- Hey guys, my name is Marc from jazzguitarlessons.net.
- And I'm Nathan from jazzguitarlessons.net.
- And welcome to this master class number one on learning the language of music. So in the next hour, we will have sort of a discussion. And as you know, the masterclasses have been created in our websites for things that do not quite fit within the curriculum, if you will, that we have, that we wanna spend more time on. So please grab your favorite beverage, a glass of water or coffee, grab your instruments. And today we will.. Why don't we have Nathan tell us what would be the purpose of this master class overall?
- So this masterclass actually it's a topic that's really close to my heart. It's the idea of.. I don't wanna say the analogy of music and language, because I like to actually make them true parallels, music and language are the same thing. And I know that this is kind of a wild concept for a lot of people. It's like, we're not using words and you're not.. It's like if you really get down to the idea of what language is supposed to do, it's an art that helps you communicate and connect with other people. English is one and French, and all the other spoken languages, they're really used for for communicating concrete ideas. But music, not so much. That's I think the main difference. And I think that's one of the things you've written down where it's like, we don't actually have to communicate. And actually it's something that Victor Wooten has said, bassist Wooten. It's not about communicating. It doesn't have to be understood. And I think he meant, literally understood.
- If I may, I have this, since I'm a teenager and I've been practicing music, one thing I noticed about music is music is only purely abstract art form. I mean, it will speak to your emotions, it will have you have a memory about a song or chord progression. But ultimately if you watch a dancer, you can associate moves to, oh, this is off, this dancer is now sad, or you can see, and even paintings or even abstract visual art is still not as abstract as music. And even historians say that musical currents are always late by a few decades for that same reason. If there's occurrence in writing, say a romantic era, it took like two or three decades for a Beethoven and the romantic composers to catch up. Just because it's abstract, there's no concept that we're trying to communicate. So great to point out Nathan.
- I heard that they loosely parallel in that way, but again, by a late amount of a couple of years, a few decades. I love this idea that music is a language and not it's like a language. I tell this to all my students. So any of my private students that are listening will be like, Oh yeah, here he goes again.
- So just to be quick and clear, doing a quick rundown of what we'll be doing today. We wanna together, to shed a light on this analogy and parallel. And we wanna look at how maybe haptic and having tune, you're playing, instead of always looking at the alphabet, because I know some of my students, they do that. They practice scales and arpeggios, and scales, and arpeggios. I'm like, well, why are you still memorizing the alphabets? You've done that first grade. You don't need to. So we want to do that, and provide with some alternative means of practice that are as technical as the contents that we talked about. In the curriculum we talk about content, we talked about scales, about chord progressions, we talk about guide tones, we talk about all these techniques. And now we will introduce tracing, density, silences, subdividing, the rhythmic field, phrase lens, accents, dynamics. We will speak about all the technical and non-music theory, if that's a good way to put it. That's what we wanna cover. So let's just start with a quick bio. As you know probably, I'm Marc from JazzGuitarLessons.net. I started this website in 2009. And started with YouTube videos on a blog, and now we grew that website to over 50,000 visitors per month, over 50,000 YouTube subscribers. And at the point of shooting this video, we run a program called the jazz style mastery program. And basically I've helped thousands of guitarists get accustomed to playing in the jazz style. And Nathan you've joined me a few years back, right?
- Yeah, late 2016 I believe, I started doing some technical work for you. And I think I wrote one article for you as well, on focusing on performance in jazz. Not necessarily, again, about the vocabulary and the alphabet, as you said, as a metaphor, but focusing on like being on stage and what it means to connect to an audience, and connect with your band mates. So shortly after that, I think you hired me on as the curriculum builder, in early 2017. And ever since we've been cranking out some courses for the jazz guitar mastery program. I think around 10, I think we did that year, in 2017.
- Oh, we had a really good run I remember. That's the program now.
- We've slowed down on producing courses since then, and just sort of trying to tighten up the curriculum and make sure it's very cohesive. But, ever since we've introduced new products and new ideas together and happy to be a part of the team.
- Fantastic. So let's jump in immediately into the content.
- Sounds good. So when we talk about the language of music and music as a language, we're not the first ones to about this of course, there's been a few musicians, for ever I'm sure, that have talked about this. Victor Wooten is one I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of this masterclass. He has a very now famous TED talk. And I think also turned into like a TED Ed video, called.. He talks about music as a language and he discusses these ideas that the way that we learn the English language or whatever your native tongue is, as a baby learning from your parents, with I guess you could say professional speakers, or at least expert speakers is what I should say.
- Expert speakers.
- Your parents are experts in the language of English, and you are immediately supposed to start engaging with them right away. With music though, he talks about this idea that we don't have people who are beginner musicians playing with expert musicians right away. They have them taught step-by-step by teachers, which is great, and it works, but it takes a long time. And he argues that supplementary to that, or at least maybe just as important as that, is this idea that we have to get beginner speakers of music, of jazz, playing with expert speakers right away, fumbling through the notes, the words, the vocabulary, trying to string sentences together and jamming in other words.
- Jamming. This is actually, I've read Victor Wooten's book recently, he wrote two or three, but that one, the music lesson, and it's sort of woo at some part, that's kinda crazy. But he says exactly that it's like, well, as a toddler, you're just trying to imitate and you don't worry about the syntax and saying the correct words, whatever, you just try your best, try it. But it seems like with the music education, there's like, oh, there's a correct way my instructor told me to do it, versus just going on and jamming, which would be more, it's almost like learning by a small system. I guess he defends the point that it will take way less time. Is that what you mean with the TED talk?
- Yeah, and I think for my own personal idea of this, my interpretation of that thought train, I think the more time idea comes from the fact that I think the way that we traditionally do it, with teachers saying there's a correct way to do it, make sure to do it this way. And that's really good for building practice. It takes more time because, there's a fear element. It gets introduced. I don't want to play a wrong note. I'm scared of doing this. I remember, I was supposed to comp for one of my earliest guitar teachers, when I first started taking guitar. My very first lesson with him, he taught me some chords for "Heart of gold". And I was supposed to just, okay, now play those chords for me while I solo. And I'm like, what rhythm? With what? What do I do? Like I have the chords, but how do I do this? He's like, "just try it out, it's okay". And I tried it out. I jammed with my dad a lot. I did that with my parents--
- I didn't know your dad played guitar.
- Yeah, he taught me guitar in the beginning. I started with piano. I quit cause I got really bored of the RCM, Royal conservatory of music stuff. And then I started jamming with my dad on guitar. I think it was like a year or so after that, that I sort of started getting curious about guitar. And my dad was like, my mom said, "why don't you teach them guitar? "You gotta teach them guitar". And my dad's like, "let him come to it, "just let him come to it, "I don't wanna push him into it "like I did with the to piano". They pushed me to piano and that was cool. That was really valuable for me. It's just, the music that I was learning, wasn't the music that I was listening to. And I think there's another disconnect there.
- Absolutely. That's what I wanted to mention. It's like you get these books and these things, and then as a kid that was.. My mom was driving around and there was Celine Dion and the Ghostbusters soundtrack in the car. Like why am I not learning ? Why am I not learning this? And this is what's in my ears all day long. And yet there's a major disconnect. We were just to come back to the whole language analogy to what Victor Wooten brought up, and how your dad was reluctant to teach your guitar, as a regular dad reaction, I believe. In this masterclass we wanted just to come across that music, it uses the same, let's say brain patterns as learning a language. Because I written a few points and this is like a corny, like sort of a reductionist view of saying, well, the letters in your alphabet, so it's like notes and pitches, and your words are like a few notes are a lick. And then your sentences are full musical phrases. And we can say a paragraph in a book would be like one course of the solo, and then you can have a chapter and then et cetera, an entire album. But the point we're trying to make here is that seeing music learning more as a language, and less as a mathematical formula. Like, what's that scale to play on that chord? We get that question all the time, Nathan.
- Definitely in jazz. Like I see it sometimes in rock too, rock guitar. It's like wow, or more technical styles of guitar, like shred and metal, different metal sub genres . And they're like, what are you playing over in technical death metal? What scale are you playing over that? You see that sometimes. But definitely like when I hear that idea, I think jazz right away. That when I think of those questions, it's immediately jazz.
- It's more formulaic. And it seems that someone that plays rock and folk, even on a very high level, it's like.. Well of course, chord, of course that chord, of course that scale. But then what comes into play is more like, how does it feel to play? How does it feel when you hear it? How does it move you? So that's why we wanna wrap up this introduction and say, well, the language analogy is that, there is a formula to the same as your grammar and your syntax is important, if you wanna convey an idea in a speech or in a book. But that's not all there is to it. There is true action and this and that, and idioms and sorry, go on.
- What's that famous jazz song. "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do a thing", what you say, it's this way that you say it, that's what gets results. All those like the morphemes and the syntax, and the grammatical structure and rules of the sentence, are akin or exactly the same as what we learn in music theory, for music. But it's not all there is. And there's also a really heavy Western bias on like melody and harmony, and to a much lesser extent rhythm. But then all the musical elements beyond that, don't often get talked about, such as inflection and articulation, dynamics. And I don't even know which part of the metaphor I'm talking about anymore. Am I talking about music? Am I talking about English?
- Absolutely. And it's interesting, because that's exactly what Victor Wooten's teacher in the book says. He just shows up and says, "you know guys call it, "like even colleges call it music theory, "but actually they should call it note theory". Because all you learn about is how to stack notes together and formalities, et cetera. So just to conclude on this brief introduction on what a music as a language is, I will say this. I've been reading a book I'm not quite finished. It's Carla, I forgot. I should have brought the reference with me. It's called "The Language of Emotions", human emotions. And they found that there's IQ tests where you can say, oh, that's your spatial intelligence, whatever. But in the eighties or nineties, researchers have found out that there are, I think, seven different kinds of intelligences. If you talk about an athlete, he'll have a very good spatial intel, a basketball player, hockey player, football player--
- The geometry of the spatial coordinates, right?
- Yeah, and that's a type of intelligence, quote unquote, emotional intelligence is one we hear more and more about this. But then she says that, your intelligence when it comes to hearing things and interpreting language, she says they call it the musical intelligence. But actually it speaks also to your skills as a public speaker. Can you give a toast? Like giving a toast at a party, and maintaining your cool or having the right sentences and wait for the punchline, and all these things, those are very musical skills.
- Definitely.
- It's not about the words. It's not about the notes. It's not about the arpeggios. It's not about the chord progression--
- All of those things are foundational for it. It's like the first step, and the first step only. After that, like if you wanna be a really good public speaker, if you wanna be Steve Jobs on stage, or if you wanna be West Montgomery onstage, it's like you said, it's very similar elements of the performance of the art, the language art, musical art.
- And it goes beyond ideas.
- Exactly. It's like, yeah, this is the idea you wanna communicate. But communicating it is the most important part. Just because you have a good idea, it doesn't mean that it gets communicated properly.
- Agreed. So that's what we will be doing in the rest of this master class. So hopefully you're on board with us and watching and friendly. So, we will go on and go to the next section when we'll talk about, maybe the danger of looking at it dryly and as not how we would advise you to look at it and then solutions to that. And then we will dig directly into techniques. So we'll see you there. So before we dig into actually the techniques we wanna explore, and the things that are not the contents, as much as the container or the means of expression, let me just speak to the danger of focusing only on the notes and chords, and meaning. Focusing on the theory as a formula. So this is the danger. And in this sense that you do not wanna become that player. This is what we were gonna tell you. And also the fact that this applies mostly what we're talking about now to improvise soloing, meaning single note. But it also does apply if you wanna comp behind a singer or a soloist, you shouldn't be looking at this from a formula standpoint. So I was just looking at more parallels and analogies, practicing scales all the time, for your soloing. Just scale, scale, scale, scale is akin to re-memorizing the alphabet all the time. It's just notes. You need the technical fluency, but you have to realize when you know what, and when you've learned, you know your scales. So it's not conducive to understanding the words, if you just practice the alphabet. You don't build phrases. So a better way to go about this would be to, and we'll talk about this later, we'd be about constraints. Like what about you have a part of a scale, or how about this on a single string or during this progression, or trying to play a short note song. Another danger is to practicing licks all the time, which a lot of players who like what licks can I play over the giant steps regression? So it passes through the chords. And this is--
- One, two, three, five, one, two, three, five, one, two, three, five.
- Cause you know that. So this is okay because even Coltrane's solo, the original 10 steps has some of that in it. But if this is all you do, it's almost like you're memorizing the spelling bee. Like you're spelling words all the time, and it's not leading you to building your own musical phrases. And ultimately expression comes to, you're not memorizing then the alphabet and then words all the time to become a good public speaker. That's still our analogy.
- It's interesting. If I may jump in actually the thing that I find that us as teachers, you and I as teachers do that a lot of students end up getting, in a lesson you get loaded with a lot of information usually. And usually we try to keep it down to a minimum amount of information, so that it's absorbable. But over the course of many years, you get some messages that stick out in your mind and oftentimes it's like, yeah, learn licks. Go ahead and definitely learn them. And like play your scales to make sure you know them. But usually those are the types of messages that get said, that get memorized by students, or at least that stick in students' minds. But then they forget that the next steps, which is like, that's just the first step, the first step is like, get them, learn the licks, learn your scales, but then take them further. So do interesting creative things with restrictions on those licks, on those scales. Take it further and create more vocabulary, or at least like synthesize your own stylist speaking.
- And by all means, don't go on stage and play scales and licks. It's message. So learning scales, okay. But so long as this not what you do when you improvise all the time. Learning words is okay, same with musical phrases and things that are really plug and play that pass through chords. You can probably learn good sentences, and that's what I wrote down birds of the feather. You have the city and that you can complete. The point is even if you memorize all English idioms, you still need to tie all of this together into a coherent story that you can tell someone. So ultimately those are the danger and you need to do it all. You need to learn the licks, you need to learn the scales, learn the idioms, you need to do so well, but you need to not become a robot. So just now I scared you with all these dangers. Now I'll go ahead and give a bit of a solution. So you need to become, like any other language, you need to become fluent with jazz. And this is not formulaic. Like if you start to learn a foreign language, Indian, Russian, Mandarin, Chinese, you will have to work on the alphabet then words, but you will need to do much more than that, which is this workshop. And so you need the context, word, meaning, you'd be able to create longer sentences and paragraphs, and be more conversational. And my last point, which calls back to this book I've been reading on emotions is it's all going through your ears, so if you attempt to do any of this without the use of your ears, meaning you rely on your brains and your fingers more then you're not really learning to speak jazz. It's not gonna be very connected.
- It's so easy for us to learn licks and turn our brains off, and not really learn how to understand it. And to like really drive the connection between music and language really home, to drive that point home. I think it's super important. I teach all my students this to try and sing all your lines. Every single line that you play, every chord that you play. I got a few students who really swear by it now, because they're hearing it better. it's the immediate connection. It's it's like, okay.. So, I'm playing these things on guitar. It can very easily become a place second finger at X point, and place third finger here. It's just like following a set of instructions. But if you actually try to sing those lines, you're like, oh, this is how it actually sounds. And I can feel it in my body, how it sounds and how it fits into a piece of music. That's a lot, that's really hard for some people who've never sung before. Especially if you've gone most of your adult life without singing. I'd say start now, it's hard, but it's ultimately worth it, because it's not really for the sake of singing, it's for the sake of hearing better.
- That's the thing. I agree, and that's how some people told me, Kurt Rosenwinkel, famous jazz player, . And I was like, I don't know if I'm into it. And guys go like, dude, you hear this guy solo, and it's like, he's not plugging the guitar into his amp, He's plugging the guitar into his heart. It's crazy.
- Amazing.
- That's what we're striving for.
- That makes a lot of sense. So with all of that said, I think it's really important that we talk about the various things that you can do as a speaker of jazz, of music and of jazz in general, to make the how you say it better in your playing, no matter what, how you practice that. So we're definitely focusing, as jazz musicians we tend to focus on what we say then the notes, the sentences, the phrases, the licks but--
- And also why, I saw that on the YouTube video sometimes, why are you allowed to play a scene over that first? Like, I don't know. The jazz police did not come and arrest me. So I guess I'm allowed.
- I wasn't caught yet.
- But that's public on YouTube who knows.
- Exactly. I love the idea that you have to.. It's legitimate if no one calls you out on it, or it's legitimate because I did it first. I'm actually writing a jazz tune and I'm like, are we able to do all of this metric modulation that we ended up doing in the in the solo? And we looked at each other and we said, my drummer and I looked at each other and said, well, Larnelle did it, he set a legal precedent for it. So we called it the legal precedent. Larnelle lyric from "snarky puppy".
- Legal precedent, that's a good one.
- So it's like, this is crazy. Can we do this? I mean, someone else sort of did things like this already, so yeah, why not? But the elements that I wanna focus on in this section, I think we both wanna focus on in this section, are we wanna talk about the not big three elements of music theory, which are melody, harmony and rhythm to a lesser extent, but still it's part of the big three. Only lately have we talked about, like in music theory classes in universities, is rhythm like focused on more and more. But still like, there is so much beyond just these first three. And I think it's like what you said before, we shouldn't call it music theory class. We should call it a note theory. And I like this other perspective, which is we should expand the definition of music theory to music grammar--
- That's a nice way to say it for sure.
- And we should definitely be teaching these things like articulation, things like dynamics. I got a list here. I'm going to look over at the list, gonna do the cheat sheet thing. Silences and rest, rest is super important. I think Miles Davis talked about, don't play the notes, play the negative space.
- As we said, play on your third impulse Myles quotes.
- We talked about that one in improv 103 I think. We'd do an entire interlude section on it. In fact, I wanna talk about articulating on guitar. That's a big thing in a lot of more shreds styles, rock and heavy metal, and technical metal, and things like that. Where you're talking about, like how exactly are you articulating it with your pic? Are you slurring? Are you hammering and not pulling off? Repetition, Adam Neely, the YouTuber, he talks about repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes, repetition.. But there's all these different elements we wanna talk about. So I think you and I have some ideas on how to practice each of these elements individually.
- So my first point will be on this. So we will attempt to give you one or two ways to do the following. Before we do so, before we say dynamics we go on a task. Because we will ramble and go and catch it. It's just, we actually, Nathan and I, we could do this off camera all day when we chat. So, one of the things I wanna just get off my chest right away, is this is one of the reasons if you take the curriculum and you use say improv 101, 102 and 103, there are so many videos in which we do call and response, meaning your instructors plays a little bit, and then you play a little bit. It's to have that jamming factor. You're a two year old and you don't really speak, and then your uncle comes in, hey, hi you little baby. And then you're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I went to the park, but you can't understand what he's saying, but at least you're trying. So we are attempting, to give you all these little non no theory, magic things just by a osmosis. You listen to Mark play and we don't go Atlanta. Oh, look in between these two notes, there was a longer song list than usual--
- Or look at the changes dynamics between this phrase and the next phrase.
- Look, I installed new pickups, so the dynamics could be clear. It's like all these subtle things, like, no, no, we don't want to, we can't teach that. Well, actually, we're allowing ourselves to teach at this master class today, but we can't teach the feeling. And that's why it's so important to do it with an instructor, and not frigging learn from eBooks, as a lot of people try to do online. It's like, you can't learn syntax and grammar from an ebook because it's not formulaic.
- Our notation, our staff notation, our tablets or notation only gives you note and rhythmic information. It's not gonna give you.. I mean you can put in dynamics. But it's something that has to be interpreted. All of that stuff is meant to be interpreted by the experts already. And if you're not an expert it's hard to interpret something that you don't have a taste for, or the skill for. Two different elements--
- By experts you do mean the classical musicians, reading a score , and they know they have to play a certain volume.
- Exactly. And that too, anyone who knows their instrument really, really well already, like the uncle who comes in and talks to you, versus the baby who is just learning the notes first of all, or the notes, the words I meant. Getting our analogies mixed up--
- Do you wanna set the ball and talk about the first one?
- Let's talk about--
- .
- Sure, no problem. Let's talk about dynamics. So my wife is a Baroque violinist and dynamics are such a huge component of what they're playing. She talks about how early Baroque music isn't exactly the most out there, harmonically, or even melodically sometimes. There's some really gorgeous pieces of course. There's plenty of gorgeous pieces. JS Bach is late Baroque, mid to late Baroque. And he talks about.. He has amazing pieces that move through such beautiful melody and harmony, and stuff. But it's really in the dynamics and the way that you emphasize certain parts. What'd you do?
- Nothing, it's just like notifications on my computer. It's like, oh, I should have turned those off.
- But the interest is again in how you play it. And how you swell to really, really loud sections and how you bring the house down. When you go to like a really quiet section. You think about like blues players, how there are very stark dynamic contrasts in blues 12, eight ballads. Where huge solo building, building, building, and then it just like gets to the end of the form, and the whole band just comes straight down, and it's just the guitar. You hear John Mayer do this. You hear amazing classic blues artists do this, like crazy, like Stevie Ray Vaughn.
- It's so effective. And just so I don't wanna sound, I don't know what the word would be, condescending. No, that's not the right word. I have the word in French, but I just wanna define. So when we're talking about dynamics, we're essentially just saying like, how loud are you playing?
- Yeah, that's just implied.
- Exactly. Just so we're clear, it ranges from a whisper, all the way to screaming. That's the first thing I wanted to get clear. And what Nathan has said just to summarize is that, they're so effective. And something I will reiterate, that I took note of is dynamics worked better If you're alone, they work way better when they're exaggerated. When you think you have to play soft, play even softer than that. And if you want play loud you exaggerate and then the contrast will be stark. It will be much clearer.
- I got to tell my students all the time. It's not enough. No matter how much you think you're doing, it's not enough. Anyone who has been in a dance class, like in a partner dance class, as a leader, or anyone who's been in a drama class in high school, the drama teacher will always say like, you can always lead more, you can always give more range of expression. If you wanna go super quiet, go super quiet. And obviously I didn't do it there so--
- Alec Baldwin on a set, which is just going like, "yeah, we'll see you in court". I was saying, man, we're freaked out. We don't even think that the mic will pick up what he's saying. He comes to a whisper and it's nuts. So let's just dig in, how would you do it? How do we practice dynamics? Let's pick one thing.
- One easy thing off the bat is like, just for every phrase that you play, play it at a different static volume. So don't even bother with sweeping between dynamic ranges yet.
- So let me pick one and we'll do it. If I lose, so any phrase that I play. So this is the one. Louder?
- Yeah.
- Whisper quiet now.
- It forces me to shape the notes differently too.
- It changes a lot and you start noticing these things.
- And then somewhere in the middle. Swelling to loud, from loud to soft.
- Go back, go reverse that now.
- From loud to soft?
- From super soft, to super loud. And I think one thing that, like you said, you start understanding the subtleties of what these dynamic changes offer. And so you start having to say, I actually want to get to the really loud or which note in here when I'm swelling, is supposed to be really loud? What's the note that I want to emphasize with dynamics? And then, or reverse emphasize like through quietness, which note do I wanna make? Like the note that people have to lean in to listen to. That's the effect of dynamics. Is like either blow people away and feel the energy with you, or you make people lean in close and be like, what's that he's saying?
- What's that again?
- It's quiet.
- Sorry, but that reminds me a lot of how someone, some famous producer or musician, describe Pat Matini playing. And he says, "every time Pat is playing, "it's almost as if he's saying, "I have something really important to tell you". Check this out and every line is that like, what? And you wanna lean in and he's just taking you and telling a big story.
- There's at least one or two people like this in our lives, I'm sure. But I remember a pianist, I won't name him, but there's a pianist that went to school with me at the same year at Carleton University in Ottawa, and he's super chill guy, amazing player, really sweet, real sweetheart, really nice guy. But he was always so chill and soft-spoken. And so I remember he had to lead one of our bands and he wouldn't yell to get our attention. He just sit there for a second and look at us. And then he quietly say, "so we're gonna do this next". And the energy that he had was so chill and still authoritative, but in like a really serene way. And it made you listen, it made you be like, I need to shut up so I could hear this guy.
- That's awesome. So let's do dynamics, we've got them covered. There's way more we wanna cover, so let's go quickly. So one thing students can do is just pick a phrase repeat it and just stage them at different levels of dynamics, from very loud to soft. And then maybe swelling between, start the phrase soft, go all the way loud, or start loud, go soft, or even go from soft to loud and back. You can do that. Maybe I'll do a course of.. Sorry, Nathan--
- I also wanna emphasize that it's important to not just think of soft and loud, but also the middle ground. What's your middle speaking ground? And try to swell between at least those three. And I think that gives people a good starting point for dynamics. It says here are the targets for you.
- And let me just do another example. I'll just use a metronome. I'll do B flat blues and it's a chill 144. So it's a 72. And I'll just try to play. And unfortunately, because of zoom, COVID, we can't really jam together. But I will try to see if I can improvise a course or two, and just demonstrate that I can play loud, I can play soft, I can play somewhere in the middle while I'm soloing. I'll play pretty simple. So let's do a.. You know this one. Something like that.
- Nice, I love it. I wanna point out to everybody listening that Mark isn't just improvising single note lines. He's not just thinking about.. So this is a little bit of a tangent, but he's not just thinking about, I need to do the chorus of improv. I need to do a chorus of comping. Like we usually separate in our courses. Mark is thinking about all of the elements together. He's thinking this requires a chord. This requires something else. And those things aren't separate in his mind, they're all part of the vocabulary of jazz guitar.
- One thing.
- So I think it's really important that we all think about that as we play through a song. And it still sounded like a B flat blues, no matter what element kinda.. More or less.
- So the next item in our list of non big three elements of music, that you can experiment with is silences. And basically it's saying, if you were thinking of jazz improvisation, specifically, you are saying, you add space between the lines. Meaning, make sure you rest. In other words, if you're a brass player, you don't have that problem because you need to breathe. And sometimes the issue with guitarists or pianists, or even violinists, that we can play forever, we don't need to breath. So we'll have a little bit of a demonstration. So I demonstrated a bit on dynamics with my guitar. Nathan here will demonstrate how can you put silences in between your phrases? And one of the clear things I like to do is you stop long enough so that your previous phrase is digested, if you will. It's one of my tricks, one of my tips. Do you want to add anything Nathan before demonstrating? No, I think one of the first things.. We'll expand on this later with this idea of phrasing and pacing. Especially like Miles Davis style pacing, talk about an improv 103. But I guess, the way I'll demonstrate it right now is just ad hoc silences. Nothing prescribed, but just be like, I'll make sure to put a silence.
- Consciously stop playing. It's something a lot of our students don't do.
- I'm going to actually, we mentioned the drama students before, be more exaggerated with what you're doing. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to take my hands off the guitar, and put them in the air, and then pick up again later on. So that's the exercise I want you to every now and then, play a phrase and then make sure to take your hands off the guitar. Didn't--
- That's a Scofield one.
- The Scofield one? I think, also Coltrane was talking to Miles Davis and he was like, "Miles, how do I stop playing? "I just can't stop playing sometimes". "So take the horn out of your damn mouth".
- It sounds like Miles.
- Probably used more swear words, actually. So here we go. I have the metronome set at 60 beats per minute, on two and four. So we're playing at 120 beats per minute, a nice and easy medium blues. I'll play a B flat blues as well. So, I'll move the camera down and say my guitar. One, two, one, two, three. Hands off the guitar. One, two, three, four. There's a long phrase. Well, that's my notifications too. One, two, one, two, three. We're back to the top. So that's the idea. Just get uncomfortable with how much silence is being played and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Sorry, go ahead.
- One of my instructors that said this actually said well, how much silence should I play? And he said, "ultimately, if you wanna play for real, you should only play what you hear". I'm like, but I don't hear anything. "Well, you might play two notes and a chorus". And don't do that all the time. I mean, don't walk on stage and play one note and go yes, I'm done. Don't do that by all means, but you can practice that. If it means you're playing just one lick of every course of blues and you force yourself to do something very consciously, which is playing silences. It sort of creeps in the rest of your playing into your subconscious.
- There's something really sincere about that. And like you said, don't do this all the time. Obviously you want to have something to say, but doing this will allow you to, as you said, have this mentality creep into your consciousness. I think a really important overarching idea to learning anything at all, not just the elements that we're talking about here, but anything at all is that you're only learning if you are pushing your boundaries. If you're doing something that's comfortable, that you're like, oh yeah, I'm good at this. Well, you're already good at it.
- You're not learning anything, I agree.
- If you're uncomfortable because you're not good at it, that's exactly where you need to be. And you need to push that boundary a little bit at a time, take breaks, pace yourself. Don't try to like become a master all in one day, it doesn't happen. You'll burn yourself out and you'll psychologically destroy yourself.
- So long as you expand your consciousness a little bit on things that are possible. So far I just wanna recap and go to the next point. We talked about dynamics, we talked about silences, that was pretty obvious. Let's just jump in immediately in articulations. So for guitarists, we are in the luck because as Nathan said, for metal shredders and whatever, and all the things I used to do when I was a kid, really, I used to.. People don't believe me and whatever, and we can talk about staccato versus legato. We can talk about slurs. We can talk about sliding in long notes, short notes. We can talk about bends. We can talk about all sorts of things. So let me just say, it could be a worthwhile experiment if you've never done it to look at one note and just go, how does it feel to go versus Or even same if you're just playing quarter notes. Versus Having long notes. And we don't have the luxury in jazz of the classical notation, to tell us where to slow and where to articulate, where to breath and what not. So you have to create this. Slurs will be maybe a slide. If you have notes that you wanna play say, can you play? But could you play it. Or could you play. There's so many ways to replay the same two things and you can just consciously make an effort to do that. We talked about staccato, legato, long notes, short notes, slurs slides, bends.. Blues guys, and rock guys know all about bends. What else would we talk about Nathan? Do you have any other ideas?
- Well, I'm actually on that point on articulations. There's a great video by Adam Neely. The YouTuber I mentioned earlier. There's a segment of the video, it's from his the worst jazz solo of all time video, that he released recently. There's a segment in it where he talks about playing a one note solo. There's a rich tradition of history in playing one note solos, in saxophones and guitars, and rock, and rhythm and blues, the 1950 genre and stuff. But the idea here is that, how can you take one note and make it musical? I mean, he even mentioned the song "One Note Samba", Antonio Carlos show theme song.
- It sounds a Gershwin song. Is it a Gershwin song?
- No, "One Note Samba" is sung by the or something like that.
- That's right. But which one? Which Samba? There's a bass Samba and there's a Gershwin one. Is there? Or maybe I'm mistaken. Nevermind, sorry.
- I can't think of it. But that particular one is ♪ Pa pa ra para tatata ♪ ♪ Tatiri tiri tita ♪
- Great song, like fantastic. But anyway, he goes through this exercise in the middle of the video where Adam Neely, where he's a bassist and he plays one note, in something like 17 different ways. Talks about the things that you mentioned, like slurs and long slides, short slides into it, slides from above downward.
- So you mean like this.
- Yeah, or a short slide from above.
- How's this
- And then a short one. Exactly.
- Got it.
- It makes a big difference. And he talks about just basically like pounding out all the variations of playing one note, and seeing how you can do it, playing it on different strings. This isn't about articulations, but guitars are very particular for hammering on, pulling off.
- Or
- Exactly. Things like we talked about slides, we talk about slurs. We talked about bending for guitars. It's huge. Playing with your fingers versus playing with your pic. This is still, this isn't exactly articulation anymore but--
- It's really, it affects the sound that comes out. That sounds different, the timbre.
- Yeah, timbre, exactly. There's a lot that you do on the standard essential series, where you are palm muting, and you're pointing out in the instructions, how your palm muting certain notes, like "Body and soul", the very beginning, the first notes you're palming.
- I go like. I don't remember exactly how it goes, it has been a while.
- E flat, minor. Sounds different. Those three notes sound different that you're playing.
- Instead of. Or even with a pic it would be. But then I go.
- So, what I want, as an exercise for this idea, I want you to take one note eliminating the vocabulary variable. And I want you to just take one note for a little bit and just play a musical one note solo, that maybe isn't over a blues or anything like that, but it's just like how many ways can you make one note sound musical?
- That's a great exercise. And there's multiple ways to work on articulation because in the midst of a phrase, then you might have a note that gets very high in the scale that you decide to do longer or staccato for a fact, with an accent. That everything else is pretty soft. And then you have your dynamic popping up on that, those couple of notes. But then that's like more advanced than that. As you develop an instinct for it, you can build phrases and have these elements of music sort of blend in. Which once again is what we do with the call and answers videos you improvise, and then you watch someone who's pretty good. Well, I don't want to flatter myself an expert. It's like, oh, that's how it sounds. But then he didn't talk about playing loud notes or soft notes. After a while you do it by instinct.
- It goes back to that Victor Wooten idea. We can't drive this point home enough, but it's learning through osmosis. Listen to the two experts, listen to the legends, listen to your teachers, Mark, myself. Listen to how we play, how everyone plays, as experts in the field and just copy the way that they do it. You'll learn the notes. We're teaching them to you and everything like that. Don't worry about them too much. Over time you'll do that, but keep an ear out at all times for absorbing through osmosis, the articulations, the silences, the short notes, the long notes, the dynamics, definitely the dynamics. There are more elements that we want to talk about. But just with these first three ideas, there's infinite variability, already.
- You're like in the realm of.. I mean this is so.. Speaking of which, let let's move on to, I wanted to do a brief intro on talking about repetition, which is getting your point across, making your point often by, repeating a part of a sentence in a speech or the same part, it's an effect. I just played earlier, I played. That's tenor madness and tenor madness is that blues head. Again. How more repetitive can this get? People are like, I don't like rock music and punk music because it's repetitive. And like you listen to jazz solos, it's always the same thing.
- Yeah, exactly. It's not just about the repetition that people don't like, because repetition is a very valuable musical device. It's very valuable public speaking device. Adam Neely says repetition legitimizes. If you do something, and you're not sure if it's the right thing to do, or as a listener, you're not sure if they meant to do that. You're not sure if they were sincere and they doubled down, and no I want you to understand this thing. This is the one I want you to do. I'm gonna say it again. They play the same lick two times in a row, you're like, I guess he meant to do that. And that is kind of like a teaching hack that we have for a lot of students, where it's like if you make a mistake, play the same mistake again, just double down on it. And it's a little bit--
- Dig yourself a hole and try to get out yourself after that.
- Exactly. Maybe that's not a good way of teaching it because it's not exactly sincere. But the idea is that we're trying to counteract that fear we talked about earlier, where it's like, don't worry about mistakes or mistakes. Go ahead and play mistakes, play them again. And that sort of takes away the fear or at least it allows you to deal with the fear of improvising, composing on the spot.
- I agree. So let me do a quick demonstration, actually, speaking of B flat blues, let's do it again. I will do a B flat blues, where I'll use repetition. And just to give you a key exercise, what you can do is aim to repeat three times, the rule of three in comedy, you have it. If you want a solid punchline, you just do it three times the third time like boom. You could elect to modify the third time slightly before moving onto the next idea. So as Nathan has said earlier, I'll try to exaggerate this. And once again, we're at a comfortable 72, so it's a 144 and we do a B flat blues again. A one, two, three, four. Now it's time to move on. Then short repetition. Longterm repetition. Something like that. So that was an example. There was several kinds of repetition, or repetitions that before I got to my third time, it took like eight bars, but then, ♪ Pu du da, pu du da ♪ ♪ Pu du da, pa pi, pa pi, pa ♪ And then you're already done your three repeats within like a bar and a half. Any comments you wanted to add on this Nathan? I see you like on the edge of your seat. Yeah, but Mark.
- More variability. If you're wanting to explore more variability in the idea of repetition, so Mark was already touching on that. You get short repetitions, you get longer bars that you're trying to copy and paste. And the more in harmonic accordance you are with the chords, the heart of that will be over other chords, especially when the chords change keys and things like that. But the idea there is that like with tenor madness, you might want to just adapt the same line, especially for longer phrases. This is hard, but you might wanna just adapt the exact same line he played to the new key. So just change, oh, the key now has D flats. Well, I can't play D naturals anymore, I'm just going to lower that down to a D flat.
- One or two notes will change. And then you can just repeat the same like run your analysis over what stays and what changes.
- Yeah, exactly.
- D flat is a really good example.
- So like, shoot tenor madness. How's it going? I just lost this could you--
- So like it's D, B flat and G, it's just a G minor triad, but then when you get to the E flat chord, you have to play a D flat. So you got this G diminished triad. I can take that entire line, which has repetition inside itself. You repeat it again, but again with.. Riff blues are great for that idea of three, or repeating thrice. And then like blues in general is exactly that. Here's the setup, repeat the setup, punchline. That's what the blues is--
- Call and answer and conclude.
- That's another way to do it. Another way of looking at it.
- I used to teach that to beginners, like non Jazzers go like we're gonna play a 12 bar blues. Your job is to play three phrases. The first four bars, you play your call. Second four bars, play your answer. And last four bars sorta concluded. So, just to segue into the next point, which I wrote down, so you can do repetition also. There's one, I don't know what he's doing here. And my thoughts was, you know that player, Eric Johnson, most famous, like modern blues player, but very like not a shredder, but a very, very fast and player--
- Direct descendant of Robert Johnson right now, I'm sorry, I'm just kidding.
- But Eric Johnson is.. It's interesting to listen to his solos sometimes, because he's probably half improvising, half preparing his stuff. But one thing you can notice whether you're into that stuff or not, he sounds like he's two guitarists. He will play a phrase and then stop. And then there's that answer. And I don't know if he did on purpose on two tracks or whatever, but I mean, when you hear really, really good jazz players, they do that a lot. So the exercise here would be a sort of repetition. It would be an answer to yourself. Almost like, yes, you can repeat things, but you can go ♪ Pe ti li do ba pa ♪ do your pause or silence, and then go, hey, if you heard that, what would you like to reply with? Like, what's your answer to that? And then you can go on and answer yourself. It's a great way to pace your solo and add silences.
- That really comes down to this idea of listening to yourself. You have to be listening to what you play. I've said that to a lot of students in the past. Like, did you just hear, are you listening to yourself right now? Did you hear what you just said?
- That sounded so bad.
- Not really.
- Are you listening to yourself?--
- Oh, God, I swear, I'm not that mean in lessons. I'm not that mean in lessons.
- Just mean enough.
- Exactly, but a actually a really good way of doing this to hack it immediately, to really hear the.. Going back to that drama student idea, like exaggerate the differences. So one way to do this is to play a phrase in the low register, and then change registers drastically in your next phrase. So you could play a similar line in the next, like two octaves higher or one octave higher. But because it's in a different register and it's usually on a different set of strings, it'll feel like a different instrument, different voice. The strings are different thickness, they have different timbre, . It'll sound like a different instrument as a result, or at least enough of a different instrument that it feels like a response to your call.
- That's a really good hack. I think we were going to move on to the next exercise. So just to recap so far, we have five, talked about dynamics, silences, articulations, different ways of making a single note sound, repetition, making your point repetition, answering to yourself that hack with different registers. Next I wrote down things about the motivic development and it goes without saying. Well we all know them. And Mozart wrote what? 12 variations or was it 16 variations?
- Don't remember.
- I think there's 12. So there's 12 variations on that theme, but the essence of composing, ultimately it's always to have that literal entry point, which is a small motif. ♪ Tarararaaa ♪ And it's like 15 minutes of tarararaa.
- The entire piece is that, and of course the classic music pieces are much bigger, than most jazz pieces.
- So, one thing you can put yourself through is just I know of course, early on, before we started filming Nathan and I talked about that we have faders. And one of the things we wanted to is just turn every fader down, no more chord progression and scale, and complicated arpeggios and this and that. We are only looking at that single element. Now, if you're doing multi big developments, if you want to have that single fader up, it's gonna be difficult if you're playing on the chord progression. So maybe start with a static , a single chord sounding, I'm gonna do a C major chord, whatever. So you can reflect and really be.. Even take out the time element and see if you can divide. Hey, actually let's play a game. Nathan and I will play "Out of Time", but I'll establish a key of C major. And we're just gonna see how much we can expand upon that piece of fragment of music, that motif I haven't decided on yet, and just see how much we can distort it and tweak it and run with it. So it still has to recognizable from the previous element. But we will just throw.. We're gonna play musical catch if you will.
- Sounds good.
- Those are all really cool ideas. And it all develops from . It all develops from this idea of a rising. For us we heard it, we were like a rising set of stepwise notes. We didn't think that, but we could feel that rising step wise motion and say, okay, cool. And then jumping back down to the original note. So the overall arc of the contour was, it goes up and then back down to exactly the same level it started at. That's a really wordy way of describing it. But when you hear the sound, you wanna just recognize it. You're like, oh, I got the idea. And then you take it and you can do different things. So one of the conscious thoughts that I had was I wanted to vary up the rhythm at which I was playing the same notes. So I just repeated them a couple of times. What were some of your ideas for developing it?
- One of the things I did was a slide in, which has just, it felt like.. I want it to go in one of the notes. For some reason, it just felt right. One reason you took it up over the scale by using the same sort of motif. I took it down. I sort of, oh, you want to take it up? I'm gonna go the opposite way. So we conference it.
- I love that. The first idea with a slide, that goes back to the articulation idea that we had, right?
- Exactly. So you can develop a motif by using any of the other previous elements we talked about, and you can even carry a motif. So I will demonstrate this just quickly because it's much harder, but you can take a chord progression and let's not do B flat blues again. We'll do autumn leaves. Is that okay?
- Yeah sure, E minor or--
- Let's do E minor. So the first part is E minor seven. Even there I'm gonna try to play even the melodies. It's the perfect melody for that, but I'm gonna avoid playing the melody. I'm going to think of the changes and play on the song, and I'm gonna see if I can carry a motif through. So it calls back to this idea Nathan, you brought, where you say, well, maybe you need to modify a note or set of note to keep the lick the same. So it fits. So that's more like formulaic. It's still back in our theory or our big three, but I'm going to try to be just as organically as possible playing on and motif and developing the motif. And I don't know what's gonna give, but let's give it a shot. Ready for this?
- Oh, wait Mark, sorry.
- Yes.
- Could you start again? I think our audio capture didn't capture it. So if you could just say something before you start playing.
- So I'm gonna start with, I'm gonna start with the last four bars. Something like that. So you see that, Nathan is laughing. Like you use the Miles with "The Cannonball". I love that thing. But the point here is that throughout I was trying to take the licks like, if it's a descending line, let me do the descending line. Oh, the descending line has five notes, but maybe the next round it's organically going to morph into six notes or four notes, or maybe it's gonna go higher, two more notes of the scale and go down. So it's not computed, but as Nathan, you pointed out it's about the shape. Oh, it's a descending line. And whether the descending line is repeated over a huge span of time, repeated again, or if it's a smaller span, or if it goes faster or lower, or if it goes lower in the scale or higher in the scale, it doesn't matter. But organically, it's really easy to follow for yourself and for a listener to develop on a motif. It's almost like you're staying on topic. If that's the language analogy.
- I think that's a great analogy cause it shows how people are understanding and hooking onto a single idea, and expanding upon it until we all understand the various dimensions of the idea. I'd like to actually give one more exercise, a short one, that's even more prescribed. And you can take the.. The idea is just take a pattern, a scale sequence, or a series of notes. That's your motif. And you can just start with that and pick your key and start that pattern on a certain note, and then take it up through the scale notes. The idea is like.. Let's see if I can do. I'm gonna take that John Coltrane one. So I'm gonna take the one, two, three, five. One, two, three, five. Keeping the fourth note in scale. I'm gonna stay with C major just cause it's simple. No sharps, no flats. And I'm just gonna go one, two, three, five, and I'm gonna say, well, what if I do that starting on D instead of C, two, three, five ,one, two, three, five.
- So with playing this, the notes of within that scale, you're just not moving the same fingers, right?
- Exactly. I'm playing in the same key of C major, no sharps, no flats, but I'm just taking that pattern of one, two, three, five, and moving it up to the next note in this scale. And then the next note of the scale. And as Mark pointed out, the shape of the motif itself will change. However, like the actual fingering will change I should say, but the the detail work will change. But the actual overall arc of that, the contour of that melodic fragment, will stay the same. One, two, three, five. One, two, three, four, five.
- It's a great exercise. Because that's even before say developing a multi.. I call it motivic development before developing your motif. And you just take it as is and see if you can run it within a scale. Almost like modulating a single lick within a scale, but has to be a very short. Like a few notes, like four.
- Exactly. This is exactly what Mark was talking about earlier, about expanding on the idea of your scales. You know your scales. Like obviously if you don't know all your scales, if you don't know your major scale very well, work on that, just work on the skill itself. But once you've got that foundation down, push the boundary and practice your scales, in a scale sequences, such as this one. This is setting up your motif. Not developing it, as Mark said. This is a sort of a prescribed exercise for creating a motif in the first place. And then you can use that, those sequences across the scale, across the key that you're playing in, once you're actually in a song to develop those ideas, and alter it, and expand upon it and morph fit.
- It's so good too, because this is anti technical, because I see all the questions coming up like which positions should I do this? It's like, well dude, to play it in, you don't have to worry, should I do it in all positions? No, do it in one position that allows you to make it sound nice. So it's like a nontechnical technical exercise. Let's see how well you know your sales. It's so good .
- Exactly, I love it.
- Finally, what Nathan and I want to cover in that whole language of music thing, is more, I don't want to say esoteric, but like harder with things you can do to add to your solos that are non-musical. And I will go quickly over those because they are more intricate. And I think we've covered and Nathan so far dynamics, silences, articulations, repeating, motivic developments, all these things. And now we're gonna go in deeper. It's not what, but it's how you say it. And the first one I wanna cover is phrasing. And it will of course start with a Pat Matini story, actually two. And there was this whole YouTube video, probably in 2010, I don't think it's up anymore, but it was young and we say young, like 18 years old, Pat Matini. You remember he was very young prodigy and he was on stage, I think giving a clinic at Berkeley, and he grabbed the metronome. He put the microphone on the metronome and he started to shred like over scales and on over all the things . And it was fascinating because I'm like, all right, the metronome is clicking on two and four and he's just playing these streams of sixteenth notes. And it's not even that fast, it's not like impressive, but what was impressive was the feel of the notes. As you see notes written on paper, there's sixteenth notes or say they're eighth notes, So one, two, three, four. So as you see . But it was his laid back feel, that was, oh my God, you know if you're sitting on a chair that has four legs, you lie down, yes that, it felt like that rhythmically. Like, oh, it's like a metronome hits that center. And he's just like laying back on all the notes, all the time--
- He lands on the note slightly later than the metronome. Almost throughout the bar, throughout the single beat.
- And it's not just once. That's how he plays like. Oh, wow, it sounds so.. And then you're like, oh, he's not really like doing the.. He's just. He's just playing very, very straight, but they're late. And it's swings so hard, like, ah. And then I guess it was 2016, I went to New Jersey with Scott, my good friend invited me to see Pat Matini, Christian McBride, and it's hosted by Christian McBride duo. And he would talk, be on a sofa and just like, tell me about your childhood in Kansas city. And then play a standard and then go back down and sit down, and talk. And it was like an interview series. I just remember because Pat came on stage before they started everything and then played of all songs. Because Nathan and I have been working on this one recently. What's the name of that song?
- "Black Orpheus".
- "Black Orpheus" thank you. And he started playing the melody, Pat solo, no bass, and then plucked a few chords and then played a melody again, few chords and solo. He did a bit solo version, it's Pat Matini, so of course it was world class. But what was most impressive to me, was the fact that you could hear, he was laying back on a pulse, that he himself imposed, but there were no metronome drummers, but yet you heard him playing, you could feel the laid backness of his thing. Like, wow. So I aspire to play like that honestly. So I'm gonna go really quickly through this one exercise. I would recommend people do, if you're at that point in your life, set your metronome slow, take a B flat blues. That's a two and four, so it's 52 and four. So it's 100 BPM and keep playing phrases and see how laid back you can be, just practice--
- You can do this with a melody to start off with, if you're not familiar. If you're worried about notes, just play with the melody which you're familiar with and then try and providing later--
- I will just jump the gun and start improvising, but you can do that. So B flat. This is so hard. It's excruciating and the slower it is, the easier it is to maintain. Ad then if you stretch too much, you will fall back on your face, like on the chair.
- Just like the chair.
- So this is a feeling freezing. Just remember we are all culprits of rushing when we're nervous, or when we don't really know the material, when we're stuck in our heads, we will rush them. In an attempt not to rush, work on you're freezing and work on getting laid back. Next topic, phrase length. It's a super obvious. You want to take it away Nathan, because it's really, really an easy point.
- We actually just did a challenge, one of the members forum challenge on Facebook, on phrase lengths. And we talk about this in improv 103. So prescribed phrase length. It's really hard as beginner jazz musicians to play those long phrases, that jazz musicians tend to play, bebop lines are huge. They're a stretch for like four or five, six bars at a time. And sometimes you wanna play a short phrase. Sometimes you wanna learn to play long phrases. Whichever one you have trouble with, try to set an amount of bars that you can play for and then create a set amount of bars, that you are supposed to be silent for. On the forum I did, I think four bars of playing two bars of rest, four bars of playing two bars arrest. If you do it within a weird number, like not groups of four, specifically, and like the actual total amount of rest and playing time is like six or five bars--
- Three plus two.
- Some weird ones like that. You're forced to play at places in the form and rest at places in the form, that you're not usually used to. It's a really good exercise. I don't think we'll demonstrate this right now but--
- Please learn, all in all, well, you should learn to play long phrases and short phrases. And contrast between the two independent for effect. And this segues nicely into the next exercise you could practice on, which is knowing that you can start or end your improvised phrase at any point, within the measure itself. So it's a bar four, four, and in order.. So I had a way of saying this, in order to uncover every little corner of the bar four and four, because some corners won't be as comfortable because you don't feel you're one as hard. One of the things I practice personally is playing half notes, and playing Charleston's on easy, like not even a one, six, two, five lose, just one, four, five lose that super obvious. I did practice this and started to displace this by an eighth note. Do it an eighth note late and eighth early. And I will just point people to Arie Hoenig, "Polyrhythms" DVD book, it's on Mel Bay publishing. And for that matter, when you say you have phrased , and you can start them, in different places of the bar, the only natural next step would be to start or end phrases naturally within the form itself. So if you have a 12 bar blues, can you start to rephrase on bar three? Or can you end your phrase on bar three? Which beats? So this is what Nathan was referring to the exercises on the forums recently. you can pace yourself by telling yourself I'm gonna play a definitive amount of bar. You can even say I'm gonna play a definite amount of beats. How about I play for seven beats and I rest for four beats. That's a total 11.
- 11 beats, yeah.
- My brain is in French today. I was to go eating sushi. I wanna travel to Japan. Got it sorry. So I know we've been going really fast with these things. We have to wrap this thing up right now. But all in all, the things we've talked about, the dynamics, the silences, the articulations, repeating using repetition, using motivic development, using now the more esoteric one, like the feel of your phrasing, laid back your phrase length, and being able to start your phrases anywhere within the bar and or within the form are all things. If you combine this, basically, it's not what you say, It's how you say it. Once you're able to do all or any of this, you won't need us very much anymore.
- So all of this said, these are a bunch of different elements that you can tackle all by yourself and with friends, of course, if you ever get a chance to play with people ever again. The jazz musicians challenge in all of this is actually understanding that you are composing music in real time. That's what improv is. You're not making up new music, but you are trying to write music, with your instrument in real time. It's pretty crazy. So wrapping your head around this tough stuff, but it takes more than just notes and chords, and rhythm, those big three. So all sorts of different elements we can target. I want you to think about everything as a speech. Mark and I have been talking about this, music as a language metaphor. Imagine you're up there public speaking, you have to think about your body language. We haven't even talked about that today. You have to think about your body language. You have to think about the way that you're saying things. You have to take a breath every now and then, and present properly, so that people can digest the things that you're saying. You can think about things like.. I think there are examples of different styles of improvising, on record. I think we have a note here about Coltrane solos--
- Coltrane solo where he was even preparing what he was doing. So there's these things that you can do to help yourself. Say, hey, I'm gonna prepare a solo and do a bit of this here and bit of that. So you're not always like without a safety net, you can always fall back on your feet.
- My teacher in Ottawa, Tim Bednar, when he recorded his album of "Light and Shadows", he mapped out exactly where he wanted to play certain ideas. And he didn't like write them out specifically, but he'd say in this segment of the music, I wanted to play this kind of line, or I want to be up in this range of the guitar at this moment in the form, for example. So it's semi-prepared. Semi-composed, semi-improvised.
- So all the sets of tools that we've talked so far, really are helping you add in contrast, variety, and helping you become the master of Jazz and improviser. It applies to any other kinds of music. So we will wrap up this masterclass. Key takeaways, like English or French, music as a language. It is dangerous, quote, unquote, to only focus on the contents of it. The aim is to tell the story with you music and you need to master what you'll talk about, the songs and the skills and stuff. But then see if you can tell a story with all these other elements we've talked about. Don't be afraid to prepare your solos. This is what we've just talked about with Tim and with Coltrane. And on that note, unless Nathan, you have anything else to add.
- All of those other elements that we keep talking about. I wish we had a more dignified name for them, as a group, they make music amazing and interesting. The notes and chords, and rhythm, they make music as a foundation. But to make it really amazing and interesting, you have to have all those elements together. That's really all I got to say about it.
- That's beautiful closing words. So on that note, thank you guys for watching the masterclass on a music as a language, on your jazzguitarlessons.net student portal and the jazz guitar mastery program. Once again, my name is Marc from jazzguitarlessons.net.
- My name is Nathan from jazzguitarlessons.net.
- We hope you have enjoyed this stream, and there's many more to come in your accounts, more master classes, and more other content. Please keep us posted if you have any other questions about what we've talked about here, in the comments below, and we will see you soon in the next video.
- Thanks and take care.
- Thank you guys.
