I'm hoping that you are like me. Sometimes my practice starts to get a little bit stale or monotonous and I find myself searching the internet for ways to inspire some change, to open up new avenues and provide myself some opportunity for musical growth. If this sounds like you, if you feel like you've hit a kind of plateau in your playing or your development on your instrument, then this advice is for you. In this article, I'd like to outline some of the ways that I use the metronome in my regular practice. I have a handful of helpful techniques that I'd like to explore here, each one aimed at improving a different aspect of my...
I've always loved practicing Stella by Starlight. The changes are so unconventional and so challenging to play over, and I've always had fun throwing on a metronome and trying to sound melodic over that form. In school, my professors always encouraged me to refer to fake book charts as a resource for learning songs, and like any other diligent music student I bought all the Real Books that I could find to study from. As a reference, here is the changes for Stella by Starlight as published in the Real Book. The Problem As beautiful as these changes are, I was routinely having trouble with the opening three bars. How is it that an A7 should resolve...
For this post I thought I'd talk about phrasing. It sounds pretty simple but phrasing can actually have a big impact on your playing and your lines. It doesn't require any new information about scales or note choices, rather it's all about where and when you play. Maybe you've never spent much time thinking about phrasing. Maybe you've hit a plateau in your playing and you don't have loads of time to learn new material and a way to make old ideas sound new again sounds like it might be the ticket. Whatever the case is, I hope my thoughts here can be helpful. Behind Bars Where are you placing your phrases in terms of beats in the...
If your playing is in a rut, I've got some food for thought that I'd like to share with you. Who knows, maybe you'll find this as helpful as I did! I'd like to lay out something I've been practicing at home for a little while now, and something I've been thinking about quite a lot as well and it has to do with dominant chords. I've always found dominant chords to be perhaps the most agreeable chord quality that there is. I'm not sure if "agreeable" is really the best word for what I'm trying to say, but what I mean is that you can play a huge range of different types of scales over top of...
I'm sure that if you're reading this, you're well aware of what the pentatonic scale is and I'm sure you're likely even experienced at using it for improvisation. Despite your familiarity with this scale, what I'd like to do in this article is inspire some creativity in your playing by using this one scale that we all talk about to the point of exhaustion as sort of a common ground starting point where I can get my foot in the door on the topic of music theory in a way that hopefully comes across as fun and interesting. Who knows, maybe I can direct you towards some unconventional ways of thinking about pentatonic scales that might challenge your playing! ...
