- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Hi Richie,
dropped out of following the lessons for a while… While trying to resume, I stumbled over your Easy Jazz Blues Guitar series on youtube. Lesson #4 Blues in the Closet really got me hooked (BitC on yt). On the base of this groovy lick I can develop something like improvisation for the first time ever. Until now, my efforts on improv always felt awkward and distressing. It always was arduous and tiring, there was no flow, just tense concentration on the positions of the arpeggio tones, approaches and neighbours while my comping on the looper galloped away. And the resulting lines made me cringe, most of the time. No jazz at all.
Working on Blues in the Closet changed that, it is an ice breaker. No idea what the reason is, maybe it’s the groovy rhythmic structure of the basic lick. Trying to keep that thing going on in my improvised lines seems to be the source of an output the doesn’t let me suffer. Now I am starting to have fun on my attempts to improvise, some kind of flow is beginning to arise. Still baby steps in my development, but finally something seems to move forward… Thanks for the great inspiration!
Last night I started to work on shifting BitC through several of the seven fingerings. As always, the three fingerings I use for the basic blues chords I, IV and V are within one position (like fingerings 1/4/5, 5/1/2, 4/7/1, etc.). So I am kind of boxed into an area of about five frets, everything is happening there. When I watch your improv starting on 03:38 in the video, you are moving all over the fretboard. Could you explain what is going on there? Are you thinking in the seven fingerings and connecting them? Should I try to emulate something similar, or rather stay in the one-position-thing until I am more advanced?
So actually, I am looking for a way to merge our Bebop Guitar Improv lesson stuff with some interesting parts of your Easy Jazz Blues Guitar series…
Robert
Hi Robert,
Glad you are enjoying the easy blues series! To answer your questions…In the segment of the video you mention, I am in fact moving throughout the fretboard freely linking the 7 fingerings. As far as whether or not you should try to emulate that, it depends on how comfortable you are with all the fingerings. If you can play Blues in the Closet in all 7 fingerings, I think it is a good start. If you can do that with most of these easy blues heads, it will force you to learn most of the basic interval combinations uniformly in all 7 fingerings. Assimilating the various rhythms in these blues riffs is also beneficial. However, if your not comfortable identifying the location of all the scale/arpeggio degrees within each fingering, I suggest you learn that first.
As far as your experience with improv, it is hard for me to help and give you personal guidance without actually hearing you and asking several questions in order to know what your thought process is while attempting to improvise. Many players who attempt to study jazz improv on their own, even with all the info provided in a course such as this one, don’t get very far. That is, unless they are already at a certain level and have the necessary ear training (formal or informal) to recognize and mentally store how different chord tone/ approach combinations sound like. The understanding of rhythms on the other hand, is also crucial! Only when this is firmly established can you spontaneously draw coherent ideas from the brain’s harmonic database during improvisation. This of course, is what we call “vocabulary”. In the same fashion as we think what we are going to say a split second before we do so using proper grammar…the same concept holds true when improvising. The only basic difference is that we are dealing with pre-hearing notes and rhythms. Again, for this to occur, several conditions need to be met and it is a slow process which often requires the guidance of an experienced mentor.
I teach many private lessons with students taking this course, and I often find that they are not getting results because they are jumping around all over the place with no consistency and trying to cut corners by shying away from exercises they do not understand. Frequently, I also find that the exercises they are working on, are being practiced wrong. That’s why I suggest to students that even if they don’t have much time, to consider taking a minimum of one lesson per month with me so I can guide them and make sure they are doing things correctly. That said, I have found that 2 out of 3 students have misconceptions of several concepts which in turn is delaying their progress. In addition, since everyone is at a different level and has different challenges, I have many exercises not included in this course, which I developed throughout my 30+ years of teaching jazz to deal with certain problems…
Let me know if you have any more questions or how I can be of further help.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.