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.