anecdote told by Lewis Lockwood who is a serious Beethoven scholar). Beethoven had an ego. A big ego. You need one to do what he did. You have to believe yourself capable of great things before you stand a chance at doing them. It’s a struggle not to let that get to your head.

Although Beethoven’s deafness brought him great suffering and made him suicidal, in a way it was a blessing because it forced him to limit his artistic vision to a very specific set of criteria. If he had never gone deaf he might have simply tried to do too much, even with all his colossal talent. If he had never gone deaf, we would never have all the beautiful works that he could not have written unless he had gone deaf. And he might have spent too much time anticipating much of the harmonic innovations which would be developed over the following century and as a result not succeeded in being the pinnacle of structural genius of Western music.

Furthermore, Beethoven’s deafness is a blessing to the rest of us, because it teaches us how much goes into the art of composition and interpretation that is completely outside the mere selection of notes.

One afterthought while we’re on Beethoven, a post-script so to speak, is that I don’t agree with the notion of writing for the future. Music is about connecting to an audience. A live audience. Not necessarily a large audience. Not even necessarily an audience at all, just the simple sharing of music amongst musicians creating a moment together is a beautiful thing. Compositional tools which have no impact on a listener are completely unnecessary from the perspective of creating for an audience. That isn’t to say they must be completely abandoned. If they don’t detract from the piece of music emotionally at all, and they bring the composer satisfaction, no harm done. But if the composer’s intellectual satisfaction comes at the expense of the listener’s emotional satisfaction, than in a very real way the composition is a failure. I bring this up because, sometimes Beethoven is simply too long for me. I was surprised to find after listening to the quartet Op. 130 that not only was it extremely long, but it was long even though the Alban Berg quartet had actually left out many repeats in their performance. Of course, if a piece is written for musicians to perform simply for their own enjoyment in private, then the composer has met the goal of satisfying his audience and has succeeded even if most people won’t like it. Still it’s funny how so many jazz musician’s and classical composers resent the fact that their music is not appreciated by a wider audience yet they make no effort to accommodate and compromise with this audience. Every relationship is a two way street.

My Foolish Heart

2009-10-30T17:24:00.001-04:00

One Way Road

2009-10-22T20:08:00.004-04:00

Kurt Rosenwinkel recently gave a talk in Montreal which despite his total lack of enthusiasm and interest managed to be useful at moments. One thing he mentioned which is a neat exercise everybody should try is to play a scale in one direction over fast and complicated changes (such as Giant Steps) and change chord scales without changing directions or leaping.

Could this be done with whole or half notes and chords? Could we take a voicing and plane it up in whole or semi-tones, allowing ourselves to alter 1 or 2 notes by a semitone in either direction to compensate for the changing chord functions, all the while moving in a single direction up the fretboard for as long as possible? I think so. Definitely to be done with a bass player.

Ted Meets Mick

2009-10-19T14:40:00.001-04:00

I had an idea. I wanted to find out just how much new material working on all these studies had created. How many voicings did they contain which I had honestly never played before and had discovered as I was writing them? Well the answer was actually less than I expected even though it sounds like a lot: 38. The reason this surprised me was because I’d already had almost 30 by the time I was done the first study, the always aptly named All The Things You Are.

If I had generated so little new material while creating all the following studies, why was it that they all felt fresh and as if I was constantly coming up with new voicings? The answer is that I was recycling voicings, but not only in different keys, I was also changing their function. This strange voicing sounds bright on a Cmaj7 in All The Things You Are, but dark on Am(maj7) in Blue In Green.

This shouldn’t surprise me because I wrote and thought a lot about how this is the “green” way to use new material. Yet it wasn’t a point I had consciously set out to illustrate in the studies, however I recognize my following my own advice in hindsight.

So why Ted meets Mick? Well, if you’ve ever opened a Ted Greene book, you’ve been overwhelmed and quickly exhausted by the amount of material within. Nevertheless, something should be said for the systematic layout of the material using chord diagrams, not tabs or sheet music.

If you’ve opened up Mick Goodrick’s Voice-Leading Almanacs, then you also know that the same musical information can be applied and combined in ways with other information which no longer make it sound the same.

Seriously, have you ever tried cataloguing your knowledge? I just did, and I got an answer: 38 (plus probably another 30-40 voicings which I ignore because they’re very basic or I’ve been using them for a long time and know who they came from). It’s kind of liberating.

The Voice-Leading Almanac volume II is called “Don’t Name That Chord.” It deals with clusters and fourths which defy easy tonal categorization. But really, this is a good idea for any and all chord voicings we have. An Em7 is a Cmaj9 is a Am11 is a Dbm7(b9b5). So when I made my charts of all the interesting chords I’ve been experimenting with, I purposefully didn’t give them any names or write down what key I originally used them in or anything like that. All I’ve got is a bunch of ambiguous blobs on an undefined area of fretboard.

Now, my job is to take each of these chords and play with them. Rather than only deciding that a chord is a Cmaj7 and then going through all the songs where Maj7 chords are and using it there, I’m going to try and look at each voicing with an open mind. What could this voicing be? Could it also be a m7b5 voicing? Well, let me see where I can use it in that context. Let me see how I can take 38 and turn it into 380 without ever creating a genuinely new shape or intervallic structure.

However, if I were going to try and find new shapes, I think my next step, following in those of Mick Goodrick, would be to plane any and all of these shapes modally through major and melodic minor.

An Intellectual Framework for Improvising

2009-10-18T01:51:00.003-04:00

A student of mine who has been playing guitar for many years before coming to me for lessons has brought to my attention an issue which I have always understood but never consciously acknowledged or had a need to articulate. This is literally how we think about what we’re doing on the guitar. Do we think of our fingers, of the notes, of sounds?

The lowest level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is finger-focused. In other words, the musician’s relationship with the instrument is very visual, and whether conscious or not, his understanding of what he is doing is very much about shapes. This musician can only play in exact fingerings and executing exact patterns which he has already practiced extensively. This is something we all need to do, so again I stress the word “only”. You can tell who these people are by asking them to play a passage and then repeat the same passage not even in a different area of the guitar, but even with a different fingering. They simply can’t do it. This is because their understanding of their actions is limited to the physical activity they execute with their hands. For them technique is not a means to an ends, but the experience itself of music making.

The next level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who is conscious of the notes beneath their fingers and their corresponding sounds, but who focuses on technical virtuosity, requiring them to often be stuck in repetitive patterns. Their interaction with music is deeper than the first group of people, but their ability to interact meaningfully with other musicians is limited by their lack of control and ability to both listen and react to others.

The next level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who can find a genuine balance between static virtuosity and listening/reacting to others in a controlled fashion. The problem with these musicians is that they do not practice enough. This lack of preparation forces them to place an unbalanced amount of concentration on their own actions rather than an equal amount of concentration on their sound as well as the sound of the other people they make music with. Not that they aren’t listening, but they could be listening better if they weren’t struggling to remember what to do as it was happening.

The highest level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who has the technical freedom to create truly spontaneous music. While I’ve already spent time explaining that we can never create a new scale or chord shape on the fly but only rearrange preexisting patterns, these musicians derive their spontaneity from their ability to respond with a high degree of versatility, sensitivity, and freedom to the actions of the other musicians they play with. Because they are extremely well prepared to play, their reaction time is minimal and they have more awareness as to what other people are playing.

It should be noted that somewhere along the line we all probably oscillate between any and all of these descriptions, perhaps even within the same night or even within the same song.

I would also like to note that I’m fully aware of how subjective, personal and arbitrary this is and how everybody has the right to prescribe their own set of criteria and standards when evaluating a person’s competency.

I would also like to note that my degrees are ranked in order of expressiveness as I see it, with the person not who can play the fastest or anything like that, but the person who is most capable of freely expressing themselves on their instrument at the top. It is not the amount of material we are able to digest or the speed at which we can regurgitate it, but the meaning and emotionality of how it is implemented as well as our consciousness of what everybody else is doing.

I would also like to note that this scale refers to musicianship and improvisation. It would be silly to take what I’m saying out of that context. A singer-songwriter may only play five or six chords, may have no real understanding of harmony or the guitar, but this is not an essential skill for their mode of expression. Simply put, their skill as a musician is a secondary concern. They may not be very good musicians, and they may note have a clue how to improvise, but this is not the means they have chosen to convey their emotions and is an irrelevant criteria for judging their artistic merit.

Finally, I would like to note that among the two “highest” levels their is an ability to think of all the available notes in a scale when creating melodies, and to have the technical freedom to play any notes in any order they can think of and, tempo permitting (the faster the tempo the more linear any new idea will be), have the technical freedom to create spontaneously and play the new melody.

For instance, why practice playing a scale in series of intervals or triads or four note chords or any other pattern (some of which I have spent much time discussing)? Is it to play those patterns at wickedly fast speeds and wow people with your technical virtuosity? Or is it so that no matter where you are on the fretboard, and no matter what finger you are playing whichever note with, if the next note you want is a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, or anything else away, your fingers are prepared to play that note with a seemingly instant reflex? Not that there isn’t a time and place for mechanical and “prerecorded” sequences at high velocities. They are useful for creating transitional and exciting material. But is it more (or at the very least equally) about systematically playing through all the possibilities of which music can be made up?

Think of chemical and physical description of the world. The periodic table has 117 elements, but all these elements can be described as combination of protons, neutrons and electrons. And even these protons and neutrons can be broken up into smaller components. So all the known matter and physical events which take place in the universe can be reduced to the interactive relationships between a handful of forces on a handful of particles.

Music can be thought of in a similar light, so to speak. By taking our instruments and practicing musical material on them, not by practicing licks, but by practicing the very building blocks of all music, from serial music to Gregorian chant (intervals), we can react in the most free way possible.

DISCLAIMER: Principles of this article might seem to contradict in spirit the previous article. If spontaneity is an illusion, why then spend so much time talking about levels of spontaneity and the various degrees to which it can be achieved? Well, let’s think about it. If you play every interval possible on a guitar from every note to every other note, than no melody from that point on could ever be considered truly spontaneous because it is made up of tiny elements all of which you have already experienced. Furthermore if you take steps to consciously try not to spew out long and repetitive strings or sequences of these limited number of elements (much like DNA), than you are making fresher music. Certain small patterns of strings constantly reappear (arpeggios for instance) and this cannot be helped, but there are random mutations and variations that can also take place.

Definition of Improvising Revisited

2009-10-18T01:50:00.000-04:00

I’ve already discussed what it means to improvise once before. The notion of navigation through an established network of possibilities, creating endless variations on a theme, be it a sequence of notes or of chord voicings, implies that nothing truly new can ever be created on the spot. When we practice we acquire and mold new musical pieces of lego, when we play we continually reconfigure them.

Ironically, my first discussion (The Upward Spiral) was centered around the notion of closed position and working extensively on the interesting possibilities that can arise from an extended study of one position. I was thinking about how I could spend years working on that idea. Well I was definitely right on that one because I’ve abandoned the concept in my practice for the time being. That’s ok though, maybe I’ll pick it up again in the future. At the time I was playing rhythmically complex and harmonically simple modal music, so these were the kinds of ideas floating around. Now I’m back in school and reexamining some more standard jazz and tonal contexts and all those ideas just don’t seem very relevant right now. Still, they’ve definitely had their influence on the way I think of and hear single line solo and melodic construction.

So for the last month and a half, I’ve been working on building small studies using chords that were new to me over standard tunes, all of which are posted here, most of which have accompanying videos. Now I’m faced with a new problem, how to integrate dozens of new voicings into contexts outside of the ones I originally used them. Every song has voicings that arose from the colors and mood of that song’s harmonic progression and melody. How can I generalize this information so I can better use it in any situation and make it a working part of my vocabulary?

The answer is old and obvious. Isolate the information and then transpose it all into all 12 keys, perhaps choosing a voicing every day or week and forcing myself to use it in a variety of different tunes and keys. But I’m feeling a little philosophical, and I’d like to dive into what exactly I think happens to our minds when we go through that process.

I sometimes hear people say how they have trouble feeling spontaneous when playing jazz. Everything seems to be prerecorded and regurgitated not in the organic fashion described above, but in a way that seems contrived and unemotional. They wonder how they can take their playing to the next level. I always ask the same question: How do you feel when you take a rock solo in a music idiom you’re more used to, say rock or blues? They usually say that this is the kind of freedom and feeling that they wish they could attain within the context of jazz music. So already half the battle is won because we’re aware of the feeling we wish we could capture with our new vocabulary.

But how did we all get to this place as young guitarists within the simpler context of rock, usually modal or blues in nature? Well, my belief is that we simply waited. We all had to spend months and months, if not years, learning the positions of the modes and developing our technique. Did our solos feel organic back then? Did we feel at ease and in control over the sounds we made? Probably not. But now, five, ten, twenty years later, depending on how old we are, our fingers somehow “know” how to navigate seamlessly through the notes of a major or minor scale, and any musical idea we can think of, our two hands cooperate effectively to execute. The truth is, we simply forget doing the work, and that distance allows us to approach the structure of the scale with a freshness and freedom that seems to help us express what is deep inside.

So how do we get to a place where we feel at home and emotional in a musical scenario that is intellectual and perhaps complex? We wait patiently. Practicing is not the answer. It is a step in the process. But not practicing is also a step. We have to take the time to thoroughly learn whatever material we are struggling with, but also take time to let things sink in, to forget them, and then upon remembering them later on, to use them in a way which is more satisfying.

In other words: improvising is an illusion. Nothing we do is truly improvised. Only the passage of time and the chemistry of our consciousness allows us the feeling of spontaneity. That’s ok. It’s the feeling we’re after, not some abstract notion of absolute and distilled invention. Especially as the tempo we play at goes up, our ability to forge new patterns within preexisting patterns continually diminishes, but nonetheless we are left with the feeling that we are doing something new and exciting.

When I see Am7 written on a page, there are probably 10 chords that I do 95% of the time. But rearranging and combining those 10 things, as well as leading into and out of them in different ways, results in an infinite number of possibilities. I move to these chords and shapes by carefully forged instincts created through diligent practice. Once again, the excitement and meaning I experience when playing comes from not remembering the process of creating those very reflexes.

To sum up, jazz, much like composition, is the very experience of maturing itself.

A Child Is Born

2009-10-16T15:13:00.002-04:00

Tune Up

2009-09-29T16:10:00.002-04:00

Blue In Green

2009-09-07T18:16:00.004-04:00

Falling Grace

2009-09-04T17:46:00.003-04:00

Stella By Starlight

2009-09-02T23:23:00.002-04:00

Yesterdays

2009-09-02T22:55:00.003-04:00

All Of Me

2009-08-29T16:48:00.002-04:00

Rhythmic Jigsaw Puzzle

2009-08-19T23:46:00.003-04:00

A combination of different inspirations has led me to a very specific rhythmic problem. I’ve been listening to a lot of recently composed classical music which is influenced by Indian rhythms. There is a lot of polyrhythms, of long beat cycles etc. One thing I’ve noticed is that typically we see the play of 8th notes grouped into 2s and 3s, we see triplets, and duplets, and we see things like a rhythmic pattern consisting of an odd number of subdivisions superimposed over another rhythmic figure consisting of an even number of subdivisions, causing one to feel displaced.

All these things are great compositional and improvisational tools, but they will serve us another purpose here. It’s hard sometimes to go into double time. But what about triple time? Mitch Haupers showed me a very useful exercise that involved a section of his book Factorial Rhythms dealing with rhythms in 6/4.

Using a metronome play what is written with the click representing the quarter note. Continue on to playing the 6/4 rhythm again with the click playing the half note. And then the third time the click will represent the dotted half note (triple time). This poses some interesting problems because the same rhythm may sound at one speed as 2 groups of 3 and at another speed as 3 groups of 2 which makes this especially disorienting.

Of course, it should be obvious in hindsight why Mitch very wisely chose to expose us to this kind of exercise using 6/4 rhythms. Look at how beautifully the rhythm fits into all 3 times. If he’d started with what I’m about to show you next, it would have been a little too much (hint).

What I’ve been seeing a lot of in the repertoire I’ve been studying and that seems like a natural extension of this exercise, is how to play 3/4 rhythms in the span of 2 or 4 beats,. What I haven’t been seeing is the MUCH harder problem of how to play 4/4 rhythms in the span of 3 beats.

Let’s start with 3 over 2 or 4. The division is actually quite simple. To divide 2 beats into 3 is a quarter note triplet. But to understand them more precisely we need 8th note triplets.

Now here’s where the real problem starts. These rhythms in themselves are easy enough to play with a bit of practice, but now we’re talking about superimposing rhythms over other rhythms. So let’s look at the tuplet as a structure over which we can hang a new pattern. This is going to become a more complicated polyrhythm because it is going to involve a full blown metric modulation superimposed over the original rhythm.

Let’s take putting 4 over 3 like I said we would. We need to divide the 3 beats into 16th notes, and then group those into 3s.

Now we get into a problem which could arise with the previous examples as well, come to think of it. As you can see, to superimpose 4 quarters in the space of 3 results in 4 dotted 8th notes. But what now if we wish to play a measure of 4/4 over a bar of 3/4. yikes! Now we’re going to have to have to use dotted 16th notes to represent the 8th note from the bar of 4/4.

The trouble, whether you try and think it through to exact mathematical values, or just feel your way through, is how to take something which you’re feeling as a natural division of 3 (such as the dotted 8th) and play a duplet over it (the dotted 16th). Now you have duplets which completely obscure where the original beat used to be, which is why we’re forced to write things out as they are in the middle of the 3 bars below.

It feels like we’re playing duplets in 12/8, and then superimposing THAT over 3/4. Ouch.

Staying Flexible

2009-08-14T21:52:00.001-04:00

After looking back at everything I’ve written in the past 8 weeks or so, I’ve come to realize something: I’m not very good at sticking to an agenda. When I first sat down to create an agenda for the future based on the ideas from the Goodchord workshop, I had decided to focus on triads for a year, thinking horizontally, thinking in terms of a bunch of independent chord shapes, thinking harmonically. Very quickly though my interest became melodic, became vertical, and my mind began to wander into other territory harmonically. I still I think I can spend at least a year working on triads. After nearly two months, I can do the 4 patterns on only two modes out of the minimum of 10 or 12 I’ll need to learn them in for practical purposes. But I’m not where I set out to be. And that’s a great thing.

It’s happened to me when using the reference material of other authors and teachers that one of their ideas might inspire a concept or sound for me to pursue that was only indirectly related to their material. But I find this especially interesting now, as I try to create a body of reference material and interact with it as a practicing musician simultaneously.

Setting out to do one thing and accomplishing another is one of the beautiful things about playing music and one of the reasons we should never stop discovering things and growing as we practice. It was a nice idea to think of a hundred different variations on the triad exercise, or the nested serial intervallic sequences or whatever you want to call them (see “Oh Boy...” or “Spread it Around a.k.a. Serial Soloing”), but what good would it actually do me or anybody else reading those ideas to get totally bogged down in them and let them eclipse the kind of creative and fruitful, discovery oriented practice that we can and should all be doing more of. In five years, when I’ve mastered the triads and can play them to pieces and am looking for a warm up exercise that can also be a brainteaser, then maybe I’ll go back and look at some of that stuff. But in the meantime, the best thing I can do is to let go of that material, and not feel compelled or committed to sticking with it, even though I made it up with every intention of doing so.

And as for the horizontal triads, it turns out I don’t really even like them all that much (right now, at least), so why allow stubbornness to stifle me? In the end of the day, music should be an enjoyable activity and you don’t win any points for being right or wrong. I think we get preoccupied with being able to do things that are supposed to be really hard and being better than other people (you know it happens sometimes, it’s okay), instead of being focused on being creative and connecting with others in a meaningful way.

So let loose, don’t be stubborn, let the music flow, commit to the material that ignites your passion (tough luck if it happens to be material that takes a lot of prep-work) and don’t be afraid to change directions, keep it simple, be “bad” according to the person with the self-inflated ego trying to label you, and stay true to yourself.

All The Things You Are Chord Study

2009-08-14T13:38:00.001-04:00

A Page From Mr. Goodchord

2009-08-13T12:36:00.009-04:00

What do you do when you’ve discovered a new voicing you like? Well says Mick Goodrick, see if you can transpose it into the other modes of the scale. Lately I’ve been dealing with diminished and whole tone chords because these chords transpose very simply seeing as the fingerings don’t change.

What I have just come to realize, although it was right in front of my face the whole time in Mick Goodrick’s Voice-Leading Almanacs, was that like the diatonic D2&4 voicings in the major scale, all the voicings discussed previously can be converted into D2&3 and D2&4 with quite amazing results.

Some of the resulting voicings are quite awkward, and perhaps it might be interesting to see what happens if we were to leave out a note to make them more playable.

****

A Little bit of Everything

2009-08-03T16:34:00.003-04:00

Some lines that put together the various sounds that have been discussed over the past week.

Examples of Drop 2&4

2009-08-02T20:52:00.004-04:00

Some nice drop 2&4 lines. Inspired by a chart by Mick Goodrick which lists all the different possible chords derived modally to play over the II V using melodic minor. (For more info on what different kind of chords there are check out the Voice-Leading Almanac.

In the last example, the spread clusters over Dmaj7 are playable as a regular voicing, but I’ve chosen to notate them with the middle note played as a harmonic.

Jaw-Dropping Arpeggios

2009-07-31T19:35:00.003-04:00

For all that talk of drop 2 and 4 voicings, I really don’t know what to do with a lot of them. Unlike drop 2s, there is a much more limited range where they sound good. But starting to look at them in greater detail has reminded me of something I have meant to do for a long time and is certainly connected to the work I’m doing now in terms of creating more angular and jagged melodic textures.

I recently asked myself why I’ve been doing something for seven years and then decided to change it. This first thing I realized was that I always played consecutive triads voice-led melodically in the same direction and always the same inversion as a consequence. Well now I’m asking another question: why are my arpeggios always derived from closed position voicings?

An arpeggio is a chord except the notes are played individually. On a guitar we have very few closed position voicings that are convenient (and you can see many a guitarist sweep through them excessively on a Bbmaj7 or Gm7 chord). As a result, we tend to think of our arpeggios as derived from a scale because they often contain more than one note per string. This is also true but it doesn’t help us understand what’s about to come.

Once we understand that an arpeggio is just a different way to express a chord voicing, we can start to experiment with different chord voicings that involve greater leaps and inversions of chords.

Part of why this is so unintuitive and difficult to integrate into our playing is because these sounds are very difficult to sing, especially if we’re not the best singers. It appears that many people sing while they play because it makes them SEEM more expressive or in control of the sounds coming from their instrument, not because it actually MAKES them more expressive or in control. And there’s an inherent limitation to playing what we sing: we have to be able to sing everything we play. And as guitarists we are capable of doing things melodically which only a truly expert singer could ever even stand a chance of reproducing vocally, especially in tempo.

We put so much time into playing extensions, triads, and all sorts of stuff over our chords, but we always voice them in the way that is most singable to our terrible guitarist voices. Why not try and use a drop 2 voicing or drop 2&4 voicing as the basis for a melodic idea? Because we’re not good enough singers to sing three consecutive and large ascending intervals (i.e. 5th, 6th, 5th in the case of drop 2&4). But this is an interesting and modern sound! We should learn it and learn to hear it and understand it’s nuance but not ask ourselves to be able to sing it in any kind of performable way.

When we learn the lick we should play it slowly and sing each note, practice each interval, and be able to sing the lick at a very slow tempo or out of tempo. This is enough to be able to hear and appreciate the intervallic nuance of a line. So break out the inversions!

How slow Can You Go Pt. 3

2009-07-29T14:35:00.002-04:00

So hopefully you’ve now tried all the different possibilities of placing a very slow metronome in various places in a bar, and even a shifting place within the bar. Maybe though, like myself, you really can’t do it very well. In fact, maybe, like myself, you’ve realized that you still aren’t half as good as you’d like to be at placing the click on the various offbeats, never mind alternating offbeats.

Enter Factorial Rhythm, another Goodchord publication by Mitch Haupers and Mick Goodrick. This is (not so) simply a book that breaks down rhythms into small 2 beat “seeds” or “cells” as they’re more commonly referred to, and then goes through all (or most or some) of the different possible permutations that can be created over 2 bars.

Here’s a small sample. There are 4 different ways to have two 8th note attacks over 2 beats of 4/4. This is all the possible combinations using all 4 seeds, beginning with a dotted quarter:

Now start with a single rhythm, and try and place the click on every downbeat and upbeat of the bar, swing and straight feel. Then move on to the other rhythms. Sticking with a single, short rhythm and moving the click helps you get over your tendency to push the click forwards or backwards onto a downbeat. You get used to the rhythmic dissonances in a very controlled environment.

And That's The Whole (Tone) Story

2009-07-28T20:37:00.005-04:00

Oh yeah by the way, all I originally wanted to say was that a chord 1,3,#11,7, has only 2 voicings because of tritone substitution. And now replace the root with the 9th and enjoy all those inversions plus their various translations (I think that's the right geometrical term). And why Ab7 all of a sudden you might ask? Well I’m used to using these voicings the most in Stella so it’s a natural starting point. Of course it turns out all this applies to C in the end anyways...

Why does this chart have 2 lines when yesterday’s chart had 4? And now derivations of the derivations:

Curious about bars 1 and 5... Well that’s a lot of work to do! But most of it mental because there’s only one other scale. Huh?

How To Make Greener Music

2009-07-28T17:40:00.009-04:00

Today it's all about recycling, maximizing efficiency, reducing emissions. Actually I'm not sure what that last one has to do with making music, but the first two are certainly relevant. In Mick Goodrick's Almanac of Guitar Voice-Leading Volume III, there is a catalogue of all the different applications a collection of 4 notes (otherwise known as a chord) could have.

The notes of the Cmaj7 chord, for instance, could be construed as extensions over a Dm7, or a D7sus4, an F maj7, make a nice passing chord on an F#m7(b5). There are many different ways that you could use those 4 notes, and all the voicings that consist of them, in a wide variety of situations. So, instead of trying to learn a million new voicings, we might want to spend some thinking about how to get more milage out of the old ones also. As I was lucky enough to hear Mick point out in person, this becomes even more evident when dealing with less common inversions for guitar such as drop 2 and 4, where sometimes an Fmaj7 might sound more like a Cmaj7add4, for instance. In other words, depending on the order and spacing of the notes, the chord might not even sound like itself, especially without a bass instrument playing the root.

Ok, so we all know about chord substitutes, what’s the big deal? Well there’s a huge deal! This catalogue in Mick’s book is almost 40 pages long! That means that, any given chord you can think of probably has anywhere from six to twelve applications you’ve never even considered and certainly don’t ever use, especially when you’re improvising.

Now I personally run into a voicing a month that I keep if I’m lucky. It takes time to digest anything and integrate any concept, as I’ve been discussing in regards to triads, but for some reason chords take much longer for me. Especially as the sounds start getting weirder, you almost have to build your sound from scratch around the chords because there’s no way they’ll fit in the context of what you were doing before. Just yesterday or the day before I started looking at the different drop 2and4 inversions, but I’m a long way off from using them in what seems to be (perhaps falsely) a spontaneous manner. And that’s only in the context of putting them where they’re most obviously supposed to go: where they match the chord on the paper. Now I’m supposed to take every single voicing I know and do that a dozen times over!? We all substitute Dm7 for Bbmaj7, and perhaps we get so used to subbing Fmaj7 for Dm7 that we end up making the connection between Bbmaj7 and Fmaj7 in a roundabout way that’s quite unconscious and totally natural. But that’s just a network of 3 chords!!!! We’re talking about 10 or 12!! and even then I bet you only use half of your Fmaj7 voicings at the most over Bbmaj7 because it was never conscious to begin with and you’re missing out on plenty of inversions which would sound absolutely amazing.

Ok, so in other words, this is a nice idea, but if we want to harness the power of this concept and apply it to our practice and eventually playing, it should become clear that no human being could ever possibly internalize in a useful way more than a small fraction of this material. It’s just a way to think ourselves into unconventional sounds, to find a small corner of the harmonic universe that excites us and then to live there for a while.

So, now that you get the concept and also how stupidly huge the possibilities are, and maybe some of my excited nervousness has been contagious, it’s time to get to my real point (I know, I wish it didn’t take me so long also).

How can we take a short cut without cutting corners? Easy, 7#11 chords, dim7 chords, 13 chords, 9 chords, 7b13 chords, 13b9 chords. What do all these chords have in common?

Well they all fit in the whole tone or diminished scale, which means that the resulting fingering can all be applied in either 4 or 6 places on the guitar neck that will fit over an altered dominant (different notes, same guitar fingering).

So this is a great way to save time when trying to understand these kinds of concepts, because you can get at least 4 wildly different sounds that fit on a dominant chord, that all are the same fingering as the voicing you already know. I find this makes things a bit more complicated at first, but then you wind up with a huge amount of dominant voicings, ranging from totally clichéd to totally wacky and there’s only 6 or seven fingerings and then there’s only 2 or 3 sets of fingerings for all the keys instead of 12 because these are derived from symmetrical scales.

Once you really start getting into this kind of thought process every key becomes unique. Aside from the fact that there’s a lot of information to process and it takes a long time to be able to transpose that information freely, the even bigger problem on guitar (or piano or anything else) is that some of these ideas are going to be unbelievably easy to execute and some unbelievably difficult, and this might change depending on the key. You might start practicing in C and hate a certain voicing and think you’ll never use it, move on to something else, forget about it, and a couple of months later it just pops up in F# and it’s totally playable and you love it.

If you tried inverting most of the chords above after you’d slid them up or down a major second or minor 3rd, you might have been disappointed to discover that this results in even more fingerings, not less (although excited to discover that those fingerings are also transposable).

Does anybody else love the symmetry of this grid? Who needs Sudoku? There's got to be a hundred voicings I've never thought of that can come from this line of thought.

Space: The Final Frontier

2009-07-26T15:59:00.001-04:00

Why should keyboard players get to have all the fun? Here I’ve been talking about triads and thinking about triads for a month, in a single closed position (which I’ve been trying to use as much as possible in as many different keys and playing contexts as possible), but been completely ignoring something on my mind for quite some time. S P A C E.

And to think all I really wanted to talk about last time was how beautiful Drop 3 and especially Drop 2 and 4 chords are and how I’d like to use them more in my chord playing. But that’s just not how things happened.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that, except to buy Mick Goodrick’s Almanac of Guitar-Voice Leading or Advancing Guitarist for everything you could ever want to know about that subject from a technical perspective. But I’d like to add that all the horizontal chordal triad work that I started doing at first really didn’t appeal to me. Firstly, everything sounded classical. Secondly, there’s no space! All my chord playing involves consecutive strings, involve stacked 4ths or triads or their inversions or Drop 2 chords.

But MAN do those drop 2 and 4s sound amazing. And everybody uses drop 3 whether they realize it or not, but MAN do some of those inversions sound great. And MAN would I like to arrange some standards with these voicings, my primary device not being reharmonization or chord substitution but simply chord inversions and beautiful open chords with greater span, but not ugly 6 note bar chords. No, I’d love to hear beautiful airy voicings that leave space to recognize and digest every note. Ted Greene’s Chord Chemistry is also a great reference if you feel like you need more technical guidance.

Spread It Around a.k.a. Serial Soloing

2009-07-26T15:49:00.004-04:00

Even in the context of triads, even in the context of closed position, of single note playing, I have been ignoring yet another area of interest: spread voicings. They sound gorgeous.

Could we do the exercise with spread triads?

Considering every arpeggio covers a 10th or 11th depending on the inversion, you run out of room much faster. I think what’s happening here is bigger than triads. Really what I have been talking about is creating and sequencing 9 note intervallic patterns. (3 inversions, then it resets). The relationship is diatonic, not absolute. I suppose I’m only really beginning to touch all the possibilities of this way of thinking by limiting myself to intervals based on triadic structures. (And with good reason, one month in, and I’ve barely scraped the surface of a single position. Hopefully the others will be easier when I finally move on). I guess this is a follow up thought to something in the previous article “Oh Boy...” about creating large sequences.

Count out the number of intervals in the above pattern before reaching the note G in the second bar. There are 9. Suppose we could create any sequence of 9 intervals, for the time being, keeping the whole group of 3 thing going by saying that the first 2 intervals will ascend and the third one will descend, although this is not necessary. Let’s throw out some random numbers and see what happens.

4 4 5, 2 3 4, 6 4 7. And now the pattern that results. First, according to the outline above, I will do 2 up, one down. At which point, according to the outline above, I might continue trying out different sets of intervals and seeing how they sound. But I could also keep the same set of intervals and see what happens if I change the order or number of intervals ascending and descending.

hmm... Maybe just dealing with one set instead of 3 would be a better place to start. Supposing you limited yourself to a 7th as the largest interval you could create a set of 3 intervals with, that would mean 343 combinations of 3 intervals you could sequence. WOW!

Maybe you could use 9ths, or 10ths, maybe you could use only a 2 interval pattern, or 4 interval pattern, or combine sets of 2 and 4, 3 and 4, 2 and 3 intervals. Maybe your head is also swimming from all of this information!

How Slow Can You Go Pt. 2

2009-07-26T15:47:00.001-04:00

OK. 30 BPM is SLOW. I’ve started using it as my reference when practicing scales as well as practicing songs. Oddly, I find the scales harder than the songs. One intermediary step, more related to the first article then to the exercise that follows, I should add parenthetically, is to place the metronome on the offbeats of every beat. So the click is on 30, and now it lands in the same spot on every bar, on the offbeat. VERY HARD not to get pulled ahead to the next downbeat. Anyhow, on to the other exercise.

Ever get really thrown off by a drum solo? What is happening that is so disorienting? The superimposition of different metric feels over the original pulse. Suppose you’re trading fours. A good drummer, regardless of how they think of it in their own heads, because there are many different ways to describe the same process, is probably at one point or another ignoring the natural accents of 4/4 and creating longer and shorter phrases with counter-intuitive accents that somehow add up to sixteen beats.

So how do we, as melodic instruments, work on this capability? We have enough to think of as it is. Well, I think the answer is to learn to feel these rhythms. That’s basically the answer for any rhythm after all. To play in any meter or tempo naturally, it can’t be a conscious process, it must be felt. So, once again, the question is how do we improve our ability to superimpose phrases of various lengths and awkward (at least at first) accents over a regular time signature?

Well, the metronome stays at 30. But now you’re going to have it click on every 5th beat. So in the first bar the click is on beat 1, the second bar beat 2, third bar beat 3, fourth bar beat 4, and no click in the fifth bar. It is crucial to notice that although the click is playing over a regular interval of 5 beats, that you are playing in 4/4 so the click gradually moves through all the beats as the song progresses.

Apparently, after a few months of this, it becomes much easier to feel phrases of 5 over 4/4. Of course, you could also do phrases of 3,6,7,8,9, and even higher. You could also do the same thing except displaced by an 8th note. Or you could have the click represent a certain odd number of 8th notes. Perhaps 7/8. In this case the click would land on 1, upbeat of 4, then 4, then upbeat of 3 etc.

Tying Up Loose Ends

2009-07-22T13:15:00.004-04:00

Here are a few more exercises, some obvious holes in the work that has been done so far.

The first is that I left out one inversion in the cycle 2/7 triad exercise, which is if you start the C major scale on root position D minor. This inversion doesn’t occur starting on C, because the chord before it would be 2nd inversion E minor, skipping the note C to get to D. (System 1)

2 other obvious ones are to go through the scale using the same inversion throughout, but using inversions other than root position. (Systems 2-3)

Here’s a neat idea: anyone who’s ever harmonized a chorale gets the idea of passing chords. A chord moves from one inversion to another of the same chord, and through the process of voiceleading another chord is created. Could this be done vertically and with arpeggiation instead of horizontally and homophonically? (System 4)

And of course, although I won’t bother rewriting everything, all of these can also be played using a ton of different nested patterns such as alternating between ascending, descending, broken, etc.

And here's a variation on yesterday's dorian lick:

A Few More Licks

2009-07-21T01:52:00.003-04:00

Finally a lick outside of Ionian and Lydian! Definitely a good idea to sing these as well as play them. The second one is especially tough.

How Slow Can You Go

2009-07-13T17:09:00.002-04:00

Something we all go through at some point, but I notice especially in younger students of a certain age group, is an extreme difficulty in playing slowly and accurately. Explain as many times as you want, but the concept that eliminating mistakes at turtle tempos will lead to the best performance at faster speeds just won’t sink in. It’s harder to concentrate on something and keep time accurately at slower tempos. Nick Gélinas, my metric mentor, has been suggesting exercises to me which have really exposed certain rhythmic shortcomings in my playing. These are HARD. So I’ve begun a simpler but similar exercise which is testing me in several ways.

I went out and bought a nice metronome. It can do subdivisions, different swing feels, and most importantly, it can go down to 30BPM. 30, if you’ve never heard it, is SLOW. If you made the click the downbeat of each measure, you’d be playing the equivalent of 120BPM as the 1/4 note value. So that’s what I did. I started playing Solar, because that’s the tune Nick always talks about with this stuff. I could play basic chords or the melody pretty consistently without messing up after a bit of practice so what’s the next step? Well, move the click to beats 2, 3 and 4 of the bar and see if that’s disorienting. I find 3 the weirdest because I can’t help hearing the metronome as an accent at this point and it’s an accent on the weakest beat. Of course, once this becomes very easy, the next step is to play the metronome on the offbeats of every beat.

But there is a fork in the road of this exercise, the first path is to work on being comfortable with the metronome anywhere in the bar. But I’m also working on keeping the metronome on the first beat of the bar, and trying to play more complex ideas without rushing or slowing down (mostly unsuccessfully at this point). It’s unbelievable how hard it is to keep really almost perfect time without hearing the metronome more often. With the metronome playing twice a bar even, it gives us a chance to correct subtle little imperfections in our time. But with the metronome playing only once a bar, those two extra beats make a massive difference in our ability to correct ourselves. For starters, a small mistake has 2 more beats (which is actually a lot) to become a slightly larger mistake. And if that weren’t enough, once you realize you’ve sped up or slowed down, without 2 clicks per bar, it is extremely difficult to correct yourself because the metronome really doesn’t give you any help at all.

So I’m going to work very hard on this, and once I feel confident enough to move on to the real exercise, I’ll come back and write about it.

Oh boy...

2009-07-12T12:23:00.018-04:00

I was recently reading a very informative Guitar Player magazine article on triads, discussing the use of triads as the basis for melodic soloing. Although I personally didn’t love the musical example, it certainly demonstrated the idea quite effectively. But I also noticed a shortcoming to this kind of information overload, one that I have been quite guilty of myself.

The article, much like this blog, is geared more towards the idea of improvisation. Yet, so far my experience in the past 3 weeks has been that the sophistication in the lines I’m discovering has yet to rub off very much on the kinds of things I’m improvising. Interestingly enough, the new triad shapes that are appearing in my playing, albeit in a simpler way and using less of them than when I write a line, are resulting more from the line building than the exercises. The exercises don’t seem to be as helpful so far. Although I know they will be eventually. But still, when I sit down to write, I come up with things that are far beyond my powers of instant computation.

Here’s an example from a solo for an original piece I’ve started working on:

Now I can play some of these lines in the solo, I can create tiny variations on them, but I’m not spinning off ideas that use the same concepts just yet. Why not?

Writing solos like this is a great process, and as I mentioned, writing lines has been more instantly gratifying in terms of applying ideas to my playing than waiting for the seeds being planted by the exercises to grow and bloom. But taking the long view, what I need is more exercises, more mechanical patterns to work through that will allow me to systematically explore all the possibilities which these concepts imply, taking these ideas beyond preconceived licks and allowing a more free application of these advanced textures while improvising.

So, in the last article, I put out four lines and then talked about what made each one special, and now I’m going to create a mechanical exercise based on what was cool about each one.

Alternating between ascending, descending, and broken. There are a massive number of combinations using these 3 interchangeable patterns, especially when there are 4 “broken” (mixture of the first 2) patterns. It might also be wise to start by interchanging only two patterns before moving on to 3. That’s a lot of work for 7 positions in two different scales (I’ll save harmonic minor for the next lifetime thank you).

Since this stuff is so complicated we won’t take anything for granted. This means there are 36 combinations of A,D,B1,B2,B3, and B4 including AA, DD, B1B1, etc. They are all pretty complicated and need to be investigated independently. Perhaps the smartest place to start would be going through all the doubles AA, DD, B1B1, B2B2, B3B3, and B4B4 to get a better feel for all of them before starting to mix them up.

And at this point, if there still seems to be a reason to investigate combinations of 3 as compulsively (although maybe that time if anybody makes it that far there won’t be a point to them anyways), there should be 216 different ways to play combinations of these patterns. Of course all this is really just a third of the work because you can start on Am/C and F/C, plus of course the other 13 positions of the major and melodic minor scales.

Using Passing Tones between chord tones. Just to keep the math at a point where this might take less than 20 years once it’s all added up, how about limiting ourselves to the combination of only two parameters at a time. Passing tones can either be between 1 and 3, 3 and 5, and then there are 3 possibilities to get from 5 back to 1 (play both or only one of them)

We have a name for when all the chord tones are connected by passing tones already: the scale.

Now here’s where our understanding of inversions and ability not to get lost in the material is tested to the extreme. I think anybody’s first instinct would be to simply put a passing tone on the first interval:

But we’ve already broken our rule of not combining more than 2 parameters. Let’s try and put a passing tone in between the same chord tones regardless of the inversion.

Yikes! We ran into a problem pretty fast. What to do now? There is no passing tone. Well, perhaps we can just skip the passing tone when it isn’t there and see what kind of funky rhythmic displacement this will create (clue: 11 note cycle won’t meet up with 4 until 44)

No matter what combination of passing tones you pick, there will always be this problem (when trying to create a mechanical or cyclical exercise)

This starts getting pretty weird as an exercise, but that 3rd bar is pretty cool. Maybe now we could create an intervallic sequence that isn’t necessarily triadic based on the 3rd bar?

And now that we’ve left our whole first constraint from the very first article (briefly) of basing everything on triads, couldn’t we abandon our other constraint and play this pattern in another cycle? (crap!!!! couldn’t that apply to everything we’ve talked about!?)

3.Using common tones as pivots between triads. Well obviously this one won’t work in cycle 2(/7), and cycle 3/6 just turns into a 4 note arpeggio, which isn’t exactly new to anybody anyways, so let’s look at cycle 4/5, which is so much fun because there is only one common tone. Now, in the name of keeping our goal of creating mechanical brainteasers, we’re going to imbed one cycle within another. In other words we’re going to do pairs of cycle 4, moving up in cycle 2. The pattern is 3 beats long. If you play it a couple of times you’ll see what I mean. This kind of larger sequence of imbedded patterns is a neat idea which I was first introduced to in Dave Liebman’s Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony. Liebman talks about using exact intervallic relationships, whereas this is looking at things from a more diatonic perspective. I’m really not sure which is harder, and I think the answer might depend on the instrument being used as well.

Another possibility, since the pattern seems to start and end on the same note, is to eliminate the repetition.

Here something interesting has happened. It turns out something much simpler is happening than what we set out to do(think of it as simplifying an equation).

Let’s go back to cycle 7 now and see what we can come up with.

And now there’s a million different ways to go about playing any/all/none of this stuff but one thing is for sure and it’s that there sure are a lot of ways to navigate through a diatonic scale.

The Upward Spiral

2009-07-03T02:03:00.002-04:00

After a busy couple of days where there really wasn’t any time to sit down and play the guitar in any kind of meaningful or thoughtful manner, I sat down today to return to this strange world of triadic voice leading. A couple of things are slowly dawning on me: while playing the triads horizontally as a chord exercise is useful as an exercise, that’s about where it ends. Most of the interesting things I’ve come up with have been melodic, and therefore if I’m ever going to improvise using these kinds of sounds, it will probably happen only by becoming very strong in each position and then eventually being able to combine the positions fluidly, much like what we all go through when we learn them all in the first place.

This reminds me of a story a Rabbi told me. According to him (certainly not to me), each day of the Jewish calendar (lunar, not solar) has a certain energy to it. Every time we come back upon that day of the calendar, this same energy fills us every time. He said: imagine not a circle, because time is always moving forward, but a spiral. This reminds me of diagrams trying to explain four dimensional space-time. The same way 2D becomes 3D with the introduction of depth, we are literally time travelers, traveling through space AND time. Anyhow, to get back to the Rabbi. This idea of constantly moving forward while at the same time constantly returning is very powerful and relevant to the musical journey we all take.

As I often say to my younger students: think of this as a video game. The best video game there is because you only have to buy it once and it never ends and people might even pay you to watch you play or have you show them because it comes with a million different manuals and most of them, like this one, aren’t very good. As you progress through the levels, the structure remains the same. You have to jump over cliffs, fight bad guys, solve puzzles, whatever. This cycle of actions never changes, but becomes more complex and sophisticated as you play through the levels.

So imagine you open up a guitar book, or go for a lesson, maybe you’d been playing by ear, learning from the internet, playing songs, and then all of a sudden somebody points out to you that there are a finite number of patterns that describe everything you’d been doing up until this point. These patterns are the positions. You think to yourself, boy, I wish I knew all of these really well. I wish I could play all sorts of neat stuff in all of them, and maybe even zip through a few of them, link them together fluidly, see what happens if I get stuck kind of in the middle of them, etc. So you get to work, playing up and down all the positions. Once you’re feeling confident and/or bored and/or too excited to wait, you decide that now you’re going to pick two positions and work on doing things that seem to connect both of them. Then you repeat this for all the different positions (although you probably don’t like some of them and in all honesty almost never use them...).

Maybe you buy a book that has to do more with metal kinds of playing where the more notes per string the merrier. Maybe inside this book, there is a section that deals with playing each mode, but rather than saying you’re in closed position, you always start on your first finger and then play 3 notes per string (advantages to metal-heads should be obvious). Maybe you realize, you’re playing a sort of hybrid scale POSITION that seems to fall in Dorian and Phrygian. Maybe you also start to realize the wonderful phrasing possibilities when you have more notes per string, or get used to playing them with different fingerings. Maybe you start to see the position in terms of notes, and after a while you could play through all the modes using only your first finger because your understanding of them musically is deep enough and your technique effortless enough and your concentration solid enough that this simply doesn’t seem challenging anymore. Maybe you opened up Mick Goodrick’sAdvancing Guitarist and decided to spend serious amounts of time playing on a single string, forcing yourself to think melodically, and to internalize the harmony on a level deeper than this shape during that bar. Then maybe after a while you seem to be doing any or all of these at the same time.

In other words, maybe a few years have gone by since somebody explained to you what modes and positions were and you’ve worked very hard on them. You have gone through a whole process of learning a vocabulary, learning to navigate your way through that vocabulary, learning to tastefully and effectively use that vocabulary within various musical contexts, and finally developed such a thoughtless and intuitive grasp of this vocabulary that you can actually think about other things, such as thematic development, while using this vocabulary. Congratulations. But just like Monopoly, this game goes in circles and never ends. Except now you’re much richer.

So to get back to triads, the more I play the longer I feel this is going to take. I could spend months in just one or two positions (Major and Lydian). The possibilities are massive. Today I discovered some licks which do a couple of different things that in themselves require some dedicated time, once I actually know the exercises better anyways. For instance, alternating the direction of the arpeggios (one goes up one goes down one is totally broken and any combination of any of these in any spot as in bar 1). Also adding in lots of passing tones, creating something which might not seem all that triadic but in fact is based on a series of triadic voiceleading (bar 8). Something that is not all that triadic at all but is starting to use intervals in ways I couldn’t really have done before all this (bar 5), using common tones as pivots between two different triads in a smooth and speedy fashion (bar 3). The possibilities are endless and this is all just in one position.

Mick Goodrick says that he’d love to imagine a guitar player who spent their whole life playing since the age of 4 in only open position. He’d have a range 2 octaves plus a 3rd and he would only have one doubled note (B). He could rip through giant steps and comp like a champion. What the hell would that look and sound like? Maybe it’s never going to happen because nobody who picks up a guitar has that much self restraint. But the point he’s making, at least I think, is that the musical possibilities on a guitar within one position, mathematically speaking, are endless. If you forced yourself to spend a very long time limiting yourself so drastically, what sort of possibilities might you eventually come up with that no one had thought of up until that point? And if you start taking this seriously, who needs 7 positions if they’re under the age of 40?

This process of learning continually repeats itself at an ever increasing level of sophistication. We are constantly faced with new ideas which we learn to integrate in the exact same manner and following the exact same stages (although it’s really not that clear cut). Rather than days of the lunar year with energy (remember the Rabbi), this metaphor of the upwards spiral seems to speak to me about what it means to practice and learn new things. To constantly undergo the same process, and yet it is different each time BECAUSE of time, because we’ve evolved as players.

Compositional GPS

2009-06-30T17:33:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-30T16:11:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-29T17:24:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-28T22:05:00.010-04:00

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

2009-06-28T18:32:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-26T13:32:00.000-04:00

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:

Group Playing
Guitar Duet
Individual harmonic development.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.
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?
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.

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.

Pick a Cycle. I started with 2.
Play through the cycle in all 3 modes.
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.
Try and come up with multiple places to switch strings/positions.
Play the chords in both directions so that you’re practicing cycle 2 and 7 at the same time.
Repeat in 11 other keys.
Repeat with spread voicings.
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!