Listening back to some of my old recordings tonight, I began to wonder if I'd lost something in the process of focussing so much on technique. I think from now on I'm going to try and devote a little time to using what I'm learning in an improvisational context. With that in mind, here's a little minor blues jam I recorded a year ago. I'd be grateful for feedback, but even more grateful if others would post there own jams.



What the hell. Here's another imperfect jam to Little Wing. Ursin's going to hate this :):

Nah, when I said that covering Hendrix was sacrilegious, I was speaking more of getting up in a club and performing it in front of people in a live band situation.

Watch the vibrato. Too shaky.

Good on yer cliff
Have i ever heard a perfect Hendrix cover..close but.......no and probably never will

Good point Cliff. There definitely needs to be more posting of jamming over backing tracks.

Thanks.

Yeah, I guess you have to actually play music to integrate techniques. Legato and sweep picking I think would be good examples. Practicing them in isolation is one thing, but being able to use them musically is going to take practice too.

Anyway, we have to remember to have fun, right? Listening back to my older stuff, I began to think that, although the technique and timing might not be so great, it had a certain something to it that I struggle to get these days.

I'll be sure to watch out for the vibrato :).

Cliff, the only thing that makes practice fun for me is to find a riff or a lick that I really like. I mean like it to the point that I really would like to know how to play it. I'll isolate the parts of it and make exercises out of them. The way I isolate it is to slow the bit down and identify the notes and how they're played (picked, hammer-on, pull-off, etc.) I find that it trains a lot of things: your ear for music and tones and sound, an understanding of when/how some techniques are used to create that sound you liked, and fingering/picking patterns because you get to think hard about how to most efficiently pick something. On top of that, playing those isolated bits you like work as an exercise, and the final reward is to play it at full speed just the way you liked hearing it the first time you listened.

Anyways, that combines business and pleasure for me.

That's a very good point. I think I'm going to be skewing my practice a little in that direction. I'm trying to learn Black Star, and a bunch of the licks there are very similar to the string crossing exercises I've been practicing, so I should be able to make a direct substitution. Hell, there's even licks with all the different rhythms: 3 notes per beat, 4, 5 and 6.

But also I feel like I need to practice songs as a whole. Licks are all very well but, as my wife said earlier today, a song tells a story. And that's important too.

Plus it would suck to be the guy that plays guitar but doesn't know any songs. :-) I'm sure there'slots of equivalent software, but on the iPad, I use the app Capo to slow down parts of an MP3, change the pitch, and do all that stuff. There's so much to learn that way, especially that tabs are often crappy. Magellan's Maze is a good example. It was driving me crazy that I couldn't get the main riff sounding like on the record. Using Capo, I found the tabbers had missed or not heard a note and it changed everything. It's also helped me find rather subtle vibratos and slides. And subtle notes. It's eye-opening the small things that more sophisticated players make that sets them apart. The little things that change the whole sound. I think taking a song you like and download some tabs for it, then revise the transcribed tabs with notations that make sense to you (like how things are picked, what's accented, where the vibrato goes etc -- you'll be surprised at how much junk and missing details will come up on just one tab)and it will up your game! It much better practice for development of the musical part of the brain than just up and down playing tabs/notes.

Black Star might be a good project to try some of that. You see, my Yngwie-fan-friend bitches over tabs being wrong all the time and with transcribed unintended harmonics, string-noise, and finger-positions that make absolutely no sense.

I'll check out Capo - never heard of it before. Last week I found RiffStation, which sounds similar. It'll analyze an mp3 and give you the chords, which is pretty cool.

I've seen similar things in Van Halen tabs - slavish reproduction of what were clearly mistakes. I tend to avoid those, since they're usually harder to play than normal :). But I think I'm a long way from being able to improve on a tab myself. My ear needs a lot more training.

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Some time ago I purchased an Yngwie tab book of his first solo album "Rising Force." I purchased the book on ebay. It was printed in Japan. I was interested in the book because it had the full score of every song; guitar, bass, vocals, keyboards, and drums.

It was all horribly wrong. The notation itself was correct but the tab was totally wrong. The fingerings were very bizarre. I found it amusing for a bit...strange fingerings for harmonic minor scales...but it became funny after a while.

So, I would advise to stay away from the Japanese tab books.

Yeah, I'm using a Hal Leonard one. I'm pretty sure some of the fingers aren't correct. For example, in the main riff for Black Star there's a descending sequence of 4 notes per beat over three beats. Watching Yngwie play it, it looks like he plays it on the top E with position shifts, where the tab I have stays in one position and uses two strings.

man. then the ultra-zone score book my friend gave me is a waste of space

Dear Cliff, I just noticed that you have a natural aptitude for starting really cool threads.

Thanks Nick :).

I'm going to take that as license to post more mindless meanderings. I recorded these two the day after I started this thread. Excuse: I'm not very used to improvising, particularly in these genres. In both cases I was trying to play around the chords, again something I don't have much experience with. In the second the chords were going by too fast, so I'm doing little more than playing the root notes most of the time.



and



So I know the rhythm is off in places. The bends are sometimes out of tune. The vibrato, I now know, is nasty. And I could add more passing notes and leading notes. I also notice it's difficult to come up with interesting phrasing in 'real time'.

Again, I'd appreciate any comments on how I could improve. And I'd really appreciate it if anyone else cared to post there improves.

Where I'd start in your shoes, Cliff, is with my sustain. I'd ignore bends and vibratos and I'd play improvisation where I focus on playing notes and sustaining them for as long as I can. Your notes fade quickly, and I think that also results in your bends and vibratos being rushed. :-)

After a day or two and you begin to feel confident in holding the note, try Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd. That song has some drawn out notes that include slow bends and gentle vibratos.

Cool Tom. Thanks for the tip.

Listen to some Al di Meola. A lot. Get all his albums. Let it really sink into your brain. Get the first few Santana albums. Listen to some Paco de Lucia. Listen to early Chick Corea albums like "My Spanish Heart." Listen to Chick's fusion band Return to Forever. Listen to all this Latin jazz stuff. Get into some Afro-Cuban grooves. Get into some Bossa nova. Listen to Di Meola's idol Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla was basically the Stravinsky of tango music.

Listen to all this stuff on constant rotation. Let it get into the brain. Research it. Read up on it.

While you're doing that, practice major scales and arpeggios, minor scales and arpeggios, harmonic minor, phrygian mode, phyrgian dominant mode, learn all your relative major/minor stuff (C Major is the same as A minor).

Learn the scale sequences from Pebber's video on youtube. Practice those. Learn to play the scales in thirds and sixths. Learn to use odd grouped notes like 5 and 7. Really drill triplets and sextuplets.

As you are doing all this, continue to solo and record yourself over the latin backing track. Record 1 or 2 takes a day.

Post the 100th attempt. Then post the 200th attempt. Then the 300th attempt and so on.

After a couple years of doing this, it will be much better.

Thanks Ursin! Good to know I'm nearly there ;).

Think of my attempts as a public service - everyone else, even Fred Durst, can feel better about their playing :).

To help encourage others to join in, here are links to the backing tracks I used:



and



Google for "video to mp3 converter" and you should find a site where you can type in a link to a youtube vid and it will extract and download an mp3 from it.

From last week's tuesday jam session with some other local guys just knocking around

Quote: Vote_For_Kodos wrote in post #20

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From last week's tuesday jam session with some other local guys just knocking around

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Nice one, o supporter of Kodos! Looks like you guys had a lot of fun.

Yo Cliff

that blues jam has some good phrases in there, I could listen to for a while, quite friendly on the ears most of the time.

love the way the chords are intergrated into the melody

Hey man - glad you like it :). Thanks for taking a listen and commenting.