Ideas for Improvising on Stablemates

[jordanklemons]

It helps hearing what you play. It helps giving you motives and making you think rhythmically. Its easier to hear the difference between tension and resolution notes. I do miss the big lines going up and down you hear from the bebop masters like mr.Brown here from 0.49. In the beginning of starting this approach it feels pretty intellectual to me. Sometimes I hear notes I wanna play but they're not within the quadrat.

Great video, thanks for sharing! Not easy to be the first one on the dance floor!

So a couple things...

First, you noticed that there were notes you wanted but "weren't allowed to play". Man... I love that. I noticed that as well when I first started this. These 4 note structures are NOT meant to be prison sentences. But they offer MANY great benefits to us. Two of the benefits I've found, and it sounds like it's happening to you also, are that they really engrain the sound and emotion of those 4 particular notes into our ears and fingers and help us to develop a personal relationship with them... and they also (seemingly magically) help create a deeper and more personal connection with other notes as well.

By withholding other notes, I found that I would want to play something "not allowed" so badly and could even hear that note... I knew what it would sound like and how it would relate to the 4 note structure. It's almost like when you're in a relationship with someone, and then you have to go on a trip and don't get to see them for a long time, and you start to miss them. By not being with them, it actually makes you fall in love with them even more. It makes you appreciate how wonderful they are and how much you want to be around them. By being farther away physically, it can bring you closer together emotionally. I found this to be the case with my relationship with notes.

And again, the 4 note structures are not a prison sentence that you can never leave. But if you're interested in this 'system'... I think it's a good idea to stick with them for a while.

"That which diminishes constraint, diminishes strength." -Igor Stravinsky

You mentioned missing the long, flowing, bebop lines. Again, the 4 note idea isn't a prison sentence. And this is also still one of the very early stages of how to utilize it. They seem limiting, but given time they can actually be very freeing. I noticed you did some encircling a couple times in the video. Half step below, whole step above... target note. If you're still new to this, that may be a little pre-mature... but let's run with that.

Pick one of the 3 chords and see if you can encircle each of the notes in the 4 note structure moving across the entire neck. Maybe try it chromatically first, then try it diatonic. If you can do that, try and do it in a (slow) tempo but play in 8th notes. You're playing 3 note patterns. If you do them in 8th notes, it will displace the pattern every other time and make it hard to hear how 'simple' what you're playing is. Then maybe at the end of the sequence, run chromatically in either direction until you hit 1 of the notes from the next chord's 4 note structure and resolve into a simple melody.

Just one idea. The possibilities are pretty much endless. I've been working on this stuff for about a year. For the first 8 months, I could not wait to get past the 4 notes and add the next tension to start working in pentatonic scales again. But then my creativity switch got turned on, and now I can't stop thinking of ways to utilize the 4 notes. I have a list going in my notebook. And every time I think I've pretty much nailed down everything I can do, 2 or 3 more ideas pop into my mind. My old teacher told me that when he's working with a student, he keeps them at the 4-note level for a year before moving on to the 5 note stuff. I'm not studying with him anymore, but I'm almost at the year mark, and I've decided that I'm not adding the next note yet. He didn't take into account the oddity that is the fretboard. There's a lot of work required to really see and play this stuff on the guitar. I've decided to spend the next couple of years really developing everything around these ideas before moving on to the variations possible with the pentatonic scales. Which will then lead to the hexatonic... and maybe the 7 note scales again... we'll see.

All of this reminds me of that Bill Evans interview where he talks about the dilemma of most musicians. To paraphrase, most of us grow up loving the sound of this musician or that. And in the jazz world, that often (but not always) correlates with virtuosity and complexity. So we listen to Bird and love his playing and want to play like him. But we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg with Bird. We don't see the years he spent mastering the basics and the fundamentals. So we try to learn to play like him by copying him. And we might even get pretty close... like close enough that people think we sound a lot like him. Bill refers to that as approximating. The problem is, if what we're doing isn't built on a strong foundation of the basics and the fundamentals, then we can't grow. We get stuck. But learning music by building up from the basics allows for unlimited growth. Which is why Bill encourages music students, in that interview, to choose simplicity. To willingly subject ourselves to not sounding like Bird or Clifford for a while so that we can build into those sounds in a connected and authentic way.

I know that sort of flies in the face of conventional wisdom and teaching which says to transcribe a lot. And I'm not going to tell anyone to stop that. But I know plenty of guys who've transcribed a ton and still feel unhappy and stuck in their playing. And I know plenty of guys who really haven't transcribed much at all and yet can play circles around the rest of us mere mortals. Those things can be helpful of course, but I think there's more to it than that.

[jordanklemons]

Nothing to contribute* except applause. No flattery intended - so suck it up, buttercup!

Seriously, and to explain, what I really like is the way in which you habitually use probing questions to get past emotive statements, personal preference and opinion - statements that defy challenge (or cause riot). I think you - and others - are the very model of well-intentioned participation.

*On second thoughts, perhaps I do (I'm self-taught, but I can improvise OK).

But I'm also an experienced teacher of languages - and that's what I usually draw from when a tune or song 'speaks to me' the way Stablemates does. (Sorry, but I take music is a language' to be more than just a figure of speech.)

With any foreign language, I listen for contextualization cues: e.g. vocabulary choice, prosody, paralinguistic signs (pausing and hesitation, or tone), code choice, formulaic phrases... Contextualization cues are context-embedded and are learned in the context of on-going activity. Inferences about them are largely subconscious. Different cultural groups - even groups that speak the same language - learn different contextualization systems.

Your idea of 'triad +1' speaks to me too - loud and clear ('chunking' always does) - and I want to study this. Thank you!

Thanks DT. I wish I understood more than 43% of what you're saying... but if I'm being honest, I think a lot of it went over my head. Have you started any threads talking about all these language ideas and how you hear them in music. Interesting stuff. But the terminology and jargon went way over my head.
-Buttercup

[jordanklemons]

2. So based off of your work, I am now looking at new way to build a harmony and or solo, behind a melody.
For example, BB Blackbird, which is a song I like, is in the Real Book with 4 bars, all in Fmaj, and some real static melody notes - mostly A's, B's, G's and F's.

I can take the first bar, 3 quarter notes of F(A), then the last at A-(A), then move on to something for the next bar, like D(Bb).

That may not be the best sounding work, but if I have the idea down right, I can come up with a million new examples for my own playing.

Are you picking any particular triad? For my example, there is no implied triad, so I just found one, then added the tension note. Does that work?

So I love BB too but honestly haven't tried to analyze it yet. So I'm doing all of this off the top of my head.

First thing you have to decide is, do you want to create some chordal movement during those 1st 4 bars. Sometimes I do this tune with a sort of latin or new orleans beat and keep it somewhat modal vamping over the F. Other times, I want more of a swing or bebop thing, and I put in some movement (ii V's, iii VI's, diminished stuff, etc).

But for simplicity sake, let's assume we're keeping it all F.

The first note is an A. When it goes up to the Bb, it's creating tension that resolves back down to A. That's a good place for chord movement, but since we're keeping it all over F major, we'll just think of that as a moment of melodic tension. The rest of the phrase is just the A note walking down through G to the F note. There's a few triads we could use to harmonize the A note.

F major, A major, A minor, D minor... am I missing any?

Notice that when we move down to the F note, it feels resolved? So ideally we'll pick a triad that contains F and A. That means A and A minor are out leaving F and Dminor. So you have a choice. Do you want an F6 type of a sound? The next chord is a G-6, so it might give more consistency to the chord progression to use the D minor triad here and create an F6 tonality. But I'm actually a really big fan of the basic root triad... I think it's very under utilized. We're often so quick to chase after complex sounds we over look how great basic stuff can sound (just ask Bill Frisell ).

Either way, you can choose. And yes, once you're more comfortable with these sounds and ideas, you can mix and match them. But it's worth sticking with one choice for a while and exploring its possibilities. Now the added tension note is not a random selection. There's a whole set of rules and exceptions to picking the best 4th note that are too complex to try and type out here. But I'll tell you that both the F triad and the D minor triad will utilize the G note as their 4th tension. So whichever of the two triads you pick, you're going to be have every melody note accounted for except for the Bb. Which really, the Bb is implying a dominant/diminished movement (a la Barry Harris... that note is part of the tension or diminished arena. Which is why we might want to have some chord movement there. But we decided to ignore it for simplicity).

But that said, you don't need to use that Bb note when soloing. You can if you want. But it might be worth sticking to the F(G) or the D-(G) for a while to get used to their sound.

Does that help clear things up at all?

[eh6794]

So I did the first two bars with the above triads, F, D-, A, and D-, then the following 2 bars, I havent figured out what I did yet.

[jordanklemons]

@yaclaus (and anyone else interested)
Here are a couple of variations/exercises I've written out for myself. These are far more advanced applications of these ideas than we've been talking about... but same 4 note ideas. The first one is actually just the encircling idea that you made me think of applied to an A7b9b5 chord [Eb(A)]. I honestly hadn't even considered working on that until I hear you do it in your video. But I think it's a great way to ornament these 4 note structures.


The next one I had already written out for myself. It's a series of different variations I put together by jumping around within the 4 note structures, and then connecting specific notes within it chromatically. This one is written out over an E7b9b5 [Bb(E)].

[jordanklemons]

So I did the first two bars with the above triads, F, D-, A, and D-, then the following 2 bars, I havent figured out what I did yet.

I'm not entirely sure if we're on the same page. I thought it might be easier to hear what I'm talking about. You can mix and match these triads if you want. You can organize your ideas however you want to. This is just one way to do it that I think works really well.

So what I did here was a basic F triad for a while. I used a G major triad to create the sensation of an Ab diminished chord which resolved me into the G minor chord... over which I just used a basic G minor triad. Then I created the sensation of a C13b9 chord to resolve me back to the F chord again before the bridge. For that I used an A major triad.

So my 4 note structures were:
F(G)
G(Ab)
G-(A)
A(Bb)
back to F(G)

I played through the tune up to the bridge using ONLY those notes. I don't think I did anything else. Just really simple structures. Then I took a pause. Then I did it again but I used chromatic movement to connect between notes. But still, everything is being governed by those 4 note structures. Even when I leave them for chromaticism, I use them as the anchors that pull me back into the form. Hopefully that makes sense.

EDIT***
I probably should have pointed out that I decided to keep things very simple here. As I said in my previous response to EH (in case anyone missed that). So there's very little movement for a while, and then there's movement, and then very little movement again, and then movement.

Just want to point out that it doesn't have to be that way. If we want a bop type approach, with more movement, we can superimpose some I vi ii V type movement over those long bars of just F major. If that were the case, I would have changed the 4 note structures to best capture the tonality of the chord I was playing over while embracing the melodic content into the harmony using the triad. That would have created much more forward momentum. And there are a lot of options when we start doing that sort of stuff. But I always think it's best to start simple and build outwards. So... that's what's in the video.

[matt.guitarteacher]

Thanks for the response. You're very generous with your time and thoughts.

This tune was an exceptionally challenging one for me. Definitely the hardest one I've attempted to analyze yet. I spent about a week chipping away at this thing until I found something I was happy with.

Yeah, that statement probably says the most. This tune is probably just a good bit over my head to start. Thanks, again. All the best.