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How do you recommend I learn chord movement in a song, I have books but they don’t seem to really show you. I’ve watch Jack Wilkens, the guy never stops moving while comping. Any suggestions on sites or books.
Thx
KenIf you ever watched someone like Jack Wilkins comp behind someone, he never sits on 1 chords, it’s constant movement…I guess most pros embellish quite a bit from whats written on the lead sheet. For example a measure of EbMAJ7 instead of playing that for 4 beats , most pros embellish, but I just don’t mean using inversions of the same chord. They use many devices I suspect.
Thx
KenOk, now I know what you’re referring to. Not that I’m trying to evade the question, but this topic is as broad as everything covered in this course, so I can’t really get into it and do it justice here. We can probably talk about it more during your next lesson. What I can say is that I have a course as detailed as this one that I teach my private students. I am planning to get it online, however my task for now is to get everything related to this one finished…and it is soooo much work…
That’s great because I’ve been trying forever to find a book or online that really demonstrates chord movement say over a standard like my romance…I can play all kinds of inversions myself, but I’m looking for more complex movement I guess….Maybe I just need to expirment more with the Barry Harris method of using the Maj and Minor 6 chord with the diminished scale.
kenKen,
Since you are always asking about this on the jazz guitar forum It’s pretty clear you need to understand and study functional harmony 101. Otherwise, you ask about ‘minimizing finger movement’ when you should ask what does it mean to be the tonic, dominant, and subdominant. If you actually understand that, the Barry Harris material on major and minor sixth diminished harmony you always criticize would make more sense.
I do and I can play the chord scales up and down, but I still say he should have taken a song, any song and said.. lets see how we would apply this concept in the real world…Most teachers use tunes to teach…this book as well as the online class don’t!!!!
Playing chords scales up-and-down is not the same thing as understanding functional harmony. When someone presents you a proper reinterpretation of the 1625 turnaround (I6-Idim-IV6-V6-Vdim-I6), someone who understands functional harmony automatically knows how that can be applied to tunes, hundreds of tunes, thousands of tunes.
rIchie, I would welcome any course on harmony and guitar, but please don’t call it “chord melody “. The tab denizens of jazz guitar are the only ones who know this term. No one else in the band has ever heard of this. Of course, if you are going to design of course, you will have to overcome the dichotomy of guitarists who don’t think like musicians and would only think of themselves as guitarists, which is apparently in an exclusive category separate and apart from musicians.
When Johnny Smith was writing his method book, he solicited advice from my teacher. He was told that sales would plummet if he decided to introduce the grand staff, Because, sadly, most guitarists can’t even read the treble clef, let alone the bass clef .
Navdeep, I agree with you regarding the term “chord melody”,yet if I don’t use that term to describe what I am doing, the “denizens of the jazz guitar” world whom my course would be exclusively directed to, might not know what it is about and “sales would plummet”. I don’t want to get all bent out of shape about nomenclature, but the term “chord melody” has become widely used to the extent that guitar instructors at major universities including Berklee, use it among their students and even in the description of the courses they teach.
I used to hate tab…I’m still not fond of it, but if i hadn’t adapted to using it in the last decade I would have lost half of my students. It makes guitarists appear as 2nd rate citizens among musicians because they can’t read regular notation. I come from an older generation where there was no tab and no one used the term “chord melody”. It used to irritate the sh-t out of me for years when it first started to crop up. However I had to adapt in order to communicate with new generations of guitarists.
Richie, that is a fair explanation. Of course I understand your plight . What I like about this course is that you seem to bridge the gap between “tab denizens” and real musicians. Looking forward to your new course whenever you develop it.
One final suggestion if I may, for your new course: what would be very useful is to have a section on how to understand functional harmony and the myriad of chord substitutions, as used in a basic standard. Such that one can unravel the layers of the onion and figure out what’s going on, bridging the gap between the “vanilla changes” and the actual changes. So that we can figure out why Cole Porter through in a D7b9 in a tune that is in the key of F.
That would seriously help a lot of people.
I will look forward to the chord melody and development of harmony course. I hope Richie will release it soon after the Vol.2 of the Bebop series is finished.
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