When you solo over a song, are you playing a chord progression or the song?

[mr. beaumont]

And I should say, I'm coming from a place of where I think you should have some fundamentals together...There is a time and place for learning and practicing scales...

A lot can be taught in context, but you gotta have your shit together too...

[James W]

We are?

Yikes, not if I was teaching it. But then again, nobody's biting on my "How Not to Completely Suck at Jazz in Ten Years of Hard Work" course, so...

I had in mind a book like this -

Chord Tone Soloing for Jazz Guitar: Master Arpeggio-Based Jazz Bebop Soloing for Guitar (Learn How to Play Jazz Guitar) : Alexander, Mr Joseph, Pettingale, Mr Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Which is full of good info, even though I would be more inclined to practice things in the context of an actual tune rather than isolated common chord progressions... It can be good to break things down though rather than attempting a whole tune at first though? Especially if there's lots of changes in that tune.

[Christian Miller]

Back to the original thread.

Maybe, the problem is that in Jazz we are taught to practice many things in isolation of the actual songs.

Examples:
Chord Tones.
Arpeggios.
Approach Notes.
Enclosures.
ii-V-I and other progressions.

Practice them on a song then


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[mr. beaumont]

I had in mind a book like this -

Chord Tone Soloing for Jazz Guitar: Master Arpeggio-Based Jazz Bebop Soloing for Guitar (Learn How to Play Jazz Guitar) : Alexander, Mr Joseph, Pettingale, Mr Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Which is full of good info, even though I would be more inclined to practice things in the context of an actual tune rather than isolated common chord progressions... It can be good to break things down though rather than attempting a whole tune at first though? Especially if there's lots of changes in that tune.

I mean, probably about 80% of jazz is common chord progressions with a melody

[GuyBoden]

Maybe, the problem is that in Jazz we are taught to practice many things in isolation of the actual songs.

Examples:
Chord Tones.
Arpeggios.
Approach Notes.
Enclosures.
ii-V-I and other progressions.

Practice them on a song then


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I was politely saying that all these things should be taught by practicing with songs, not in isolation.

[John A.]

Back to the original thread.

Maybe, the problem is that in Jazz we are taught to practice many things in isolation of the actual songs.

Examples:
Chord Tones.
Arpeggios.
Approach Notes.
Enclosures.
ii-V-I and other progressions.

Maybe some teachers (yours?) do that, but I don't think that's true generally of how people are taught, at least not early on. I think it's more common for teachers to teach those devices in connection with learning and practicing tunes.

[AllanAllen]

Probably better to teach tunes and point out "this is an enclosure" or "that is an approach note" as the come up. None of these things are complicated in context.

[Christian Miller]

I was politely saying that all these things should be taught by practicing with songs, not in isolation.

I see. Well I certainly agree.

Do people really not teach like that? I think every jazz guitar lesson I’ve had over the years has centred on a tune, we play something and then work on it. Barry would ground everything on a tune.

It’s how I teach as a result, and I tend to think of it as the norm in jazz circles although maybe that’s my perception.

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[Reg]

Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Back to the original thread.

Maybe, the problem is that in Jazz we are taught to practice many things in isolation of the actual songs.

Examples:
Chord Tones.
Arpeggios.
Approach Notes.
Enclosures.
ii-V-I and other progressions."
............................
First of all .... practice should be divided into at least two groups...

1) Technical skills, which include all of the above.... and a lot more.
2) Performance technical skills... how to incorporate technical skills into performance and performance skills.

* 3rd) Formal structural organization of Music... I personally enjoy and needed these, but not really required for performance. Memorization and understanding how to just plug and play some basics work just fine.

[pamosmusic]

I made these for a student recently ... patterns derived from A Train and Just Friends

Dropbox - a train patterns.pdf - Simplify your life

Dropbox - just friends patterns.pdf - Simplify your life

[AllanAllen]

I see. Well I certainly agree.

Do people really not teach like that? I think every jazz guitar lesson I’ve had over the years has centred on a tune, we play something and then work on it. Barry would ground everything on a tune.

It’s how I teach as a result, and I tend to think of it as the norm in jazz circles although maybe that’s my perception.

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I think we're in straw-man arguments with this, or outlier personal experience. Every music lesson I've had revolved around a song, except when someone taught me the major scale.

[pamosmusic]

I think we're in straw-man arguments with this, or outlier personal experience. Every music lesson I've had revolved around a song, except when someone taught me the major scale.

Yeah probably so.

The ii-V-I and its minor being the notable exceptions, but I think that’s probably worth the digression. Being so common.

I also do teach blues forms outside the context of a particular tune. In large part because giving someone Now’s the Time can get them hung up on hitting the sharp four diminished or something, and there are some simpler ways of navigating those changes before starting to introduce the reharmonizations.

[RLetson]

Interesting conversation, especially for someone who has taught a non-musical skillset with the practical goal of a "performance" that is actually a fixed-form product--a piece of writing. (I suppose a more exact fit would be a response from a speech/debate teacher, whose aim is thinking/talking in real time.) Teaching writing is mostly about doing writing, with modeling (based on extensive reading) being the primary guide and theoretical or abstract matters (grammar and rhetoric) feeding in from the side, as it were: "This is what's going on in those sentences and paragraphs you're framing." And in an ideal teaching situation, the students have been instructed in very basic skills (parts of speech, subject-verb agreement, simple/compound/complex constructions, punctuation) in K-6 classrooms.

So it's interesting that the original question here (chords vs melody as basis for a solo) has become one about pedagogy and how-one-learns-to-play, with the goal of how to play improvisationally. There it's pretty clear to me that the divide is between ears/hands technical skills and ears/mind musical awareness/application skills. The various kinds of technique training are aimed at control of the instrument--a kind of physical understanding of how to produce given notes on demand. Most of this is covered by the term "fretboard knowledge"--where are the notes, how are they usually put together, how do the fingers navigate the fretboard most effectively. The means to this kind of mastery in most pedagogical systems is flat-out technical practice, eventually reinforced by etudes that embed the skills in musically-interesting compositions.

But musical understanding of the kind involved in improvisatory playing seems to me to be rooted in a sense of the work being (re)created. And by "sense" I mean hearing the basis (the melody and sometimes the words), understanding how it's constructed (whether or not that understanding can be expressed in the technical language of compostion/theory), and seeing the possibilities for varying or extending or reinventing that basis. And since soloing is a real-time process, I suspect that one is not so much thinking about it as drawing on previously-built-up technical resources (you know where the notes are, you know how to connect phrases) to express an in-the-moment musical recognition or insight.

I think that's what I do when I sing. Ella I ain't*, but I do have a strong sense of how to play with phrasing while still making sense of the words--in fact, I suspect that I'm guided as much by different ways of performing the words as by any concious abstract-musical notion of what I'm doing. (Though I might, on hearing a recording, be able to name some of the devices being employed.)

* And I know that there are vocal-technique pedagogies aimed at giving the same degree of control of the voice that well-trained instrumentalists aspire to. I got as far as "stand up straight and breathe from the diaphragm," along with a set of exercises I should practice but don't.

[jameslovestal]

I think we're in straw-man arguments with this, or outlier personal experience. Every music lesson I've had revolved around a song, except when someone taught me the major scale.

My first guitar teacher, who said he followed the GIT methods didn't focus on songs but instead scales, modes, arpeggios, harmonic-chord-progressions, etc... All from guitar-neck diagrams based on the 5 positions. For chords there were 6 and 5 note chord grips for 'main' chords. No orientation to songs. After many months getting-this-down, we started focusing on songs, linking what I learned to specific songs.

The next teacher used the song-a-week method with the focus on my weaknesses.

[AllanAllen]

My first guitar teacher, who said he followed the GIT methods didn't focus on songs but instead scales, modes, arpeggios, harmonic-chord-progressions, etc... All from guitar-neck diagrams based on the 5 positions. For chords there were 6 and 5 note chord grips for 'main' chords. No orientation to songs. After many months getting-this-down, we started focusing on songs, linking what I learned to specific songs.

The next teacher used the song-a-week method with the focus on my weaknesses.

This is your first guitar teacher, like when you were 10? And you stayed with it?

[bediles]

Not all lessons were explicitly tune based for me. There was still a musical goal but these were more about building technical skills.

Off the top of my head:
1. Voice leading triads or 7ths through various cycles or a random progression as determined by a die roll.
2. Had to jam modes in 4 keys min3rds apart to test out of them
3. Playing up the octave of one key on two strings 3NPS in 6 note patterns and then descending the next key in the cycle.
4. 12 Leavitt fingerings, focused on 7 but this was another fretboard awareness exercise

This was back in the days prior to and during school when I had 8hr a day to practice.

[bediles]

I see. Well I certainly agree.

Do people really not teach like that? I think every jazz guitar lesson I’ve had over the years has centred on a tune, we play something and then work on it. Barry would ground everything on a tune.

It’s how I teach as a result, and I tend to think of it as the norm in jazz circles although maybe that’s my perception.

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Have you taken many guitar lessons? Or are referring to one offs with NYC guys? (Or equivalent)

If you only have one lesson, usually tunes will be involved bc that's the common language.

Working on a specific technical deficiency over multiple lessons can happily exist outside of a specific musical piece.

[Kirk Garrett]

I majored in philosophy in college and and read tons of Nietzsche, some Heidegger, and a fair bit of Kant. Nietzsche's overall tone and iconoclastic shtick was kind of fun, but it seemed so scattershot that I was never really sure what he was getting at. Heidegger, oy vey. Could be worse, though. I mean Hegel. Gadzooks. That guy is a freakin' neurotoxin cable of inducing coma with a single sentence (that goes on for 27 pages without a verb until the end).

Same major here, similar experience. I even took a course on Heidegger. For the final paper I simply regurgitated everything the professor had said all semester long, and avoided attempting a single thought of my own, which proved a wise decision.

[ragman1]

I've heard that from a lot of students. If you want a decent degree don't bother being creative, just give them what they want. It works, too.

[John A.]

Same major here, similar experience. I even took a course on Heidegger. For the final paper I simply regurgitated everything the professor had said all semester long, and avoided attempting a single thought of my own, which proved a wise decision.

as a freshman, I took a class in recent and contemporary (for 1981) European phi. So Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, critical theory, plus Nietszche, and Husserl. Complete word salad (tbf, Foucault is relatively lively and has sex and violence). Plus for some reason Cornell West was in the class (yes, that Cornell West) preaching about I had no idea what. No idea how, but I got an A+. In hindsight that should have been my signal to major in anything but philosophy.

[jameslovestal]

This is your first guitar teacher, like when you were 10? And you stayed with it?

I started on violin so my first musical teacher was at 10 but for violin.

The GIT guy was my first jazz guitar teacher, and this was when I was in my 20s when I decided I wanted to get back into music via jazz guitar.

[Christian Miller]

Have you taken many guitar lessons? Or are referring to one offs with NYC guys? (Or equivalent)

If you only have one lesson, usually tunes will be involved bc that's the common language.

Working on a specific technical deficiency over multiple lessons can happily exist outside of a specific musical piece.

Tbf I’ve never had a regular jazz guitar teacher. I did take regular guitar lessons when a beginner. (I also had regular classical singing lessons for years which follow believe it or not a similar format.) Even if it was beginner pieces out of a book we were always working on music.

But I was talking about jazz guitar lessons which I believe is what Guy was talking about?

Noted re technical issues. I personally would teach that separately, because asking a student to concentrate on technique as well as music is too many things. This is true regardless of whether I’d be teaching beginner or advanced students in fact. And is true for all instruments of course.

For more advanced students we might come across a tricky bit in a bebop head for example and build an exercise out of it, but again - rooted in repertoire. If someone’s technique is not working for them, I’d be focussing time on that. But that’s teaching guitar, not jazz, at that point. I suppose in terms of working on changes playing a ii V I for example is a fragment of a tune abstracted into an exercise. I don’t personally see why one wouldn’t ground that in an actual tune as quickly as possible, such as Honeysuckle. But as I say, maybe others have had other experiences.

The same is actually true of say, classical guitar. The reason why we practice scales and arpeggios is because we will come across these things in pieces of music. Classical guitar students and so on focus on major, minor and chromatic scales because that’s what we find in Bach and Guiliani etc and don’t tend to practice jazz scales, and so on. (One could argue with the narrowness of that of course.)

Of course in an established didactic tradition like that one that’s a long term goal and that connection to rep is probably not obvious to a beginner.

But also - that’s not really what Guy was talking about was it?


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[Christian Miller]

It does pose a bit of challenge when rock students come for ‘jazz’ lessons and we are not working in the context of standard jazz repertoire. That does tend to become technique and theory centred. We also work on transcriptions.


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[mr. beaumont]

It does pose a bit of challenge when rock students come for ‘jazz’ lessons and we are not working in the context of standard jazz repertoire. That does tend to become technique and theory centred. We also work on transcriptions.


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You mean the "I want to learn some jazz, man, because I really think it'll help my (insert non jazz genre here) playing" guys?

[Christian Miller]

as a freshman, I took a class in recent and contemporary (for 1981) European phi. So Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, critical theory, plus Nietszche, and Husserl. Complete word salad (tbf, Foucault is relatively lively and has sex and violence). Plus for some reason Cornell West was in the class (yes, that Cornell West) preaching about I had no idea what. No idea how, but I got an A+. In hindsight that should have been my signal to major in anything but philosophy.

I liked him in the Matrix


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