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I'm very interested in this practice, but I'm not sure if I really got the point. For the A7#5, You mean I can try other extensions too, meaning A7b9 A7#9 A7b9#11 A7b9#11b13 ... all the altered dominant 7?
Originally Posted by Tal_175
Any chance that you make a short video of doing it? No need really to play 100 voicing, 10 would be enough for me to get the idea. Thanks alot!
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07-30-2024 01:53 PM
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I don't think video is the best medium to describe such an exercise. Originally Posted by Peng1026
Let's start with a voicing of A7#5 in the low position without the open strings (open strings can be incorporated if preferred)
x
2 - (3)
2 - (1)
3 - (#5)
x
3 - (b7)
This has the following chord tones of A7#5 from lowest to highest: b7 #5 1 3 (also indicated in brackets).
There are other chord tones nearby each voice:
x
1-2 - (#9 - 3)
2-3 - (1 - b9)
1- 2-3 - (b5- 5 - #5)
x
1-3 - (#5 - 7)
All these combinations are different usable voicings (right there 20 or so voicings).
Let's go to a different string group in the same position:
x
2 - (3)
2 - (1)
3 - (#5)
4 - (3)
x
Here are some of the available chord tones nearby:
x
1-2-5-6 - (#9-3-5-#5)
2-3-5-6 - (1-b9-#9-3)
2-3-5 - (5-#5-7)
1-3-4 - (b9-#9-3)
x
There are a large number of very usable 4 note voicings in there.
Note these two groups of voicings all reside in the same 2 octave-ish scale position. You can play the scale with these voicings or arpeggiate them. The idea is that you want to see the scale and these voicings as one. ie View the voicings as imbedded in the scale. The chord tones are also the intervallic scale degrees.
The goal of course is not to memorize all these voicings but to cultivate a view of the fretboard where chord tones are transparent in chords and they are seen the same way as the single note lines. This unified view of harmony and melody is very handy. Ideally every chord can be the white keys of a piano in the context. Of course you'll probably memorize voicings that you like to sound of if you don't know them already.
This is just one activity idea. It doesn't have a specific end point. It's got many good things going on IMO. I am very fond of it.Last edited by Tal_175; 07-30-2024 at 08:52 PM.
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I learned something like this, reportedly developed by Chuck Wayne.
The approach can be explained by example.
Take G7, xx3433. Now, adjust it to make Gm7. You get xx3333. Now Gm6. Lower the 7th to get xx2333. Gminmaj7 -- raise the b7 to 7, xx4333. Try G7#11 -- lower the 5th to xx3423. G7#9b13? xx3446 Keep going until you run out alterations.
Then move each note in the original G7 to the next note in the chord on that string. You get xx5767. And do the entire exercise again. There are two more G7s further up the neck, so you do those too.
Now, that's on the highest 4 strings. You can do the same exercise on any set of four strings. And you may have to get it all down in 12 keys.
The advantage, it seems to me, is that all the voicings relate to one of four G7 grips. If you know your intervals and the fingerboard, it soon becomes pretty obvious where the alterations are.
A problem, I think, is when you get to m7b5 chords. They are also m6 chords (same notes) and rootless 9th chords. And, they all sound good and are usable. I've found it hard to keep then all straight in 12 keys. Every chord can be played in 4 places (referring just to the first string set) and has 3 names.
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I remember as a teenager, during the 1970's, learning all the notes up to the 12 fret, but as flat notes only.
My teenage logic was this 'why have two names for the same note?'
G Major was G A B C D E Gb G
D Major was D E Gb G A B Db D
etc
Later, during a music lesson, a Teacher was confused with my answers to the notes in each scale.
But, I still remember all the notes on the fretboard, especially the flat notes.
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Did you know how to read music back then? Originally Posted by GuyBoden
The use of notes rather than pitches in music notation is specifically designed to allow a position in the staff (a note) to represent multiple pitches. The staff corresponds to diatonic scale degrees, and with key signatures allows all major and minor scales in all keys to appear as linear diagonal lines across the staff (suppressing the kinks from the scales' half steps that would appear if the staff positions were chromatic).
In this system single notes (positions in the staff) may represent multiple pitches and single pitches on the instrument may be represented by multiple notes. The advantage for this system is that diatonic music is much easier to read (and read ahead), due to the linearity of the scales enforced by the accidentals of the key signature and the "only one of each note letter name for all diatonic scales" convention.
It is a kind of clever medieval public music data compression and is quite an elegant solution... but extremely confusing if observing music theory without learning to read music, since the notation is the source and foundation of the primary definitions of the canonical music theory.
We who assiduously play guitar by ear in spite of having classically learned to read music for multiple other instruments have to internalize "ear theory" into an idiomatic space unique to our individual methods of internal abstract representation.
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No, at this time, as a very young teenager I played by ear. So, only using one name for each note on the fretboard made perfect sense in my teenage logic. Originally Posted by pauln
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Enharmonic note names for pitches is among the potential mysteries of first water, along with the 7th chord using the "7" to indicate the b7, the duration of a new tonic center before becoming a modulation, what constitutes vertical vs horizontal on the finger board with respect to the description on the staff... Originally Posted by GuyBoden
No, at this time, as a very young teenager I played by ear. So, only using one name for each note on the fretboard made perfect sense in my teenage logic.
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you have alot of good ideas to help you get the picture. Originally Posted by Peng1026
keep in mind..the A7 and its alterations are coming from the D major scale..so try this to help you map the fretboard
use a ii7 V7 IMA to further develop harmonic movement..using some of Tal 175 chord voicings
start with the Emi (ii7) just play the triad 1 b3 5 E G B then the A7 alt chord ...now resolve to a D major triad .. now if you know the inversions of
the triad go to the next one and find the E G B and then the A7 alt and play the D triad inversions..now go to the next inversion and so on
try and do this on all string sets with each inversion..go slow ..
of course if you get this type of harmonic expansion..you can add the iii7 and iv7 to the progression..and in time with dedication
these chords can be altered dominants to add harmonic complexity to progressions.
hope this is clearLast edited by wolflen; 08-01-2024 at 12:46 AM.
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One word: sing.
1. put down your instrument, listen to the music, and try to sing a line that works. It will take time and the lines will be simple at first.
2. pick up your instrument, turn off the music, and play what you just sang. You will struggle to do this at first.
3. now put them together. It won’t work the first time. Keep at it.
The instrument tempts us with patterns and muscle memory. You’re doubling down on that with rote practice. Your voice can break that cycle.
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Joe Pass explains his approach to fretboard starting at 23:16.
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You, sir, are working on the right thing, and that is fretboard mastery, because THAT is where it's at, IMO, in terms of becoming an outstanding player. One thing I see often on internet forums is guys seem to be more obsessed about what guitar they play instead of how well they play guitar, and that is dumb. How well you play guitar is going to determine how many gigs you get called for etc. I've never heard of a bandleader saying "I didn't chose that guy for the gig because he plays a D'angelico, I chose the other guy because he plays a Heritage, (and with most any good jazz guitar from a reputable major brand.) Nope, you can get great tone with either of those, so the bandleader is exponentially more likely to choose the guy who nails the improv on the tunes, and that requires fretboard mastery. We're you reading this thinking, "what does that have to do with fretboard mastery?" LOL.
The best advice is to practice/woodshed all of your theory knowledge 'in context' and that means within tunes/jazz standards. From your OP I got the impression that you learned your chords and scales etc, by practicing in all keys etc. Those are called "exercises." and exercises are good for memorizing where the notes are on the fretboard, BUT, that is not practicing actually making music. You make music when you apply all of that knowledge to tunes, and that is where you should be practicing, in context, in the tunes themselves.
Becoming a musician is more than learning the music theory, it's an "applied science" so how well you can make music with all that knowledge is the "X factor." I've seen guys with Masters degrees in music who, IMO, are terrible players, just awful and uninspiring. I heard Pat Metheny talking frankly once about how a lot of the players he has worked with have degrees in music but that he does not have a degree, and that he has been more successful in his career than them. I suppose at some point you have to ask yourself, "do I have enough musical talent?" What I've gleaned over the years is that not everyone has the talent to be a musician.
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Yes - a masters degree is about intellectual knowledge, music is about embodied knowledge. You need to spend a lot of time applying things, a general intellectual knowledge of the area is not that helpful here. That’s hours and hours training your hands and ears of course.
This is why I say modern jazz theory* can be a distraction because it can give the impression you know more than you do. This may make people laugh as it’s coming from me, but it’s about doing not taking. It doesn’t matter how much theory you know, and many know a lot these days.
Naturally talented people exist but no one plays jazz guitar through natural talent alone. I’ve also seen more naturally talented musicians eclipsed by those who have more of an appetite for the guitar and its weirdnesses. I think the guitar is a strange one like that. It gives up its secrets grudgingly.
But one rather boring but very important aspect of musical talent is certainly an intuitive understanding of how to practice effectively. I would say that’s the number one thing most students need to learn, and I try to teach. Most noodle.
I would say part of talent for the guitar specifically is an intuitive understanding of the physical aspects, which may not have anything to do with wider musical talent lol.
I wish I’d learned that younger haha.
*chord scales and so on, rather than the piecemeal but highly practical and embodied ‘street knowledge’ of someone like Jimmy Bruno or Joe Pass.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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this is like the topic - I sometimes worry that I've put too much time into 'mastering the fretboard' - what about surfing, and hanging out with chicks - and one's children....
what a super post from the OP! - fabulous attitude on display. I'm sure he/she is articulating concerns many feel, but few are prepared to be so honest about. I hope the various replies it has generated will be of help to them and to others concerned about similar issues. Certainly the problems the OP mentions are problems I have struggled with over many years - the solutions to them that I've found have been hard earned, and continue to prove their value to me in the project of learning to play jazz on the guitar.
tricky to know where to start:
I think that nothing less than total fretboard mastery is crucial if you want to learn to improvise chordal arrangements and melodies using songbook tunes. the ideas you hear have to be able to guide you - to force you to make the moves necessary to play them. being able to move confidently and effortlessly all around the fretboard both helps you get sufficiently into the swing of things to have the ideas, and it makes it possible for you to start playing the ideas you have. all the fretboard-learning - which can easily become robotic and over intellectual - has to be connected up, from the start, with hearing and singing musical ideas.
I have found that the best place to find musical ideas when one is getting going - is in the gaps in the tunes ...
focus on the simplest tunes - 'A train' - 'exactly like you' - 'st Thomas' - rhythm - little suede shoes - things ain't what they used to be - moonlight in Vermont (?). - (rhythm changes is perhaps the single best one.... such simple phrases and such regular gaps....)
focus on the change not the sound which changes (to do this you have to know the first sound and the sound it changes into - so the point is: the bare minimum is much more than just learning a sound (but its much more fun too). when you hear an idea in a gap between the phrases of a tune, it is going to be an idea which connects one sound with another.
don't over-complicate the harmony - in fact simplify it as much as you possibly can. the sense in which one has to 'master the fretboard' - is a sense which involves cutting everything inessential out. its big and complex enough that even learning the two basic sounds - major 6 / minor 6 - in their triadic and scalar forms, is a very substantial undertaking.
approach learning to play from two directions at once.
1 - from the direction of drills and exercises which map the sound or set out its core logic (these will be triad based on the one hand and scale-based on the other). you have to make these as musical as possible - first and foremost whatever arpeggio type thing or scale type thing you drill HAS to be rythmically grammatical - it has to fit the bar. if you don't do this you will destroy your sense of time in the very act of trying educate yourself about harmony - and this is a price that is not worth paying. there are lots of wonderful ways to make triad work and scale work musical (and fun). I have found Garrison Fewell on triads and Chad Lefcowitz Brown on what he calls 'melodic chromaticism' the most helpful teachers here. you should sing all this stuff at least sometimes - as you play it. it has to become effortless to sing your triads and your enclosures.
you can use this work on the logic of the basic sounds as a basis for composition - try to invent your own musical moves by exploiting the musical drills you set yourself. Johnny Smith said in an interview once that he thought that too much transcription inhibits originality - and everyone starts to sound too much like everyone else.
2. from the direction of the actual music you're into - transcription. with modern jazz this should feature lots of time with Charlie Parker (who just does it better than anyone else - so you learn more, quicker, with him than with anyone else.) and it is easier to hear what he is doing. you have to use the harmonic logic you're learning to generate lots of different ways to play your favourite learned lines on the neck of the guitar.
2 a) learn the melodies you like with bass lines and chordal accompaniments. first in one key, then four, then 12.
I strongly suspect that the actual business of learning the neck does not merely allow you to express your musical ideas - it vastly improves your capacity to have good musical ideas in the first place. so it's not just a necessary technical challenge - but the very substance of a musical education.
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I've never seen as A follows B, it's always been music alongside instrumental development.
If you wait until you have 'mastered the fretboard' you might run out of time to play any music. OTOH this music does seem to require a degree of instrumental practice.
Balance is important. Learning music has a way of teaching us our instruments anyway, especially in combination with drills and so on, it lends context to what can seem dry information.
The main principle is that we should find comfortable positions and fingerings and practice them consistently. For straight-ahead changes oriented jazz I've found building my fingerings around chord forms is simple and effective, as well as learning mobile one octave scale positions that amount to pretty much the same thing.
Call that what you like. It's also the way Dave Cliff and Joe Pass does it for example.
However much we might practice scales and so on, all of us have things we use again and again. Certain positions and lines that are our go tos.
As a general bit of advice to the forum, I would say it's important not to get too hung up on the ideal improvisation. 'Pure' improvisation beyond vocabulary and licks is a goal as much as it is an everyday reality for the real world jazz musicians. Meanwhile great jazz players of the mid century - however progressive or otherwise - got on with the everyday business of sounding good and swinging hard. And this is clear from transcribing the same artist over different solos. It's famously true of Bird.
You widen your bag over time, but you could happily be playing gigs all the way.
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one sort of foreign language student learns vocab / grammar / syntax from books as a way of preparing to speak - another embarrasses themselves again and again in (say) French cafes, railway stations and kitchens by doing the best they can to get by.....
there was a chap on the forum who had learned all sorts of wonderful solos which he could play at high tempos - but bemoaned the fact that he couldn't improvise very much at all
you have to get your head in the 'books' and do the best you can 'on the street' - right from the start.
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I think mastering the neck - so you don't keep bumping into things or falling over - can be made much simpler than it is by the famous Joe Pass chord-form/scale method. there are too many apparently distinct chord forms - the real trick is seeing that they aren't really distinct (e.g that the vast majority of alt dom sounds are really melodic minor sounds).
it is much easier to master the multi-dimensional fretboard by learning the many uses of a couple of very simple and basic sounds than by learning the specialised uses of twenty or more very complex ones. this is about understanding harmony in the best way - which is the way that reduces harmony to the fewest number of genuinely distinct 'simples' and the fewest number of rules for how to combine them. it took me a very long time to get the harmonic theory simple enough to work with effectively. diatonic harmony - with its seven basic sounds (plus alt doms - dims/augs ) is helpful for reading chord charts - but not so helpful for learning to improvise freely and precisely.Last edited by Groyniad; 09-14-2024 at 08:33 AM.
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This has been true for me. I’m leaning things very well playing gigs and tiring of my arrangements, then trying things on stage. A year of gigs and some of my ideas even sound good. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
As far as mastering the neck, that’s a lifelong goal. I think I’ll never master it, there’s always something to work on.
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