-
At a contemporary discussion of the antithetical method of Robert Conti, I commented on Berklee's focus on the voice-leading texts of Mr. Goodchord:
Originally Posted by Kiefer.Wolfowitz
The Guitar Department at the Berklee School of Music may be extreme in its emphasis on Chords, Scales, and Theory (CST).
Its final-exam syllabus specifies fast scales (in all modes), chords progressions, and arpeggios. Most performance students start at level four or above; the level five-eight levels follow the Mr. Goodchord Almanac of Voice Leading by Mick Goodrick, which are discussed in a dedicated thread here. In its list of performance standards, Berklee's Guitar Department does not post a requirement that students know some particular pieces of music---not even one classical, folk (e.g. Greensleeves or John Barleycorn), country, blues, jazz, or rock standard!
The CST approach has a long history at the The Berklee School of Music, which had a curriculum inspired by the Joseph Shillinger System of music.
Nobody can deny that Berklee has been successful at educating jazz guitarists for decades. I've only seen statements of admiration for Berklee from previous students and from professional guitarists (who had not studied at Berklee). There must be some professional guitarists, like Conti (?), who would have found Mars more compatible than Berklee!
-
09-12-2013 04:49 AM
-
I have to say that I do agree with what you are saying. In the time I've spent getting to know this ever expanding universe known as Jazz Guitar, or modern guitar as a genre or discipline, it's taken decades of constant exposure and immersion for me to even feel I have any kind of foothold in what is around me, no less what tools are necessary to equip a young student going into the world.
When I started this thread, it was not and still is not intended to be a debate on the perceived relevance of this particular tool in the context of the institutional curricula, but really a place where those wishing to explore the potential of a very different, and largely unexplored resource could take part in a community of linear and harmonic expansion.
I see this material, the systematic and exhaustive cataloguing of linear harmony very exciting, specifically in a genre that for whatever reason has found a sound in a root in bass voice (drop 2) perceptual template.
Like Slonimsky's thesaurus of scales, it's a tool. It's not my intention to debate the merits of a college's final requirements, that discussion is worthy of a thread of its own. It is worthy of a lively debate within that institution. It's worthy of a letter to the Berklee College of Music. It's certainly worthy of consideration in defining what the toolset a student would be equipped with, how much knowledge, history, real life experience, peripheral knowledge, instruction in process, reflection on the state of the art... etc. that a student should have at the point that a student is deemed to have completed that education.
However, this thread is merely a small place where a group of us have gathered to tackle and realize our individual potentials through work with a largely unexplored tool: Usable voice leading in modern improvisational music on guitar.
Kiefer, I'd welcome a thread dedicated to the discussion of Berklee's or other comparative institutions' final requirements and the implications, implied deficiencies, perceived strengths of the knowledge base they entail. As I said, there's so much that we are here to explore OUTSIDE of the Berklee system (this is not a Berklee sponsored thread, I assure you) and it's been a place where I feel some of the most important work with this material is taking place.
Mars or Conti's universe, this is not Berklee. Please don't confuse us with things outside the study.
That's all this is. Humble advancing guitarists putting their dedication outside the institutional context.
DavidLast edited by TH; 09-12-2013 at 05:57 AM.
-
sorry... maybe I lost some bit along the way... does Berklee education path rely on out-of-print material ?
(or maybe it's referred to the time when the Almanacs were available?)
-
Heh both. There are extracts and printed pages from the, as we all know, unobtainable volumes. It's one way that Berklee feels students should be responsible for not knowing just grabs, but how they can work with one another in a melodic way.
As many of you have by this time discovered, you can take your 4 inversions of drop 2, for example, and play them over changes as root position "markers" of harmonic obligation. Or you can form Bach like lines with these same forms that lead a melody in each voice. There was a time that this was considered impossible. Mick saw that there was indeed a way that this could be done through cycles, and it's those cycles that students are "forced" to be aware of.
I think it's Berklee's way of making these possibilities an area that students should become adept in.
Admittedly, many students don't care to hear this way, nor do their teachers even have proficiency in voice leading, so it does ask the question of whether the original vision is being effectively and practically addressed.
Mark Simos, a great teacher in the singer songwriting department took it upon himself to study with Mick and he's working with his students to find alternatives to the 3 chord harmony that that genre relies on. Some of his efforts are turning up some really great results; based on voice leading.
But in answer to your question, no, the books are not necessary to pass the requirements. In answer to the bigger question, I know there is probably more being done within our group here, many fold, than is done by the vast majority at Berklee in the direction of finding new harmonic possibilities in modern creative improvisation.
Recently I got an email from Ben Monder. He's working with this material now. His response is one of Wow and amazement. And he will use it. You can count on that. I think Berklee is hoping that students of Ben's spirit will be exposed to the tools that will allow them to educate themselves as they continue to grow and advance. It's an unfortunate situation that the source material in its raw form is no longer easy to come by.
That's why we have this group.
DavidLast edited by TH; 09-12-2013 at 10:06 AM.
-
Wow, great sales strategy: make your books impossible to get. It seems each time a great jazz musician dies, there is more laudatory press than ever was in life. Death: great career move for a jazz musician. I've got to know what he thinks of this. Ha. David
-
How do people deal with the 4 way close chords while practicing this material?
7th's------1357 3571 5713 7135
TBN#1---1257 2571 5712 7125
TBN#2----1247 2471 4712 7124
etc.
-
Do you mean physically playing material that will self destruct the musculature in your hands? Or are you talking conceptually? Originally Posted by bako
David
-
That is seriously funny. Originally Posted by TruthHertz
There are a select number of this collection that are playable depending on hand reach, scale length and willingness to test the limits of a human hand.
Physically speaking, what do people do to address all members of this great on piano,
torturous on guitar family of voicings. Arpeggiation is probably the most obvious move.
I also organize them into various fragment combinations.
Of course, these solutions all take more than one initiation of sound.
I am just curious as to how others negotiate this situation or do they simply move on to the next page.
-
Hmmmm, funny you should mention it. Yes, bako, that really is the most important question of this entire thread and you've asked it: How does this material become useful, not to mention playable.
Two days ago Ben (M) was showing me some absolutely beautiful things he was working on, things unlike anything I'd ever heard or imagined, even from him. No surprize there, but after he was done he said "cycle 2, and cycle 6 with my own kind of voice leading thing." What he played combined notes of different lengths, different combinations of single line, two and three part articulations weaved into an intricate line that he'll eventually see popping up in a solo.
Maybe this is not a direct answer to your question, but it's hit me like a bolt of lightning recently- this material, as complex as it is, is a template for your own sounds as much as a melodic major scale is a template for a chord solo passage.
Everyone that's been diving into volume 2 and 3 of late has said some uncannily similar things, you've got to stake out a couple of pages you like, set up camp and work with them deeply, commitedly and well beyond being just able to play them without thinking. You've got to totally have them become the furniture in your house, the pair of broken in running shoes, the guitar you are no longer aware of. And then something remarkable and totally unanticipated happens: your own creative propensities find a new language and posture to the forms you create, things you write, ideas you use to develop a solo and you are in the voice led world.
Now this makes the whole idea of 3 volumes of endless pages even more intimidating, but it also is one way to break into how they can be used-and it actually makes it ironically less daunting. It also establishes a precedent for how all the other pages can be approached. It's the instruction manual you write yourself.
Speaking of which, and in part answer to your original question, I was reading the intro to volume 2, and in particular the suggestions of how Joe Diorio tackled some pages. These progressions don't have to be played in direct sequence as written. Those are indications of movements converging in certain points, but what goes on in between is also open, very open to interpretation. Connect two chords with passing notes (something beautifully demonstrated in a Lage Lund talk I saw yesterday), or play two diads against one another, or put passing notes into that line of notes, or make it a dialogue between a single note and an articulated triad (and as the root moves within the chord voicing, this gets really interesting, particularly in later volumes) and on and on.
Once you have your own take on this, it doesn't even matter if it sounds like the chord on the page, you've got linear material at the speed of thought that you can use, material of harmonic and melodic density that once played in real time will have everyone asking "How is he DOING that?" and it all comes from your own broken down and reassembled system. I'm inspired to write a series of etudes of linear combination where the chords are the structure but not the content. We'll see where that goes.
I suppose I'm saying that with you guys, and those people who are working really hard on uncovering what this all means, there's going to be an entirely new spectrum of sound, that has this kind of voicing at it's beginning, but the deeper it goes, the less you'll be able to recognize the original pages.
Does this have anything to do with your question bako?
DavidLast edited by TH; 09-28-2013 at 08:54 AM.
-
David,
It's not the simple answer but intriguing all the same.
-
Hello guys,
I've made a simple decision. From now on I will work only on Mick's books. I have volume 3 and creative chordal harmony written with Tim Miller. I need volume 1 and volume 2 and that's it. I'm enjoying playing Guitar like never after I found this deep well.
Regards.
-
That's quite a commitment; I would guess, however, if you told this to Mick, he would say, "Well .... I don't know about that ..." Originally Posted by mikostep
Enjoy the journey, though!
-
Or he might say "Been there, done that. I'm really glad somebody's getting something out of it." which was the pleased reaction after all the comments on the back of the Mick/Tim book. The material's like an ocean: it's deep enough to get lost in or worse, but if you learn your way around even a small part of it, there's uncharted land in your hands. And mikostep, share your discoveries! Let us know how you practice this, if you create musical etudes, how it makes an appearance in your solos and compositions.
Have fun
David
-
Back to the roots... MSRP ???
I'm going back to "triadic playing" after listening to some non-jazz guitarists, Carl Verheyen and Eric Johnson in particular, which make great use of spread voicing.
I realised how much I neglected these voicing and how much more effective they could be in a solo comping situation, so I re opened the almanac, vol.1 page 1, and went by the spread voicing part only.
Wonderful sounds. Working on the single cycle2's from one inversion fingering to the next (talking about the root chord).
What is still quite cumbersome to me is the M.S.R.P. at the end of the page.
I understand that it is some kind of "fingerprint" for the cycle and every voice in the cycle is horizontally queued that way, but I still can't figure out what use could I make... and why it's subdivided three notes at a time...
Should it be a shortcut to memorize the voice leading, or is there something else?
Anyway, just playing those triads (some are real triads, some are 3 note spread voicing with larger intervals) brings me to some "deja vu" chord progression... there has to be some meaning to it!.. but I don't quite get it... for now.
-
A little update after starting back from the beginning...
After a few weeks spent practicing only the first cycle2 page (C major triads), I find myself more and more comfortable in playing whatever triad (diatonic) in whatever position just looking where a single note is on the fretboard (root, or 3rd, or 5th).
The side effect was that when I went to the next cycle (cycle4) I wasn't restarting from scratch, and the learning seems quicker (still didn't finish...), so I presume (hope) that the next cycles will be still quicker to learn...
The key seems to be going in depth with the first pages, the other will follow more easily...
This confirms the fact that the almanac is not meant to be studied completely from the beginning to the end.
I'd rather start to consider the various pages as many "entry points", but after that will be easier than you thought moving chords by fourths, or sixths, etc...
Does this make sense to anyone?
-
I studied with Mick, and hung out with him for years at the beginning of my career, and I'm sure he'd respond to this thread by saying "you're all right." He was never one for pat answers, clearly.
-
e_del
The more familiar you are with the source material, the easier it will be to place that material in a new context.
-
Yeah, Pat was always quite capable of giving his own answers. Originally Posted by ronjazz
David
-
Hey Folks!
Great thread here. Really cool discussion about how to use the Goodrick material.
It's a lot to dig into but so rewarding! It can be so musical!
Here's an "ambient" take on playing through E melodic minor drop 2 voicings in cycle 2.
-
Nice! I'm working on volume 2. Don't think these books need to be taken in order. As a matter of fact, I just opened up to 3 part 4ths spread voicings. Just to throw a dart on the wall and jump in. Wow. I'm going to stay here a while. Melodic minor. Cycles 7 and 6 at the moment. ideas pouring out just getting a buzz from sounds I have never heard before.
David
-
I don't have any of these books, but thx to some of the PDFs and examples in this thread, I've been able to get a better idea of how Harvey put his example together in the above video to create some beautiful sounds. Thx for sharing.
-
I I've seen the books. It has a lot of pages but I think the theory can be handle down in a few pages. I know that theory because I'm a student of the composition method "Equal Interval Sysytem" by Lyle Spud Murphy (that probably influenced Goodrick). The voice leading really changed my playing.
http://ararur.bandcamp.com
-
Very interesting! A number of people in this forum have been very curious about EIS. Originally Posted by António Silva
https://www.jazzguitar.be/forum/theor...al-system.html
It might be worth a resurrection.
Could you talk a little about it either here or on the thread linked in the above address?
Mick's voice leading is based on the fleshing out of Joseph Schillinger's principles. Schillinger was a very interesting theoritician, who in his lifetime sought to find mathematical commonalities in diverse fields of visual art, music, design, etc... The voice leading is one area where his ideas can be seen. Composers have used his permutations, improvisors also in some very high levels of permutations, symmetrical scales, 2 octave scales, and other uses. Very fascinating guy.
It seems that the more that guitarists are bringing things like Goodchord, Schillinger, EIS into their composition (and I include thoughtful soloing) the more it seems that the movements of harmony on the guitar need to find both horizontal and vertical movements together.
For a long time, guitarists have thought in terms of "along the strings" and "across the strings" when conceiving line and chord. Anyone working with voice leading needs to be fluent in both movements at once. This can be daunting when you're used to one or the other. But that's the beautiful thing about the Goodchord, it's mapped out for you. You have the notes, and it's up to you to find the navigation on the fingerboard (and the wonky interval layout) and it's up to you to assimilate the sounds. But once you do, there's a way of playing that used to be thought of as the composer's or pianist's domain.
I'd really like to know a little about how EIS has been translated into guitar playing. António, would you share some of this with us here or on the other thread?
Thanks, and thanks for turning me onto this.
David
-
HEY GUYS
Earlier this year I posted some clip messing around with cycles within symmetrical scales that do not repeat at the octave. In the past couple of weeks I've been digging these up again, I'm finding them pretty wild and opening my ears up to some interesting movement.
Here is cycle 2 within one of those scales, 7th chords in drop 3 with a basic arpeggio pattern, and I picked an arbitrary starting and stopping point.
I am excited about the personal directions one can take the material.
My goal is to get some of these sequences ingrained so I can use them in solo improvisation.Last edited by JakeAcci; 10-11-2013 at 08:55 PM.
-
Very interesting! Originally Posted by JakeAcci
What scale did you use in this particular example?
Can you think to these sequences in terms of notes, or scale degrees? Originally Posted by JakeAcci
At my level the only way I could manage this material would be as fingering positions.
Maybe I want to "run before I learn to walk", but these sounds are so intriguing that I would explore them a bit anyway, even if only to figure out what will be the next thing to study... next life! :-)
Reply With Quote
anyone selling an ibanez pm120?
Today, 01:33 PM in For Sale