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More than half of my career was spent as a Special Education Teacher. NYC, LA, Washington. 4-12th grade.
Although I've definitely seen research around PDA, I've never seen that coded in an IEP or input that myself.
PDA sounds eerily similar to ODD--opposition deficient disorder.
I'm not comfortable with the implications of either diagnosis. At least in the states, we have a real problem with behavior. The problem being that we still see it as a problem to normalize instead of an act of (mis)communication. Unfortunately, both perspectives are tied up in Applied Behavioral Analysis. Goes back to the whole teaching via obedience and coercion. Sure sounds nice on a bumper sticker--back my day, kids knew how to do as they were told--in reality, that doesn't work in the classroom.
I guess people like me are the problem with education
Last edited by PickingMyEars; 08-22-2025 at 06:08 PM.
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08-22-2025 04:17 PM
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Excellent idea, I will start term that way
Originally Posted by Mick-7
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At one level it's:
1. think of a good line
2. play it
Improving #1 probably requires, foremost, listening and may not need to be consciously directed.
Improving #2 requires focus on the issue and plenty of practice.
There's another way, I suspect, which may be thinking of a good fragment and then elaborating on it using whatever technique, vocabulary or tricks or one possesses.
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Catching up here after a couple weeks of distractions--a really interesting conversation for someone with a spotty and unorganized musical education (I even hesitate to call it "education") but who did spend a couple decades trying to teach another complex skill set (reading/comprehending/writing). And who has spent sixty-odd years assembling musical skills.
About learning with or without a theoretical framework: In the course of writing a book about Hawaiian slack key guitar (maybe to be finished before I die), I talked to a lot of players about how they came to the music, how they learned, and so on. Several of my informants had conventional training, read and write standard notation, and can describe what's going on in their music in terms a college-level music student would recognize. But the most traditional path to playing slack key in particular was rooted in a very traditional Hawaiian practice: listen, watch, imitate, and don't ask questions. (Though there is also a long, post-Contact tradition of European-style schooled music training--Queen Lili`uokalani and her brother David Kalakaua were both accomplished songwriters. And a number of post-WW2 players came from professional-musician families--the Isaacs, for example--with mainland-style training.)
I have a large collection of how-I-learned anecdotes that emphasize the arms-length side of traditional guitar learning--and the proprietary, family-secrets traditions that only started to decline in the 1950s. So we have an entirely aural tradition and a cultural bias against structured training, at least in slack key*. While I don't have as much data on this, I know that while older players had names for the tunings, they did not seem to have the kind of keys-and-chords nomenclature that mainland Folk Scare pickers like me got from instruction books or more sophisticated friends. And the old ways changed thoroughly starting in the 1970s with the publication of instruction and repertory books and slack key courses offered at UH-Manoa and, say, tunings being described in conventional European terms.
Hawaiian music isn't jazz, of course, but my impression is that post-Django-to-1960s grassroots gypsy musical culture is rather like the old-style Hawaiian approach in its emphasis on hearing, imitation, and repetition without a lot of theory. (Though, of course, Matelo Ferret sent his sons to conservatory.)
No absolute conclusions from me--though I do suspect that that listening, imitating, and repeating are the primal activities, and that the naming and analyzing and organizing we call "theory" come along a bit later and reinforce and extend the primal stuff.
* Unlike the hula halau, which is an institution.
(Later--Had to edit a bit because the a-macron character used in Hawaiian spellings doesn't show up on this forum.)Last edited by RLetson; 08-24-2025 at 12:42 AM.
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To return to the subject of this thread, I thought I'd illustrate the improvisation exercise of playing chord tones/arpeggios over the chord changes. I've found that this helps me grasp the harmony of a tune.
This is probably not the best example, because I strayed from the exercise at times (mostly near the end) but I think (hope) it makes my point. I am targeting chord tones for the most part. This is the ATTYA 180bpm backing track again.
All The Chord Tones You Are @Box.com
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Reviewing this thread (which is painful at times) I see that we've considered: 1). playing continuous 8th notes, 2). playing and connecting chord tones/arpeggios.... is that it?
So the example I just posted would fall under #2 - if it were more succinct anyway, probably too busy to qualify as is.
Peter mentioned using guide tones, are they different than chord tones? I don't even know.
P.S. - Graham mentioned this, but I don't think anyone pursued it in this thread:
Originally Posted by grahambop
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Page 25 and that’s all you’ve got? Originally Posted by Mick-7
Bummer.
Chord tones are the notes of a chord.
A guide tone line is a simple melody made by stringing those notes together. It’s like a single strand of the voice-leading.
For example, if you look at the melody to Autumn Leaves, you can see the guide tone line in the top note of each phrase:
Eb, D, C, Bb … to take you through eight measures of changes.
As for Grahams thing, I did pursue that and even posted some videos of it relating back to the guide tone lines.
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I didn't read every page, looks like a few other things were discussed - responses to Graham's comment, playing chords over chords, etc. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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50% of this thread was arguments over terminology as I recall.
Another idea is just to embellish the melody, sounds basic, but Peter Bernstein recommends it in a video (he says something like play the melody 50 times, and you will get so bored you will start to change it and come up with new ideas).
Also Lee Konitz had a 10-step method for going from the melody to developing a solo, you should be able to google it.
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Other things I’ve been getting into over the last year or so:
- pentatonics (i.e. Coltrane/Tyner type pentatonic patterns, Jerry Bergonzi has good stuff on this).
- triad pairs (also Jerry).
- melodic cells (a la Michael Brecker, Chad LB does a good musicmasterclass video on this).
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If nothing else you’ll learn the melody haha. But I rarely get to ten, which says more about probably lol. Originally Posted by grahambop
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Personally I usually just play it by ear. Saves an awful lot of time.
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I mean, you might be great at playing by ear but if your ear isn't saying anything...
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Had a look through the thread, we also discussed playing ‘inside/outside’ (e.g. Adam Rogers ideas such as playing altered scale patterns on a minor chord). I actually prefer diminished scale for this, I just find it easier because of the symmetrical nature. I think Scofield and Stern did this a lot with Miles.
Also the ‘continuous scale’ idea (as advocated by Mike Stern = playing a scale all the way up the fingerboard then down again, etc. changing to fit each chord). Quite hard this, I usually go wrong somewhere. I find that pausing and quickly playing the root note of the next chord when I’m about to get lost is very helpful.
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He runs the whole gamut from ‘ere to ‘ere! Originally Posted by Christian Miller
(apologies to Dorothy Parker.)
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Arpeggios, and connecting scales are good foundational exercises for internalizing the fretboard, technique and hearing the changes but they don't by themselves lead to a rich vocabulary. For expanding vocabulary, I work on short ideas from transcriptions/heads. These are rarely longer than two beats (four notes if in 8th notes). I sing them and play them starting from different chord tones and scale tones everywhere on the fretboard. If I sing the phrase from a different note, I have a tendency to sing it diatonically. I find it much harder to sing a new phrase in different keys which is the ultimate litmus test for whether I really learned it.
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Yes that’s basically how I learned, for years I just kept copying phrases off records and trying to fit them into different tunes until eventually I was able to create some kind of half-decent solo. Also the phrases I’d learned tended to evolve and change over time as I forced them into different tunes, chords etc.
So it created a vocabulary and was also good ear-training (no internet in those days so I had to figure it all out myself).
I did more stuff on scales and arpeggios later, maybe a funny way round to do it in retrospect. (I knew the basic scales from my classical guitar lessons, so I did have some theory knowledge already.)
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I used to work on a phrase for a while and then forget it. Now I am more disciplined about turning the phrases into my own vocabulary. I also find it useful to not just working on applying the vocabulary over chord changes but playing over static chords. For example I play just using major vocabulary ideas for several bars in all positions. I sometimes alternate single notes with self comping (movements, subs, turnarounds within the chord's sound). Then do that for minor, dominant etc. I find that I get better at connecting chords if I am comfortable playing the ideas for each chord everywhere in isolation first.
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But, grasshopper, the end is the beginning... Originally Posted by grahambop
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Not sure if this was mentioned before, but a good book for developing the ability to play longer lines of 8th notes is Pat Martino’s Linear Expressions. He has so many cool ways of getting extra notes into the line (over one chord) which would not have occurred to me.
E.g. that ‘Just Friends’ example I posted earlier in the thread starts with 2 bars of Bb, I can hear the influence of it there.
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I learned more from linear expressions than any other book. But it must be said, it's not a method book. It’s up to the student how they use the book and what they learn from it.
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I remember there being a forum study group for Pat Martino's Linear Expressions book:
Here:
Linear Expressions by Pat Martino
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Are melodic cells the same thing as tetrachords? Hal Galper suggests they are: "In his book Forward Motion, Hal Galper defines a cell as a four-note group of which at least three of the notes are chord tones."
Tetrachords -- Slonimsky Curiosities
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It can work as long as you recognize its limitations, even someone with phenomenal ears like Art Pepper said he had to learn some theory to be able to improvise well over the more harmonically complex charts he encountered when he joined a big band. Originally Posted by ragman1
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Just 4-note phrases, either diatonic (made up only of scale tones) or non-diatonic (i.e. containing some chromatic notes). Can also be combined in various ways into 8-note phrases (or longer). Originally Posted by Mick-7
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