The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #76

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    i'm a horn guy. i love mobley, morgan, dorham, trane, bird, newk, mclean, dex, dolphy, grossman, etc.

    jazz guitar usually bores me. i *never* listen to players like rosenwinkel, kreisberg, lage, grasso, metheny, scofield, etc. it's not my cup of tea.

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  3. #77

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    Quote Originally Posted by djg
    i'm a horn guy. i love mobley, morgan, dorham, trane, bird, newk, mclean, dex, dolphy, grossman, etc.

    jazz guitar usually bores me. i *never* listen to players like rosenwinkel, kreisberg, lage, grasso, metheny, scofield, etc. it's not my cup of tea.
    you and me both (no bird on your list??). I've always listened to Wes a lot - he's the one exception for me.

    I've never thought that I have a problem copying Hank Mobley because I play guitar - though now saxologic has turned me on to this basic phrasing issue I think the stuff I work out will sound much better.

    this phrasing issue may be a large part of the reason why guitarists tend to be less musically engaging. I think Wes and Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall (Pete Bernstein), Grant Green are the guitarists who most obviously phrase in a natural way (I bet Pasquale Grasso has worked on it too - need to check him out)

  4. #78

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    Quote Originally Posted by Groyniad
    you and me both (no bird on your list??). I've always listened to Wes a lot - he's the one exception for me.

    I've never thought that I have a problem copying Hank Mobley because I play guitar - though now saxologic has turned me on to this basic phrasing issue I think the stuff I work out will sound much better.

    this phrasing issue may be a large part of the reason why guitarists tend to be less musically engaging. I think Wes and Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall (Pete Bernstein), Grant Green are the guitarists who most obviously phrase in a natural way (I bet Pasquale Grasso has worked on it too - need to check him out)
    grant had it all figured out. imo he was also the first jazz guitarist who made effective use of the amp for phrasing purposes. and it's no wonder that drummers loved him. grasso wouldn't last 5 minutes with a drummer like blakey or elvin.

    i'm not a huge fan of books but this is a good one adressing the exact topic of this thread.

    https://www.alle-noten.de/out/pictur.../1/CE00164.jpg

  5. #79

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    Listening to and transcribing horn players =/= trying to 'do' saxophone on guitar

    I think it's entirely possible to overthink this stuff. It's not really something that can be sensibly discussed on a jazz forum because its very personal. Exercises can help cultivate the technique to phrase in different ways, but ultimately it's intuitive and based on the ears.

    Listening to other instruments is a great way to get ideas. Other people would rather imitate other guitar players. Many people go through phases? Pat Metheny started off copying Wes, but he was influenced by other instruments as well.

    I have to say though - if it wasn't for guitarists influenced by the saxophone and trumpet we'd all be playing chord solos still. The single note thing comes from an impulse to play like a horn. So make of that what you will.

    Anyway, I like slurring. It is natural to the guitar and sounds good. I prefer to do that now than pick every note like I did about 5 years ago. I like the way you can get more phrasing in the line. Jim Hall, Wes Montgomery, Grant Green and Jimmy Raney all used slurs a lot.... If people want to pick every note that's cool too, but it gives you a different type of phrasing.

    On sax, I hear it like the difference between Parker, say, and Dexter Gordon. Raney reminds me of the former, (early) Pat Martino reminds me more of the latter.

    Technically, the most important thing, and one of the key areas to work on with many guitar players, is to maintain a legato line. Django and Charlie Christian could do this just as much as Gilad Hekselman or Mike Moreno. It means paying attention to the way the notes join up. However you achieve this is up to you. Pat Martino sound legato even though he picks every note, because he has great hook up between the two hands, for example.

    You want to be able to have one note sounding at a time without too much of a gap between notes or over-ring between strings (electric is less forgiving here than acoustic). It doesn't matter how you do this so much, but you probably will need to work on this if its not something you've thought about. However you do it, you need to work on synching the two hands.

    I would say; if you've only listened to jazz guitar, your grasp of the music is likely to be quite limited. But if you want to play Wes tunes in an organ trio, or Gypsy jazz, or whatever, does it matter?

    This might sound odd as people probably think of me as straight-ahead jazzer; but it wasn't actually the guitar that drew me personally to jazz. I got into jazz through horn players and I liked the way McCoy Tyner played piano. Jazz guitarists always sounded a bit boring to me at first, though I liked Django, Charlie Christian, John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth, who sounded less noodly and insipid to me than the 50/60s guys.

    This is not what I think now, obviously... But even now I hear non-guitarist jazz musicians say that sort of thing, actually. These players play great, so this is not coming from a place of ignorance, but rather one of taste... straight ahead jazz guitar is kind of a niche if you've listened to the tonal possibilities rock and post-rock players offer. (I'm always happy to strap on a tele and go at it with some pedals. Drive gets you more in the horn ballpark, of course.)

    So, I was never that interested in copying Wes at the age of 19. And, I think that was fine. People sound the way they do because of who they listen to.

  6. #80

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    Quote Originally Posted by djg
    grant had it all figured out. imo he was also the first jazz guitarist who made effective use of the amp for phrasing purposes. and it's no wonder that drummers loved him. grasso wouldn't last 5 minutes with a drummer like blakey or elvin.

    i'm not a huge fan of books but this is a good one adressing the exact topic of this thread.

    https://www.alle-noten.de/out/pictur.../1/CE00164.jpg
    Yep. No disrespect to Pasquale. But the way those guys played wouldn't have allowed Pasquale's way of playing. (BTW Pasquale sets his amp to sit slightly under the level of the drums when playing live which is very interesting.)

    Grant's playing just cuts through, has that edge. I find myself coming back to him more and more. The amp sound, as you say.... I think he got that from Charlie Christian's tone.

    Furthermore, the people I have found most enthusiastic about Grant are not guitar players, but horn players and drummers. They hear his playing in a different way to guitarists. Grant is no-ones idea of a guitarist's guitarist. It's easy to lose sight of how irrelevant a lot of the things we obsess over are to players of other instruments.

    So; is Grant a horn influenced or guitaristic player? To which the answer is yes. Just as it is for Wes, Charlie Christian, Django, Allan, Raney et al.

  7. #81

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    Quote Originally Posted by Groyniad
    have you heard Veronica Swift Christian?
    Well, she's clearly never listened to horn players being a singer. (jk)

  8. #82

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Technically, the most important thing, and one of the key areas to work on with many guitar players, is to maintain a legato line.
    many very good points. but i would totally disagree with the above sentence.

    i think that one of the most fundamental aspects of jazz phrasing is that the notes need to be separated from each other.

  9. #83

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    I think the reason saxologic has managed to set out something very general that isn't particularly personal about jazz phrasing - the 'slip into the chord tones phrasing pattern' (if you like), and the stress on downbeats ascending and upbeats descending - is that he's done a whole load of classical sax, and he has learned what it is that accomplished classical sax players consistently tend to get wrong, the thing that tends to stop them sounding good.

    what has stopped me getting this consistently (even though most of the best things I play will tend to fall in with it) is that whenever I work anything out or put something together I have to shoe-horn it into one or other known fingering position. and I do this, not just for something like convenience - but because it's only the position-fingerings that tell me where the bloody notes are on the guitar.

    already after just two days of working out fingerings that allow me to slip into the chord tones from below (ascending) and above (descending) - the instrument feels very different and everything sounds more natural. I don't care that it's a daunting task to internalise new fingering patterns - because I'm so bored of phrasing in unmusical ways. the other hugely positive thing about this is that it gives you a reason to favour one set of fingering patterns over all the other possible ones (which you have to exclude somehow because they bog you down in endless, pointless, equivalences).

    Saxologic starts by considering how the Parker phrase would sound if you slurred all of it (something we would find very hard to do but which is easy on wind instruments) - he doesn't even consider the possibility of playing it ALL tongued (picked)! If you slur out of the chord tones instead of into them (1-2; 3-4; 5-6) it sounds crap. And when you have this slurring pattern setting the basic phrase-framework you're hitting the change in a whole new groovier and less wooden way.

    who has tried the relevant phrasing pattern and found:

    that they already do it
    or
    that they don't already do it but aren't interested in it?

  10. #84

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    Quote Originally Posted by djg
    many very good points. but i would totally disagree with the above sentence.

    i think that one of the most fundamental aspects of jazz phrasing is that the notes need to be separated from each other.
    I'm talking about technique.

  11. #85

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    Quote Originally Posted by Groyniad
    already after just two days of working out fingerings that allow me to slip into the chord tones from below (ascending) and above (descending) - the instrument feels very different and everything sounds more natural. I don't care that it's a daunting task to internalise new fingering patterns - because I'm so bored of phrasing in unmusical ways. the other hugely positive thing about this is that it gives you a reason to favour one set of fingering patterns over all the other possible ones (which you have to exclude somehow because they bog you down in endless, pointless, equivalences).
    absolutely. the good thing is, jazz phrasing is a percentage play. if your phrasing is good in general you can get away with the occasional slur into the off-beat. see 60s pat martino (like with stitt and patterson) who attacks less notes than people think. the solos on donna lee or now's the time are fantastic studies in hard-bop phrasing.

  12. #86

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    Interesting. I bow to your superior knowledge on Pat! I assume he picked every note.... all of which kind of underlines the point really .

  13. #87

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    Scale outlines
    I tend to do like this:

    ascending accent the first of the four note groupings (beat 1 and beat 3) and for descending accent mostly “+”

    i agree with accenting downbeats when ascending and accenting upbeats when descending. But to a different degree. I prefer to be very subtle when doing the accents on downbeats and less subtle on upbeat accents. If I accent as heavily on the accents ascending it sounds corny to me, like Lawrence Welk swing. Thus accenting the first of four note groupings on the downbeats smooths it out.

    What do do you think about that?

  14. #88

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Interesting. I bow to your superior knowledge on Pat! I assume he picked every note.... all of which kind of underlines the point really .

    pat attacked more notes as his career progressed into fusion and rock territory. i guess he started out picking almost everything as a kid in his johnny smith phase, then applied wes' phrasing around the time he was with willis jackson (he paraphrases wes' solo on satin doll for example) and went to attacking more notes during his "sunny" and "along came betty" phase.










  15. #89

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    but ultimately none of this matters, because some of the best jazz phrasing is played on the hammond organ, where there is no slurring or tonguing. it's also non-legato.

    edit: man, that eddie mcfadden solo is so good, that's the jazz guitar i love. bouncing, yet so comfortably behind the beat. non-legato. mcfadden captured bird's spirit like few other guitarists, he's so underrated.


  16. #90

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    in general I've always been so concerned with what to play that I've put way too little energy into how to play it - how to 'articulate' it (picked/notpicked).

    getting clear - thanks to Chad and Saxologic - that there is a whole stress and slur pattern (an articulation pattern) that is rhythmically natural and that differentiates between an ascending feel and a descending feel: this is fascinating stuff. (Chad gave examples from both Pres and Dexter - and made very confident claims about how basic and widespread it is.) It suddenly gives me musical reasons (not just fretboard geometry reasons) to move one way rather than another on the fret board - and it feels punchy at the same time as being smoother.

    sliding into chord tones the whole time is a big deal too - both in terms of time feel and harmony

    and I'm immediately cutting the number of times the pick hits the string in half

  17. #91

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    Quote Originally Posted by Groyniad
    and I'm immediately cutting the number of times the pick hits the string in half
    downstrokes...

  18. #92

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    I always feel the accented upbeats descending.

    However, I’m not so sure I play and feel accented downbeats in ascending lines. Perhaps it’s a minimum or no accenting of the upbeats in the ascending lines. Or perhaps simply accenting the first eight note in groups of four eighth notes.

  19. #93

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    I finally watched the Chad vid, sorry I din't before it's hard for me to watch vids ATM.

    Been talking a bit at cross purposes. Sorry the Moreno thing doesn't address what Chad is talking about at all.

    It's interesting what he says - if I do this already (which I think I might do?) it's something I intuit more than I have thought about.

    (Probably like most?) I learn solos by singing phrases. When I sing the phrases I connect the scat syllables the way that seems to reflect the phrasing to me. I then put them on guitar in whatever way feels most natural to the shape of the phrase. I've done a fair amount of classic sax stuff; the two examples he plays I know from the record a few years back, and sing with that phrasing, although it's not something I'd ever thought about.

    Technically, its more important to teach most students to feel accents on the upbeat than the downbeat, because they can usually already do the latter. The aim of accenting the ands as an exercise is not to teach players to always accent upbeats, but rather bring the upbeat up to the level of importance of the downbeat in the musical mind of the player. Similarly, we teach legato on the guitar because it's harder to do for most students than detached articulation (see above.) Most beginners play detached, right?

    So it's just an exercise to develop control. In combination with lots and lots of listening, it should allow players to hear and apply the appropriate accents and articulations. But it can be useful to have things like this pointed out. The better you get the more you hear...

    So, I say this because I thought I just accented mostly upbeats because that's what I had practiced. But - playing some lines on the guitar. I do seem to accent the downbeats on ascending figures. But, of course I'm now aware of it! For me its more a hearing thing than a technique thing, although using slurs etc can bring out the detail, the most important thing is to audiate the phrasing.

    So let me put it this way - if I don't already do it, I think it would be natural to make the transition to doing it.

    As a theory it seems fun, and I'll listen out for it.
    Last edited by christianm77; 11-11-2020 at 07:53 PM.

  20. #94

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    Quote Originally Posted by Groyniad
    because a string change forces you to 'tongue' (pick) the note on the new string (if you hammer onto it you don't get the same slur sound, but its not as bad as actually picking it)

    you need different fingering patterns ascending and descending to keep the natural slur-pattern going

    if you play through e.g. Chad's enclosure exercises without this slur-pattern in mind it doesn't really work - but if you use this slur pattern it really works

    you could quite easily pick this up on a horn without focusing on any of it - on the guitar you have to work hard with your fingerings to make it possible

    I knew people would be negative about this - but read over the thread and stop being so defensive about the guitar people!
    I'm not being negative about it. Thanks for the explanation.

    I guess there are few lines where I would try to emulate a sax, but not many. Some would say that trying to follow a slippery sax around on the guitar is a fools errand, and others would just say it's a ..... choice.

    I really loved Holdsworth's playing but I would never want to emulate him. Speaking as a listener, all that legato playing begins to bore me after awhile, but that's just me. To each his own.

    But - approach notes and enclosures are a valuable study regardless.

  21. #95

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    Test: Run the Barry Harris “scale outlines”, meaning play scales in eighth notes up to the 7th on a bunch of medium
    tempo swing tunes. And try accenting the down beats. I think it sounds better not to accent them... except maybe on strong beats 1 and on beat 3 (Coltrane style 4 notes groupings.
    Accenting all the downbeats in the scale when ascending scale sounds ridiculous, IMO. I have been listening to the Chad’s video and I notice he doesn’t systematically accent the downbeats when ascending. He does a mix of both. So I am puzzled why he claims it is some great secret.
    Last edited by rintincop; 11-11-2020 at 09:12 PM.

  22. #96

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    As with pretty much all ‘rules’ and ‘theory’ in jazz probably best to view this is a guideline or helpful practice exercise rather than a cast iron rule.

    There is no jazz theory really; only jazz advice, because the sounding music itself is definitive, and theoretical ideas always represent a distillation of the real thing through the filter of that particular musician’s ears and sensibility.

    Chad LB clearly found it helpful to practice this. And he’s quite good at saxophone you know :-)

    His phrasing on the etudes fits what I would think as idiomatic bop; and if you start to feel that pitches, rhythms and accents are all interconnected parts of the language you are on the right track IMO. Just like spoken language, stress and prosody are as important as the pronunciation of individual syllables.

    For bop phrasing especially in Parker, I’d look out for accents that fit the clave as well.

  23. #97

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    I'm glad you recognise something important in it Christian. I totally agree that after listening obsessively for so long and playing so much we do it a lot of the time without realising it. but I think when I sound wooden and typewriter-esque I'm not doing it.

    I learned guitar in the most horribly self-conscious way starting at about 22 - I had nothing but Ted Greene's seven (six?) positions etc. etc. - and they have provided the fret-board-framework I've been working with ever since. This phrasing advice (or this observation about a prevalent characteristic of the music) cuts right through all my positions and generates much more flowing sounding and better accented lines.

    he's some player - I'm blown away. I love how he brings Hank Mobley and Sonny together - and his enclosure/approach tone exercises are very powerful I think.

    I'm also - incidentally - blown away by Benny Benack (III) and Veronica Swift (my close friend who plays bass in New York turned me on to these last two last week. he thinks Veronica is the most exciting young thing in town - I find it hard to imagine how anyone could be more exciting!)

    but I love their phrasing - all three of them. it's great for me to hear young guys/girls who seem to have the same attitude towards bird, Clifford and sonny (et. al) as I do.

  24. #98

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    Quote Originally Posted by djg
    downstrokes...
    yes - almost all now it seems

    I haven't been pushing the tempos yet (which might encourage one to use upstrokes too) - but do you think its better to use downstrokes as much as possible?

    it seems to go very well with a Wes-type approach - the thumb suddenly seems like a real option (and it never has seemed that way to me before)

  25. #99

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    I like downstrokes. I practiced a lot playing each new string with a downstroke (Gypsy/Joe Pass style.)

    But these days I have no idea what my right hand is doing. I find it best not to ask most of the time.

  26. #100

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    Quote Originally Posted by Groyniad
    yes - almost all now it seems

    I haven't been pushing the tempos yet (which might encourage one to use upstrokes too) - but do you think its better to use downstrokes as much as possible?

    it seems to go very well with a Wes-type approach - the thumb suddenly seems like a real option (and it never has seemed that way to me before)
    yes to downstrokes.

    and every wes fan needs to go through a thumb phase. it is so helpful with the phrasing. not only the challenge of finding good fingerings to slur into the beat. but you can also slur into every quarternote, giving every note some english. it's fun to practice and really exaggerate this tendency that wes has. maybe learn the solo to west coast blues, with your thumb of course. the tempo is humane and the lines are great with good fingerings being relatively easy to find. or the single line portion of gone with the wind, or d-natural blues.