Graham English

Posts Tagged ‘soloing’

Equinox

A late night interpretation of John Coltrane’s Equinox performed on my new Nord C1.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 5

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern gets tougher again. It has four notes in C and four notes in D flat but they are all spread throughout the bar.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 4

This pattern should be easier than the previous dominant 7 scale pattern. The transposition doesn’t split the bar so you only have to think about transposing once during the full pattern.

How To Use Tension And Release In Your Melodies

Music, much like life, is fundamentally a swinging pendulum between tension and release. Fortunately, with music, this is easy to represent objectively and to utilize in your music composition.

Piano Voicings Part 1: Left Hand Voicings

Left hand piano voicings enable you to play the basic progression of jazz harmony, II-V-I, with good voice leading while freeing your right hand for soloing. The most important notes in these chords are the third and seventh because they determine the chord quality. The root and fifth of the chord don’t require much attention [...]

Top Secret Patterns (shhh, they’re free!)

Patterns are a great way of putting scales to work. Not only do they get you out of any do-re-mi rut, they expand your musical vocabulary. They also expand your mind by forcing you to think about systems within systems—and sometimes within other systems. For example, this diminished pattern is a three note system:

within another [...]

Internalize And Eternalize The Music By Transcribing Solos

A time honored tradition for learning the ins and outs of a specific discipline is by transcription. Monks transcribe sacred texts in order to internalize the teachings. Writers copy their favorite authors’ books in order to assimilate their style. And musicians will transcribe their favorite artists solos as a study in ear training and to [...]

Do You Consider That Each Note Has A Different Character?

Ross: Hi, do you consider that each note has a different character? If so, have you found that the same qualities of the same notes are heard by different people (eg. F# = bright, Eb = dull)? If not, what do you see as the point of learning AP besides using it as a party [...]