The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    Nothing to offer, except to state that the whole, "thinking ahead", "playing what you hear", thing has been a sore spot with me for a long time. Makes me feel like less of a musician because I can't do it at an advanced level. I posted about it a while back.

    i believe that 99.999 percent of musicians are improvising stuff they already know. "Stitched together."

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  3. #27

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    Sure...but are they conscious of it? Does it come out the same way every time?

    There's 12 notes...They've probably been played in every combination possible by now...We're all re combining previous information...that doesn't diminish the wow factor when it's done well...

  4. #28
    Thanks all for the input so far, but I thought I should try to steer this discussion away from being about thnking ahead on the bandstand to thinking ahead in the practice room, which is what my primary concern was about. I think Henry describes quite well how many performers probably feel about thinking during performance, but how you get there obviously is through doing all your thinking in the shed, no one will argue that. Such thinking is going to involve thinking ahead, even at the basic stage of trying to recall something from memory, like a complicated etude you are devising. While playing one bar you have to remember what's coming up, like the actor remembers his lines, or the concert pianist remembers his concerto....

    How do you get better at it, why, simply by just doing it often! Yep, but if an athlete needs extra work at say strength or endurance, he may devise for himself a practice routine where he does something very different in practice compared to what he does on the field, maybe a lot of running up sandy hills into a strong head wind.. This might give him more strength than years of training on the track. Similarly, if I try to isolate exercises to make my brain more efficient at recalling various options in the practice room so that one day little effort is required to do it, what might those exercises be?

    It is said that Bach could improvise, possibly by having dozens of pre learned variations at one point in his practice that he was able to draw upon without dropping a stitch. Maybe after years of this, the variations would just come to him with no effort. Maybe he eventually composed totally new and perfect variations on the spot that were never transcribed, infact I'm sure he did. But was it a natural "gift" that enabled this, or years of training his mind?

    Unless I've been looking in the wrong places, I've found very little information on how to "think" in the jazz woodshed. After all, it's how we think, if not on stage then certainly in practice, that makes us the musicians we are. Better quality thinking will create a better quality improvising musician, notions of natural talent notwithstanding....

  5. #29

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    It's gotta be playing tunes. Practicing licks in isolation is like a running back practicing only sprints.

    when you play over a tune, what comes out...that's what you really know. It's disappointing, usually, I know it is for me

  6. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by 3625
    PP sounds like you're not practicing actual improv enough - do you ever sit down with one lick, playing it over and over, but each time changing it a little bit? That tends to work pretty well IME.
    Yes, that's true, I only allow a limited amount of time for pure improv, and the results always remind me that I don't have enough tools in the shed to be building the monuments I see in my mind.. Don't worry, I also remind myself of the danger of collecting too many tools, without the skills to actually use them! But man, these Hard Bop tools are hard to forge, I just don't see any other way to do it....

  7. #31
    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    It's gotta be playing tunes. Practicing licks in isolation is like a running back practicing only sprints.

    when you play over a tune, what comes out...that's what you really know. It's disappointing, usually, I know it is for me
    Ha! Well you know me by now that I'm too far down a different "struggle street" than your own. Instead of just playing a whole blues, I prefer to really nail the I to IV, learn a hundred ways to do it, steal licks from the greats, or roll my own. Then move on to the IV to I etc etc. If I was better at accessing what I've stored in memory, then I'd be putting more time into seeing what comes out against the whole form every time I wanna practice to a blues. I mean, that was the plan, but my mind is not quick enough. When I'm playing something that is not on "auto pilot" , my mind's resources are so committed to the task at hand I can't find the next idea in time.

    No one has suggested slowing down the practice until I can find the next idea without dropping time. I have tried this and it feels really awkward, no fun at all, but maybe it's the only way....

  8. #32

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Thanks all for the input so far, but I thought I should try to steer this discussion away from being about thnking ahead on the bandstand to thinking ahead in the practice room, which is what my primary concern was about. I think Henry describes quite well how many performers probably feel about thinking during performance, but how you get there obviously is through doing all your thinking in the shed, no one will argue that. Such thinking is going to involve thinking ahead, even at the basic stage of trying to recall something from memory, like a complicated etude you are devising. While playing one bar you have to remember what's coming up, like the actor remembers his lines, or the concert pianist remembers his concerto....

    How do you get better at it, why, simply by just doing it often! Yep, but if an athlete needs extra work at say strength or endurance, he may devise for himself a practice routine where he does something very different in practice compared to what he does on the field, maybe a lot of running up sandy hills into a strong head wind.. This might give him more strength than years of training on the track. Similarly, if I try to isolate exercises to make my brain more efficient at recalling various options in the practice room so that one day little effort is required to do it, what might those exercises be?

    It is said that Bach could improvise, possibly by having dozens of pre learned variations at one point in his practice that he was able to draw upon without dropping a stitch. Maybe after years of this, the variations would just come to him with no effort. Maybe he eventually composed totally new and perfect variations on the spot that were never transcribed, infact I'm sure he did. But was it a natural "gift" that enabled this, or years of training his mind?

    Unless I've been looking in the wrong places, I've found very little information on how to "think" in the jazz woodshed. After all, it's how we think, if not on stage then certainly in practice, that makes us the musicians we are. Better quality thinking will create a better quality improvising musician, notions of natural talent notwithstanding....
    My 2 cents;
    Improvisation is energy. It happens when you put notes together in a way you never did before. A perfect phrase. How many people have done this successfully through a whole solo? Nobody ever, that's my guess. We need a bag of tricks that make up our style. Style is repetition but if we just rearrange our pet phrases it will bore people. They know, you can't fool them because they can feel it.
    So what do we do? I don't have any idea. I'll try just about anything to get into that elusive zone.

  9. #33

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Books, magazines, even this forum, all abound in advice regarding what to play and how to learn what to play. And that's fine, but what happens after you have 500 2-5 lines memorized, every known scale, arp, chromatic embellishing device in every key in every position? After all, just because you memorize the dictionary, it has no bearing on your ability to write the next great American Novel....

    The important stage of learning Jazz has to be "putting it all together". First, gather all your raw materials, then learn to think ahead. I would think that the ultimate stage in learning is "hearing ahead" and effortlessly finding the notes you hear, but for most of us here, I would say that seems fairly advanced, especially with fast tempos or tunes with difficult changes.

    So to take things back to the intermediate stage, I just wanted to hear people's thoughts on how they deal with the "thinking ahead" part, because I don't see much discussion about this. Pro's often say they don't think on the band stage, they save the thinking for the woodshed. So how do you train yourself to think in the practice room? Is it something you isolate and spend time on?

    OK, I'll offer an example that I'm currently struggling with. I'm trying to construct yet another etude for the A section in Autumn Leaves, because it's a great way to practice all my memorized 2-5 stuff (lines and devices etc) for both major and minor. So I limit the challenge to say a dozen ideas for each 2-5-1 in each of 5 positions, that's 24 x 5 = 120. Fine, I spend a coupla weeks memorizing routines where I recall these in a specific order. In doing this I found that I needed to think ahead to the next idea while in the middle of the current one, particularly as each idea has a pickup of between 3 and 9 notes, combos of triplet or straight 8ths... I began realizing how bad I was at focussing on the upcoming idea, being distracted by the effort required to play the current idea. Eventually I memorize the whole routine, through sheer tenacity.

    Progress? Maybe... I mean it makes my brain hurt, so it's probably a good thing, but here's the thing: When I try to randomize the ideas on the fly, even at only 200 bpm (8ths), I get stuck. Just because I can remember a routine that may last a few minutes, it hasn't really helped me access all the ideas out of the order I've memorized! Sure, If I slow it all down, or leave lots of space between phrases, I can eventually retrieve whatever my mind "targets". But great players seem to be way beyond this where the well is inexhaustible, and flawlessly stitched together. I know the aim for a lot of you is to not rely on pre-learned stuff in the first place, but I love Stitt, Bird, Jackie McLean etc styles of Bop/Hard Bop where you just know they are stitching material together so it comes out different every time, usually sounding inspired at the same time.

    So, to the guys that feel they have progressed to the point where they have no trouble thinking ahead to any idea that comes to them on the fly, how did you teach yourself how to do that? Did you isolate the thinking / visualisation part as a separate exercise? Any techniques you care to share? I mean. what's the point of me memorizing all these cool ideas if I can't freely access them meaningfully in mid flight?
    my thoughts: " lines" are just one ingredient, despite being the most discussed in forums like this. The most historically/idiomatically correct sequence of notes is not going to work unless it has all the other content important to jazz: articulation, time, control, phrasing, solo arc, dynamics, etc, and most important, connection to what the rest of the band is doing. If anything, focusing on lines prevents you from thinking ahead.


    also, knowing 500 ii-v-i s is good, but knowing 10 so well that you can call on them instantly is better. Add another 10 blues licks and you have enough "lines" and you need to spend your time on execution. Playing wiht others is the best way to get there at that point.

  10. #34
    OK, starting to get some ideas....

    Maybe :


    -have a smaller, more realistically manageable pool of ideas,

    -get to know them well enough that they all feel like auto pilot,

    -s-l-o-w down any routines to give myself enough time to access upcoming material I may wish to stitch on to the last,

    -practice combining and "tweaking" these ideas on the fly. Small chunks and slowly.

    -master the above steps before trying bigger chunks or faster tempos or both.

    - Apply the above to entire tunes in the way pkirk suggests considering: "articulation, time, control, phrasing, solo arc, dynamics etc"

    Hopefully I'll live long enough to reap the rewards....
    Last edited by princeplanet; 11-28-2013 at 01:48 AM.

  11. #35

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    Sounds cool. I always thought the most important thing was developing a good auto pilot. That's not a popular notion here. But for me learning how to play jazz I mostly wanted to get my fingers to fly intuitively. All the thinking thinking had been done. I believed in my intuition. Those things would eventually come out if I got out of the way.

    Now I think the truth, the better methodology, is somewhere in between.

  12. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by henryrobinett
    Sounds cool. I always thought the most important thing was developing a good auto pilot. That's not a popular notion here. But for me learning how to play jazz I mostly wanted to get my fingers to fly intuitively. All the thinking thinking had been done. I believed in my intuition. Those things would eventually come out if I got out of the way.

    Now I think the truth, the better methodology, is somewhere in between.
    Sorry Henry, when you say somewhere in between, what do you mean, between what and what?

  13. #37

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    Between practicing intuition by just letting fingers go and heavier analysis thinking or pre planning like you're doing. I did very little of what you do. I never pre planned or wrote or memorized a solo in my life. So I'm saying I could have done more of that. But I was on a mission.

  14. #38

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    I'd say having 50 highly tweak able ii V I licks is a heck of a lot better than 500 that are tough to play with. I actually think that's a quicker path to a good autopilot. Flexibility and Intuition...hearing the fretboard, not the "lick." Licks are a means to an end, not an end themselves...they teach what the fretboard sounds likelike from every imaginable angle.

    And I still say you gotta practice over the form of a whole tune....brains space is finite...at least mine is...i find it much more useful to spend it on memorizing tunes and forms...

  15. #39

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Books, magazines, even this forum, all abound in advice regarding what to play and how to learn what to play. And that's fine, but what happens after you have 500 2-5 lines memorized, every known scale, arp, chromatic embellishing device in every key in every position? After all, just because you memorize the dictionary, it has no bearing on your ability to write the next great American Novel....

    The important stage of learning Jazz has to be "putting it all together". First, gather all your raw materials, then learn to think ahead. I would think that the ultimate stage in learning is "hearing ahead" and effortlessly finding the notes you hear, but for most of us here, I would say that seems fairly advanced, especially with fast tempos or tunes with difficult changes.

    So to take things back to the intermediate stage, I just wanted to hear people's thoughts on how they deal with the "thinking ahead" part, because I don't see much discussion about this. Pro's often say they don't think on the band stage, they save the thinking for the woodshed. So how do you train yourself to think in the practice room? Is it something you isolate and spend time on?

    OK, I'll offer an example that I'm currently struggling with. I'm trying to construct yet another etude for the A section in Autumn Leaves, because it's a great way to practice all my memorized 2-5 stuff (lines and devices etc) for both major and minor. So I limit the challenge to say a dozen ideas for each 2-5-1 in each of 5 positions, that's 24 x 5 = 120. Fine, I spend a coupla weeks memorizing routines where I recall these in a specific order. In doing this I found that I needed to think ahead to the next idea while in the middle of the current one, particularly as each idea has a pickup of between 3 and 9 notes, combos of triplet or straight 8ths... I began realizing how bad I was at focussing on the upcoming idea, being distracted by the effort required to play the current idea. Eventually I memorize the whole routine, through sheer tenacity.

    Progress? Maybe... I mean it makes my brain hurt, so it's probably a good thing, but here's the thing: When I try to randomize the ideas on the fly, even at only 200 bpm (8ths), I get stuck. Just because I can remember a routine that may last a few minutes, it hasn't really helped me access all the ideas out of the order I've memorized! Sure, If I slow it all down, or leave lots of space between phrases, I can eventually retrieve whatever my mind "targets". But great players seem to be way beyond this where the well is inexhaustible, and flawlessly stitched together. I know the aim for a lot of you is to not rely on pre-learned stuff in the first place, but I love Stitt, Bird, Jackie McLean etc styles of Bop/Hard Bop where you just know they are stitching material together so it comes out different every time, usually sounding inspired at the same time.

    So, to the guys that feel they have progressed to the point where they have no trouble thinking ahead to any idea that comes to them on the fly, how did you teach yourself how to do that? Did you isolate the thinking / visualisation part as a separate exercise? Any techniques you care to share? I mean. what's the point of me memorizing all these cool ideas if I can't freely access them meaningfully in mid flight?
    well to be fair, do you really have all that stuff memorized and under your fingers? oh, and developing "etudes" and improvising are not the same thing, but i think you recognize that.

    so... at first i think that you have to compartmentalize things a bit. sure, learn all your technique and patterns. learn some classic swing, bebop, blues, funky licks too. but patterns are not complete music. they are merely components of vocabulary. i think you get that too.

    in other words, you need to practice the art of improv unto itself. having vocab will increase your improv capability, but it will not guarantee your actual musical execution.

    and while you are learning all this technique and vocab and tying to make it second nature, also study simple improv. listen to the most melodic, lyrical players - a lot. you'll notice that they don't worry about being a human version of a "jazz pattern randomization machine". they make statements. they construct phrases, and they make melodies. try to sing along with them without your guitar. then learn some of their stuff on your guitar. keep listening to these players your entire life, even if you want to be a blazing bebop or fusion machine who can blow like crazy. even if you desire to be that great blower remember that you need to build tension in your solos and tell a compelling story. that starts with melodies and not chops.
    Last edited by fumblefingers; 11-28-2013 at 10:50 AM.

  16. #40
    Good advice all. thanks, but I'm not done yet! While I got the attention from some of you (presuming I still have!), I wanted to explore this matter a little. Let's talk about other aspects of the "thinking" part of jazz. Here's a couple, Memory, and Concentration....

    Let's discuss memory first. I've never been confident with my memory, I forget people I've met, forget names, never seem to remember what happens in movies I've seen in the past, or which actors were in them etc etc... Always been a bit of a daydreamer and never was interested in processing events to the point where memories may form.... Yet did well in all my studies through University etc. I guess where it counted I could force myself, but it's certainly not a natural gift. So first question, how important is memory to the Jazz musician? Is it mainly useful in remembering dozens of tunes, or accessing all the material you know during solos? Is muscle memory a different beast?

    Concentration - does better concentration yield better results in the practice room? Is mindless repetition in order to burn in muscle memory (create auto pilot) a dangerous practice? Do you find you concentrate on some occasions better than others? Is it because of environment? Circumstances? Time of day? Stress? Distractions or lack of? How does concentrated practice manifest on the band stage? Do you concentrate on stage? On what? How is it different to your mind state in the practice room? Are you easily distracted? Once distracted, does that throw your flow entirely, or can you easily get back in the flow and find your place? And, can you indeed think ahead while improvising, or even practicing, do you feel you want or even need to? Do you have trouble separating your minds faculties when practicing, for example, while practicing some demanding, can you talk during it, describing what you are doing as you are doing it? Does this become more difficult the faster or harder the demands of the playing become? Do you think it would be desirable to be able to plan ahead while playing. When you choose to make your next moves whilst improvising, does it come to you in a flash? Between phrases? At the very end of previous phrases? In the middle?

    Finally,what techniques do you know of to improve memory and concentration on both, the shed and stage? That's a ton of questions I know (and I got a ton more!), so feel free to address just one of these questions if you wish, I'm grateful for any response.

    Like most people I suppose, my mind can wander while practicing, going in and out of focus. That's why I like pushing myself til my brain hurts, but it's tough. I put it down to too many hours of muscle memory repetitions in front of the TV Not saying I regret those hours, I could not have done those repetitions without a distraction, but there is a price to pay - It's time for my mind to catch up to my fingers!...

  17. #41
    Quote Originally Posted by fumblefingers
    well to be fair, do you really have all that stuff memorized and under your fingers? oh, and developing "etudes" and improvising are not the same thing, but i think you recognize that.

    so... at first i think that you have to compartmentalize things a bit. sure, learn all your technique and patterns. learn some classic swing, bebop, blues, funky licks too. but patterns are not complete music. they are merely components of vocabulary. i think you get that too.

    in other words, you need to practice the art of improv unto itself. having vocab will increase your improv capability, but it will not guarantee your actual musical execution.

    and while you are learning all this technique and vocab and tying to make it second nature, also study simple improv. listen to the most melodic, lyrical players - a lot. you'll notice that they don't worry about being a human version of a "jazz pattern randomization machine". they make statements. they construct phrases, and they make melodies. try to sing along with them without your guitar. then learn some of their stuff on your guitar. keep listening to these players your entire life, even if you want to be a blazing bebop or fusion machine who can blow like crazy. even if you desire to be that great blower remember that you need to build tension in your solos and tell a compelling story. that starts with melodies and not chops.
    Yeah, I forgot to add "Learn to play lyrically" to the end of my list above. That's the ultimate goal, to be sure, that's why I think Jimmy Raney is higher art than Sonny Stitt, who in my mind gets pretty close to being that "jazz pattern randomization machine". Still, I just gotta get that hard bop burnin' thang outta my system first....

  18. #42

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    Quote Originally Posted by henryrobinett
    Sounds cool. I always thought the most important thing was developing a good auto pilot. That's not a popular notion here. But for me learning how to play jazz I mostly wanted to get my fingers to fly intuitively. All the thinking thinking had been done. I believed in my intuition. Those things would eventually come out if I got out of the way.

    Now I think the truth, the better methodology, is somewhere in between.
    I think the "autopilot" thing is a good way to approach it. Think about how many people play blues competently. The reason is that the melodic material and the form is simple, and so one can immediately put note selection and "where am I in the form" on autopilot and focus on all the bigger things that make improv sound good. In jazz, one needs some more "autopilot" control since typically changes have to be addressed, and you therefore have to keep your place, but it seems to me that the sooner one can get past that the faster one gets better.

  19. #43

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    We're all going to have different weaknesses, aren't we? I'm un-schooled and I noodle too much. It makes me inconsistent.

  20. #44

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    My memory for tunes sometimes sucks. Chord changes is fine but melodies I can fumble if I don't remind myself. I tend to try and memorize fingerings, which is not the most efficient way, I think, because then I stumble over what I memorized rather than just playing the melody. And then of course when we play the tune in a different key . . . Obviously the more I play the song the less this confusion is likely to happen.

    But this area is also exactly what I've been harping on. I think you're placing far too much emphasis on mental gymnastics and far less on improvisation. I think you have to just JUMP IN a lot more. Jump off the cliff and not concern yourself with all that other stuff.

    I practiced scales and arpeggios and ii-V patterns and exercises until I was blue in the face. But then I improvised on tunes and located the notes via scales and arpeggios and my EAR. But I NEVER worked anything out. As I said, I'm not sure this is the best approach, but it was for me. It all comes out in the wash eventually. My only concern is, if you don't start IMPROVISING , you might never. IMPROVISING takes as much, or more PRACTICING than all the other stuff does. I don't think people think about this. They think of it as wasting time or noodling. I never had that point of view. Noodling is essential. Organized noodling is the best. But you have to train yourself to trust yourself to come up with the goods. You have to train your intuitive mind to run your fingers, and believe me, THAT takes a lot of practice.

    Working out things ahead of time is great. Memorizing solos and transcriptions is fantastic. But I THINK you have to balance it with MORE time spent improvising, or at least as much time. I know it's challenging when you only have a small, finite period to practice. In that case I make sure my students devote some significant time to it. Maybe not as much as the technical side. That depends on where the student is at. If he's already ingested that stuff, then yeah, blast away.

    My two sense.

  21. #45

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    I'm taking lessons with a really great young player in my area. He often talks about the two ends of the "spectrum" when practicing for improvising: on one end it is mostly technical and non-creative...very "prescribed" such as just playing 1-3-5-7-9 arpeggios on a tune (for beginners, this is a good entry to improv). Slightly less technical/slightly more creative would be the same thing except when switching chords on the tune you go the then-closest chord tone of that next chord and do your arp from there...farther along the spectrum is to limit yourself to one "motif" for say 4 bars, then switch the next 4 bars...farther along still would be to play with a certain "concept" for 8 bars then switch for the next 8 bars...the point is, these are all improvisational games of some type.

    And for what's it's worth, the few times I have really been in the zone when soloing...I am NOT playing what I know. I am surprising myself. This state is rare for me, but it does occur. Even when I record myself, transcribing those moments is a bitch...how can it be so hard for me to play something I already played? Because I did NOT "know" it! It was truly spontaneous and based on what I was hearing and wanting to hear next. Sometimes I really will "play it and tell you what it is later"!

  22. #46
    A lot of you are saying I should spend more time actually improvising and not stitching together pre learned stuff. I touched on this earlier, but permit me to mention it again. For about 20% of my practicing time (or even less), I try to improvise melodically, just following my ear, getting better at hearing what I want to play an instant before I reach for the notes. It's hit and miss, but getting to be more hit than miss the more I do it, I'll admit. It's the true art, and I get it, I understand that is the zenith right there, the ultimate satisfaction to be had for most improvisors perhaps, when it's done well.

    But here's the thing, there's no way that years of just doing this alone will get the lines I'm hearing in my head to come out. I'm hearing systems, worked out formulae and devices, licks, lines, stuff that mere improv, based on what I already know, just won't reach. Those fast slippery lines by guys like Griffin, Shorter, Dolphy, Golson .... they'll never come by me just searching for one note at a time. Like I said, to build the monuments I see in my in my mind, I need better tools than the ones I already have. I've listened to these great sax players for years and damn it, they set the bar high! Sure I know that they probably split their time 50/50 between the mechanics and the art, but they must be gods or something!

    I still feel like I'm at the tool gathering stage, I'm trying to get enough systems under my fingers. bop language, chromatic devices, altered and symmetrical ideas, blues concepts, the stuff I hear in my favorite players, the way they play it. I don't hear Raney, or Hall, not even Pass or Martino! I hear Adderley or Rollins! Maybe I should be asking questions on the Sax forums, but I'm not sure they can relate....

    I know that putting off the "art" bit is missing the point, all tools and no skill to use them is not where I wanna be in 5 years. And it is a trap. I said to myself a coupla years ago "just 6 more months committing devices to muscle memory, then I'll start using my tools"... but it keeps getting blown out, there's always another gadget to add to the kit.... This forum always serves as a good reminder to get on with it, and I especially feel the weight of certain comments like Henry saying you need to spend more time learning how to use the tools, than in acquiring them. That's sobering.....

    But having said all that, I know I'm not alone, there are plenty of current chops based players across all instruments who have worked out the tools/skills balance somehow and are enjoying the fruits of their labor. Hmm, how about I go 70/30 from tomorrow - and promise to go 50/50 by next Xmas?

  23. #47

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    It's good to read your enthusiasm though! It's definitely a chicken or the egg thing that ultimately probably might not matter. You might arrive there any way. But you also might be surprised how you can pick up and play things you can conceive but didn't necessarily practice. I play lines I've never practiced. I've never practiced any of my lines. I just play. I think I can play out of a Shorter bag or a bop bag. The ear rules. The imagination rules. I don't want to box myself into a preconceived box. But one must know the tools and the fretboard. What I'm trying to say is, if you exercise your imagination you don't have to worry.

  24. #48

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    Pp,

    I think you're missing my point a bit...i think the thing that's giving you trouble is looking too "micro."

    Seriously, not trying to call you out, but how many tunes would you say you really know? I could be misreading, but it sounds like you've spent a lot of time with "common movements" but not on songs...why wait?

    I know, enough with the friggin metaphors, but even if the quarterback knows the play book cold, he's gotta scrimmage to practice executing.

  25. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    Pp,

    I think you're missing my point a bit...i think the thing that's giving you trouble is looking too "micro."

    Seriously, not trying to call you out, but how many tunes would you say you really know? I could be misreading, but it sounds like you've spent a lot of time with "common movements" but not on songs...why wait?

    I know, enough with the friggin metaphors, but even if the quarterback knows the play book cold, he's gotta scrimmage to practice executing.
    Not at all Mr B, I always get your point on that one! You don't like hearing it, but I'll tell you again, I'm more interested in composing tunes than learning them! That puts me out of the gig scene, I know, who wants to play in some geezer's original outfit? hehe... but lucky I have pals who will humor me when/if the time comes.... and If they don't, I'll pay them to play with me! But seriously, tunes, yeah, I need some more under the belt. I'll get on it, promise!

  26. #50

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    My guess is that most of us on these forums are basically living room players. Work, family, real life keep us from being anything more. I believe that what separates the great players mentioned in these posts from the rest of us is the fact that they immersed themselves completely in the music at the right time in their lives. Countless hours of repetitive practice. Countless hours on the hot seat that is the bandstand. Then, finding after hours jams where they could push the envelope with like minded souls. There is simply no substitute.