Spread It Around a.k.a. Serial Soloing

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

1. 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.

1. 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

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.