Jazz
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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 [...]
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 [...]
Monday, February 18th, 2008
As promised, here is a recording of the etude I posted not too long ago. I learned it as is, and then slowly started to improvise with it…mostly just playing with rhythmic anticipations and adding a little motion to the bass line. I still need to work on it a bit, but I [...]
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
With all my fascination for counterpoint on the guitar, I feel bad for not having mentioned Jimmy Wyble yet. The truth is I’ve yet to check out his book The Art of Two-Line Improvisation, which doesn’t seem to be available in Amazon or Sheetmusicplus at the moment. Mel Bay doesn’t say it’s out of print, [...]
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Here’s a little 3-part arrangement of “There Will Never Be Another You.” I simply play the melody while holding a simple root-5 bass line underneath, what I talked about in this post. Then I added a guide-tone line in the middle.
Here’s the score.
This is really a starting point. I plan to add a little more [...]
Friday, December 28th, 2007
In an effort to add contrapuntal textures to my playing, I’ve been messing around with species counterpoint and trying to apply it to jazz tunes.
Here is my first attempt, a cantus firmus for the blues in Bb:
So first, I started playing it and improvising a line on top of it in first species. This proved [...]
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
I recently came upon a sort of epiphany. In a way, I’ve always known this, but somehow I get distracted very easily. Now that I’ve made it a rule for myself, it’s made my music-making and practicing much more productive.
Here is the rule: Everything I play and practice should be music.
I can hear all of [...]
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