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i find there's a big stagnation point when i did my scales and arpegios home work , i was disapointed there was some big GAP between the theory knowledge , intervals and the real jazz language , and this GAP isn't filled by any academic curricula , it's something each one should find out on his/her own.
i think it could be very inspiring if we share how we overcame that GAP between scales arpegios and the language . i personaly still haven't , i struggle jut follow the harmony and in the same time express myself within the framework of the tune , including some chromatisim and target strong chord tones did emprove my phrasing just a tiny bit , but i'm still uncoherent , my phrases make up a frankeinstein at the end , no meaning whatsoever , i sometimes hate myself and think of taking a break to change my ideas .
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05-03-2016 06:45 AM
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I like the ideas of Jerry Bergonzi and also forum contributor Jordan Klemons. Use the triad as the main component and maybe just add one note to the triad like the 9th or the 13th. If I could start all over I would find a teacher who could REALLY show me how to play simple
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I would go through solos and bebop heads and find lots of devices from those and work on how to apply ideas from those in my technique practice
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Originally Posted by mooncef
You might like this site.
Bebop Guitar Improv Series |
Ken
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While I don't think many of us will ever be satisfied with our playing, the best we can hope for is to hate our playing less and less with each passing year. We need the patience to trust that years of heavy lifting (arps, scales etc) is the foundation we need to build upon, but also the realisation that there is a helluva lot more work to do once we "know the alphabet"....
My own journey has been something like:
- learn every scale in every position
- learn every arp in every position
- learn to combine them in etudes (eg, arp up, scale down against tunes like ATTYA, Cherokee etc)
- Tell myself I'm a loser for wasting my life (failing at sounding like a Jazz player) ....
- Do a ton of transcriptions, mostly horn players from Hard Bop era
- Decipher my favourite devices that players are using (language)
- Learn to use devices instead of scales and arps
- Realise that scales and arps help me to discover my own devices
- spend several years incorporating chromaticism around chord tones and extensions
- simplify my strategies by dividing material into Tonic and Dominant classes
- Solid work on substitutions and inside/outside playing
- Solid work on picking techniques (alternate and eco), working up all my etudes up to 300 bpm
- Apply all that I know to tunes that I like
- Tell myself I'm still a loser, but getting better....
It's been a wild and wacky ride so far and I'm addicted to the ongoing challenge, so I don't mind that I've learned certain things out of order. After all, they say there's more than one way up the Jazz mountain...
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
taking a break to change your ideas sounds like a good idea, but I wouldn't change them to princeplanet's! sounds awful Originally Posted by mooncef
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Haha! Well, he did ask for how we each do our thing... In my own journey, self flagellation seems to come with the program! Originally Posted by joe2758
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Doing musical exercises can be helpful, but they are intentionally abstracted devices...don't mistake the learning device for the thing itself.
I mean think about it---if you play all arpeggio tones, aren't you excluding a lot of tension tones?! Tim Lerch, who I respect, has said that playing pure arpeggios can sound like a bugle call. And learning them by playing straight 8ths, which is oftentimes recommended, is grafting another artificiality (straight rhythm) onto the original one.
It's kind of like "musical MadLibs" --remember those---they had a little narrative where you asked someone to supply a noun, verb, adjective, or some other part of speech...and then at the end, you got to read it, and it was sometimes funny, sometimes random, and sometimes incoherent...but no one would mistake that for real literature. So don't mistake musical devices for the real thing.
Or another analogy, is art classes they sometimes use those little stick figures that you can move around to present, in abstracted form, what the human body looks like in different poses....now these can be useful, but would you paint a picture and paint in a stick figure like this for a real person?!
That is why studying really good models is helpful....I love Tal Farlow....oftentimes I drive to visit the gf in Detroit and will listen to the Verve CD of TAL for 10.5 hrs. straight, or Hank Garland on Jazz Winds From a New Direction. Also, beware of the "earnest student/overplaying" trap----as Hal Galper has said, everybody who learns this stuff is emotionally invested in showing what they learned....and so they have to show (play) what they know, and the result is "Spaghetti a la 8th Note"....listen to Lester Young, or Miles Davis, or Bird playing a blues or Lous A. playing friggin' whole notes on Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy.Last edited by goldenwave77; 05-03-2016 at 05:27 PM.
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Yup. That pretty much sums it up. Originally Posted by princeplanet
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We all come to the point where we realise the difference between etude and performance. The former is technical study, the latter is expression. I'd like to say that the sooner you practice performance / expression, the better, however, I don't think anyone can say for certain that it will always make one a better musician in the end. Originally Posted by goldenwave77
I mean, you obviously dig Tal, and Hank G (me too!). All the musical expression in the world won't help you play in those styles without some serious chops, the kind of chops you only get by learning to play straight 8ths at tempo. It's hard enough to do that as an exercise, but once you can, you can start the final phase of mastery which eschews flash for pure expression, whether that be whole notes, silence, or 16th triplets. Etudes are one concept at a time, Performance is all the concepts you know as you need them. If you haven't shedded every concept you want individually until it hurts, you probably wont have command enough of any of them to mix them up at will.
And yes, I know that not every Jazz improvisor learns this way, but most of the ones that like to "burn" every once in a while (most of the players you mentioned for example) seem to have spent some time in the "earnest student/overplaying" trap, as you put it
It's all good, maturity and "taste" will win out eventually, if we're lucky....Last edited by princeplanet; 05-03-2016 at 09:54 AM.
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Oh, I agree with you. I've benefitted from the basic violin studies (Wohlfahrt) that Conti has in his technique book....the very first one in fact, helped me to play "Scrapple From the Apple" a lot better. These studies are very pleasant to play and will teach you about modulation, etc.
I'm not saying do away with all drill, exercises, etudes....I'm just saying recognize them for what they are.
The OP I think was maybe confusing one for the other. The ideal is a drill or etude that is also of musical benefit like Chopin's stuff for piano.
Somebody posted a link yesterday re: piano pedagogy which has a lot of interesting stuff re: practice techniques. I don't know if it is widely accepted, but that fellow comes out pretty strongly against Hannon type exercises and other exercises that he thinks non-musical, and he goes as far as to say they can be harmful. I'm agnostic, but find it interesting that people differ on the value of this type of thing.
I also wonder what Tal did for technique...as he didn't read music, I'm not sure he would have been doing a lot of formal exercises....maybe he made up his own...could be.Last edited by goldenwave77; 05-03-2016 at 10:07 AM.
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Good point, though it seems that all the great horn players and piano players know these "devices" inside out---I don't think it hurts 'em any! Originally Posted by goldenwave77
Here is a bit of Clifford Brown practicing. Lot of devices here.....
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My big goal is simply to suck less this week than I did last week.
I'd rather suck at jazz than burn at anything else.
Also: I've realized that I likely won't ever be an amazing improviser, so I'm taking some advice Joe Pass gave me in a letter some years back that somehow I missed. He said if you can't improvise well, learn to read music. I thought "Well I know how to read music so..."
I've realized, though, that if I can sight read really well, I will always have a welcome in a rhythm section as a reliable, solid player of charts. Also, reading well opens up the world of published transcriptions, and makes it possible to learn a lot of things that I can use. I might not create brilliant solos, but from reading great solos I can learn enough to put something together.
So recently I've stopped playing the background tracks and trying to break through to new heights of improvisation. I'm taking songs I know and reading through studies based on those tunes, and trying to read (slowly for now) solos on those tunes by great players.
I'm finding this is causing the great glacier that is my totally suck-y soloing to begin moving just a little.
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I often think of this when reminding myself of the value of etude practice. It's almost as though everything Clifford knew was crammed into an hour long practice session that he felt he had to run through every day just to "keep his chops up". I also used to think that it'd be cool to have a transcription of the whole routine (I wonder if someone has done this?), but then you realise that personal practice routines would be useless to others without the "thinking" behind it. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
It's like the Owens dissertation on Bird- he figured out the 300 or so devices Bird favoured, but no one will ever figure out the conception, how Bird put it all together in the heat of battle. My little routines would be useless to others, and I've come to realise that many artist's "methods" similarly are too personal to be really effective for others.
There is, I guess, a difference between traditional, time honoured and universally accepted pedagogy (which doesn't really exist in Jazz), and the various Jazz "Method" books that never seem to produce the promised results. I've heard it said that there are as many ways to teach Jazz as there are players...
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The post yesterday about piano pedagogy ("A perfect book but.." is really interesting. The author of that piece (which contains a link to his training treatise), a Japanese fellow, thinks there is a lot for improvement in traditional methods.
The problem in assessing teaching/training is that there is extreme "survivor bias": It's like testimonials which can be next to worthless....ever read a testimonial which said "This is a complete waste of time and money, and I am ashamed to say that I was a sucker and fell for it." ?! No, you won't ....first it probably wouldn't get published, and second, it won't be written, because people are too embarrassed to admit it....so if we have 100 people who start some program of instruction, and we're left with 7 testimonials...do we really know anything?! So you get people who are products of traditional instruction, and then they say "Look, it worked for me...and therefore is the way to go..." Maybe, but maybe not.
How many people start playing this instrument, and give it up? I remember telling someone years ago, that I liked jazz and wanted to try to learn to play some, on a guitar...the guy said to me..."My advice...get a cheap acoustic, learn a few chords, and learn to sing a little...playing the guitar like those jazz guys takes YEARS of practice." That kind of stuck in my throat....and I'm still here...after putting the instrument down for about ten years, after I'd started.
It strikes me that many, many musicians drift into teaching to supplement their professional, playing income....some are good teachers, a lot are not...and playing well, doesn't automatically translate into being a good teacher...I think the latter is a separate skill set.
I think it IS true that guitar pedagogy is MUCH LESS systematic/uniform than with other instruments...but I am not sure the situation with other instruments is actually ideal, if we're ruthlessly honest about it.Last edited by goldenwave77; 05-03-2016 at 11:52 AM.
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Guitar pedagogy exists, Classical, Flamenco, even Gypsy Jazz... But "Jazz", on any instrument seems to belie pedagogy. After all, it came from the "street". You hear people bemoaning the Institutionalised way Jazz is often taught these days (Berklee etc), and it is seen as a badge of honour lately to announce oneself to the world as autodidact. Yet, far too many players still sound too alike, a sure sign that "organised" Jazz teaching is the greater influence. For the worse, methinks...
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I think the first goals in any guitar pedagogy is to learn to read notation and to hone your technique to the point where the limits on your creativity is your imagination rather than your dexterity.
There are different aspects to playing jazz guitar. On the one hand, most anyone with decades of playing experience should be able to 'comp' adequately. The best players, however, will comp with added refinement in voicings and the musical rhythm and flow.
Playing guitar solos in a group context is another thing. In this case the objectives must be two fold. First, to create a sure link between what you hear in an anticipatory sense and the ability to execute it on the guitar in real time. Second, to hear something that is worthy of being a solo. It is that last part that may be more of a 'gift' than just the product of pedagogy or incessant practice.
In the end the greats on this instrument have a 'signature' sound. You don't confuse a Wes Montgomery solo with Pat Metheny. The guitarists who attain the highest stature sound like ....themselves. They have a unique voice because they are fully themselves.
It is not that hard today to transcribe the solos of the greats with devices like Transcribe and Sibelius. Apart from the fact that I do not have Transcribe to use for that purpose, it has been some time since I seriously transcribed whole solos of Wes or Jim Hall or even Metheny and other greats. But in the pursuit of 'devices' and learning certain signature sounds of these guys, perhaps it makes sense for me to go back and really pick apart the solos of these players. But there would remain a world of difference between playing a Wes Montgomery solo note-for-note and being able to come up with something original in the context of the same song.
And therein lies all the difference.
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My two cents:
While it is certainly necessary to learn scale fingerings and arpeggio fingering of all types, these things alone will not necessarily allow a player to create music in a particular idiom. I believe we learn the fingerings of scales arps etc so that when we play a melody our fingers are prepared to make the movements needed. The scales and arps are not necessary the melodies themselves. I think a very good way to remedy this if for instance you want to improvise Jazz, is to learn melodies. Louis Armstrong, Bach, Bebop Heads, Jazz originals, excerpts from solos, all of these are a great source of melodies, Standard songs are also chock full of beautiful melodies. all of which, if learned deeply, will become the raw material for ones own melodic creations. There is really no way around this.
I also think that an academic approach, (4 years in a music school) may be excellent for learning scales, scale to chord relationships, arpeggios and theory etc, but the actual building of a melodic base, a real musical morality as it were, can take much longer for many of us.
While i have a pretty well established knowledge of scales, arps etc and continue to warm up with and review, refine and study this material, I tend to improvise around melodies especially in the beginning of a solo, becoming more harmonic as things unfold. It seems my improvisations are guided by my store house of tunes and melodic phrases that I have gathered over the years rather than scale/arp theory. Its kind of obvious and simple sounding as I read what I have written but simple and obvious is good right?
all the best
TimLast edited by TLerch; 05-03-2016 at 12:37 PM.
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There's quite a bit of detail on how Tal learned and practiced here. From what is implied here (and said in other interviews), he could read notes, he just couldn't sight read. That's true of quite a few very advanced players (and a bunch of no-hopers like me ...) He clearly had a very well developed understanding of harmony and composition. Originally Posted by goldenwave77
Tal Farlow Interview
My take on the OP: Scales and arps tell you what pitch collections are available for a given tune/changes. That's it. They don't tell you about time, phrasing, timbre, dynamics, complementing what other musicians are doing, or when how to go outside. That's the real stuff music is made of. IME, the path to that is not through academic study of "theory". Rather, it's through:
Transcribing/imitating good music
Playing with other people
Starting with simple (mostly diatonic) melodic ideas/phrases and developing them.
Playing a lot of blues
Specifically to the question of how to solve the "gap" between understanding theory and actually being able to play, it happened to me the other way round. By doing the above I could play semi-decently (mainly blues and R&B at first) before I really knew what I was doing. I have more formal knowledge than I did many years ago, and that has helped me improve and given me more ideas about what notes to use, subs, comping. But actually playing (including finding myself on stage in contexts for which I was completely unprepared formally) is what got me to learn how to play, not thinking about how to play.
John
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scales and arps played straight (but rhythmically correctly so that the right notes fall on the strong parts of the bar) - are primarily for the development of physical technique
at the beginning it seems like they're mainly to find out where all the notes are - but this is wrong. melodies you love tell you where the notes are. but you have to live with them for ages and play them all the time for them to do what they need to do to you.
if you fail to appreciate that the point of scales is to learn to play notes smoothly and musically all over the instrument - and continue to believe that the point of them is to show you where the notes are so you know what to play - you will be shocked and disheartened to discover that after learning loads of scales and arps you're playing still sounds awful
there is no way to derive musical inspiration from straight scales and arps. they give you a chance to spend the requisite number of hours playing notes on your instrument for you to be able to play them smoothly and at tempo.
they help with how to play NOT WITH WHAT TO PLAY.
i think you should get pretty much all your ideas about what to play from
1 - the standard repertoire (easy to love; i'm glad there is you; indiana; strictly confidential; celia; dewey square) - from the tunes themselves to start with
2 - jazz solos of the very very great players (no point in spending all that time on okay solos - bird has got to be the first port of call here for any mainstream jazz player)
3 - musical patterns derived from scales and arpeggios
but you had better not let 3 take over from 1 and 2 here - because you'll sound worse than you need to if you do.
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the best kinds of scales are probably 3 octave ones - because they develop physical fluency fastest. it does not matter AT ALL that you will not 'use' them in soloing - you'd better not.
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if you know 30 standard tunes really well (can sing them and the bass lines etc. etc. - fill in gaps in the melody - embellish the melody etc.) - then you should have no problem with HAVING musical ideas. it will just happen.
the fact that you can 'find' or 'see' scales and arpeggio fragments in e.g. charlie parker solos does not mean that they are really there or that the solos are constructed out of them. scales and arpeggios don't really exist - they are ABSTRACTIONS from what really exists which is just the music.
scales and arpeggios have their home in our attempts to DESCRIBE the music - not in the music itself.
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I think Tim Lerch and John A. nailed it here.
Clearly you must develop your technique and musical knowledge of theory in service to freeing your creativity to express what you hear. But all the technique in the world will not in itself make you a great jazz improviser. I think for that you have to go deeper or have a gift for melody like Chick Correa or Keith Jarrett.
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I found that arpeggios indeed had gaps in them. I filled them with notes in the scale. I also found that scales had gaps in them. I discovered I could fill them with chromatic notes. I found that chromatic notes had gaps between them. When I played them, people noticed. Originally Posted by mooncef
Then I tuned my guitar.
David
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[QUOTE=John A.;647002]There's quite a bit of detail on how Tal learned and practiced here. From what is implied here (and said in other interviews), he could read notes, he just couldn't sight read.
I wasn't aware of this interview. It goes into a lot more detail than the one I'd read which is in a compilation of interviews from about 25 players that I think were originally in Guitar Player Magazine. In the Guitar Player interview, he talked about his early musical start....listening to tunes on the radio and figuring them out. Later on, he mentions being embarrassed in recording sessions while the others had to wait for him to figure out things, due to his reading lack. Pretty sure the interview closes with the question "Any closing advice...?" And I think his answer was "Learn to read...". Maybe he had his audience esp. in mind: a lot of teenagers read Guitar Player, so maybe he didn't want to give the impression that musical skill or training can just be ignored.
I do think a lot of novice players get thrown for a loop...they hear, "Learn arpeggios" and "play chord tones", and from that conclude that drilling the patterns, allows one to ...compose...which is really what jazz is ...in the moment, on the spot, composition.
As a bunch of posters point out, the drills are probably necessary, but not sufficient.Last edited by goldenwave77; 05-03-2016 at 05:42 PM.
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You've got to be able to play the patterns, sequences, arpeggios , scales, because they comprise everything basically , in one form or another. Anyone device, and isolation's pretty worthless.
Doesn't take long to figure out that scales, played straight up and down, get you almost nowhere. By comparison, arpeggios are a lot better . Feels like you're doing at least something more . Targeting patterns and learning to hear melodic patterns as basically targeting is THAT much better as well again.
Jimmy amadie's improv book sums up most of improvisation as being basically about tension and release. It's a very basic concept, but most of us just don't hear that way when we're learning all the stuff with arpeggios and scales.
I mean, looking at non-chord tones TENSIONS , which can be wailed on as long as they resolve is VASTLY DIFFERENT, philosophically, from simply viewing them as in-between notes to get from one chord tone to another.
Once you learn to hear things in terms of tension and release, and also as targeting patterns, you realize that THAT'S what all the interval exercises over scales, the Jazz patterns etc., actually are about. Once you start studying the targettinf patterns, you also quickly get an idea of where your fundamentals are lacking.
It's all valuable but you kind of have to know how to actually use it. I'm still working on it. :-)Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 05-03-2016 at 03:49 PM.
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I think you're right, Tim. Melodies teach the shape of a singable phrase. The more of those you know---and regularly play--the more likely you are to phrase like that when improvising. (At least, that's my theory... ;o) Originally Posted by TLerch
Last edited by MarkRhodes; 05-03-2016 at 08:57 PM. Reason: editing
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