Transcribing Whole Solos Is More Than You Thought
In my lesson on Monday I talked about why you’re not getting the results you want from transcribing whole solos. For the most part, that article was written with respect to language: how to make useful language from a whole solo. While gathering, understanding, and implementing language is one of the most important aspects of ...
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Why Transcribing A Whole Solo Has Gotten You Nowhere
So you finally transcribed your first solo, but unfortunately, you don’t feel like you’re improving at the rapid rate you’d hoped for. Where did you go wrong? This is a common situation. I know people that have transcribed hundreds of solos, but little to none of it translates into their playing. Transcribing whole solos is ...
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7 Harmonic Breakthroughs that Completely Changed My Playing
Every so often you’ll make a musical discovery that will drastically change the way you approach improvisation. One day you’re struggling over the same tunes, growing more and more frustrated with your own predictable patterns and then it hits you – you discover a secret that was hidden right before your eyes. A subtle mental, ...
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Taking Advantage of Technology in Your Practice Routine
Since the time of Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, the practice tools of the jazz musician have consisted of three basic things: a room, your instrument, and a record player. If you wanted to get some work done in the shed, that’s all you needed… Nearly 70 years later, things are still the same for ...
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Getting Started With Transcription
We get questions all the time on how to go about transcribing. Often, the people that write in say that they tried transcribing, but it just didn’t work for them, or it was just too hard. Yes, transcribing is not easy, but the problem does not lie in the inherent difficulty of this activity, but ...
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10 Ways to Make a Line Your Own
So you’ve transcribed some lines and you’re learning them in all keys. You’ve even started to apply them to tunes you’re working on, but after several weeks, the line you transcribed which started out as sounding magical to you, now sounds boring. And on top of that, you’re playing that same line everywhere. Don’t fret. ...
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Two Five Progressions Made Easy
The ii V progression makes up the vast majority of chord changes within the jazz standard repertoire. Much of our success or failure as improvisors comes from being able to navigate this deceptively simple progression. Learning how to play over ii Vs is actually much easier than you think. The mistake most people make is ...
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The Lost Art of Looking for Nuance
Let’s face it. As improvising musicians, we’ve become obsessed with notes. Obsessed with harmony, chords, and scales. Which scales to use over which chord progressions, which diminished scales to play over dominant chords, how to play “outside,” how to play “inside,” which chords can be substituted for others…We even reduce entire sounds, full of infinite ...
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Integrating New Rhythms Into Your Playing
Rhythm is often thrown to the wayside, in favor of working on harmony and melody. Perhaps this disregard is caused by a lack of understanding about how to approach this aspect of improvisation. Here’s a simple and effective process to find and incorporate new rhythms into your playing. Step 1: Choose a chorus You’ll need ...
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How Transcribing One Solo Can Entirely Change Your Approach To Improvising
On this site we’ve talked about transcribing numerous times. From the reasons you should be transcribing solos to the best method of transcription…even to the different definitions of transcription for jazz musicians. Knowing why you’re transcribing and how to do it are vital to improving as an improviser. The most important aspect of the transcription ...
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Transcribing for Technique: Improving Musicianship Through Transcription
After hours spent practicing technique: endless articulation, tone, range, and fingering exercises, are you still not matching up to what you’re hearing on your favorite records? Are those same étude books and exercises you’ve been working on for years still not cutting it? It can be very discouraging when you don’t see any improvement in ...
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3 Reasons Why You Should Sing Everyday
Have you ever wondered why great pianists, guitarists, bassists, and drummers often sing along as they improvise? Ever noticed how many of the best horn players also happen to be great singers? Great musicians all over, seem to have developed the ability to sing somewhere along the way, whether they’ve had formal training or not. ...
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