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what were important milestones for your jazz guitar improvisation skills , something that changed you.
something that made you get in touch with the artist within you and make sens of arpeggios , scales and theory and start producing artistic lines ?
Jazz is a very complexe form of art , sometimes just the fact to sit with a great guitar player might change you forever.
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02-10-2016 06:38 PM
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Signing up for Jimmy Bruno's Guitar Workshop.....
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I've been working on solo guitar for my whole life
My first chord melody was on All the Things You Are
in my 30s I got to where I could move 3rds, 6ths, and 10ths, around naturally and be able to improvise lines with that
when our sax player moved to Florida and we became a trio in my mid 30s, the guys liked when I played the "chordy stuff" so I started improvising more with triads and octaves and full chords
and in the last few years I've been able to put it all together finally and play a tune, take a ride on a chorus or two and keep the tune bouncing along
now I'm working on giving each tune its own treatment. Sort of having enough in the bag of tricks to be judicious.
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Great idea for a thread mooncef. I started 'learning' theory and its application on the fretboard without realizing I was back when I was about 13. So I found a lot of things gradually on my own time and at my own pace before I even realized what it was I was discovering.
But once I got to college, got interested in jazz, and started studying with jazz guitar teachers...
-I had already been playing in a 'jamband' for some years before jazz. So I was already quite comfortable improvising (diatonically - including the 5 non diatonic notes) and had started to formulate my own voice. So when I got to school I decided to leave behind the 'voice' I'd been building and focus on jazz in hope that eventually the two paths would coalesce and create something greater than the sum of their parts. It took several years, but that was what happened for me. It was a big milestone when that happened.
-Along the way, there two big milestones that took place. First, my first jazz guitar teacher had me arranging chord melodies for standards. He offered a little guidance here and there, but mostly just pointed me in the direction and said 'Go'. The first couple of those were huge milestones for me as it was an entirely new way of thinking. They got easier over time.
-Because of all the chord melody stuff I was doing, I learned to be able to see the dominant and tonic shapes on the fretboard simultaneously superimposed over each other. That was another big milestone.
-The next big milestone was about 10 years later when a guy I was studying with in my masters program told me I was really good at "playing all the right notes" but that a computer could play all the right notes too. That lesson brought me much deeper into the idea of playing with the melody of the tune.
-The most recent milestone was about a year ago when I decided to drop all the scale stuff and focus on relearning everything from the ground up based on triads and on really hearing how the melody notes move through tension and resolution. Really learning to identify where the melodic stable notes are, and how best to utilize them.
I've probably had a lot of other milestones, but these are the biggest and most memorable... especially in how they affected my improvisation.
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very inspiring , i'm still trapped in playing the right notes and the feeling of having to play all the changes , i think that's a milestone too , just being able to play the right stuff , now i'm trying to use my inner ear more and find the artist within me , i wasn't lucky to have started guitar at an early age , i had started at 17 and it wasn't even serious , just playing Emin Fmaj chords and stuff , then i only started very seriously at the age of 28 ,i had bought a great fender stratocaster that inspired me to pick it everyday, had decided to make things right and study music on my own, now after two years i learned a great deal of jazz harmony , arpeggios , scales in all positions , how to construct my chords , but probably a huge mile stone in my playing was learning intervals and how to construct my own altered dominant arpeggios .
Originally Posted by jordanklemons
but i'm still struggling and suffering to find the little something that can make my lines sound better than a race to catch all changes , like if it was a game or something , it really doesn't make sens at a certain time when i listen to myself i'm really not proud of what i do , but i guess that's a suffering most of us mere mortal have experienced in a certain period of jazz journey ?
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Reading and working through just the very first couple of pages of this opened a big wide door for me as a total jazz guitar beginner:
I'm not done with it and there's also the second volume....
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Still being an amateur, but I was able to hear the change in my playing when I finished conservatory. The biggest changes were after I began to transcribe other players lines and analyzed them.
What they play, how they play, and why they choosed those tools under those chord changes.
MAking that inspired me to make my own lines from scales, arpeggios, etc.
MrBlues
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I signed up , can you please share was your experience in the first months ? Originally Posted by boatheelmusic
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I got (and still get) a lot out of "Rhythm Shapes" by Herb Ellis.
https://www.amazon.com/Herb-Ellis-Ja.../dp/1576233413
It's light (very light) on theory but teaches lots of 8-bar phrases for the A section of rhythm changes and quite a few for the B section too. The book/CD ends with two 32-bar choruses played by Herb. Herb played out of simple shapes, so it's all easy to grasp (-though not so easy to duplicate, as Herb was a master and such students as I am are not.)
One thing that gradually happens is that you find yourself mixing and matching parts of long phrases and thereby coming up with your own lines.
It felt really good to be able to have something to play over the rhythm changes at a brisk tempo.
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I can think of a couple:
The first was when I finally "got" theory. I had learned theory from a classical perspective in college, understood how to harmonize a scale, could do basic voice leading (e.g. chorale type stuff) and that kind of thing, but I never really understood how it applied to improv. I was playing mostly blues, and supplementing it with a bit of diatonic type stuff, but it was still all the rock thing of sticking with one scale for a whole tune. At some point I was reading theory books from a more jazz-oriented perspective, and the whole thing just kind of "clicked". I could see the harmonized scales as spokes on a wheel (each spoke being a key), and I could see how each chord in a scale was the root of a mode, and then I could see interconnections between the modes. This all happened pretty suddenly. (I'm sure it had been churning in my subconscious for a long time, but I wasn't aware of it). It was a pretty profound moment. Like I was just kind of plugging through my day, and then all of the sudden, as we say here in New England, "Light dawns over Marblehead." I don't remember what I was doing, but I remember feeling like I needed to get to my guitar as quickly as possible.
Another one was when I'd picked up this book: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Book.../dp/156222994X. There was one page in particular, early on (like page 16 or something), where it explains the idea of four note voicings being able to make substitutions for other chords (e.g., a dim7 being a rootless 7b9, or a maj6 being the same as its relative min7). Just that one page opened up a ton of stuff for me.
And then there's been a bunch of stuff on this forum that's helped me tremendously. Nothing quite as momentous as those two things, but I'm always learning new things here.
Oh, and finally starting to understand the way I learn things, which, oddly enough, I came to understand by learning to play golf. (Understand the theortetical context, break the problem down into component skills, work through a few examples, and then apply to a real problem - repeat several hundred times). I'm still a lousy golfer, but understanding my learning style has helped a lot with music. (And other things as well).
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I don't know about my "artist within" . I'm still learning.
But the biggest milestone for beginning to understand what good lines are and why they work was in looking Jimmy Amadie's concepts and simple exercises on tension and release, in the beginning of his improv book.
The thing that was really profound about it was that I thought I was basically learning some exercises/patterns, but with the emphasis being on tension and release, rather than simply the patterns themselves, you develop an ear for it, and begin to hear tension/release in everything you play and in the playing of others.
It unlocked something to allow me to immediately use the scales and arps I already knew, but in a more musical and melodic way. It also gave me a framework for understanding why certain lines/melodies "work", even though they seemingly break "rules" about strong/weak beats, passing tones/chord tones and "avoid notes". Finally, it taught me to see, hear, and understand Melody as being its own organizational entity, apart from strictly thinking in terms of vertical harmony.Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 10-01-2016 at 11:42 AM.
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You mean like "Aha!" moments? Hmm, most important ones for me were:
- Realising hybrid picking made horn like phrasing more accessible.
- Figuring out certain "accepted" ways of combining chord/extension/ tones (on stronger beats) with chromaticism is what separates Jazz from most other musics.
- Practising scales is not only useless, but harmful in the quest of acquiring a Bop based aesthetic.
- All tonal music (including Functional Harmony based Jazz) can be reduced to Tonic vs Dominant.
- Relating every phrase to a chord shape is helpful.
- 99% (at least) of all the advice from friends, books, internet etc is not applicable for my needs or tastes.
- Patterns, devices lines etc must be mastered in all positions and all keys, but ultimately, is a subordinate skill to that which yields the ability to spin melodies on the fly.
- Spinning melodies on the fly is the hardest skill to acquire as it relies almost entirely on the artistry or imagination of the player. There is no Pedagogy or guide book for this.
- Getting good at playing melodies you "pre hear" is no guarantee that people will enjoy listening to you....
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Although I'm definitely not an artist, can't play any artistic lines except those I've stolen, and what I play doesn't interest many people, the following were important in my journey:
when I stopped using fake books, and started memorizing tunes before gigs.
when I realized time is more important than note choice (for how I want to play)
when I started transcribing
most of all: when I started playing more often with other people.
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It seems like many milestone moments have been gaining an important insight into the underlying theory. For example when I first realized how to figure out the chords in any key, and then by deduction was able to figure out the key of any given chord progression. Probably the first big milestone was when I figured out how to play a single scale (pentatonic) up the entire neck. I was then able to quickly develop the ability to play fluidly up the neck, as long as the chord progression worked with E min pentatonic ;o) I guess each scale that I learned to play up the entire fretboard was a major milestone. After the pentatonic came the diatonic major scale, and then of course the natural minor and harmonic minor. I actually didn't properly learn the melodic minor scale until I'd probably been playing the guitar for like 15 years already ;oP No wonder my early jazz improv attempts didn't quite sound right! Probably around the 3 year mark I purchased Ted Greene's Single Note Soloing vol 1 and learning to play over changes just using arpeggios was a pretty big milestone. I also began learning to read music at that time (so I could read and play Ted's examples). Beginning to read on the guitar was a huge milestone! So in about year 4-6 I practiced arpeggios quite a bit as well as navigating jazz changes using the major scale and it's modes. By about year 6 I could play just about any jazz chart chord changes at sight and do an acceptable job of soloing over any changes and that was a huge milestone to reach, also considering I'd never had a music lesson up to that point and we didn't have the internet and youtube back then...Let's see...then the next major milestone was probably finishing a music degree. Other milestones since then have been mainly gaining a little more insight as to how to create interesting musical ideas by thinking outside the box. Lately I've been doing a lot of free jazz improvisation unaccompanied, and taking a lot more chances than I used to by doing a lot of atonal and general outside playing. The benefit I'm finding from this is I'm using my ears more instead of just always using the "correct" theoretical approach to a given set of changes. I think in 10 yrs from now I'll be able to look back at this current time period and call it a milestone since I feel like I am opening up to a whole new approach to improvisation, but I'm still right in the middle of it and still trying to figure it out precisely.
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The opposite to signing up to JBGW, when I quit JBGW and dived into transcribing the masters - Grant Green, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan. WOW it really blew me away, still does, the simplicity of it all, it is within reach/it is just out of reach. The rhythm of the language oh the rhythm of it all, man those guys are so smokin.
My First transcription took 6 month Greens Greenery. Hmm April 2015 that is getting on:
My first original (goal is three this year, been trying to write a blues for the last 2 months):
Just the other day I learnt resolving on the 1 of the odd number bars in a blues then sit out. Immediately felt like Lou Donaldson lines were spewing out of me. So much fun.
Last night I finished my first Chord Melody thingy, Here's That Rainy Day. Next have to record it.Last edited by gggomez; 10-07-2016 at 05:19 PM.
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Old Milestones or New Milestones?
Sorry, I am a dick.
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Update, chord melody done and recorded. Now to make it great, fit for the public ear.
Sent from my D6503 using Tapatalk
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Update, chord melody done and recorded. Now to make it great, fit for the public ear.
Sent from my D6503 using Tapatalk
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