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Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Making An Exercise To Learn New Chords
One of the things I try to teach my students is how to develop their own exercises. Basically this involves deciding what you want to learn or get better at and finding the most efficient possible way to practice the material. It's important to understand that effective practicing is NOT the same thing as playing music. Effective practicing is goal oriented and consequently a very left brain activity. Playing music is usually fun or expressive, maybe even both. That's right brain territory.
The following example is something one might come up with to help learn new chord voicings. One of the most important things to keep in mind when creating an exercise is to think of a situation that you'll encounter several variations on in a lot of songs. You need a framework to put the exercise into. This framework is sort of like a container. If it has a funny shape or size (look at your guitar case), it may work well for a specific application, but it won't have much general use. If it's a fairly standard size and shape (think of your backpack), you'll be able to put a ton of stuff in it. Your exercises should be like your backpack. They should have a wide range of uses.
For these new chords, a blues progression is a great place to start!
In this particular case, I've further simplified the progression to simply cycle through I7, IV7, and V7 over and over again. This enables you to cover a lot more ground in a short period of time. The more efficiently you use your practice time the better. Efficiency not only means you get better at playing the guitar faster, but you also end up with more time to play music or eat cheeseburgers or whatever else you want to be doing!
The chords I've chosen are the 4 different inversions of a dominant 7 chord using a drop 2 voicing type. Don't worry if you don't know what that means. They're cool chords. Trust me. Just try playing through the exercise and keep your ears open. You'll probably find that you like the sound of some voicings better than others. Remember which ones those are. They're the ones that will add the most to the fun and expressive parts of playing music.
This is what might be called a voice-leading exercise. The chords connect to each other in a logical way using as little movement as possible from one pitch to the next. Again, the idea of economy is prevalent. I usually tell my students that playing a perfectly voice-lead progression like this will most likely result in getting fired from a band or a gig (logical is often not musical), but it's a great way to learn new fingerings and to really understand how the different chords want to behave in a given context.
To get the most out of the exercise and your practice time, you should definitely memorize it, play it in all 12 keys, and get comfortable starting from any chord. Be as thorough as possible. Think of variations that might be useful.
In application, try taking one little chunk of the exercise and use those voicings through a chorus of a 12-bar blues. Play the chords with a fun groove. Try different things with your right hand - arpeggiating, strumming, slapping the strings... Whatever comes to mind. Try skipping around through the exercise by playing two or three chords in a row and then jumping forward or backward to a different voicing. You can slide up into a chord from 1/2-step below or use the whammy bar to make the chord dip and dive all over the place. Suddenly this little exercise becomes music AND you've learned a pile of new chord voicings!
Boston Guitar Lessons
Skype Guitar Teacher
The following example is something one might come up with to help learn new chord voicings. One of the most important things to keep in mind when creating an exercise is to think of a situation that you'll encounter several variations on in a lot of songs. You need a framework to put the exercise into. This framework is sort of like a container. If it has a funny shape or size (look at your guitar case), it may work well for a specific application, but it won't have much general use. If it's a fairly standard size and shape (think of your backpack), you'll be able to put a ton of stuff in it. Your exercises should be like your backpack. They should have a wide range of uses.
For these new chords, a blues progression is a great place to start!
In this particular case, I've further simplified the progression to simply cycle through I7, IV7, and V7 over and over again. This enables you to cover a lot more ground in a short period of time. The more efficiently you use your practice time the better. Efficiency not only means you get better at playing the guitar faster, but you also end up with more time to play music or eat cheeseburgers or whatever else you want to be doing!
The chords I've chosen are the 4 different inversions of a dominant 7 chord using a drop 2 voicing type. Don't worry if you don't know what that means. They're cool chords. Trust me. Just try playing through the exercise and keep your ears open. You'll probably find that you like the sound of some voicings better than others. Remember which ones those are. They're the ones that will add the most to the fun and expressive parts of playing music.
This is what might be called a voice-leading exercise. The chords connect to each other in a logical way using as little movement as possible from one pitch to the next. Again, the idea of economy is prevalent. I usually tell my students that playing a perfectly voice-lead progression like this will most likely result in getting fired from a band or a gig (logical is often not musical), but it's a great way to learn new fingerings and to really understand how the different chords want to behave in a given context.
To get the most out of the exercise and your practice time, you should definitely memorize it, play it in all 12 keys, and get comfortable starting from any chord. Be as thorough as possible. Think of variations that might be useful.
In application, try taking one little chunk of the exercise and use those voicings through a chorus of a 12-bar blues. Play the chords with a fun groove. Try different things with your right hand - arpeggiating, strumming, slapping the strings... Whatever comes to mind. Try skipping around through the exercise by playing two or three chords in a row and then jumping forward or backward to a different voicing. You can slide up into a chord from 1/2-step below or use the whammy bar to make the chord dip and dive all over the place. Suddenly this little exercise becomes music AND you've learned a pile of new chord voicings!
Boston Guitar Lessons
Skype Guitar Teacher
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
assembling modes
One of the cool things about teaching music is that I'm often put in a situation where I have to reorganize my thinking about something. Maybe the way I see a particular concept doesn't work very well for a student and I have to find a new way to present the material to them. The following is the result of one such occasion.
I have a student who'd been struggling for a while with understanding how to really work with modes. It's one thing to understand the fingerings, but it's a different matter entirely when you start trying to use them musically with other structures. He had a really solid grasp on pentatonic scales and major scales and we'd spent a lot of time working on arpeggios. He also understood what the modes are all about. The material was all working just great inside his noggin, but these different ideas wanted to stay different ideas, especially when it came to modes and applying them to playing over a blues.
What we came up with was a sort of flow chart that illustrates the development from the simple idea of octaves through pentatonic scales and arpeggios to the mode. In this example, I chose to use mixolydian.
To analyze these charts, we start with R. From that, we generate two more complex patterns - an arpeggio (R 3 5 b7) and a major pentatonic scale (R 2 3 5 6). We then put these two shapes together into a kind of hybrid (R 2 3 5 6 b7). At this point, there's only one note missing to make the full mode! We add the 4th, and we've got a full mixolydian scale.
This approach will work for any of the natural modes except for locrian since it has a b5 and the pentatonic scale won't really work in that context. It'll even work for a bunch of synthetic modes like lydian dominant!
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Skype Guitar Lessons
I have a student who'd been struggling for a while with understanding how to really work with modes. It's one thing to understand the fingerings, but it's a different matter entirely when you start trying to use them musically with other structures. He had a really solid grasp on pentatonic scales and major scales and we'd spent a lot of time working on arpeggios. He also understood what the modes are all about. The material was all working just great inside his noggin, but these different ideas wanted to stay different ideas, especially when it came to modes and applying them to playing over a blues.
What we came up with was a sort of flow chart that illustrates the development from the simple idea of octaves through pentatonic scales and arpeggios to the mode. In this example, I chose to use mixolydian.
To analyze these charts, we start with R. From that, we generate two more complex patterns - an arpeggio (R 3 5 b7) and a major pentatonic scale (R 2 3 5 6). We then put these two shapes together into a kind of hybrid (R 2 3 5 6 b7). At this point, there's only one note missing to make the full mode! We add the 4th, and we've got a full mixolydian scale.
This approach will work for any of the natural modes except for locrian since it has a b5 and the pentatonic scale won't really work in that context. It'll even work for a bunch of synthetic modes like lydian dominant!
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Skype Guitar Lessons
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
2nd edition of my ebook is available!
Although I haven't been active with the blog for a while, I have released a second edition of my book, The Ultimate Guitarists Survival Guide:
The purpose of this book is not just to teach you a bunch of scales, arpeggios, and chords. This book teaches you how to really use them and it includes numerous exercises to help you really master the material. There are also chapters on technique, chord substitutions (which can also be applied to arpeggios!), and etudes.
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