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I always have less time in the summer — my son and wife are home from school, so more family time. Lots of other stuff going on this summer, but anyway.
I always try to keep my routine together, but after a few weeks, I have to pare it back quite a bit, and I’m always interested when I see what stays.
This summer it’s transcribing Grant Green, and playing shell chords over tunes and one or two chord progressions I’m trying to get into my playing.
With time I’m playing through my bebop heads, then using some triad plus one sounds over the same tunes and progressions. But mostly it’s Grant and the chords.
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07-09-2025 08:16 AM
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I only care about blues licks so I don't have any advice. The blessings of a one track mind.
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Last weekend it was the opposite for me - my wife's been away, and my boss gave me the Friday off for good behaviour, so I had three solid afternoons of practice. I tried for the first time an exercise I've seen recommended time and again, and somehow thought I never needed: play a scale, then play it in thirds, then in triads, then in 7th arpeggios. I did this for each of the chords in ATTYA, and it took me well over an hour. Clearly not practical with my regular 90 minutes or so a day. I've got 5 songs on the go at the moment, and move from one to the other each day to try and keep the melodies and progressions remembered. Then I'll apply whatever ideas I'm working on to the song of the day. Recently it's been composing lines to land on the 3rd of each target chord, incorporating groups of 3 or 5 repeating rhythmic ideas, and comping with a steady quarter note pulse in the bass and the top shell voices in a Charleston rhythm.
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If limited time for practice then I do some Bach violin partitas, then some solo arrangements - basically I practice performing some short solo pieces. Only when I have more than 1 hour of this I can move to improvisation practice with standards.
This method which I have been using only since a year or so, gives me most pleasure of short practice time.
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Below is my daily practice routine, I apply myself to it everyday, but some days for a longer time than other days.
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Since you mentioned shell voicings, here is how I practice them.
Suppose you are playing Gmajor and the first voicing is G in the bass maj6 or maj7. The next bass note up is A. So what passing chord you play there? A minor, D7/A, Adim all good options. Next bass note can be Bb (Bbdim) or B (Bmin, Gmajor/B). The next note is C. Ok that can be a D7 inversion or you can skip and go to C#dim and lead that to G7/D etc.
The idea is to move up and down in steps inside a chord using three note voicings until these choices can be made aurally. Moreover you start seeing these choices as just separate melodic lines in each of the three voices rather than substitutions and inversions.
Another way I practice this is, instead of the bass note, I focus on the melody note. In that case I place the melody note on the high E or B strings and explore moving in steps while harmonizing the melody note within the same chord. Although drop 2's work better than shells when harmonizing melody notes on high strings.
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Good idea, if you keep it pleasurable, you'll keep doing it.
Originally Posted by Tomcat
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I have a few lists of new, or tricky, tunes and I try to get though one list every day. That's about all I can accomplish in the summer days.
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Making up solo arrangements beforehand I can do (useful for gigs). When it comes to improvising stuff I feel like I can always improve on it but its a slow grind. Maybe transcribing charlie christian stuff or melodies/heads is the way to go
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I'm unhappy with my articulation, hitting the note I want when I want to. Been hitting up the metronome a lot more recently, even when I play something like Satin Doll that I'm deeply familiar with. Also, I've been adding different turnarounds to stuff. Peter's anecdote from another thread opened my eyes to some more possibilities. Probably time to figure out how to apply Coltrane changes too, the comping on Coltrane's version of But Not For Me is great.
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I"m working on playing sixteenths notes fast with a relaxed right hand.
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I need to do this. I want to add some new material to my aging set list. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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What I need to practice is songs.
Just got back from my weekly 3 hour jam session at a local venue. It’s something like group practice, though not for a gig. Tonight there were four drummers, three who were very good, and one of which I haven’t seen since before corona shut these weekly sessions down for the better part of two years. It was great to practice locking into a groove with different drummers.
There was also one newcomer, a young guitarist, and a couple of horns, two bassists and a pianist. It varies every week. These jams are not to entertain an audience, we “pay to play,” but once in a while people do stop in for drinks, since the venue hosts live acts on other nights. For jams, I have a list of a couple dozen songs that I run through the basics at home and then call a few at these jams.
One was Killer Joe, and tonight I practiced playing a little behind the beat, and also using whole tones over the C7 to Bb7 vamp.
Others called tunes, too, including Whisper Not, which gave me a chance to practice comping cold from a lead sheet, and doing a little ad-lib. And since tonight there was a newcomer, we also called a few jam session “staple tunes” (e.g. Summertime, Days of Wine and Roses, etc.) to help them feel comfortable, and to give me some needed opportunity to practice listening and restraint.
Last night, I practiced with a bass player who lives nearby. He runs a jazz cafe, where I go to jams once a month, and he also does some gigging. We meet every week to practice together for a couple of hours. Last night, we practiced his arrangement of Dear Old Stockholm, the form of which is a bit unusual. He kindly wrote out a chart, and he added some parts, including a rubato ad-lib verse with a bow, for which I have to listen carefully to accompany him.
We also practiced a couple vocal tunes, East of the Sun and More Than You Know, as a vocalist will practice with us from next week.
I’m also practicing maybe an hour or two a week on arrangements of a few tunes for a solo guitar set I’m preparing to perform live in September, including working with some pedals. Once my full time day job goes on summer break in August, I’ll put more practice time in on polishing the solo set, which is still more like a rough draft.
At the moment, I still don’t really have time to practice conventional stuff like technique, exercises, etc. but this seems sufficient for now.
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If I had to recommend a bare bones minimum ...
1. Practice hearing (or imagining) something and playing it immediately. The idea is to be better able to go from mind to fingers without much thought.
2. Songs.
At the risk of belaboring the point, this is minimal. If I were to add a third thing it would probably relate to vocabulary, but, frankly, I've never been good at practicing that.
Here's what I actually practice (bearing in mind that over the decades I have practiced a lot of different stuff).
Songs that are difficult in some way. In my main band, I have to be able to play all the heads. So, a lot of this is getting written melodies under my fingers. Comping tends to be easier, but there are some exceptions which I practice. And, some of the tunes have unusual harmony, which I have to think about and work on.
Vocal tunes. I recently started singing on gigs. I had to practice things as basic as how to set up the mic stand so that I could see the chart (if I needed one) and how close to get the mic to get a decent sound. And, to memorize the tunes and find interesting and feasible ways to comp while singing.
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There are so many unknown tunes too. Originally Posted by DawgBone
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I've used chatgpt to suggest set lists for Senior Living gigs.
It worked great. At one point I asked it to modify a list to make it lighter-hearted and to omit tunes about romance (the manager suggested that some tunes can affect audience members who have lost loved ones) and chatgpt came up with an appropriate list.
Which gives me an idea for another thread.
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I’ve started zeroing in on just minor ideas. Stuff I’m raiding from some of my old Grant Green solos and putting it over all the changes to tunes I’m working on.
Easy to Love today, but in a review mode at the moment, so nothing super new.
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I do that with Pat Martino linear expressions every now and then. But I don't think of the lines as "minor material". I don't even think of them as "minorization" lines that can be superimposed over other chords using the simple substitution concepts (ie the way Pat Martino intended them to be used). I use the lines as a source of short phrasal ideas that can be applied to any chord in multiple different ways. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Tunes, tunes, tunes, and by that I mean jazz standards right out of the Real Book, etc. Every tune has its own interesting harmonic and melodic "thangs" going on that you can learn from. Yes, and listen to other players who can play blowing over those tunes as food for your own ideas.
Chord scales, ya gotta know those down pat, chord voicings, myriad subs you can play with in musical ways within the tunes. Every chord sub you can use means you can also sub in the scales that go with those chord subs, even over the original harmony, unless it's a reharmonization and not just a chord sub. It gets technically deep, this is jazz. IMO, you get more mialage out of all the knowledge if you start applying it to tunes ASAFP (the F is for fucking). Arpeggios, arpeggios, arpeggios too. Maybe I should have put that right after tunes, tunes, tunes.
Get a copy of The Real Book if you don't already have one. Every legit jazzer should have one, IMO. In the modern editions the infamous "errors" have been fixed, or if the changes differ slightly from the original recording, that's because that's the way most guys play the tunes at jam sessions, so you're good with those. Usually they sound better, IMO.
Good luck
That ought to keep you busy for the Summer.
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I truly don't understand why anyone would waste their time working on shell voicings though. Seems to me there are so many more fruitful things a jazz guitarist could work on than that.
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Youre clearly not up on your Ed Bickert Originally Posted by AdroitMage
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1st+7th+3rd(10th) voicings are all you really need for comping in a guitar duo. IMHO. Originally Posted by AdroitMage
Maybe, 1st+6th+3rd as well.
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A lot of what Ed Bickert did weren't shell voicings. His comping involved harmonized lines with rootless voicings and lots of movements inside chords. At least the aspect if his comping that I really like and find unique is not his use of shell voicings. He was the ultimate harmonized counter line guy.
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He used LOADS of rootless shell voicings. Originally Posted by Tal_175
Basically anything he played that was more than two notes.
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Maybe we have a different definition of shell voicings. The shell voicing are root, third and 7th. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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