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Post by jack1982 on Feb 8, 2015 12:34:53 GMT -6
Bass player wore the wrong shirt again Let me know what you think - constructive criticism is always appreciated
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Post by joachim on Feb 8, 2015 13:15:07 GMT -6
I don't have any criticism to offer - to me it sounded terrific, and I wish I could write my own solo like that...
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 8, 2015 14:28:22 GMT -6
Thanks so much guys, glad you liked it! Tbone I tend not to write too many of my own solos because I just take so darned long to do it - once I get started on something like that everything else (More BYCU, R&B book, bass stuff) gets pushed to the side until it's finished lol. Of course I suppose if I did more of it I'd get more efficient at it.
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Post by blackcountrymick on Feb 8, 2015 16:17:41 GMT -6
Well Jack, I really liked what you did with that lesson, the rhythm and bass playing was solid together and sounded great, that alone more that covered what was required, then you added your own solo and just kicked it out the park!!! The solo was well structured following the chord changes with some nice phrasing and with a good selection of articulation techniques. Brilliant Job, just don't expect my band to follow that . I reckon John G should showcase that on his FB page . Man, what is it with bass players? they just won't conform to any sort of dress code!!!
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Post by cunningr on Feb 8, 2015 16:34:22 GMT -6
I can't add anything as usual you put out a great video, and it amazes me how you can get all the parts into a single video. I need to have my bass fixed the nut broke, not that I know how to play the thing been wanting to get some basic stuff though.
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Post by Phil on Feb 8, 2015 18:15:19 GMT -6
Great job, Jack, well thought out and well played. This is not the typical thing you hear on forums where people upload attempts at an original solo. Like T-Bone said, it's usually someone just noodlin' over the progression. What you did here is well composed.
I've got a chorus or 2 that I want to add to "Jumpin' Blues" as soon as I figure out how to copy and insert into Reaper so I can stretch the 24 bar rhythm out to 48 bars. You've raised the bar pretty high for anybody who's thinking about submitting an original solo.
Wow, things just keep getting better and better around here.
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 8, 2015 19:20:21 GMT -6
Wow, thanks so much you guys, you're making me blush I better have a few beers to celebrate! Oh wait...I'm already doing that I think the neatest thing about making up your own stuff is that you can really express yourself emotionally, and what I played definitely expresses what I feel. Phil, I'm really looking forward to hearing something you've composed yourself - you put a lot of your own style in your playing and it will be great to hear you express yourself! Mick - yeah those bass players lol. In his defense he was the only one who didn't show up hung over for the recording session that day lol. Rich - I'd say get your bass fixed, but I'm pretty sure you'll be busy with another guitar this week!
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Post by bluesbruce on Feb 8, 2015 20:47:30 GMT -6
Very cool, Jack. Not only a knock out job on the rhythm lesson, but really took it to a higher plane with the bass part and solo! You're definitely pushing the bar upward on this forum. Nicely done. Care to share with us how you go about creating a solo part? Could be helpful to all of us. I'm sure it's like songwriting - that everybody has their own methods, and it probably varies from song to song, but it'd be interesting to hear how you approached it.
Bruce
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 8, 2015 21:45:39 GMT -6
Thanks so much Bruce! As far as writing a solo, well first there's the groundwork: I spend about 30 minutes each day improvising along with backing tracks on YouTube (just type in "blues backing track" - there's approximately seven gazillion of them). No matter how simple or complex, almost all of them are based on a I - IV - V progression. After a few months, you subconsciously start to know what chord you're playing over and which one is coming up next. You develop an ear for which notes of the pentatonic (or blues) scale sounds good over each chord and which don't.
After that, I start out with the first few bars of the song and loop it so it plays over and over. I come up with a couple of phrases which sound okay, then write them down. Then I lengthen the loop to few more bars, play what I've already come up with and improvise something after that until I stumble across something I'm happy with. Then I write that down, etc. Once I'm a little ways into it I'll record what I've come up with so I can remember it for the next practice session. Of course as you get farther into the song, you don't want to play it from the beginning each time as you'll be spending 90% of your time practicing what you've already written and only 10% of your time creating something new, so I'll start the loop later on in the song. It might take me two minutes to write four bars, or two hours to write two notes - it totally depends on the vagaries of inspiration lol.
The way I hear music is a constant repetition of "the tide rolls in, the tide rolls out", and if I only practice along with a single song my phrasing becomes very repetitious and "sing song". I find it extremely helpful to improvise along with other similar backing tracks, then come back to the song I'm working on with a bunch of fresh ideas in my head and then I can come up with some cool stuff (subjectively speaking lol). That helps a lot with creating some variety in my phrasing.
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Post by joachim on Feb 9, 2015 2:30:34 GMT -6
Phil, that's dissapointing. You didn't even try. There must be something... I tried it with the solo being okay, but not really fitting the BT... didn't work out... so I tried it with the recording process (bviously the cameramen has to be fired, again you can't really make out the features of the single band members - then again, this can hardly be blamed at the musicians... the I was lamenting the guys could be a little more lively insted of just sitting around... hmm, it's a blues band, siting around... but: There's no singer! Oh, this is a guitar forum... Man, there must be something... or is it just that this was so good?!? Seriously, this was really cool, Jack is taking the motto of the BYCU series seriously! maybe we should all share our solo stuff here? Bruce is right, this might helpful in the learning process and also keep us motivated! T-Bone, I for one plan to have a more wholehearted go at improvisation when I get through BYCU. I need to start using the stuff I've learned (and forgotten again) instead of keep practicing increasingly difficult songs. I think if you manage to use the stuff in BYCU and BRYCU in your own way, then you've already come a long way...
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 9, 2015 6:46:44 GMT -6
Tbone, as far as my camera crew, well as somebody once said "In the video your head is cut off - as well it should be." I'd love to hear some of your own compositions, looking forward to you getting all set up with your recording rig and showing us those glorious tones!
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Post by Phil on Feb 9, 2015 7:07:08 GMT -6
Phil, that's disapointing. You didn't even try to give Jack a proper smack-down...... Bruce, although I'm far from being able to give real tips, this is how I approach a solo: Below you find me starting out with a rather boring exercise where I try to play the harmonically correct note over a jazzy progression - once I got this down, I try to play more freely, add outside notes (chromatic, blue notes) and concentrate rather on melodic and rhytmic motives than just playing up and down... this is far from improvising on the spot, but might show a a starting point: I familiarize myself with the chord changes (like in mapping it out on the fretboard) first in order to find out which scale or arp might fit the chord changes before I try to use the material to mold it into a solo (this would be the next step which is not shown here - work in progress, and obviously I'm just at the beginning of something that is quite a workload). again, this is more like an exercis, but Jazz players practice playing ther chaord scales and arps over chord changes in 8ths and 16ths! When I play over a Blues progression I rather try to use only the Blues scale as introduced in BYCU, trying to imitate the traditional Call-and-response licks the traditional players use and put them into a cohesive solo... I found out to do this somehow stylistically correct for me it helps most to do it the traditional way and to transcribe original licks from records and then put them together... but on the other hand transcribing unfortunately (for me) is a rather lenghty process which can eat up days and weeks before I got a tune down, and then I still haven't put it into practice... so it's not like I've got a big blues bag, but this is something I want to have down before I move on to MBYCU... when I play a Rock or Pop oriented solo then it more like composing something, which is something I do like Jack described above... I guess there lots of more concepts, and I'd love to know hoew you guys do it. BTW, I want to get out of the bad habit to record and upload crappy webcam videos, so I won't keep those clips up for long - but once I got the recording process with Reaper/Audacity down and become more proficient in creating BTs with BiaB, I'd love to share some recordings as Jack just did and exchange on that... anyone interested? Greetings, t. Yeah, Jack, Rich, Joachim, etc., are taking away all my fun. They're not giving me the material I need to give a proper smack-down. Your approach to creating your own solos is a good one. I like the idea of coming up with a melodic motif and then work the solo around that little melody. I'm interested and will soon upload my humble attempt at an original solo over the "Jumpin' Blues" backing track. I have one chorus down and another worked out in my head that I need to figure out on the guitar. This is going to be interesting if we can get more people to participate. Of course, we're going to have to be very diplomatic in our smack-downs of original solos.
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Post by joachim on Feb 11, 2015 9:13:21 GMT -6
I liked that alot Tbone. I am not familiar enough with Jazz impro to give any real feedback, but don't sell yourself short as far as the playing goes - it was pretty good.
Why is using Reaper complicated? One thing you probably need to do is to use an ASIO driver and set the buffer length as short as you can without getting weird popping noises. I use a buffer length of 3ms at 41kHz sampling rate, that results in an unnoticable audio delay for me.
I started digging into Blues Lick You Can Use, which is a different approach to improvisation, I suppose. Eventually I hope to mix something together using those licks and post it, but it will take a lot of drilling before I can start to mix them on the fly. The licks book is pretty cool, though.
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Post by Phil on Feb 11, 2015 10:43:41 GMT -6
T-Bone,
Although I'm slowly being drawn towards Jazz, I don't know enough to give you a prpoer smack-down. Doing a Jazz improv is so far removed from my current abilities that I wouldn't even consider it. I do know this: what makes a Jazz guitar solo sound "jazzy" is the extensive use of arpeggios played over the chords. The way I understand it (and I could have it totally wrong) is that jazz players tend to think more in terms of arpeggios than they do scales.
So, I have one question for you. Did you work completely through "Jazzin' the Blues?" That book is all about making the transition from Blues to Jazz.
Regarding Reaper: it appears very intimidating at 1st, but to learn the basic features is not too hard. I had to to set it to use the Behringer driver. I could not get it to use the ASIO4all driver. But that may just be a problem with my computer. Anyway, once you figure out how to do a basic recording you are going to love it. You import your backing track into one track and play your guitar on another and you shouldn't have any latency problems.
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Post by Phil on Feb 12, 2015 6:24:35 GMT -6
My posts were supposed to show how I try to cope at this point in time... I haven't started with JtB yet, and I won't before I successfully worked through first BCYCU and the MBYCU... in the meantime I will neverthelesst practice what I already learned about Jazz. My main focus will remain on the Blues, though... Jazz and Blues are close relatives, anyway, so everything stays in the family... T-Bone, OK, don't take this the wrong way. You are entitled to do whatever you want without comments from me. But if you are spending time working on Jazz, then why not take a look at JTB? I've only read a little of it, but the in the 1st study John mentions that the melody is taken from the arpeggio. This seems to me to be the ideal book to transition into Jazz from Blues. Phil
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 12, 2015 7:33:46 GMT -6
You've got some interesting melodic ideas there Tony, I liked it. I've never tried playing that jazz stuff with the constant changing modes or using chord scales etc., except for a little bit in John's Jazz book. It's some cool sounding stuff but it would take me all day to write 4 bars using those techniques lol.
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Post by Phil on Feb 12, 2015 10:52:48 GMT -6
....what I still work on is to play all those studies in BYCU, BRYCU and BCYCU in all keys and positions and different tempos... Man, talk about hijacking a thread Holy shit!!!! I thought John G. was just kidding when he said to do that. No wonder you don't have time for anything else. Seriously, I understand what you are doing. Last week, for the 1st time in months, I took some time to just noodle around. I also took time off from my regularly scheduled practice to work on coming up with my own 2 solos (2 choruses) to extend "Jumpin' Blues." I hope to get that recorded this weekend. I plan on doing this kind of thing on a regular basis even if it cuts into my regimented BYCU time. I feel I'm getting to the point where I need start putting into practice the Use part of "Blues You Can Use." If I wait till I think I'm ready I will never do it. And yes, we did a very good job of completely hi-jacking this thread.
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Post by bluesbruce on Feb 12, 2015 14:58:27 GMT -6
That is quite a thread hijacking... that aside, I did enjoy hearing your improv, Tbone. The other "parts" of playing jazz are "comping" (or playing accompaniment) and the so-called chord-melody playing - where you play both lead and accompaniment at the same time! Joe Pass was a master of this style. I have kind of dropped out of JTB, but keep intending to get back to it.
Bruce
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Post by Phil on Feb 12, 2015 16:08:13 GMT -6
That is quite a thread hijacking... that aside, I did enjoy hearing your improv, Tbone. The other "parts" of playing jazz are "comping" (or playing accompaniment) and the so-called chord-melody playing - where you play both lead and accompaniment at the same time! Joe Pass was a master of this style. I have kind of dropped out of JTB, but keep intending to get back to it. Bruce I once heard that the road to Hell is paved with ... ah... darn, I can't remember what it was!
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Post by bluesbruce on Feb 12, 2015 18:13:51 GMT -6
I once heard that there's a highway to hell and only a stairway to heaven - and which of those do you think is more heavily travelled? Bruce
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