-
Originally Posted by Tal_175
Everything you have been describing is the same thing. If you want to describe his system as a *12* position system, you could do so. it certainly encompasses that as well. It depends on the context of what volume of his work you're talking about.
It's not some rigid "only five position" thing. The stretch protocol is the most specific aspect , and every thing I have described fits exactly within William Leavitt's fingering system. I mean, who cares? I'm not William Leavitt disciple or anything. I really don't care that much . You're making a big deal out of something that's less important than the way we are talking about it.
These books are cheap on Amazon.
-
08-17-2018 12:58 PM
-
Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
Don't make me post quotes from the book, if you don't know that Leavitt system requires index and pinky stretch and calling person who tells you this foolish, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe read the books again. Because anyone who understands the Leavitt system is laughing at you right now.
If you can't follow a simple thread of thought don't get frustrated and attack. This whole discussion started when you disagreed with a statement I made about exactly the Leavitt system. Now you realize that you didn't know what you were talking about, you're trying to downplay it. Fine, but it's not a good way to contribute to the thread.
All systems cover the same notes. May be you should grasp this first. Different systems approach these notes with different organization. When one talks about Leavitt one is talking about index and pinky stretch covering outside frets.Last edited by Tal_175; 08-17-2018 at 01:25 PM.
-
Originally Posted by princeplanet
I HAVE been reading all the advice given quite carefully, I'm not just sure the point you are making now.
Maybe there is lot more philosophical debate around jazz and how jazz should be taught than what I was aware of but my point is very simple:
- I'm a beginner jazz guitarist hobbyist
- I love playing jazz standards with essential chord forms pretty much like these: Easy Jazz Guitar Chords (Tabs & Chord Charts)
- I know the Major Scale, it's modes, pentatonics, some arpeggio patterns.
- That allows me to comp and improvise on many standards, I love it but feel it's not enough. Not jazzy enough.
- So I get to the part where supposedly you play a "scale" for each chord you encounter. This is common is jazz, I'm not imagining this, right?
- That's where I'm at. When looking at a chart, trying to improvise over a song, figuring out the best scale/arpeggio/collection of notes. Because, like I said previously, at my current level, when I just try to play what sounds good in my head, many times it fails because there is no underling structure I can use as a crutch. Of course you can just hit a bad note and quickly move one step, and it's good again but you do need a level of knowledge I still lack.
-
Originally Posted by djg
-
Originally Posted by rsergio
Ignore the rest of what you are reading in this thread, and just put in a few hours of practice using the information in the lessons section. You should start to see how that makes you sound more "jazzy" than just playing scales. If you like what you hear, then do some research to dig a little deeper along these lines, at your own pace, or ask your teacher for more of these ideas. Somewhere down the track, yo should listen to your fave players and try to work out what they're doing. If you can't, or you can but don't understand what's going on, then ask us on the forum here and we can probably help. This place can be more useful for you when the questions are very specific.
-
Originally Posted by Tal_175
I mentioned ONE thing about incorporating slides stylistically, but I wasn't saying that it is a shift-based fingering, like CAGED. Sorry for the confusion.
Check out reg's approach if you like. Defaults to 1st finger stretches in all but one of them, which stretches 4th, as described above (in line with Leavitt philosophy btw). I personally think his approach is a substantial improvement on what Leavitt himself was doing.
-
Originally Posted by rsergio
The decision comes from the fact that in order to play one must have a source from which ideas flow, among which particular ones may be selected, and then played; I'm referring to improvisational jazz playing, but this concept extends to other popular forms like blues, rock, etc...
The decision that must be made is in choosing what will be the nature of your source of musical ideas. All answers may be spread across a spectrum that includes everything from canonical music theory to playing by ear. From the outside this all may appear as an argument between the theory and ear advocates, but it is really a reflection of differences in how guitarists have learned to feed their all important source of ideas.
To the degree you find your source is not actively presenting enough multiple ideas contending to be played from which you select the best to come out of your instrument, it may be time to reconsider various things with which to feed and build your source... these might comprise shifting toward the theory end of the spectrum, or shifting toward the ear playing end of the spectrum.
-
Originally Posted by djg
-
Originally Posted by PMB
-
Originally Posted by princeplanet
Carol Kaye may fit in this group too. (Both Conti and Bruno admire her playing, btw.) Her short "Jazz Guitar" primer has no scales in it except the major scale. And she doesn't teach fingerings of that as a scale. Her emphasis is triads. The "chordal scale". (In F: F Gm Am Bb C7 Dm Emb5, F) She calls chord tones the "anchor" notes. You learn some patterns based on triads (and how to substitute patterns in common situations that crop up in playing jazz standards)
She recommends that people go on from there to "Joe Pass Guitar Style" which has a lot more scales in it.
The basics aren't that hard, really. Some may have difficulty. (I am such a one.) And as Reg points out, that difficulty is mainly due to poor technique. Developing technique might involve scales and such. Jimmy Bruno has said (recently) that he played scale fingerings for hours a day when he was a kid. Not a lot of scales, either: Jimmy's focus is on the major scale. Up and down, hour after hour. He's got incredible technique. I think technique takes a LOT of practice and WHAT you're playing can't be something you have to think about. (The Wohlfahrt etudes are good for this. They're short musical pieces written to help a student develop technique. They're for the violin but they make good practice on the guitar.)
-
Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
Building Solo Lines from Cells by Randy Vincent | Sher Music Co.
-
Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
Teaching Jazz guitar needs to get smarter if we are to get young students to commit amidst a world of increasing distractions. This Forum should be a god send for the novice, it's something I wish was around when I was a kid, but then, I sometimes wonder what a confused novice will make of the conflicting advice we all spew forth . If they don't have a teacher, I try to point them towards the Lessons section on this forum, which is an excellent primer. But even that will seem daunting to many. Everyone needs guidance and a rough idea of how much time to spend on each aspect that is pertinent to their musical ambitions. Maybe there should be a sticky somewhere that helps to address this. Just imagine you are new to Jazz guitar - regardless of age - what questions and issues would you have? I'd be asking how much time I should be spending on chords, scales, arps, language, tunes, etc as well as how do divide up a typical practice session. Surely most of us know that we guitarists can quickly become addicted to the scales "challenge", like it's a sports contest!
You gotta nip that in the bud early, I reckon...
-
Originally Posted by princeplanet
One thing about Carol Kaye's approach is that she expects students to be creative from the beginning. (She was unusually creative---many of her legendary bass lines were not written out for her by the arranger but made up on the fly. She really is an extraordinary talent.) I like that better.
Frank Vignola likes to say, "You learn jazz by learning tunes." And "When you learn 50 tunes, you're a player." There's a lot to that. Great melodies are great lines. Duh. Trite but true. They really work. (Joe Pass once said you can play bits of melodies from standards over any major chord! An overstatement, perhaps, but there's a lot of truth in that. When you know the basic changes to several dozen tunes, you know a lot about how standards work. Plus you have standards to play. And if you start improvising by "playing off the melody" you can learn a lot and start developing your own style.
As for techinique, I do think some exercises are especially good for it (and for developing use of all four fingers), such as 1-2-3-4 on all six strings. Dead simple but a good exercise. And chromatic scales in 2 octaves are good. And also understanding the chromatics between chord tones, esp (b3) 3 4 b5 5 and b7 6 b6 5. O, hell, between 1 and 3 too.... ;o) Carol Kaye calls the notes between chord tones "traveling notes".
When you know chord tones and have a sense of melody, you know where you're going. Chromatics and embellishments delay the arrival until just the right moment. (Charlie Christian was a genius at this. He could work a simple lick a hundred different ways and make them all sound good and right.) That's anothe part of improvising, having a strong rhythmic sense. Bird and Charlie Parker were giants in that sense. Wes too.
-
Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
If we follow a purely academic route we may remember some of what we study. But we all remember the music we truly love without effort.
Working on integrating the study of theory and scales and technique is actually MORE EFFICIENT from an academic point of view, at least if we look at random selection from long term memory. And that random selection from long term memory is what allows us to grow as improvisers or, and the success of this is much more easily calibrated, people who aim to play what they are hearing in their head which is very often and usefully real tunes.
Now that all sounds pretty complicated but it can be boiled down to this. Play a tune in open position from ear in say C. NOTICE the arpeggios,notice the passing tones and chromatic passing tones, notice perhaps that a Swing tune melody which apparently needs a lot of chords might simply outline the tonic over again. But don't take too long about it, move straight to G, work out completely different fingerings (again for open strings) and you will notice more. At all times you should remain intellectully active, which is to say EMOTIONALLY ENGAGED, it will all be memorable. Running tunes with the same fingering on different frets soon becomes mechanical and we learn zip.
Following this method makes a lot more sense on every level than trying to understand how to finger everything that you might want to learn in advance. Firstly not only is that approach susyphean because we have to start over so often because we cant remember because we are working without emotion, but it is also INFINITE because the amount of possibilities for novel fingerings presented by even the simplest music are infinite themselves.
There is a whole world of Jazz that I do not have alive in my ear, I guess I have been quite conservative in my listening. When I listen to something that inspires me in a format that is new to me, I will listen and listen till I can sing it. I'll then learn how to play it fairly straightforwardly on the instrument. I'll notice how it is constructed, if I don't have the theory that explains it already then I will make one up and check that it fits or can produce results that sound stylistically consistent to me, that should take about ten minutes (if I've really listened) then round the keys, different fingerings for every key means HAVING TO THINK all the time. Liking the material means being emotionally engaged, emotional engagement=remembering.
Oddly enough when one becomes fairly accomplished as a sight reader and one is in the habit of deconstructing music as one studies by ear we can get A LOT of the same benefits as we sight read. And of course all good sight reading is intensely emotional and rests on true comprehension and good instincts.
D.
-
Originally Posted by princeplanet
For me as a beginner, but worse, hobbyist with no structured approach/time to devote, the biggest challenge is to use my time in a productive, stimulating way, so I can learn something useful, make it part of my actual knowledge, and then build on that and move to something more complex.
Had two guitar teachers, both Berklee method. They both told me: Learn to read music; listen to solos and transcribe; learn Major scale and modes on all fingers/strings; use shell voicings alternating strings; learn most common cadences in every key; create solos over cadences writing them down; solo continuous eight notes over the same fretboard area with one finger per fret; etc. All things that to me make a lot of sense. But you know what? I really like just sitting down with the chart for Embraceable You, play the chords, sing over it, do so improvisation. I do like the musical side of it, much more than devoting daily hours to a ton of theoretical and technical aspects (mind you I'm 44yr, with no aspirations to ever being a 'proper' musician).
What I've been looking for, but honestly never found is a true roadmap to which things you learn first, and then what, and then what, and so on, so I can manage it myself at my own pace and liking. Of course when I ask here "do I really need to learn 12 patterns for the Phrygian Dominant", most people will say it's overkill, just focus on the Harmonic Minor first, others will say "forget all that and just play what sounds good".
But the reality, and like you said, the lessons on this forum are VERY good for beginners, you do have these concepts of "essential scales", and of course the Phrygian Dominant is there 7 Essential Jazz Guitar Scales For Beginners . To me this kind of lesson is VERY good because it's concise.
But I stumble a bit then. I need to figure the Harmonic Minor/Phrygian Dominant patterns to solo over a 7b9 or susb9, and I remember my guitar teachers saying "every finger every string" and I just think "shit, I just want to sit down for 30 minutes noodling around Summertime or Misty, I don't want to spend months memorising a scale.
So, I'm just trying to, as I play a song I like, to incorporate new scales/patterns, as I improvise. That's why I asked my original question, which positions/patterns people find most important, so I can streamline it as much as possible. Of course people can tell me "dude, if you want to play jazz you need much more time/effort". I know that, I just want to make the time I have, as productive and fun as possible.
-
Originally Posted by Freel
There's a balance. no need to completely reinvent the wheel with an instrument people have been playing this way for decades.
-
First the answer:
You can pass by knowing only one shape, if that much, of one scale, for all the music. You just take care about intervals you need, adapt it to strings you use ... and memorize results for future uses.
Now, questions:
What is your goal?
Do you want to be musician?
What is more important in regard to your goal and questions, knowlege about jazz, or general command over instrument?
Who are we, people giving free advice?
Musicians, or teachers, or what?
... humans, or dancers?
What is "our" goal?
Are the advice given any good?
Are we any good in our professions, music, jazz ...?
What should you learn first, tunes to derive couple basic progressions they are all made of, with convenient grips and fingerings, or ...
learn basic progressions and fingerings then learn how to "spot" and apply them within tune?
Jazz specific (???) theory and technique vs general musicianship?
Which advice is better, one you like, or one you do not understand?
Answer:
It is iterative.
Getting hung up on rhythms when transcribing
Today, 11:59 AM in Ear Training, Transcribing & Reading