Eventually I want to be able to smoothly recall the chords at speed. However, when memorizing them, it helps to have a series of mnemonics, and to chunk them together. Just as you practice a song slow before you play it fast, you memorize the chords slow.
Here is my analysis of “All the Things You Are.”
Continue readingI have been working on memorizing chords for a bunch of Standards and originals. It helps tremendously. A couple things that have worked for me:
Continue readingMusic and Lyrics by Adam Young,
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My Band, The Standard Deviants, had a rehearsal this weekend. As usual, I tried to record some of it. As so often happens, our best performance was our warm up tune. This time, we performed a tune called “The SMF Blues” by my good friend Paul Campagna.
Continue readingDesign prototypes for a band logo
All images Copyright Adam Young.
Designed in Inkscape. Working title is “Smirking Sigma”
The font used is Beachman Script. by David Rakowski. It really seems to capture the classic feel of a fifties music venue.
When you start looking at Jazz lead sheets, you might notice a Chord with the Alt modification. This is an altered chord.
Continue readingSomeone 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.
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 readingGeorge 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 readingWell 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.
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