Another question from the Reddit Theory board. Here is my answer.
Continue readingWhen to play notes out of the Key
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Category Archives: Music
Altered chords
When you start looking at Jazz lead sheets, you might notice a Chord with the Alt modification. This is an altered chord.
Continue readingSwinging eighth notes via articulation
Someone asked (on Reddit) how to swing eighth notes. Here’s my response, somewhat cleaned up and expanded.
Don’t. If you try to swing them, they will be over done.
Play straight eighth notes. The “swing is done via articulation.
Backpacker Guitar Hanger
Normal guitar hangers use the flange at the head to hand, but the Backpacker is straight there. So I had to build my own. And improvise.
Practice Aid
18 Triadic Permutations
I use the term permutations loosely here. But for any given chord inversion, there are 6 variations of the tones in the pitch you can play in order to play each tone once. What makes this an impure use of the term permutations is that the second and third notes of the sequence can go both above the starting note in one variation, and below it in another.
Continue readingDecisions when playing Chromatic Triadic patterns
George Garzone is the Sax players sax player. He is a teacher that has taught the best of the crop that is out there right now. I had the privilege of studying with George back in high school. I can honestly say that no subject I studied before or since taught me how to think better than Jazz improvisation.
Continue readingI know JACK!
Well enough to be dangerous. I was able to get the JACK Daemon running on my Lenovo Laptop running Fedora 32, and us it to record MIDI-based music.
Continue readingAlready Met
The Bird Run
The Summer Youth Music School (SYMS) at the University of New Hampshire runs each summer. I attended it a couple years back in High School. The second year, I prepared a piece called Au Privave (No. 1) from the Bird Omnibook. This is a transcription of solo by Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker played on alto, but I played tenor sax, and prepared the version from the B flat book, which was transposed down a fifth. It turns out that this radically alters the fingerings. Parker played insanely fast, and in doing so, he naturally sought out the fingerings that flowed smoothly and naturally on the Saxophone. And then he played them at superhuman speed. It turns out that transposing it up a fifth radically changes some of the fingerings, and also puts many of the notes out of the range of the Saxophone
I bombed the audition.
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