The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    I'm trying to move away from picking every note and incorporate slides, pull offs and hammer ons.

    Is there any conventional wisdom as to the accents these introduce?

    In other words is it more common to pick the on beat and slur into the off beat or vice versa?
    Last edited by charlieparker; 09-28-2024 at 04:43 PM.

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2

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    Quote Originally Posted by charlieparker
    I'm trying to move away from picking evry note and incorporate slides, pull ofs and hammer ons.

    Is there any conventional wisdom as to the accents these introduce?

    In other words is it more common to pick the on beat and slur into the off beat or vice versa?
    Oh buddy you’re speaking my language right now.

    Slur into the downbeat slur into the downbeat slur into the downbeat

    This is obviously tricky for guitar because we can’t easily slur through a string change but I basically just trained myself to slur into *all the downbeats I can* by playing bebop heads in different positions and working those slurs out.

    I would also say bebop or BH added note scales are a good way to practice this.

    Upside: I love the way it sounds. I think it sounds way more bebop than picking everything, though of course there are players who sound amazing without doing this.

    Downside: time can get very squirrelly at high tempos so I do a lot of working out of licks this way and working them up to high tempos. For me this is about 220 bpm right now. I feel comfortable playing up there, but find that I slur less. The consistent picking becomes an asset up there in a way that it isn’t at moderate tempos.

  4. #3

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    Listen to sax players, e.g. [sic] Charlie Parker.

  5. #4

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    me too - this is so important for guitar if you want to play be-bop.

    what helped me most was Chad Lefcowitz Brown's stuff on jazz articulation - 'saxologic' has some great you tube vids on Parker phrasing too

    I've been working on his enclosure and approach tone exercises for a long time and they have had the biggest impact

    one has to find ways to finger which enable you to slur into the chord tones. you go:

    1 - 2/3; 4/5; sharp5/6; 7/1 : dum, de-yum, de-yum, de-yum, de-yum - the enclosure exercises show you how basic chromaticism is in be-bop (if the heads and solos hadn't done that already) and they force you to learn how to slur into and around every scale degree.

    Chad went into this in so much detail I think - because he had loads of classical sax students who needed to have it spelt out explicitly. but guitarists need it too - because they tend to have committed to fingerings which make musical phrasing very difficult. the 'positions' on the guitar force you to phrase badly.

    best thing ever - for me

  6. #5

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    I wouldn't be able to play Donna Lee at 320 or Confirmation at 190 without slurs. Jimmy raney studied Bird's lines and has a good thing on you tube about phrasing bop using slurs.
    Sure, he uses economy picking for triplets with notes on three consecutive strings, but that's it. He didn't fall into the Chuck Wayne method of using it for everything, which is why Raney was able to use accents more powerfully than Grasso, Bruno, Wilkins, and others who followed Chuck Wayne or Joe Sgro, Joe Lano, etc...
    Farlow also came up with his own way of playing the lines of Bud, with the surprise of Bird using economic picking sparingly and also slurs. Warren Nunes was another player that used slurs to great effect.
    Here's Raney demoing bop picking and phrasing:

  7. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by sgcim
    I wouldn't be able to play Donna Lee at 320 or Confirmation at 190 without slurs. Jimmy raney studied Bird's lines and has a good thing on you tube about phrasing bop using slurs.
    Sure, he uses economy picking for triplets with notes on three consecutive strings, but that's it. He didn't fall into the Chuck Wayne method of using it for everything, which is why Raney was able to use accents more powerfully than Grasso, Bruno, Wilkins, and others who followed Chuck Wayne or Joe Sgro, Joe Lano, etc...
    Farlow also came up with his own way of playing the lines of Bud, with the surprise of Bird using economic picking sparingly and also slurs. Warren Nunes was another player that used slurs to great effect.
    Here's Raney demoing bop picking and phrasing:
    What's the very quick 5 or 6 note phrase at 1.13 starting F to Db - triplet kind of thing with upstrokes?
    Thanks

  8. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by charlieparker
    I'm trying to move away from picking every note and incorporate slides, pull offs and hammer ons.

    Is there any conventional wisdom as to the accents these introduce?

    In other words is it more common to pick the on beat and slur into the off beat or vice versa?
    I'll send you some tabs

  9. #8

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    General principles
    - always sing the phrase first (more for rhythmic feel than pitches)
    - finger neighbour tones on the same string as target tones
    - in running 8th lines slur the usual rule from the upbeat to the downbeat (this comes from horn playing)
    - most of us are naturally rubbish at upbeats, so this is a good thing to get into, as is accenting the upbeats of a line as an exercise.
    - however this isn't a hard and fast rule. The sense of the phrase may demand you break this rule. It depends on where the accents in the line are.
    - go with what your ears and instinct say. If you have internalised the music by singing it, you'll have a good sense of what feels right and wrong.
    - Do try different combinations of slurs and picking and left hand fingerings, to see what gives the best sense of the phrase.
    - Don't worry about improvising this stuff. This will come once you'll internalised this stuff from working it out on a lot of phrases.

  10. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    For beginners, below is a simple practice exercise that slurs into the chord tones on down beats 1 and 3.

    Attachment 115979
    I read the slur as a tie.

    Precautionary natural sign warranted? Or am I just a dunce?

  11. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    General principles
    - always sing the phrase first (more for rhythmic feel than pitches)
    - finger neighbour tones on the same string as target tones
    - in running 8th lines slur the usual rule from the upbeat to the downbeat (this comes from horn playing)
    - most of us are naturally rubbish at upbeats, so this is a good thing to get into, as is accenting the upbeats of a line as an exercise.
    - however this isn't a hard and fast rule. The sense of the phrase may demand you break this rule. It depends on where the accents in the line are.
    - go with what your ears and instinct say. If you have internalised the music by singing it, you'll have a good sense of what feels right and wrong.
    - Do try different combinations of slurs and picking and left hand fingerings, to see what gives the best sense of the phrase.
    - Don't worry about improvising this stuff. This will come once you'll internalised this stuff from working it out on a lot of phrases.
    This is a really good list.

    and also I might have some alternate fingerings tabbed out for bebop heads with the slurs and stuff. I’ll have to look.

  12. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    I read the slur as a tie.

    Precautionary natural sign warranted? Or am I just a dunce?
    It's the best I could do with MuseScore, so I wrote Slur underneath.

    MuseScore, select Notes then press "S" key.

    Guitar Slurs for bebop-amusingscore-add-slurs-png


    Edit: I've had to move the Slur manually in MuseScore. (To avoid confusion, I've deleted my posts.)

    I hope this is an improvement, "Precautionary natural sign" added too. Thanks.

    Guitar Slurs for bebop-slurred-approaches-png



    Last edited by GuyBoden; 10-01-2024 at 07:48 AM.

  13. #12

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    Okay okay ... before Christian comes for me.

    I don't claim that any single one of these fingerings is the best fingering for performing the whole thing.

    I also think you can probably get like ... I don't know ... 70% of the benefit from working on two positions that are next to each other. If you do that, you'll have worked out the slurs on two positions with drastically different string crossings. Fingerings that start on the same finger, but different strings, will have different string crossings, obvs, but still quite a lot of overlap. Less overlap with Donna Lee though, to be honest, because the range is pretty big.

    I've done about 25 bop heads this way and work on most stuff this way and these sort of choices became second nature. I'd guess if you did two adjacent positions with maybe like four or five bop heads, you'd be in pretty good shape.

    donna lee fingerings.pdf - Google Drive

  14. #13

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    slur triplets

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by joe2758
    slur triplets
    Nice, is this your video?

  16. #15

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    yeah that is me quite a few years ago

  17. #16

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    I like to pick the second triplet, is nice

  18. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    It's the best I could do with MuseScore, so I wrote Slur underneath.

    MuseScore, select Notes then press "S" key.

    Guitar Slurs for bebop-amusingscore-add-slurs-png


    Edit: I've had to move the Slur manually in MuseScore. (To avoid confusion, I've deleted my posts.)

    I hope this is an improvement, "Precautionary natural sign" added too. Thanks.

    As a musescore user, probably something I should look out for.

  19. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by pamosmusic
    Okay okay ... before Christian comes for me.

    I don't claim that any single one of these fingerings is the best fingering for performing the whole thing.

    I also think you can probably get like ... I don't know ... 70% of the benefit from working on two positions that are next to each other. If you do that, you'll have worked out the slurs on two positions with drastically different string crossings. Fingerings that start on the same finger, but different strings, will have different string crossings, obvs, but still quite a lot of overlap. Less overlap with Donna Lee though, to be honest, because the range is pretty big.

    I've done about 25 bop heads this way and work on most stuff this way and these sort of choices became second nature. I'd guess if you did two adjacent positions with maybe like four or five bop heads, you'd be in pretty good shape.

    donna lee fingerings.pdf - Google Drive
    Without my actually reading through them I wouldn't have a clue anyway, so you're safe.

  20. #19

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    For clarity. Below shows that difference between a Slur and a Tie symbol in music notation.

    Guitar Slurs for bebop-slur-clarity-png

    From: Music Theory and Composition : Music Theory and
    Composition


  21. #20

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    Below, I think that this Barry Harris Chromatic Scale type lick, which includes a three note slur sounds good.
    (It's easier to write "Slur" underneath the stave.)

    Last edited by GuyBoden; 10-01-2024 at 10:34 AM.

  22. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    For clarity. Below shows that difference between a Slur and a Tie symbol in music notation.

    Guitar Slurs for bebop-slur-clarity-png

    From: Music Theory and Composition : Music Theory and
    Composition

    Got it, one’s blue, one’s red! My bad.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

  23. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    General principles
    - always sing the phrase first (more for rhythmic feel than pitches)
    - finger neighbour tones on the same string as target tones
    - in running 8th lines slur the usual rule from the upbeat to the downbeat (this comes from horn playing)
    - most of us are naturally rubbish at upbeats, so this is a good thing to get into, as is accenting the upbeats of a line as an exercise.
    - however this isn't a hard and fast rule. The sense of the phrase may demand you break this rule. It depends on where the accents in the line are.
    - go with what your ears and instinct say. If you have internalised the music by singing it, you'll have a good sense of what feels right and wrong.
    - Do try different combinations of slurs and picking and left hand fingerings, to see what gives the best sense of the phrase.
    - Don't worry about improvising this stuff. This will come once you'll internalised this stuff from working it out on a lot of phrases.
    Alright, sir, but if those are the general principles, I don't think I could take the comprehensive ones.

  24. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by sgcim
    Here's Raney demoing bop picking and phrasing:
    Quote Originally Posted by garybaldy
    What's the very quick 5 or 6 note phrase at 1.13 starting F to Db - triplet kind of thing with upstrokes?
    Thanks
    Something it would probably never occur to me to play is what.... as you suggested, sweep-picking and slurring a Db/Bbm7 arpeggio.

  25. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mick-7
    Alright, sir, but if those are the general principles, I don't think I could take the comprehensive ones.
    Oh it could get a lot more granular than that haha


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

  26. #25

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    Elaine Gould's "Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation" is the standard reference I would consult regarding notation.