More Things On All The Things

 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)

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

7 no 5

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

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

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

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

Contrepoint 3.0

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

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

The Mountain Climber

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

Why Do?

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

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

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

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

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

mp3 on MySpace

Dynamic Duo

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

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.