Great lesson to break into playing tunes solo.
Here are links to all the other vids:
Check out the attached PDF!
Retired a while back and now have the time to get more serious about the vibes. Thought the 15 week thing would be a good place to begin. So here is my lesson 1 stuff.
My four root notes are F, Ab, B, and D. I think of the vibes as an F-centric instrument, so F. Going up or down a major or minor third takes it in more of a sharp key or flat key direction, so Ab and D. And B is a tritone away, which takes you as far from the original key as possible.
Here we go!
From F - all modes, muting and open/close, improvisation all modes
Check out the attached PDF!
🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 10
Up to this point, we’ve been building a blues vocabulary through:
• Guide tones
• Chromaticism
• Augmented, diminished, and whole tone sounds
• Full chorus line studies
This week, we shift into something more practical:
👉 Applying these ideas to a real tune
We’re using the melody to “Bag’s Groove” as our starting point, and combining it with chord voicings in the spaces.
This is an important step.
Instead of thinking separately about:
One of my students has been working on "Footprints" and wanted to explore playing in 3/4 time. To help, I put together a simple etude focused on adapting familiar patterns to fit 3/4. What I like about this approach is that it lets you apply a straightforward line throughout the tune, and it flows well in 3/4. There are a few places where I adjusted the line slightly to better match the chords. Also, keep in mind that these changes are a bit simpler than the original ones, but they’re still widely used by many players—dating back to an old real book version!
Check out the attached PDF!
Check out the attached PDF!
In Part 5, we shift our focus from arpeggios to scale-based soloing, using the bebop dominant scale as a framework for outlining harmony with a smoother, more linear flow. This scale includes a chromatic passing tone (usually the natural 7th in a dominant scale), allowing you to maintain a strong rhythmic flow while still landing chord tones on downbeats.