The Bebop Line that Keeps on Giving

[Groyniad]

Okay ... they are studies ... things you practice for purposes of working a particular concept into your playing.

What be the alternative if you don't mind my asking? How does your practice become "actual music?" Honestly it's hard to say if it can be. What do you consider the alternative?

there isn't one i don't think - and i didn't mean to imply that there was - i tried to make it clear that i thought etudes could play a very valuable role in practice...


but in general:

isn't it a bit of a mystery for all of us exactly how practice relates to performance? (except in the most obvious way that if you practice a head over and over, playing it well in performance will be the direct result of practicing it again and again)

i get confused about whether to think of practice as something utterly different from performance - and e.g. do lots of work on physical technique - and try to just let things happen in performance

or whether to get as close as possible to performance in practice - and e.g. - do lots of playing through tunes, soloing to backing tracks etc.

- in my case, even when i practice right hand stuff i have to make what i play singable - so useable in performance (just) - because i just can't stand to hear musically meaningless patterns.

my big thing with actual scales is to play them in such a way that they sit right on the bar - either by adding notes - or by extending the range of the scale e.g. to the 9th etc. etc.

i think that using scales to tell you where the notes are is probably a mistake - little musical ideas do that job better. just the sort of thing you're sharing here in fact.

[Groyniad]

Okay? We can agree that APPLICATION is the most important part, and always will be . What's the point? Do you think Coltrane and Parker knew their arpeggios? If they worked on them/studied them to any degree, do you think they were wasting their time?

i think coltrane probably did play a lot of scales and arps - or at least very abstract patterns (1,2,3,5 - famously)

but i very much doubt that parker did

i bet they became musical ideas under his fingers absolutely instantly - and then he would play with those

that's my (pure) guess

[matt.guitarteacher]

i think coltrane probably did play a lot of scales and arps - or at least very abstract patterns (1,2,3,5 - famously)

but i very much doubt that parker did

i bet they became musical ideas under his fingers absolutely instantly - and then he would play with those

that's my (pure) guess

1235's aren't really very abstract though. Playing through the cycle, the last two notes form an enclosure for the succeeding 1 in the next chord. Speaking of which, you can do the same thing with arpeggios by resolving in the opposite direction of the arpeggio etc.

Anyway, it's kind of the job of the practicing musician, at some point, to make music out of things like arpeggios. ( of course, to be able to make something musical out of an arpeggio and not sound like you are "just playing arpeggios" , requires that you actually be able to play them in the first place.) I don't know how you get there without practicing them at some point. To play them in isolation and then, insist that they aren't musical isn't really "getting" the point of them, at least the way I would like to think of them.

There just seem to be too many great players that played the crap out of scales and arpeggios, at some point in their development, regardless of how much of a percentage of their practice time it was. I would think, at some point, you have to spend SOME time PLAYING arpeggios to get to the point where you DON'T "just play arpeggios ". It's like this recurring statement with people telling beginners about "just 12 notes", when they can't even play a major scale.

Again, I agree with you that you HAVE to make music out of them.

[Groyniad]

we're in broad agreement - i'm sure

and i have spent a lot of time practicing things i thought of as scales and arpeggios - mainly to try to find out where any of the notes were (in the first place, so to speak)

but i tend to think this practice undermined as well as developed my hold on the music

you can make melodies more easily out of little melodic fragments - quotes even, or semi-quotes, more readily than you can make them out of arpeggios and scales

if you work with fragments of parker solos for example you're working with musical units that have a strong rhythmical identity. they sit in the bar in a purposive and clear way (you might say).

so right away, if you're working with that sort of unit and chasing it around through a given sound or whatever - you're playing with musical purpose and listening to musical things happen (e.g. the way it sounds here rather than here etc. etc.).

and that's true for fragments of popular tunes as well as a fragments of parker solos.

i suspect that if you start with something you're thinking of as an arpeggio its very hard to end up with something that feels like a melody (or a bit of one). and its better to work with bits of melodic material you've picked up - and worked with (maybe by analyzing their harmonic content and working them through an arpeggio or chord etc.) - than it is to work directly with the scales and arps themselves.

[pamosmusic]

we're in broad agreement - i'm sure

....

i suspect that if you start with something you're thinking of as an arpeggio its very hard to end up with something that feels like a melody (or a bit of one). and its better to work with bits of melodic material you've picked up - and worked with (maybe by analyzing their harmonic content and working them through an arpeggio or chord etc.) - than it is to work directly with the scales and arps themselves.

I guess on the idea of "lines being more musical than scales and arpeggios" then we are in broad agreement but the point of practicing like this, for me, was to sort of eliminate the need for there to be much of a distinction at all. I think the distinction is a little weird. Like by taking a line and transcribing it diatonically you're making your using the line to practice your scales and your other arpeggios. If you alter it you can use it to practice your other inversions ... or anything else you can dream up. How you come at them might make the practice more useful for technique or fretboard knowledge or improvising but whether or not you call it scale practice or shedding lines is sort of irrelevant.

I'm doing the opposite right now with major triads. Forcing myself to use nothing but those notes to make up my own lines. Trying to make them as pretty or interesting as humanly possible with zero extra spice. There's a lot of value there too. While I agree that, if you had to pick one over the other, the lines would be more musical and useful than the scales and arpeggios - I think that ideally there's very little distinction. They're both supposed to be tools for creating music and they each are incredibly interactive with the other.

[pamosmusic]

It's a weird thing realising melodies and music is made of scales and arpeggios. I guess it's because scales and arpeggios don't always sound like beautiful music but just like nuts and bolts. However they're a big part of what makes music music.

Yea that's sort of an opposite challenge. Maybe a thread related to that sort of thing would be useful as well!

[Groyniad]

i'm with you pm - you want a half-way house between the bare abstract patterns (scales/arps) and the fully fledged musical ideas - and i think the way you're doing it is fantastic.

maybe the biggest difference between a mere scale and an idea is their rhythmical feel. the idea has a rythmic identity that a scale fragment lacks.

but the distinction can be taken to a vanishing point

[Groyniad]

as soon as you use a scale or arp fragment to do something musical it ceases to be a scale or an arp fragment and becomes a melody or a bit of one (so whether something is a scale etc. or a melody doesn't depend on the notes but on the way they're being used)

there will be - i guess - little magic moments when you're successful with the 'triads' - and they're moments when a bit of mere musical logic is transmuted into a bit of music