Guitar
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
We guitarists have a tendency to look at the fingerboard way too much. I think there are a few factors involved. First of all, the guitar by its very nature is a very visual instrument…we rely a lot on patterns and shapes to learn the fingerboard.
Second, unlike most other instruments, a lot of guitarists [...]
Friday, June 20th, 2008
Here’s a transcription I did some time ago of Rosenwinkel’s solo on Minor Blues, from The Next Step album. Just thought I’d share.
minorblues.pdf
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Here’s a short arrangement of Blue Bossa . I wasn’t trying to work on one particular concept, just "following my muse" as the say. Still, I was going for a contrapuntal texture. It’s 3 voices, the second voice doubling the first one in thirds, for the most part. Although I tried to give it some [...]
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Getting back on track, here’s a little voice-leading etude I did with Misty. Four voices; top voice is the melody. Basically, I tried to voice-lead the two middle lines as smoothly possible, which led to some pretty crazy stretches. But I think the resulting sound is pretty nice. I especially like what happens on bar [...]
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
I was messing around with Bach’s Invention in D minor today, and came up with a cool way to play it on the guitar. By simply transposing the bottom voice up an octave it becomes very playable and sounds quite nice.
The only catch is that the two voices cross each other at times. Here’s the [...]
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Here’s the full 2-part etude based on All The Things You Are. First, the basic outline using different polyphonic patterns:
allthethings.pdf
And now with some melodic activity added:
allthethings2.pdf
And here’s a rather clumsy rendition of it:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Of course, the idea is to use that as a foundation and to play around with [...]
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Ok, so you’ve learned all the fingerings for every inversion of the basic arpeggios in C, right? Or at the very least you should be somewhat familiar with them. If not, this next step may prove pretty frustrating.
What we’ll do now is apply these fingerings to a tune. It can be any tune…choose one you [...]
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
In a previous post I mentioned having to really know you’re arpeggios. The first thing I did which really helped me out was to figure out the fingerings for all the inversions. Once you have the shapes under your fingers, everything else becomes a lot easier.
So I took the four basic chord types: maj7, m7, [...]
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I just wanted to share my approach to learning to play over changes. What has worked for me is to stick to playing the basic chord-tones: 1-3-5-7. I take whatever tune I’m working on, and improvise at a very slow tempo, only with chord tones.
The objective is to really get inside the changes, to really [...]
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
I started messing around with applying patterns to some standards. Here is one I came up with for All The Things You Are:
Because of the constant movement in fourths, it pretty easy to apply a repetitive pattern like this. Other progressions require a little more creativity.
Here’s the same pattern with some added melodic movement:
[...]
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