Week 9 - Melodic Minor

For those of you actually reading, you will notice that this should technically be Week 10. The truth is, the real week 9 I had to study for a test, a big test, so I literally got like 0% Jazz in. There wasn't even a jazz jam for me to listen to, so I thought I'd just continue like nothing has happened.

This was a pretty good week for me, I got all my melodic minors down. That includes (embrace yourself, these names are insane): The Melodic Minor, The Dorian ♭2, Lydian Augmented, Lydian Dominant (Overtone), Mixolydian ♭6, Locrian ♯2 (Aeolian ♭5) and lastly The Altered Scale (learn this one first!). The nice thing about these scale names is that they actually tell you how to play the scale. I.e. The Lydian Dominant is simply the Lydian scale we all know but with a flattened 7, as its the minor 7 and major 3rd that makes a dominant! I made my own scale study sheet for myself, with the help from a professional Jazz muso Keira WitherKay who provided me with the initial information (Thank you), so for those of you who want to tackle the Melodic Minor scale next, use this sheet on the left, it will give you basic theory and the scale fingerings.


Aside from the scales, I also jammed with my skilled friend Josh Prinsloo. We went to the music conservatory on Thursday, found a practice room with a piano, he played the piano and I played the guitar. He is a bassist by trade, so he wanted to improve on his Jazz piano, and boy where his chops fantastic. Real jazzy! Anyway, so we chose a few songs such as Funny Valentine, Blue Bossa, Beautiful Love we played them start to end and both took turns with the head. We improvised back and forth. It was great fun. We definitely going to make a weekly event of it. We also did some ear training, which I HIGHLY recommend. Its very simple, and quite difficult at first, but the ear does get better over time. What you do, is play a 4 or 5 note lick on your respective instrument and the other instrumentalist has to copy the lick... Note for Note. And No, you may not tell them what note you start on, they must figure it out. Even if you hit the wrong first note, it will be a good reference point for where the right note is. Try this. Its really challenging but fun. 
          - - -  The reason why I was with Josh at the conserve is that I want to take bass lessons from him. Why bass? Well, Joe Pass can play the melody, harmony and bass all on his guitar so effortlessly, and its just nice to know that if ever there is no bassist around, you  can play the bass and chords on the guitar. So Josh will be teaching me some walking bass vibes. What he roughly taught me on our first lesson was some Tritone theory. Basically what it entails is that if you see a dominant shape, play an altered dominant chord a tritone away (flat 5). So G7 will be D♭Alt (♭9 and ♭5 sound quite nice). If you actually compare all the notes between the G7 and D♭alt, you will see they are quite similar, except for the root note. 


Lastly, Josh taught me "Harold's Bossa", both the chords and melody. This is a fun fun fun song. And the chords are super easy. Its just quite fast. You must check this video from one of the Jazz jams (before my jazz days) of Ramon Alexander (the master pianist of Stellenbosch) and Lou-Ann Stone (the master saxophonist of Stellenbosch) doing Harold's Bossa. Its tight! I love this recording. Do yourself a favour and listen to it!

Another standard I got down was the classic "Take the A Train" by none other than Ellington. This song also has some nice easy chords, so is a good song to improvise over. There is also an altered chord in it, so my melodic theory will come in use. Cant wait!


        This week coming up I will practice  the melodics, my arpeggio's etc. Maybe get into some of my blues scales. Who knows. I will surprise myself :-)

Week 8 - An Introduction to the Blues

Mark Levine - The Jazz Theory Book

If you remember from last week, I had planned on doing some intense jazz theory, alongside my keyboard. Well, I did do that, and my mind certainly grew, the keyboard was such a great feature. Often the theory book would contain a scale lick accompanied by a chord, and it would explain the relationship between the 2. Playing guitar, you cannot hear both the chord and lick without the help of a looper, so with the piano I could play the chord and the lick and hear the jazziness of it. So keyboard was well worth it.

In terms of my theory, I still got a long way to go, I didn't cover as much as I had hoped, but then again, I was on holidays and expected to see all my friends who I hadn't seen in a long while, as well as doing other admin stuff. I did however cover: Pentatonics, Playing 'outside' the scale (Listen to Coltrane for this kind of stuff, its really interesting), I looked at "Rhythm changes" but I will need more energy to really tackle that song/concept. More importantly, I covered the Blues. And the timing was perfect, cause I finally met up with my mentor (Otis) for what must of been a 5 hour 'lesson' and we covered the Blues. So from the Blues lessons I learnt there are essentially 2 types of Blues. The normal/major/dominant blues and the minor blues. The normal blues is only played with dominant chords in the normal I, IV, V progression. The turn-around(s) are more interesting and theoretically intense. Although, on the topic of theory, Blues is actually quite an 'unexplained' occurrence in Jazz. There is no reason why the Blues scale should sound so good over so many chords, yet it JUST DOES. And that is essentially the blues.

Further, I said that I wouldn't play any guitar. I lied. After so many hours of blasting your mind with intense Jazz theory, I just had to pick up my pride and joy and do something else. I covered quite a lot of the melodic minor scale. I have nearly covered it all. So far, I have gone through the:


° Jazz Minor
° Lydian Augmented
° Mixolydian b6
° Superlocrian aka Altered Scale
° Lydian b7 (Overtone)




I love these names. They sound really hardcore. But the melodic minor in general is such a great scale. When I was playing them (over the correct chords) I could actually taste the goodness of the notes. They were resonating with my teeth. It felt right. So I am gonna get these scales under my grip, followed by the Harmonic minor scale (I'm getting excited for that). I really need to brush up on my Pentatonics. I know all my 5 shapes, I just haven't practiced them in a long time. Also, I really really need to learn all the shapes for the Blues scale. So far I only know the Minor blues scale shape, and I learnt that when I was like 10. I must make the effort to learn the other shapes. So as you can see, I have my work cut out for me. This might take me a while, but it was inevitable that I would have to learn all these scales at some point. I will try play them and apply them to the right chords and songs so that I can get the feel for them.
             I don't have my guitar with me at the moment, she has gone in for a set up. I have bumped up the string gauge from 0.10 - 0.52 to 0.13 - 0.56 Flatwound. For those of you who don't play guitar, that is a very big jump. Essentially the strings I am playing on will be thicker, so they will be harder to play, but they will sound deeper and warmer and much more Jazzy. I have never played on strings of this caliber before, so I am getting really really excited for this. Will try record the sound so you can all hear the difference.

Oh, I also have a big test coming up this week, so I will need to really focus on that. Academics do come first! I will try ration my time for both Jazz and Studies.

Week 7 - The Sound of Music

This will be a short one. I'm gonna say it straight. I literally did NO practice this week. I was way too consumed with my law work, so I had to put my studies first. I did however play at the Jam. It was nerve wracking. But all in all, I think I did alright. Especially for a new-comer to Jazz. I got a friend to record it for me, for your viewing pleasure. Its quite long, and the quality isn't the best, but hey, its a reference point I suppose. It kind of turns from a swing to a funk halfway through, so listen out for that.

*I must apologize for the video quality, it looked much better straight off the camera, but of-course, YouTube must of added some green fuglyness

I'd like to give credit to Mr. Ramon Alexander who was the master pianist you hear, if it where not for him, the song probably would have collapsed as some point. Mr. Prinsloo for his rap performance near the end. Lastly to Carlo Milandri for taking the video.

             
              I also recorded in my own home studio a one take improvisation of the all time classic "Blue Bossa". What I did was found a play along version on youtube, added it to my Ableton, and recorded my guitar over the track first time. So what you are essentially hearing is me in the raw and without having listened to the play along first. The track was a little too fast for me, it didnt give me enough time to think about my next move. You will certainly hear that this is a rough improvisation, but its baby steps none the less. In the future I can use this recording as a reference to my playing.

http://soundcloud.com/fruitargeek/blue-bossa-my-quick-improv <-- Copy Paste This

So whats in store for this week to follow? Well I'm on holiday now, so I thought, maybe to give my fingers a break (okay they had a week break already, I know that), but my mind will certainly be busy. I've set up the keyboard in my room, and I intend to do some intense Jazz theory. 

Why the keyboard you ask? Well, the keyboard is very much a visual instrument, in the sense that I play a chord and I can see all the notes I am playing. I asked a friend of mine to recite the Ab major arpeggio, and he did so effortlessly, by relying on a visual aid of a keyboard in his mind. I have read countless times that a good jazz muso has a good understanding of the piano too. You don't have to play it amazingly, but just enough to get on by will be sufficient.  

Time to expand the mind