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My band, Red For Dissent
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
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.
My band, Red For Dissent
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
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
My band, Red For Dissent
My band, Red For Dissent
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.
Ears are the answer.