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Ok, so I don't know how that's called, the not-licks.
Some musicians keeps licks, or lines, in their bag of tricks that they throw out in an improvisation every once in a while. How much of licks do you use in your solo's? And how much have you kept in your arsenal? Or do you even believe in using them?
Personally, I don't like the idea of using pre-made lines during improvisation, but I find that I use some lines repeatedly. Sometimes I record myself and recognize some lines that's similar to some of the artists I've been listening to. So maybe I am using a collection of lines, but nothing that I've really practiced, except maybe two lines that got stuck with me. I find more soul in playing what I imagine to hear next, instead of forcing a line I've learned over a progression that's coming. However, I find it difficult to create a good line with this.
What are your thoughts on this one? Should a musician use licks, or to each his own?
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04-03-2010 02:11 PM
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I find I end up repeating ideas when I solo over the same progression a lot, but think that's fairly natural - there are only so many things you can do over a ii-V-I really (I'm far from exhausting that list of "many things" but you get the point - the harmony sometimes dictates the shape of the line to an extent).
I'll no doubt be increasing (actively as well) my licks bag over time. Right now it's terribly low stocked. But I also want to really develop my ear to play only what I hear whenever possible. Don't really see why the dichotomy seems so stark though.
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I've heard Pat Metheny and Carl Verheyan both say that on a good night only about 30% of their improvisation is new material...
Licks, it's not a dirty word, it just means jazz vocabulary.
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I'm not sure if we are all on the same page - let me try to differentiate my definition of licks and ideas. For me, I call those lines that is practiced and repeated exactly as is in an improvisation as licks.. And for ideas, these are sounds or concepts that I repeat, over changes. For example, that melodic minor sound over a V7 or that chromatic line I always hear musicians do (it's E-F-F#-G in the key of C), and playing around with their motif, making it longer or shorter as I want to. Sometimes even changing the motif.
So given this, you think I should start keeping licks, or is keeping ideas enough? Or should I treat all licks as ideas - practice them first then reverse engineer the sound, so I can manipulate them as I improvise? I find the latter difficult, the two lines I've learned are still coming out as is when I play because my fingers have memorized them - maybe I haven't practiced enough, and I should focus on this?
Just want to know your thoughts, to get an idea of how other players think.
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...that chromatic line I always hear musicians do (it's E-F-F#-G in the key of C)...
Originally Posted by rjtorres
I'm not sure if we are all on the same page - let me try to differentiate my definition of licks and ideas. For me, I call those lines that is practiced and repeated exactly as is in an improvisation as licks.. And for ideas, these are sounds or concepts that I repeat, over changes. For example, that melodic minor sound over a V7 or that chromatic line I always hear musicians do (it's E-F-F#-G in the key of C), and playing around with their motif, making it longer or shorter as I want to. Sometimes even changing the motif.
So given this, you think I should start keeping licks, or is keeping ideas enough? Or should I treat all licks as ideas - practice them first then reverse engineer the sound, so I can manipulate them as I improvise? I find the latter difficult, the two lines I've learned are still coming out as is when I play because my fingers have memorized them - maybe I haven't practiced enough, and I should focus on this?
Just want to know your thoughts, to get an idea of how other players think.
that's a lick, and if you change it ryhthmically or in some other way it's still an idea based on a lick.
I'm an advocate of a lick diary, that's how I remember licks and ideas. Otherwise I'm off to another idea before I've memorized the previous idea.
I like to practice my licks as my technical excercises. Beats the heck out of practicing dry scales or arps. And your practicing material you can use when playing music.
One way I like to practice a lick is: Play along with BIAB, play the lick and then make up a line that goes along well with the lick, then vary the lick, then another complementary line...etc.
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One of my uni teachers taught me to learn it then forget it. learn the lick and practice it over as many different chords as possible then never think of it again. In that way it ends up creaping into your playing not as a lick but a springboard into other ideas.
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Bird used licks, even if he didn't consciously do so- there's been so many books about it.
The trick is that you don't play them always the same- you modify them, use them as motifs. Think of the lick as a jig for making a new improvisation- there to provide a sort of 'shape'.
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Alright, thank you for the ideas guys.
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Wow, licks, in my opinion, asides from "genre (what is improv, free/avante gaurde/legit jazz) is the touchiest subject.
Obviously, different players have different theories. Emily Remler said that it is impossible for anyone to improvise 100% of the time, and only guys like Wes and Trane would use licks 30 %. Meanwhile Scott Henderson says 50% is licks and 50% is what we've never played before. Now if we look at a guy like Jimmy Rainey, his playing was really based on motives, line conforment and manipulating those chromatic ideas, so I wouldn't consider him or a guy like Jim Hall, who uses space and time, motives a ideas rather than licks verbatim, lick-players.
We must be careful with the word "lick," because playing something verbatum unless playing it deliberately can be dangerous. How many times have you walked into a music store and some kid was regergitating licks vs playing ideas?
Ah, ideas are different from licks. Ideas, IMHO are cells, patterns, motifs, figures ect that we practice and learn ( even chromatic bop lines) yet never play verbatim, we apply these ideas or concepts. Meanwhile a lick is taking a phrase made up of multiple ideas and playing it verbatim.
So for example, if I heard a 1,2,3,5 using a maj 7 as an embellishment over a ii chord and connected it to a V7 #5b9 arp, and learned that lick, rather than realize what comprises that lick, the three ideas (the cell, embellishment and arp) I would be confined and try to play that lick verbatim in all 12 keys. I wouldn't accomplish what I would if I would learn the ideas that comprised the licks then applied them.
Think of this: try playing straight 8ths over a turnaround, outlining the harmony. I bet you're not playing licks, but rather targeting tones and playing arpeggios. That is an "idea," not a lick. Just my HO
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Let's put this discussion in a comparable context that gets used a bunch. When you start out learning to speak, you use simple words you learn mimicking your parents. After a bit, you begin to string a few words together to get some simple sentences.
By the time you get to school, you know maybe 100-200 words. By the time you finish HS, you have a several thousand words in your vocab. However, you continue to use the same words you learned when you first started to speak. But now, these words are improvised, as you are not aping anyone, but are spontaneously taking these words and reforming them to create new sentences to reflect your unique thoughts and ideas.
However, we still use common or current phrases and words like "Dude", "No way", etc, that everyone seems to use from time to time. I think licks are like this. We start off learning what others have said, and eventually, we reshuffle, and morph these things to fit our musical ideas. But you have to start somewhere. If you don't start with at least some licks, you run the risk of missing the subtle lessons on what makes jazz distinct.
Add to your licks, sequencing, intervallic stuff (ie, playing in 4ths, etc.), moving patterns around in chromatic, minor 3rs, etc., arps and scale runs. These things become the glue that connect one musical phrase to another. After a while, you are able to get closer to saying what you want to on the instrument. At least that is what I am finding out.Last edited by derek; 04-05-2010 at 11:10 AM.
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derek, I agree with you.
at the risk of losing all jazz-credibility with this post....
I've listened to a lot of hip hop. I like it. Well, some of it. I like the guys who can freestyle well, and found listening to the way rappers (some of them) tell their stories can have analogies to all improvisation. The best guys who freestyle spend hours, like other musicians, perfecting their craft. They keep rhyme books and will do things like come up with as many different ways to rhyme one word with another. But I find it easy to spot which words are a given rapper's "favourite" - these are the ones that get returned to in rhyme after rhyme (or even in the same tune). Sometimes it's whole sentences or groups of sentences, other times it'll just be the rhyming word(s). Stuff like rhyming "mental" with words like "coincidental" "fundamental" "elemental" "dental" etc. Though you pick up on those "favoured rhymes" the story wrapped around those rhymes will often change.
Other people, and Lupe Fiasco is a key guy I think of here, have certain techniques they use quite extensively. One thing Lupe does is describe, e.g. the ghettos, using the human body as his, uh, skeleton (see wut I did there?). He'll literally go from head to toe saying stuff like "they do drive bys, like up and down the thighs..." - but the human body image helps to structure his collections of images. Or he'll come up with a bunch of lines where there's word play on a load of popular fast food chains - using their names as metaphors or other parts of speech, but telling a story that has nothing to do with those establishments per se. Both those devices help him structure his lines, and you can bet he's given a lot of thought when not improvising rhymes to what words and images each device affords him.
I think of licks and ideas as being one and the same thing - no one wants to hear you play the same one bar lick, same notes, same rhythm on everything, but you might have an idea (e.g. start on the 9th of G when soloing over All Blues - one I recently tried and liked) and that will direct your playing somewhat. But you also have to work out and trial various licks in the practice room using that idea as your focus. Any good stuff that comes out, you'll no doubt want to play again. Those licks stay and can be used as licks or as basis for further development. It's important to work at the latter, but you need the former to start work on the latter, imvho. Doing that with All Blues is what really nailed "the sound of the 9th over a 7th chord" for me - there's no way I could have heard and executed that sound proficiently before really owning that sound, but it was developing some licks where that was the prominent feature that nailed it for me.
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I think "jazz vocabulary" is the better term than licks. For one thing, we don't just love jazz because what we might play next but because of great things that were played before---solos we can 'sing' along with a record. Learning to play some of those is a joyful thing, just as learning to play some great old tunes is fun even though we didn't create them. Put another way, you can be a great singer without being a great songwriter too!
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Originally Posted by derek
Bur Derek, wouldn't you separate ideas from licks? Example-playing a scale in 3rds is an idea, playing a note in a distitnct rhythmic pattern is an idea/concept.
Meanwhile multiple ideas strung together are licks, especially those learned from others
Ex: a bop players played a chromatic idea like g,f#,f,e then either added a g or an a at the end of the idea, thusly making it a lick. Now licks become words. So players don't play the idea g,f#,f,e, but rather the lick/word g,f#f, g or a. This is where vernacular comes from
This is my beef with certain players that NEVER change thier vocabulary, and insist that the jazz language is never changing, they are clearly mostly lick players. I've heard countless players say "all you need is to get a few licks and experiment," but they never learn theory or ideas and new concepts to broaden thier playing.
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But aren't words just ideas? If I say "chair" all I'm doing is vocalising an idea of an object. All words, used in sentences or on their own are merely referents for ideas - some concrete, some abstract, some a mix of both. Now, if I talk about "the chair of King Arthur" I'm using a bunch of ideas and relationships (the ideas being chair, king, and king arthur, and the relationship being that between him and his chair). But I'm not really doing anything beyond a more complex, subtle and accurate version of simply saying "chair". Ideas and relationships - that's all there is. They're the basic building blocks of all understanding (pure maths demonstrates this - ideas in terms of numbers/letters and relationships in the use of connective symbols like + = - and so on). Everything else is just a combination of those two things.
So, a lick can be played and not fully understood by the player, or played and fully understood, or played and then used to get back to the underlying ideas and relationships upon which the lick was built. But playing a lick doesn't mean leaving the realm of ideas and relationships at all. For any communication, understanding, or knowledge, those two things (those two ideas? heh heh) are all we have.
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This fit reasonable well with my understanding: From Bars, Measures, Phrases, Motifs, Riffs, & Licks | FIX YOUR MIX .com » BLOG Originally Posted by Jazzyteach65
Some musical terms are so basic and widely used that we never stop to ask ourselves: “Hey, what is a measure? What is a riff? What is a phrase? What’s the difference between a bar and a measure?” This article should answer all of those questions for you and more.
Summary:
• Bar = measure
• Phrase = long(-ish) musical idea
• Motif = short musical idea
• Riff = lick
Phrases are mysterious creatures. The most basic definition is a musical idea. Doesn’t really explain anything, does it? Well that’s because a phrase can be just about anything. They don’t even necessarily have to be repeated. Songs can have phrases within phrases within phrases. To understand phrases, you just have to learn by example.
It can be daunting to understand what constitutes a phrase in Classical or Jazz context, but when talking about pop music it’s a little more intuitive–generally we’re talking about a section of a song with a chord progression, usually one that repeats.
If you play in a rock or pop band, using the term “phrases” is often much more useful than talking in measures: “Hey, I love that lick you play at the end of every other phrase” is much more concise and less awkward than “Hey, I love that lick you play at the end of every 8-bar section.”
Motifs
A motif is any short, repeated pattern. Usually both the melody and rhythm of this pattern are repeated–also known as a lick or a riff. If you have a motif which is purely rhythmic, it can be called a “rhythmic motif”.
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Sure you could see it that way. I tend to think of ii V I lines I cop from somewhere, and then use the above stuff, sequencing, intervals, etc., as connectors between my next ii V lick. If it is the same sequence, intevallic idea, arp run, etc., then it becomes a lick you put together and reuse, rather than someone else's. Still a lick I suppose. Originally Posted by Jazzyteach65
Yeah, the never changing thing is interesting. I get bored with my own playing before others do I find. So I am always looking for other sounds/ideas from other players to add something new.
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I find licks VERY useful in improvisation. I use them all the time. However I almost always do some sort of variation of the lick - changing the timing of it, leaving out a note or two, playing a note two or three times instead of once, adding approach tones, etc. To me licks are like mini scale patterns that I can take apart and use as needed when soloing.
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This, in my opinion is a very healthy conversation. Now that I've thought about it for over a day, the whole "lick" vs non-"lick" idea, I've come to this:
There are two schools of thought here: learning to play and being a lick player, and learning to play by exploring possibilities and ideas, either derrived from licks or from what has been learned.
Some players will painstakingly lift licks off records, internalize them and make it thier own, part of thier own vocab, maybe manipulate it somehow. We are all guilty of this. Actually, this is how most of us started out. Like as previously stated, this is a language, a syntax if you will, and just like the language of our parents and peers, we learn through mimicking others. I rmemeber being a teen and trying to copy Charlie Christian and Joe Pass.
Then we learn adjactives, construction, grammar ect, and our able to form our own language. Jimmy Rainey once said "you have to start somewhere."
However, to do nothing but copy other's is limiting oneself. Without working out our own ideas learned through concept and established ideas (theory and patterns ect) we will stay robotic and never have the gammit to express what we are capable of expressing.
Technique and vocabulary are just a "container" of the emotions in which it contains, our emotions. The form and structure through which artistic ideas (learned or created) are just a vehicle of emotion.
John Coltrane copied Gene Ammons early in his late teens. I clearly hear Trane playing moving 1-3-5 and 1-2-3-5 lines in his early playing, then midway through the late 50's he was isolating chords, playing MANY notes from the derrived scale or sound, not addressing chord tones, but rather scale tones in a linear fashion.
Emily Remler started implying 4ths in her playing right before she passed. I remember seeing an interview with Scott Henderson saying he was working on fifths in his blues playing.
In other words, this is a language only to express ourselves, and IMHO learning through ONLY licks limits us
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Well thought out statement. If we only regugitate licks we have either picked up or created ourselves, are we really improvising? I find that what happens to licks I have internalized is, I will start with one, but end up on part of another, or start with some sort of scale or arp improv, play part of a lick, and wind up with improvised stuff that is more spontaneous, or at least not thought out. Originally Posted by Jazzyteach65
So, though I may learn a lick from say Grant Green, in a few months it is no longer recognizable as a GG lick, because it has morphed a few times and becomes available in part or whole for a musical statement that I make. So from this place, being a licks player is fine I think, because they really stop being just licks, if that makes sense.
However, the former, where you are just an encyclopidia of everyone else's licks, that just seems odd. I have seen this on youtube with Wes clones especially. Maybe at some point, they move away from just playing Wes lines. I have read interviews with both Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis where they said that all they did on their early gigs was play Charlie Christian solos they had memorized. It didn't take long for them to realize they needed to get past doing just CC stuff.
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Very interesting discussion indeed. I'm not a full time musician, so having time for practice is a bit hard. Right now, I've already passed by modes and scales, playing over changes, basic subs and harmony, etc. (not that I don't practice them daily, I'm still a little sloppy, especially the melodic minor.) Hence, I feel like I need to move on to a higher form of learning - in this case, other people's music. I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track so I won't be losing time.
I guess the reason for my confusion is that I see a lot of reading materials with licks on them (especially for guitar players), and not one explained how to actually learn them. So I was like, "you learn this note for note? what's the fun in that?" And not one of the useful books I had have licks in them. It just didn't make sense. So maybe we have to learn licks like we learn scales? Maybe use intervals on them? Hmmm..
So I'm not a lick "fan", but maybe I will revisit learning some again, the right way perhaps.
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Cheers for putting this post up Derek, I have found it very useful in helping me to clarify my own thoughts on this subject! Very well put if I may say so. Originally Posted by derek
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Very interesting discussion indeed. I'm not a full time musician, so having time for practice is a bit hard. Right now, I've already passed by modes and scales, playing over changes, basic subs and harmony, etc. (not that I don't practice them daily, I'm still a little sloppy, especially the melodic minor.) Hence, I feel like I need to move on to a higher form of learning - in this case, other people's music. I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track so I won't be losing time.
I guess the reason for my confusion is that I see a lot of reading materials with licks on them (especially for guitar players), and not one explained how to actually learn them. So I was like, "you learn this note for note? what's the fun in that?" And not one of the useful books I had have licks in them. It just didn't make sense. So maybe we have to learn licks like we learn scales? Maybe use intervals on them? Hmmm..
So I'm not a lick "fan", but maybe I will revisit learning some again, the right way perhaps.
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You're welcome. I spend plenty of time thinking about this stuff and talking to the pros I know for their take. Like everyone else, I am on the path trying to figure this stuff out, and get out on the instrument the stuff I can sing or hear in my head. Slow frickin' process. Originally Posted by Meggy
Cheers for putting this post up Derek, I have found it very useful in helping me to clarify my own thoughts on this subject! Very well put if I may say so.
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If we only regugitate licks we have either picked up or created ourselves, are we really improvising? I find that what happens to licks I have internalized is, I will start with one, but end up on part of another, or start with some sort of scale or arp improv, play part of a lick, and wind up with improvised stuff that is more spontaneous, or at least not thought out.
This is EXACTLY what I was trying to articulate. It's a lifelong journey to find our own way of dealing with things, articulating ideas, our own "voice" if you will. Much like life, we are growing and trying to understand and relate ideas until the day we die. We will never find our TRUE selves through the music, but we discover every day. Again, organized sound is just a vehicle if you will.
I remember hearing Terrance Blanchard once say he wanted to sound like Wayne Shorter very badly, to play all those sadly articulated notes. Then when he met Shorter, he realized this would never be possible, because he and Wayne were two totally different people with different lives and different personalites. He said it was the scariest moment of his entire life, but also that he then realized he had to find his own "voice," throughout his life.
It's more than arpeggios, licks and ideas, it's a sound that reflects our being. Sorry if I'm being to spiritual.
Here is an old interview of Trane I just pulled out of the Bill Cole book I got when I was a freshmen in college. It's from 1962:
"There are so many things to be considered in making music. The whole question of life itself: my life in which there are so many things on which I don't think I;ve reached a final conclusion; there are matters I don't think I've zovered completely, and all these things have to be covered before you make your music sound any way. You have to grow to know.
When I was young I didn't think this would happen, but now I know that I've got a long way to go. Maybe when I'm 60 I'll be satisfied with what I'm doing. "
Ultimately he died just five years later, which means he, like many others never reached there "true voice." I think we never do, because our ideas are always changing. I think he was connotating that have conviction in your playing if it reflects yourself and what you want it to reflect.Last edited by Jazzyteach65; 04-07-2010 at 12:24 AM.
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Originally Posted by derek
You're welcome. I spend plenty of time thinking about this stuff and talking to the pros I know for their take. Like everyone else, I am on the path trying to figure this stuff out, and get out on the instrument the stuff I can sing or hear in my head. Slow frickin' process.
And Jimmy Rainey once said that he couldn't play everything he heard in his head until later in his life, right before his death
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