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Originally Posted by Jamesrohr1
Hi James,
I didn’t want this to be part of the thread.
I wasn’t suggesting you “drop” anything.
I was only suggesting, to combat your stated “frustration”, you could revisit the arduous path you chose for yourself.
The method you choose might include some of the same parts of your current method - because you recognize their value.
You know the joke:
Me: (lifting my sore arm). “Doc. It hurts when I do this”
Doc: “Don’t do that”.
I’d be curious to know how you (generally) ended up with your current regimen.
BTW: I’m not a very disciplined person nor skilled jazz guitarist. I study jazz mainly because it is a vehicle for exploring theory with the guitar. My other choice might have been classical.
I’m sure you’ll find satisfaction continuing as you have - but your original post title pleaded for “relief”. So I gave you “permission” to “reboot”.
For myself: After comparing myself to others, I realized, I probably shouldn’t. I should try to do things the way that my tastes and goals dictate. Perhaps the ones I’m comparing myself did exactly that (they were original). Not everybody (including my girlfriend) approaches things this way.
I know you’ll continue to succeed. Good luck.
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08-21-2019 11:48 AM
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Hi, James,
There's a lot to swallow in the previous posts: some good . . . some, not so good. I believe in the organic approach:
1. Study Classical Guitar: learn the mechanics of music--sight reading, theory, general pedagogy with your goal to become a musician where
you can track your real progress. If you're an "ear musician," your road will be long and tedious with slow progress
2. Listen to all quality music--Classical, Bossa and Jazz
3. When you're confident in your mechanical skills, begin learning Jazz Standards. Always choose songs that you love since you'll be spending
years with them
4. As you become comfortable with the songs, add embellishments that sound good to your ears. Copying solos, for some, leads to robotic
playing with old, tired, cliche riffs that do not express who you are as a musician. Use your ears!
5. Then, in 15 or 20 years, you might be a good Jazzer. How's that for odds. . . unless ,of course, you're the next Wes or George.
Good playing . . . Marinero
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Originally Posted by GuitarStudent
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@jamesrohr
How’s it been going these past few months?
Although I disagree with the specifics of some of what’s been said here I would say one important point that came up is being able to assess your progress.
Educators talk about different types of assessment. If you have a teacher, their assessment and goal setting is key to driving the process onwards.
If you are self taught you need to assess yourself and set your own milestones. In the end all musicians should eventually become self directed learners, so this is useful for everyone. We don’t tend to expect this of beginners but most interested in jazz are already past the beginner stage, and lessons may be a lot less frequent even if they are regular. Teachers at this stage may also assume the student will know how to direct their own learning.
There are two main types of assessment - formative and summative. Both are important. Formative assessment is ongoing while summative is as the name suggests something that happens at the end of a section of study - so an end of term recital, music exam, big concert or something like that.
Formative assessment is the kinds of calls you make when practicing - do I know that piece well enough? Did I play that picking pattern correctly? And so on. I suspect you may already be doing this type of self assessment, perhaps if anything too much! Because so much of practice is to do with, basically, working on stuff we suck at, some sort of long term assessment is really important to stop that feel of thankless grind.
In my stage of musical life summative assessment is normally making a recording or playing a really nice gig. It’s not assessed in the academic sense but it still gives me a goal to work towards. I can video and record the concert and reflect on how it went later. Eventually I have a record of how my playing has developed over the years.
I’ll also make little lists of things I would like to learn, like a list of tunes, perhaps ideas I’d like to explore and so on.
I think you should certainly think about this kind of thing. I think I would go mad if I didn’t have things to work towards like this.
Lastly some areas of learning can be assessed in a quantitative way - one’s knowledge of scales on the neck, a theory syllabus, performance on an ear training app, graded reading and so on. This is very useful because the numbers don’t lie. You can see your development in a very objective way. “Hey last March I only knew 1 position for that scale, now I can play it in 5.’
However not all areas can be assessed numerically and it’s equally important to find ways to assess those. Certainly recordings, videos, internal reflection and feedback from peers are good ways to do this. Music and music education is not purely positivist....
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As a closely linked point, I often see students that complain about their progress having plateued. Usually what these students need is a process for practice.
Most are noodlers - so they will pick up the instrument and play, often very nicely, but not usually in a directed, purposeful way. In this case, getting them to do 5 minutes of actual, focussed practice can be really helpful. Also making sure that the distinction between practising and performing is well understood.
I think that's important to note, because while noodling can actually be a really beneficial thing at the early stages when time on the instrument and a love for playing are the most important things, by the intermediate stage you want to be working more on specifics and details.
As a basically self taught player, I avoided this type of work for years, and it did my playing no favours, even though in some ways I was a strong player. I feel if I'd really understood the process of practicing and self assessment, my playing would have improved much more quickly. In fact I would say I've only been practicing properly for half my playing life (about 12 years out over 20.)
Good teachers are obviously helpful here. I don't think they have to be jazz musicians to teach the process of learning. In fact, most of the jazz education experiences I've had have been focussed on information and material over process.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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"I think that's important to note, because while noodling can actually be a really beneficial thing " Christianm77
Hi, C,
If by "noodling" you mean playing around with ideas in a undirected manner(free flow), I would agree. I call it doodling(US?) and it is one of the most important things a serious musician can do AFTER he has finished his formal practice. Doodling fires one's creative instincts and allows a free flow of undirected ideas to materialize. Many times, I have rewritten new beginnings, endings or turnarounds by the power of free association. This works for me in my Classical, Bossa and Jazz playing. Indispensable for the creative musician. Good playing . . . Marinero
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Originally Posted by Marinero
I actually should make more time for myself to do this. It’s not goal oriented but you often end up with a tune or something at the end of it.
OTOH a lot of what I do is to strict deadline and I work well this way too. Say I have a rehearsal tomorrow. I have to write a new tune. Just blat one out and get it done and don’t think about it too much.
But that quality of playfulness should always be there. It’s easy to forget.
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Thank you for asking. My apologies for the tardiness of my reply. I just now thought about this post and wanted to review the replies to see if I missed anything.
Unfortunately I have chosen to stop practicing Jazz and Improv. After some years of study and diligent practice , I came to understand that I am simply unable to grasp improv for a number of reasons, none of which I’ll trouble/bore anyone with.
And although my failure to comprehend Jazz improv definitely hurts, I’ve mostly just shifted focus to Jazz-adjacent musics such as Blues, Fusion, and Funk. I also joined a fairly terrible Dad Rock band that gives me lots of space for obnoxious soloing. Again, it’s terrible, and I’m not satisfied doing it but, unlike Jazz, I can actually do it.
I still warm up daily with my Parker heads and Martino lines, and I still listen to Bop quite often but it’s a much more casual thing now. Throwing in the towel has afforded me to opportunity to just listen and enjoy, which I think I was missing.
Again, thanks for asking. Take care.Last edited by Jamesrohr1; 11-11-2020 at 03:24 PM.
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This is the exact point where you should keep going.......
If you stick with it you will be rewarded ......
Go back to basics and have fun playing ii V I's (use the altered scale over the V for a real jazz sound).
Good luck!!
PS I'm also a rocker in days gone by, started learning jazz and like yourself I didn't get it, went and did the whole classical guitar thing as I liked fingerstyle guitar, now I'm playing chord melody jazz and loving it. You just gotta find your feet.
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The great bluegrass guitarist, Doc Watson was blind. His father put a guitar in his hands and luckily Doc had the genes to make gorgeous, impressive music. Also, it should be mentioned: “Doc had an imperative: He had no other, obvious way to earn money”. I’d guess the same was true for countless other accomplished musical performers.
I’ve been an inspiring guitarist (with quite minimal talent): Who knows what my motive was: Girls, peer admiration, the thrill of mastery? Certainly not money.
Enter a pandemic: Shacked up with girlfriend for 9 months so far. I can’t fulfill any of the above motives, immediately. I’ve been reading literature, I’ve been exercising, I’ve been cooking - and the guitar and guitar books gather dust.
Last I looked, my abdication hasn’t harmed planetary orbits or created tidal waves.
My point: Not everybody CAN be (needs to be) Pat Martino.
Your story may be entirely different.
I’ll likely get back to those glorious fingerstyle charts and playing with others. But in the meantime, I’ll “just sit here and watch the River flow”.
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Is Jamesrohr1 still around? How are you getting on? Out of curiosity :-)
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Thanks for asking. I appreciate it. See my previous reply above from this morning:
”Thank you for asking. My apologies for the tardiness of my reply. I just now thought about this post and wanted to review the replies to see if I missed anything.
Unfortunately I have chosen to stop practicing Jazz and Improv. After some years of study and diligent practice , I came to understand that I am simply unable to grasp improv for a number of reasons, none of which I’ll trouble/bore anyone with.
And although my failure to comprehend Jazz improv definitely hurts, I’ve mostly just shifted focus to Jazz-adjacent musics such as Blues, Fusion, and Funk. I also joined a fairly terrible Dad Rock band that gives me lots of space for obnoxious soloing. Again, it’s terrible, and I’m not satisfied doing it but, unlike Jazz, I can actually do it.
I still warm up daily with my Parker heads and Martino lines, and I still listen to Bop quite often but it’s a much more casual thing now. Throwing in the towel has afforded me to opportunity to just listen and enjoy, which I think I was missing.”
Again, thanks for asking. Take care.
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Originally Posted by Jamesrohr1
It's not about listening - I listen to tons of jazz. I transcribe. I read the books. I work through a lot of stuff and the lines that I'm given I can play, and when I do play them they sound okay, and good enough to know that articulation would come given a few more years. I can compose a passable but extremely derivative and cliched solo that uses arpeggios and passing notes and stolen licks. But I can't improvise decent lines myself for love nor money. I once figured composing was just improvising but a great deal slower. Alas, it's not. Improvising is very different.
The lacking creativity element may be a bit like song-writing, I knew a guy who could take three chords and a few notes and bang! Wow! A great melody. I mean, the pop charts and history of rock music is full of such people. Me? Three chords and I come up with the same melody every time. If I force myself to try something different it's invariably - no, always - awful.
I'm trying something different. Two things actually. I've sort of left improvisation behind and these days just concentrate on the melody - playing it straight, maybe adding in some passing notes, and maybe some rhythmic deviation. It won't get me on a bandstand anywhere but at least it works in the context of a song. And secondly I'm trying to play this stuff on another instrument altogether (clarinet) and in the process avoiding any preconceptions and stylistic ruts (I've played country and rock'n'roll guitar for 40 years and maybe that's simply too ingrained), and also it's forcing me to learn proper notes rather than patterns (although once you've practiced a scale a hundred times you're no longer thinking of notes). We'll see whether this enables me to get into guitar jazz via a secret doorway!
In the end I think I'll end up doing something similar to Liarspoker and probably end up as chord melody player. I play a lot of fingerstyle ragtime and maybe that cross-over point will be where I find my place.
Anyway, you're not alone James!
Derek
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As very much a beginner, this is the most depressing and discouraging thing I've read. Ugh. It was like reading a disturbing news story that you cant put down.....I just kept reading. I'm a couple guidless years in and had a major setback the other day and now i read that after 30 or 40 years of playing guitar folks still cant improvise and are gonna stop trying? I will be 50 in December, double ugh.
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DMGolf66, don't despair! I may have been playing for 40 years, but I think I've done the same two years twenty times, so really I've only myself to blame! Push on and keep moving forward and you'll be fine :-)
Derek
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Originally Posted by digger
I certainly don't want to discourage anyone or be any kind of a toxic influence on this forum but I had to stop. Oddly, I'm listening to Jazz however as I type this.
Towards the end of my Bebop studies I wrote a fairly comprehensive one year practice plan to try to stay on track. I followed it closely and was crushed when I still hadn't made any progress. I'm now following a fairly dense two year practice plan for Blues/Fusion. The difference is, I'm not going to be upset in the least if I don't finish it or if I don't see the results I want. At my age (48), I'm just going to see where things take me and try to enjoy it as much as possible.
And if I'm in a better headspace who knows? I may try Bop again. It just scares the hell out of me right now though. And that's not a healthy attitude.
Best of luck to all.
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Originally Posted by digger
I think sometimes people may have an exaggerated idea of what ‘improvisation’ means in jazz. Can you play the melody of the tune, but vary it and embellish it a bit? Change the rhythms, add some passing notes, enclosures, etc., throw a few blues licks in here and there? If so you can play a perfectly acceptable jazz solo. Some great solos (e.g. Lester Young) sound like this.
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Originally Posted by Jamesrohr1
Seriously, that is no time at all. Took me at least 10 years to get anywhere playing jazz (bebop). And I had already been playing classical guitar for ten years and rock guitar for several years before I got into jazz.
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Originally Posted by grahambop
Thank you for your insight however.
*edited for grammarLast edited by Jamesrohr1; 11-13-2020 at 01:23 PM.
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OK I’m in grumpy old man rant mode today, so here’s another thing.
Don’t you guys get any FUN out of playing this stuff? Cos that’s what kept me going for ten years. Not worrying about which complicated scale to play over which chord, or how fast I could go, or did I sound like Joe Pass or whoever, or was I being ‘original’.
Just to be able to play some cool Parker or Wes licks on a blues over a backing track, and make it swing, it just felt good and really enjoyable. A hundred times more fun than playing the same old boring rock solos I had been playing for ages.
So I kept on doing it and having fun. For a long time I thought ‘yeah but I’ll never be able to play jazz properly’ and of course I got very frustrated at times.
But I just couldn’t stop doing it, and eventually it sort of came together somehow.
If you don’t enjoy the process of exploring new ground and finding out from real-life examples how this music works and feels, then maybe that’s part of the problem?
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I enjoy it always - any music, playing, listening, performing. But that fun is always tempered by the feeling that it shouldn't be this slow, this hard, this impossible.
I remember, many years ago doing the original Jimmy Bruno school at Artistworks, learning his five shapes (and I still practice them religiously) and eventually getting to the point where I learned how to apply these shapes over Satin Doll. It took masses of brain power and calculations to figure out I was playing this ii-V which meant I was in this key and, as I was in this position on the guitar neck, that meant use this shape... and by then we were on a different ii-v. My brain never, even now after many more years of working on those shapes, works quickly enough to make those connections.
After a while, of course, you've played the damn thing so many times that the calculations aren't needed (for that song) and so you can concentrate on playing the notes... and then, after all that shape practice and calculus you discover you don't sound jazzy in the least... so you listen to Jimmy playing effortlessly and swinging so well and you try and copy it and it just doesn't happen. Then you move on to Blue Bossa, and actually it's a little easier, so you go back and try Satin Doll and discover you've forgotten it.
Sometimes I wonder if this last point is the key one - memory. I'm currently working through Chapter One of Randy Vincent's Introduction to Jazz book for the fifth time. My memory for chords / sequences / rules / lines etc is just non-existent. Maybe I banged my head when I was 16 and damaged the jazz-memory centre. I can remember Johnny Cash songs fine :-)
But to get back to the enjoyment - oh yes. These lockdown days I've surprised myself of how much I enjoy playing music just for me. But still can't improvise once the chords go by at any decent pace, and even on a blues I still can't swing.
The clarinet's coming on well, though, and only today I took a lick back onto the guitar and found that it did sound pretty neat, and though simple, was something that I wouldn't have played on the guitar. So it's entirely possible that I am too ingrained in other styles.
Cheers
Derek
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Originally Posted by Jamesrohr1
You said you were disappointed to see no real progress after six months. That does seem a bit impatient to me. Maybe you had been so successful playing rock that your expectations were similar for learning jazz?
Also you implied that you were learning jazz to make you a better player or something. I think the only possible motivation to learn jazz is because you love it and desperately want to play it for its own sake. Otherwise I don’t think you will stay the course. I wouldn’t study metal for ten years because I thought it would improve my playing generally, it would have to be because I really wanted to play that genre of music.
But hey, I’m not trying to criticise you, I can only speak from my own viewpoint of course.
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Originally Posted by digger
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Originally Posted by DMgolf66
There’s always something you can do. Doesn’t have to be all about improv. Learn a new tune. Learn some chord-melody stuff. Learn some new chord shapes. Try playing a tune you already know, but in a different key. Learn to play walking bass and chords (lots of youtube videos on this I should think).
Think of something else that I haven’t thought of!
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