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[QUOTE=ECHOPLEX;245374]
Originally Posted by Reg
A few want to dig into music, to learn how it works, to create something. When I first started taking jazz guitar lessons a depressing number of years ago, my teacher spent a lot of time gauging what it was I wanted to learn. He had me into jazz at Gmaj7...
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08-02-2012 12:16 AM
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Originally Posted by 1313
One tune worth checking out, off the top of my head (and considering your expressed interest in jazz), is Kenny Burrell's version of "Chitlins Con Carne", on his (great) record Midnight Blue. You can play both the head and his solo using familiar C minor pentatonic patterns.
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Originally Posted by 1313
As others have said, don't limit yourself to fingerings. And definitely don't limit yourself to pentatonics. There's far much nicer note choices you can use over common chords. For now try to work past the pentatonic sound, and don't just transpose scale fingerings to other keys by shifting the fingering. Learn the notes, when you play a note in a scale, say the note to yourself to reinforce it on you. There's a lot of movement in jazz and you're gonna have to be all over the fretboard, a single fingering might not suffice and you'll need to be able to work out something on the spot with your ear.
In the meantime, work on the tune Summertime. The melody is mostly derived from A minor pentatonic with some nice harmony that allows you to go outside of it easily. Use the Mark Levine jazz theory book as a resource on what to work on, look at the different types of scales and work on it to get it in your ear.
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Originally Posted by jtizzle
Originally Posted by 1313
But the best way is to learn a few pentatonic tunes. Seeing as you mention 'Twinkle Twinkle', there are very few pentatonic nursery rhymes (there's a reason for that, semi-tones are very easy to sing). One of the few exceptions is "Old McDonald." If you play it through in C, you'll notice that there is no B (or F) in the melody (harmony is something else). And if you mess around with the melody and start playing B naturals, you will completely change the 'feel' of it.
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Originally Posted by 1313
Or another way to put it is if the melody is completely diatonic and does not use (or rarely) the 4th or 7th of the key, which have the most tension, being half-steps away from chord tones. e.g. The notes C D E G and A in the key of C. (The Minor pentatonic is 1, b3, 4, 5, b7).
Off the top of my head, here's an example of a modern pop song: Sunday Morning by Maroon 5 (I had to transcribe/arrange this recently); the chord progression is a ii V I in the key of C... which would be "Jazzy" sounding to most people... the chords played are more like Dmin9, G13, Cmaj9... but anyways, the vocal melody throughout the tune is entirely C major pentatonic, which keeps the song very simple. I think John Mayer songs are usually the same way.Last edited by RyanM; 08-02-2012 at 03:28 PM.
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Originally Posted by Reg
Learn the names of the fingerings. Example; one of many G dominant 7th arpeggio fingerings name 1st-5th. That means find the root on the on the 5th string with your first finger (in this case at the 10th fret). If you do that, and you know the intervals as root, 3rd, perfect 5th, m7th, 8va-root, 3rd, perfect 5th, m7th . . . (2nd finger never moves out of position) . . . then you own the fingering.
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Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Scottish, Chinese, and Pop have a lot of pentatonic, but this is a jazz forum. Any question I read I'll answer in a jazz sense, which I believe in the end is his goal if he joined a jazz guitar forum, right? If not, what stopped him from going on yahoo answer? And jazz does have a lot of pentatonic stuff in it too, but it's not limited to such thing, and goes way further out than those other styles of music that you mentioned.
If something is "genuinely pentatonic" and you start playing pentatonic, that's cool. If you like how it sounds, good for you. If you go to a jam session, call a tune, and play a solo based solely on standard pentatonics, which is what we're talking about, I don't see your career going very far. Standard pentatonics get pretty repetitive, but if that's your thing, go join a rock cover band. There's pentatonics that sound good and interesting but that involves reharmonization and superimposition.
Now, tell me how playing something like, say, Summertime, or even a blues like Bags Groove or Sonny Moon For Two for the sake of the pentatonic example..., and take it out of the pentatonic sound (basically getting out of the A minor pentatonic or Bb) will spoil the tune? Do you listen to jazz? Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that guys like Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jonathan Kreisberg (both have GREAT versions of Summertime and blues tunes taking it way out), or Peter Bernstein (who goes really out on many blues tunes), or even Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans (three greats), are/were spoiling music, because they took something based on a pentatonic scale and went out with it?Last edited by jtizzle; 08-02-2012 at 06:35 PM.
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Well, you're still not being helpful, and you're still being misleading.
Originally Posted by jtizzle
Scottish, Chinese, and Pop have a lot of pentatonic, but this is a jazz forum. Any question I read I'll answer in a jazz sense, which I believe in the end is his goal if he joined a jazz guitar forum, right?
If something is "genuinely pentatonic" and you start playing pentatonic, that's cool. If you like how it sounds, good for you. If you go to a jam session, call a tune, and play a solo based solely on standard pentatonics, which is what we're talking about, I don't see your career going very far. Standard pentatonics get pretty repetitive, but if that's your thing, go join a rock cover band.
There's pentatonics that sound good and interesting but that involves reharmonization and superimposition.
This is very not helpful. And misleading.
Now, tell me how playing something like, say, Summertime, or even a blues like Bags Groove or Sonny Moon For Two for the sake of the pentatonic example..., and take it out of the pentatonic sound (basically getting out of the A minor pentatonic or Bb) will spoil the tune? Do you listen to jazz? Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that guys like Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jonathan Kreisberg (both have GREAT versions of Summertime and blues tunes taking it way out), or Peter Bernstein (who goes really out on many blues tunes), or even Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans (three greats), are/were spoiling music, because they took something based on a pentatonic scale and went out with it?
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I don't think you understood that that last post was addressed to you, not intending to be helpful towards 1313. I'm also not sure if you read my first post entirely if you're going by the "unhelpful" argument, then. More than half of my first post explained how he should learn the pentatonic scale (or any scale, for that matter) as opposed to shifting a shape with mindless fingerings, which leads me to believe you haven't even read the full thread.
And I also do not know what is misleading about telling him about things related to his question which he didn't directly ask. I have/had teachers who give me more information than I can handle. Is it misleading? Not to me at least. I look into the topic and get a good ground on it myself, go back to the lesson and ask questions. In fact, when I was starting out, my teacher had me doing an exercise where I was playing the diatonic scales and arpeggios to the chords of Stella By Starlight, in time while connecting chord tones. He talked to me about the different scales I could use other than the major derived scales, such as the octatonic scale over dominant chords. I looked into it, practiced it a bit, came back next week and showed him what I did. And I probably wouldn't have gotten to that point of practice til a few months later, but it was fun to know how far I can take what seems as really boring at the moment and transform it into something weird and fun. The same thing I do to my students, I mention things that are quite far from the lesson, but next time they come back having gotten some grounds on the subject and I proceed to teach them more about it/how to practice it. I honestly don't see anything wrong with mentioning, in this case, the different kinds of scales he could use to play over something that could also be pentatonic.
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Originally Posted by JohnRoss
As a quick example, the notes of the C major pentatonic scale, <C,D,E,G,A>, are common to the keys C major, G major, and F major. If you add the note B, you limit the possibilities to C major and G major; similarly, if you add F, you've got C major and F major as possibilities. With the <B,F>-tritone added to <C,D,E,G,A>, there's no question.
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