Most Popular Lessons

They are a few years old, but they are timeless as is his music!

Solo Playing Tips Part 1

Solo Playing Tips - Part 2

The Attack

Phrasing

Here is Donna Lee. A Quick and Dirty Audio Duet. I played both parts. You can listen.

Your job is you accompany me and use rootless voicings. Download the Accompany me track. Use Garage Band or whatever to record your part. put them together and make an mp3 file and post it!

I can help! (Time permitting)

I've also included a PDF with some rootless voicing examples.

So here's the deal.

I have a Sibelius file and a midi file and an xml file. So there's a way to use this with any notation file or even DAW that you have.

I put down chord tones on the beat. You fill in the off beats with notes from the scale (the rests).

Make musical sense. Half step below is fine. Half above has to be in the scale.
Listen to it and make changes to make it sound as good as you can. it won't sound super great but parts of it you will like and you can play. I recommend playing the whole solo.

Sorry, but I had to do it.

I've talked about this many times, however since we're talking about chord melodies I thought another Dad speech was appropriate.

I'm up in the mountains of Pennsylvania this week and I brought a bunch of gear. I put some thoughts down on practicing 2 5 1 licks and wrote the licks out.

Song for My Father is a Great tune to study mainly because it has a couple dom 9 chords. Not altered, not diminished, just a 9 chords. We can get rid of the root and the fifth and add the 9th and the 13th. I do this in this etude.

Most of this tune can and should be played with rootless voicings ESPECIALLY with a bass player. Here I add the root but it's never with the chord. This is to make sure you can hear the voicings in context.

We have to be careful with rootless voicings. They can sometimes sounds like a different chord then they are supposed to be.

Here's a play along I made for a student.

We are working on moving 2 5's through the keys. So the Progression is:

C | C | Gmin7 | C7 | Fmaj7 | Fmaj7 | Cmin7 | F7 | Bbmaj7 etc. get it?

i wrote out voicings and i played a solo where I just play the chord tones to make the solo.

So check it out.

I don't put the chords in, you have to write them him. the are chords WITH roots, so you should be able to figure them out.