Wide interval soloing ideas, counterpoint beginnings 

Hi guitarists, here is the accompanying sheet to go with this week’s lesson.
Drop 2 voicings on middle string set of Bbmaj7 which we will use to do some very interesting things with.

We will be improving our playing using wide interval concepts, outlining chords and using this as a starting point for counterpoint ideas. 

The work will also help us feel more in control of navigating the fretboard and playing quality, strong sounds on the guitar

I’m getting there with the recording.  I can’t do it as host, but if you can send me the recording by WETRANSFER then I can send it to people who missed the class.

See you Thursday!

Expansions on Quartal harmony, clusters, linking clusters using interval leaps, connecting lines to chords

Hi, here’s the material for this week’s class.

Be sure that you know the harmonised major scale in C

Have these diagrams to hand during class and better still, print out so you can write on them.

always have blank TAB, blank chord diagrams to use! Will make learning easier.

We will be in Investigating spread triads in this weeks lesson.
I would often hear players like Julian Lage, Jonathan Kreisberg and other modern players utilising lovely sounding wide interval structures and wondered how they did it.

Well rewind back to the year 1720 !
I was playing through Bach Violin sonatas on the guitar and realised that Bach was using triads but the chord tones were spaced out all over the place in different octaves and intervals.

By looking closely at these, I developed and came up with many of the voicing I will show you today.

As I say, Bach was the original jazzer!
You can see all the voice movement that Charlie Parker used pioneering bebop music.

Below are the shapes I’ve come up with.
You don’t have to learn them all before class, just have them to hand when I am explaining the concepts involved. Probably best to print them out.

We will be using these for use in both chord melody and single note line soloing. We will begin to use these shapes for the basis of sophisticated Counterpoint and Polyphony ideas.

Don’t worry if you can’t play them all by the end of the class. This is just an exhaustive diagram of all the possible shapes to keep working on over time!

Quartal clusters – inversions, voice movement, modal uses, 251 prog

Ever wondered how guitarists play about 20 chords over 1 chord?!

We will be looking at a concept to create interesting modern chordal movements, single note line solos & fresh ideas for composition.

We will be looking at playing over Gminor Dorian & C7 mixolydian
ie the 2 and 5 chords of Fmaj

And transpose this to other keys.

  Make sure you are familiar with these modes.

Then make sure you can play the triad inversions of Fmajor, Gminor and Aminor in the “E shape”

this will be our starting point to derive the quartal harmony!

you need to know which is the root, 3rd, 5th of each triad.

here is a diagram of the shapes, Aminor is simply the same as Gminor 2 frets up.

See you this week on either Thurs or Sunday!