Long Scale Exercise - Playing out of the Box, Playing over the Changes

[fep]

This material was taught in a master class by Bob Magnusson. There were several topics that he covered that I thought were so good that I went home and wrote them out for posperity.

There have been recent topics on the forum about playing over the changes and playing out of the box... i.e. playing out of the position boxes that we learn on the guitar. This is a great exercise for accomplishing that.

Note, the goal is to come up with your own fingerings and shifts and to vary them each time you run the long scale. You're trying to break away from patterns. Try to hear the scale degrees.

(Note, he always suggested you end each exercise with some improvisation, improvisation where you don't restrict yourself by the rules of the exercise.)



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[fep]

The second part of the exercise is to play the long scale over the changes of a song of your choice (change the song each day you do the exercise).

Remember to end the excercise by improvising over the song changes using the entire length of the fretboard.



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[fep]

Here's a link to pdf of those exercises:

Long Scale Exercise - Bob Magnusson.pdf - File Shared from Box.net - Free Online File Storage

In the class we also discussed doing this for arpeggios. I'll post those examples in another thread.

[FatJeff]

This exact same exercise is in David Berkman's "Jazz Musician's Guide to Creative Practicing."