Soloing over A major to C major?

imalrightjack

Chord tones are how I've been playing it anyway, so no stresses there.  I just wanted to know how others would approach it, I guess, to find out whether there was a better way.  I can actually play a wee bit already, honestly

octatonic

imalrightjack said:

Chord tones are how I've been playing it anyway, so no stresses there.  I just wanted to know how others would approach it, I guess, to find out whether there was a better way.  I can actually play a wee bit already, honestly

Apologies if I came across as didactic.

How is your harmonic knowledge?

If I said treat the A major as a ii V I, would you be able to play an arpeggio based melody without too much trouble?

HAL9000

I guess another approach might be to use the melody as your starting point, and then build up by gradually adding 'widdly' bits, chord stabs, etc. (This, of course, comes nowhere near to answering your original question!)

JAYJO

octatonic said:

imalrightjack said:

Chord tones are how I've been playing it anyway, so no stresses there.  I just wanted to know how others would approach it, I guess, to find out whether there was a better way.  I can actually play a wee bit already, honestly

Apologies if I came across as didactic.

How is your harmonic knowledge?

If I said treat the A major as a ii V I, would you be able to play an arpeggio based melody without too much trouble?

oooh my hands in the air!  (If the op answers yes, i would still be interested in an explaination as my answer is no cheers)

GuyBoden

octatonic said:

imalrightjack said:

Chord tones are how I've been playing it anyway, so no stresses there.  I just wanted to know how others would approach it, I guess, to find out whether there was a better way.  I can actually play a wee bit already, honestly

Apologies if I came across as didactic.

How is your harmonic knowledge?

If I said treat the A major as a ii V I, would you be able to play an arpeggio based melody without too much trouble?

This Jazz speak, you need a student grant to play A major as a ii V I.  )

frankus

How can it be Jazz when the key doesn't have flats in it... hmm?

Tunez

octatonic said:

imalrightjack said:

Tunez said:

The minor third sounds awful over the A major though so it isn't that simple, at least to my ears.

I'm I intrigued as to why the -3 sounds so wrong over your progression...I can dig that you may be sick of that sound, but for it to sound wrong, based on the info you supplied is odd...

If I were noodling quickly over it (in 8th/16th notes), I suspect it would sound fine.  The progression is best-suited to longer held notes so landing on the C over the A major sounds flat-out bad.

This is where phrasing comes into it.

The problem with scales, as a conduit to musical improvisation, is that certain notes of a scale have greater weighting than the other notes.

It should come as no surprise that mostly the notes of greater weighting are the chord tones.

If you start off on uneven ground, where you are trying to think of what notes of a scale are better than others then it is difficult to get a handle on it.

The downside for you, now, is you basically want to forget largely about scales and try to improvise with chord tones as your starting point.

If you were my student then I'd give you a bunch of exercises to play, a small mental game to work through when you weren't playing the guitar (harmonising chord progressions in your head) and transcribing a lot.

Then transcribing some more.

Seriously- learn some solo's- learn a lot of them.

Then analyse them against the chord progression they are played over.

You will learn WAY more doing this than you will trying to get better at improvising just using scales as your basis.

Transcription is really where it is at- it is the long way round but it informs your harmonic knowledge, your phrasing- so many other areas of your playing.

I agree with a this and refer you to my original analysis ^ ^. Not all tones are equal and the weighting of the tone varies depending on its place both in the vertical harmony and the course of harmonic progression. For the sake of simplicity (and brevity) I only addressed 5 tones and tried to describe these vertical/horizontal changes. The approach can be extrapolated over the twelve available tones.

Whether you take a scale/modal approach or arpeggio based, or all options is irrelevant in the long run so long as you manage to convey what's in your head. It's like the guy with the amazing studio who can't write, if you can't 'hear' a melody you're not going to play it. Scales etc serve to partly to widen the pallet to potential options but primarily to increase motor neurone function. As Octatonic says, its ripping off other peoples' solos (transcription) which provides us with the vocabulary to speak improvisationally. To truly internalise someone else's ideas and make them yours ("...bad musicians borrow, good musicians steal") I believe one must understand the harmony as thoroughly as possible…

As an aside, I find these threads tremendously difficult to respond to at the right level. I always feel like I'm reading between the lines to try to work out where the OP is at, so my apologies if anything I have written is patronising, or simply too elementary to be useful...

frankus

I'm donating any of the remaining music-theory-asshat-awards people have silently awarded me over the years to this dude.

Anyone playing over Amaj, Cmaj and Emaj is answering a homework question - or in a prog band who's music sounds like a homework question.

Keep it real people.

matt1973

@tunez I dont think it is necessary to apologise for variables that are impossible for you to know. 

Most, if not all of the above information is useful. It would be unrealistic however to expect the OP to incorporate it all into the short passage notated at the top of the page. But others may well be interested.

I enjoyed reading it and, one would also assume that the OP is progressing with this musical passage now

imalrightjack

frankus said:

I'm donating any of the remaining music-theory-asshat-awards people have silently awarded me over the years to this dude.

Anyone playing over Amaj, Cmaj and Emaj is answering a homework question - or in a prog band who's music sounds like a homework question.

Keep it real people.

Well said.  I consider myself a decent guitarist, half-decent technical skills/reasonable feel/basic theory, but it's always great to know how other people approach things.  I always get by but sometimes want to do more than just get by.

This is the band I noodle with: https://soundcloud.com/nosoapnoradio

frankus

To be clear, I'm not awarding you the awards.
I'm not against improvement, I've had lessons and classes with some biggish names.

To my mind there's nothing but getting by. Scraping by, in fact. But it's like a computer game... go back to the earlier levels and it's a breeze... but where you are in the game, you're always scraping by.. it's a sure sign you're always getting fresh challenges.

Eric Roche said "Head, Hand and Heart all have to be working in unison" ... or something like that... and he might have borrowed it from Fritz Lang... but there's no point learning theory you'll never use.

Theory attracts people who for whatever reason aren't all that fussed about "hand" or "heart" ... and avoidant people (might be one and the same) are attracted to the internet... take me for instance, in life I'm a red setter but I come here to pretend to be something other than I am and avoid having a wet nose jammed in my hoop as a "how do ya do". Seriously I'm a dog with a big keyboard..

To my mind you're playing about with modulation, the sus backdoors it a bit... ultimately there are only 12 notes and 4 chords... loop it play each note over each chord, sort them into order. See if the sus makes that much difference...

I've grown to disregard theory as a means of approach because creating the whole thing from scratch is easier than remembering anything.

I've not seen that many people claiming to know the ritu-sen-poi, byzantine scale and hungarian gypsy be able to extemporise anything that didn't sound like painting by numbers... but worse was in denial about the noddy clockworkness of the music created.

I'll listen to soundcloud when I can

octatonic

frankus said:

Eric Roche said "Head, Hand and Heart all have to be working in unison" ... or something like that... and he might have borrowed it from Fritz Lang... but there's no point learning theory you'll never use.

Pretty sure he stole that from Fripp.

Or it was the other way around.

frankus

Fripp doesn't predate Fritz Lang ... anyway they stole it ergo they're artists...

imalrightjack

frankus said:

I've not seen that many people claiming to know the ritu-sen-poi, byzantine scale and hungarian gypsy be able to extemporise anything that didn't sound like painting by numbers... but worse was in denial about the noddy clockworkness of the music created.

That's a fair point!  I'd actually quite like to delve into jazz more and am working through Jody Fisher's 'complete' book.  It's certainly helping my understanding generally and I'm happy with my tiny increments of progress.  I'm nearly 40, have no intention of going pro (I wish!), so it's really not essential that I learn one more thing.  I just don't want to stand still forever.  I wish I'd learned half of what I've learned in the last five years 25 years ago!

matt1973

I just saw a post from a guy who was struggling a bit and tried as best I could to help the fella. Now I'm thinking about all the shit I'm avoiding.

imalrightjack

matt1973 said:

I just saw a post from a guy who was struggling a bit and tried as best I could to help the fella. Now I'm thinking about all the shit I'm avoiding.

What do you mean?

frankus

As Oct has said, transcription (although Fripp said it first).

It's not even stealing - lift a lick you like and you'll bounce it about and make something utterly different from it. rhythm, placement in the bar... all those things change it... people learn that from transcription.

It's no different to Chess players studying the matches of grandmasters. They do this in order to better understand the games ... compare that to music ... it's the songs... the scales are simply the rules like how a knight moves and they deserve no more reverence than that because in music there are no rules just tastes. So find the "grandmasters" who's taste you like and understand their game.

Now, a study in 1971 set out to test memory, chess players and non-chess players were given 5 minutes to memorise a board from a game.... who was better? the chess players.. when the boards presented to the two sets were of random arrangements of the chessboards... who remembered better? There wasn't any difference... the action of chunking is recording snapshots of familiarity - in a non-chess player the biggest chunk was a piece... whereas for an average chess player it was 4 times that. Grandmasters recall entire boards... fragments remind them of different games at different stages.

To my mind, songs are the same. Scales are largely irrelevant, in Jazz where the chords change often thinking (let alone in scales) means death. You need chunks, scales can provide that...yes, but they'll also give a lot of dead ends (99% are dead ends), where as understanding the tunes and snippets you love (using a very few scales) helps.

In any improv environment, you are not learning, you're manifesting what you know, licks give you that: scales do not - they give a framework to fuck up from. A player is zoning in on what will sound good and what better way than by starting out with what you know? Musically the best stuff we listen to hangs off what we know - if it surprises us it is from what we expect... scales don't have that cultural context... it'd be like writing a book knowing the alphabet but not the writing style of your favourite people, it's like having a dictionary but not knowing how to pronounce the words or which ones have fallen from use.

Over systemisation. T-Bone Walker played a lot of chord tones and used a major ninth to sweeten the melody... some dufus crunched it down to the pentatonic scales. Blues isn't pentatonics, that was a mistake - some people  can use a broken system and apply it - other people try too much to apply it to everything.

Work out the magic of a few magical songs... dare to look up the skirts of a few solos and demystify it. I think a lot of people parroting the virtue of scales are simply echoing the mystification that sent them off down that cul de sac.

GuyBoden

Unfortunately, a lot of musicians need to sell music theory books, courses, dvds etc to make money, because of the lack of good paying gigs.

Ears are the answer.

matt1973

frankus said:

Theory attracts people who for whatever reason aren't all that fussed about "hand" or "heart" ... and avoidant people (might be one and the same) are attracted to the internet... take me for instance, in life I'm a red setter but I come here to pretend to be something other than I am and avoid having a wet nose jammed in my hoop as a "how do ya do". Seriously I'm a dog with a big keyboard..

Avoidant people are attracted to the internet. It's got me thinking.

frankus

don't take it too seriously, unless itleads to happiness.