I read an article about how you need at least ten ways to play over ii V I progressions as a kind of quick start to playing jazz improvisation. To that end I wrote out a lot of different ways of creating the lines. Theoretically you can play various scales over the minor ii chord for starters but I wanted to practice the ones I like and not the ones that leave me flat. I wrote them in a way where if I ascended a four note arpeggio starting on a chord tone then I descended a scale afterwards. If descending a short, four note scale then I’d ascend a longer eight note scale afterwards. Or after a long scale, then I’d descend an arpeggio. I listened to everything I wrote and came to the conclusion that I don't care much for the bebop dorian scale which has a natural three added and would go D E F F# G A B C if playing the D dorian bebop scale over a D-7 chord.

I also didn't care for the D melodic minor, A melodic minor, or the E melodic minor played over the D-7 chord. Sideslipping the D dorian scale up or down a half step also was lifeless for me. What seemed to work best was the normal D Dorian and the D harmonic minor scales.

For the V7 chord [G7 for our purposes] anticipating the subsequent chord's assigned scale worked best which was either C lydian or C harmonic major #4 [aka lydian b6]. Also effective was the whole tone scale and the Dominant bebop scale/G bebop which is essentially a mixolydian scale with an added sharp seven but I also liked adding the sharp 4 as well [reminiscent of holdsworth’s added tone scales] so Tatsu's G bebop would go G [A] Bb C C# D E F F#.

Besides C harmonic major and C harmonic major #4, the D melodic minor sounded good on occasion

For the minor ii V i's I prefered the ii aeolian b5 and the I harmonic minor played over the ii-7 chord.

I didn't like the the tritone substition over the V7 Alt except in a couple of instances [It's a Db7 arpeggio or derived scale {a half step above the I chord}] superimposed over the G7 chord. I prefer the I/C harmonic minor and the half whole. I'm told if the V7 chord doesn't resolve, then melodic minor is the most appropriate scale choice but I haven't listened to it yet.

For the i minor[maj]7 chord I most prefer melodic minor and the melodic minor #4.

To cope with something fast you could possibly resort to the C natural minor add #6 add #7 for the ii half dim, V, and I chords.

You can hear these ideas worked out on my version of “My Favorite Things” presented here both as a sound file and a rough score. I thought the lines I’d created obliterated the melody so I edited what’s written there by keeping the beginnings and endings of the original melody intact. As you can hear, the result works really well. Another reason is because I throw in a triple here and there to break up the monotony of straight eighths. This allows you to milk those easy straight eighths for all they’re worth. When I move to almost exclusive triplets playing, then I break up the triplets with four sixteenths before returning to triplets. I’ve avoided quintuplets and sixteenth note triplets which are really hard to play on stick.

My Favorite Things http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=13219438

Here's the My Favorite Things score.

Chords don't only move one chord per measure so you have to have some lines worked out that fit when there are two chords per measure so here are some of those.

For the blues Parker would use substitute chords and fit scales over those chords instead. So, for example if we had a D blues, he would say the progression went Dmaj7/Dmaj7, G7, or two chords in the bar D-7 G7/Dmaj7, D7, or A-7/D7 or Ab7// Between the first two bars he often focused on the motion of the guide tones going from F to F#.

For the D7 at bar four he would add b9, #9 and/or #5 where he also emphasized the b7.

The next four bars would get /D blues played over a G7 chord/G7/ Dmaj7/B7b9, F#-7, F-7 or two chords in the bar F#-7 F-7.

For the last four bars there would be an E-7/A7/ then a turn-around for the last two bars. He often paused on a note for the last two bars during his improvisation which was not the tonic. You can see an example of all this in the page entitled “How Parker approaches the Blues.”

Parker would also stretch the superimposed chords so although the chord had changed he would continue in the old chord or anticipate the new chord.

All of this sounds good to me but seems really old fashioned. Coltrane seemed to think so too so I imagine that’s why he came up with the Coltrane changes used on Giant Steps which he would use as substitute changes for a blues also, even though the rhythm section/pianist wasn't playing them. You can see an example of chord substitutions over a blues on “Superimpose Giant Steps Changes on a Blues.”

In the case of the actual tune Giant Steps being so fast, Coltrane exclusively used the same motif throughout, 1235, making it easier to flow seamlessly through the tune. You can see an example of that at the bottom of the page labeled “How Parker approaches the blues”. But when I write lines using the Giant Steps progression superimposed over four bars of I7 in a blues progression, it sounds old fashioned too. Not as old as Parker but still, I want my music to sound modern.

For a minor blues tune such as So What, I prefer to superimpose over the four measures of i-7[D-7 for our purposes] instead with B-11/Cmaj add11/D-11/E-11/Fmaj7b5/Gsus/A-11/A-11// Notice it's a linear progression that Miles uses here and is reminiscent of the requirement of altered scale harmonic structures needing to move linearly as with Holdsworth. Maybe this idea would work with dominant blues too but I haven't tried it yet. These substitutions might fit the D7 blues just as easily.

One writer said he recommended for blues we could play the first four measures of C7 using the C dominant bebop scale on one pass, the C whole tone scale on another pass, the Db7 tritone substitution on yet another pass, and the C minor blues scale on the final pass.

I tried it with anticipating the resolution of C7, aka F maj7 too, so, using F Lydian or F Lydian b6.

None of these ideas really works well unless I moved everything up a half step or a tritone but even then they didn’t sound good enough for half of them. Superimposing changes or mostly ignoring the key worked better than; tritone subs the entire time, the bebop scale the entire time, or the whole tone scale the entire time especially…blaech.

I thought that the idea of moving a passage up a half-step or a tritone worked best on ii V I’s major or minor if the line being transposed already sounded good before being transposed. Transposing a crappy line didn’t help it. Playing the I/C over the V/G [aka F Lydian b6] over C7 but transposing a tritone for four whole measures [so B Lydian b6] sounded the best out of all these options where changes aren’t being superimposed. C minor blues transposed a tritone also worked nicely so that gives you F# minor blues over C7. Maybe changing back and forth between B Lydian b6 and F# minor blues would make them even more palatable where the F# minor blues serves as the V of the B Lydian b6 making a simple substitution.

Next, I had this idea that I wanted to create a way of playing where I avoided all the normally used patterns found in the common scales of the a] major/minor modal system, b] harmonic minor, and c] melodic minor. The result wasn’t a single scale but an approach you can see in the image called “Middle Level Complexity Still Making Connections.” Although, I did label what’s there the “Defy Expectations Scale for Guitar.”

I was thinking that when you have a complex solution it’s difficult to implement effectively, and if you have a very, very simple solution, like using a C minor pentatonic scale over a C7 chord also is difficult to reach the potential that’s there in the music. So, I wanted to zoom in and out of scalar concepts at various levels of magnitude. The solution I came up with on “Middle Level Complexity” was something that would be hard to get under your fingers. You’d practice something like that 3OO or 4OO times to learn it. I went to a website about how to memorize music and they said intelligent people don’t try to brute memorize things that can have connections made to what you already know, so I started drawing in images I saw in the patterns. The images were of patterns encompassing three notes on three strings for a total of only 9 pitches: not much longer than a telephone number. There was a place where what I saw naturally attached together. You can see it just below the top of the page in the middle where it says in a descending column Chinese Lantern, Diamond II, Diamond I, Rocket II, Lamp III. So I ran with that idea on the page labeled “Middle Level Complexity Linked with Connections.”

The ideas on “Middle Level Complexity Linked with Connections” are linked from top to bottom and from left to right. I’ve also included two-string ideas [6 pitches each] in the upper right hand quadrant giving each names like Boat Right, Boat Left, Luxury Liner, Left Capsized… This is an example of zooming the lens in to a greater level of simplicity.

In the spirit of the idea where a scale has none of the characteristics of common scales, I put a scale I’d discovered across the very top of the page all on one string in two octaves that goes C DEbE F# G# B. It’s really odd because it has the harmonic minor intervals ½-m3rd where the G# functions like an Ab which would normally step down to a G but steps down to an F# instead.
In the lower right hand corner is an arrangement of dots which is the major scale played the opposite way across the string but without repetitions in the first half and is also given the last three notes of the harmonic minor scale following the pattern with two whole steps.

If we were to zoom the lens into an even greater level of simplicity we end up only with the lines and shapes that are contained in my Defy Expectations Scale. The lines and shapes are actually contained in any scale and can be seen on the page titled “Low Level Complexity.” This chart is similar to another chart I painted previously that had shapes arranged serially in two note, three note, four note etc… ideas. Playing these concepts motivically sounds very Miles Davisy since he is unconcerned with forcing structures to fit keys. These are easily made to work if you’re comfortable with dissonance and you let your ear decide where to resolve now and then, but for my money they seem to work best over a dominant or minor blues in a modal jazz quartal style and not so much with standard tertian harmony guitar chords for example. These shape based motives don’t flow well and are impossible to play really fast.

I tried to find a way of playing which flows better and came up with a tentative approach which seems similar to what Shorter and Holdsworth do. It’s the image called “Linear Motives.” Shorter takes care to use his motives on the correct notes of the scale. Holdsworth uses motives within his added note systems. I think he adds notes to scales as he’s desiring more and more dissonance. But if you just start with his C chromatic scale minus a C# you’re in business to play entirely motivically without concerning yourself with what key or chord is playing. Of course not everything will sound viable with an approach like this but I think if you stick with it, you’ll uncover things that work well for you that no one else is touching on. It’s the kind of really cool shit I’m always trying to reach towards.

Lastly, I’ve included the “Rhythmic Comping Approach” I discovered a while back on how keyboardists comp when playing quartal harmony. It’s given on a blues presented in all 12 keys. I use this comping rhythm on the audio version of “My Favorite Things” so you can hear if it’s something you’d like to try. It's in 3/4 so I hacked off the end to make it fit and voila, comping in 3/4. Just realize that many times the blues being played by the average jazzer is different than the blues being played by the Grateful Dead. But the fact the rhythm section is incorporating different substitutions than the one’s the soloist is playing doesn’t need to concern you much if you stick with the standard substitutions for soloists discussed previously. What the rhythm section will play is often not C7/C7/C7/C7/F7/F7/C7/C7/G7/F7/C7/G7 but some variant of C6/F6/C6/G-7 C7/F6/F#dim/C6/E-7b5 A7Alt/D-7/G6/C6 A7Alt/D-7/G6/C6 A7Alt/D-7 G7Alt//. Notice the change from C6’s to C7 in bar 4 which are often implied in the other version as well. For me, these substitutions sound really old fashioned and I much prefer the approach taken by the modal jazz movement; B-11/Cmaj add11/D-11/E-11/Fmaj7b5/Gsus/A-11/A-11 all over a D-7 chord. I really need to try these over the D7 chord but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s a good direction to go in.

Tatsu; Crazy stuff, man. A good read to be sure;

Just when I think I am making progress I try out a "real" tune like this and fall flat on my face. I realize just how "linear" a player I have been all my life... Well I guess some of us will just have to play the simple stuff, right?

*Goes and jams on Iron Man

You've really thrown down a gauntlet there - 10 ways to do a tune, with complete melodic possibilities outlined.

Very good, very challenging. I might be able to take up that challenge in a year, maybe.

I love your contributions to this forum, Tatsu. Keep 'em coming!

R

Thanks Jay and Rodan.

Parker and Milels Blues http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=13222372

I’m going to make a video of playing those comping patterns in the previous post on a blues and how to use quartal “rides” with that comping pattern too, also on a blues. There will also eventually be a video illustrating these chord and scale concepts discussed below.

There’s an error early in the previous post where I say the G Bebop scale is spelled with a Bb. That’s wrong. It’s a Mixolydian scale with an added F# so that should read G A B C D E F F#. You might think the Trane sub with DMaj7 for the D7 chord is wrong too but that’s right. Parker also did that.

Speaking of Parker, I wrote a solo over blues changes using his characteristic approach mentioned in the article. You can hear it in the mp3 file “Parker 12…” First is how standard jazz is accompanied for 12 bars. Next the same solo and accomp for only the first 8 bars because that’s the area with relatively stationary chords I7/I7/I7/I7/IV7/IV7/I7/I7//, and 8 bars is the length of the Miles Davis “So What” substitutions mentioned in my previous post.

After that, I’ve given you a new solo composed for the Davis substitutions so you can compare which one you like better; the Parker subs or the Davis subs. I followed the same rules for composing each one to keep them as identical as possible. Presented after the So What solo subs is a more melodic bass part focused on a D Dom scale the whole time to accompany the same “So What” sub guitar solo.

After that is an example of the piano playing only various quartal D7 chords underneath it. Next the piano plays the same substitutions as the soloist. Lastly, the bass joins in following the “So What” substitutions instead of playing melodically.

In the image of my “Preferred Scales for ii V I’s in Fourths” there are places in the five scales shown where they exhibit a pattern also found in the whole-tone scale. It creates a “v” and single diagonals which you can see are enclosed by lines.

There are also some places where notes of the scale exist all the way across one fret. Those have been enclosed too. Notice where the C Harmonic Major #4 and the D Harmonic Minorb5 have the identical diagonal pattern ascending to the right from Ab.

Notice also the C Melodic Minor #4 and the G Bebop scales have notes ascending straight across the strings above A. The D Harmonic minor and the D Harmonic Minor b5 also share a diagonal line ascending to the right from C#.

I think Wayne Shorter’s system where you just touch on the notes of the scale could be applied here where you just find out what key you’re in without having to follow every chord, then Ascend or descend straight across that fret at the minor sixth [Ab in the case of C Major] from the tonic with any motives, or ascend diagonally to the right above C [since the Major I chord’s scale has those notes and the Min[Maj7]’s i chord also has them.

I say this because I’m placing the most importance to touch on the correct notes for tonic chords so when it arrives, things sound like they have resolved somewhat.] This might be a really nice short cut to having to learn a ton of different scales and how to apply them.

In my case I came up with thirteen “scales” but they only exist in one position, not all over the neck. They’re basically altered scales with a different altered scale in the second octave than the one in the first octave. Notice also that the C Harmonic Minor #4 scale’s lower half is a whole-tone scale C D E F#.

If you moved your motives so that they touch on the notes of a whole-tone scale ascending from C, the notes you play will mostly all be “correct.”

I had said before when I was testing one educator’s suggestion to play one scale for all four bars of a blues, that it never sounded good. Having the soloist play substitutions to the actual chords sounded best. It means the improviser’s scale choices are changing.

In particular, I think Coltrane and Davis tried to access all the chromatic notes which is why they used a linear chord progression for the substitutions used by the soloist on “So What.”

I’ve read where Coltrane in was influenced by Schoenberg’s twelve tone approach. As an example of how that works say we’re in CMaj, are going to use all the chords and my preferred scales, so want to play C Melodic major for the I chord, the IV chord F will also get F melodic major. The D-7 then gets D harmonic minor, and the E-7 with the A-7 also get their own harmonic minors. In this case we end up playing the pitch Ab over the CMaj chord, the pitch Db over the F Maj chord, C# over the D-7, D# over the E-7, G# over the Am7 and we still haven’t talked about scale alterations for the G7 or the B-7b5 but we’re already well on our way to using all the black keys.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat though and my Defy Expectations approach is just a different, albeit freakier, way to do that.
I analyzed which scales are present in my ever shifting Defy Expectations scale in my last post.

They are the MixAddNat3, Dor#4#5AddNat3, Lyd#5Addb7, Mixb2b5Addb6, HarmMajb2, Mixb5Addb6, Phryg#4#5nat6AddNat7, MelMinb2#5AddNat3, Lydb2#5Addb7, Mix#4#5, IonAddb3, Mixb5AddNat7.

I’m fairly sure playing motives based on it will get most if not all of the chromatic notes since the “scale” already shifts to other scales before you complete two octaves. Yes, this is the kind of crazy shit that composers think about, especially ones like me.

So anyway, I wanted to come up with a way of going up and down the “scales” and up and down the arpeggios contained within those scales without getting lost in form of the music. In the upper left hand corner of “Duple Arpeggios and Four Pitches Per String…” there are some dots labeled an 8th arpeggio since that motif only has four pitches for 1&2&…

If you couple it with another four pitch arpeggio found elsewhere on the page, you’ll be able to play the 3&4& finishing the first bar of music and ready for the second. Remember, you don’t have to start with the first pitch of an arpeggio every time. Next time you play it, start it in the middle, then play the rest of the notes. [Same is true of scales and tetrachords.]

You can’t play arpeggio’s all day so the next cluster on the graph labeled Chinese Lantern is of one of my patented Defy Expectations SCALE finger patterns in one position. It has been given passing tones so that there are four pitches per string on four strings.

If you play straight across that pattern in eighth notes, 1&2&3&4& you’ll have finished the second measure. The next 8th note arpeggio appears below that. So now we’ve got this nice alternating back and forth between scalar and arpeggic material going on that adds variety to the music.

You’ll get bored with playing 8th notes all the time and will want to throw in some triplets or switch to triplets long term. If you look again at the Chinese Lantern cluster, the pitches to leave out are circled. Then, just play across the string three notes per string for four strings this time saying tripla tripla tripla tripla and voila, another measure has been successfully navigated.

The first triplet ARPEGGIO is labeled HEART MONTOR but only covers the first two triplets, so you’ll need another triplet arpeggio for the rest of the measure which you can find subsequent to that one continuing down the list just below Chinese Lantern II.

You can play up and down scales a few times but that can’t be the exclusive thing you do so that’s why there’s the next page labeled “8th Note Shape and Linear Patterns.” See the square at the top under the word 8th NOTES? Play the four pitches in that shape for 1&2&.

You’re not finished yet so move up a half step, a whole step randomly from where you left off, follow some “correct” scale, or fudge with using all the notes on the fret a sixth from the tonic [A if in C] ascending straight up in fourths, or ascend diagonally to the right from the tonic, then play the linear motif to the right of the square on my graph. It also has four pitches. It’s pitches now fall on 3&4&.

The next shape is a rectangle. Notice I’ve incorporated a back and forth motion between shapes and linear motives for increased variety.

Just remember you can’t just play straight up or straight down the linear motifs every time. After you’ve done that once, the next motif will need to have the notes shuffled around.

As before, you can’t play 8th notes all day so the next page “Triplet Shape and Linear Patterns” has triplet motifs starting half way down the page separated by a long wavy line.

Beginning with the equilateral triangle play that and say “tripla,” then go to the next motif to the right which is three notes in a straight line. Play that and say tripla again. Alternating one more shape and one more linear motif finishes a measure in 4/4. Tripla tripla tripla tripla.

Lastly the CHORDS that exist in all the scale’s found within the Defy Expectations scale are written on the “8th Note Shape and Linear Patterns” page which I’m also including at the end of this paragraph. When most or all of the chords in a “key” are altered chords and or when the chords step from chord to chord in an unusual way, it makes alien scale choices and random motifs more viable which is where a system like this will be the most effective, especially if you use non-3rd and quartal chord voicings which have much less need to resolve to a particular tonic.

Holdsworth wouldn’t just play those chords as they are though. He’d move the inner voices of some chords before shifting to their neighbors. Go ahead and play through some of these bad boys on a keyboard to hear what the keys sound like. It’ll be fun.

It’ll be hard on a guitar in tertian voicings though because there will be two fifths to flatten but only so many fingers to flatten them just as an example. Anyway, play them as tertian, non-3rd, and quartal.

Remember the first chord/note doesn’t have to be the tonic and if you’re composing a tune with these you may want to change whichever chord you choose to be the tonic to a more stable sonority like a somewhat more normal major or minor seventh chord as a substitution. Here are some of the esoteric keys.

The key of C Mixb5Addb6 has C7b5, D-7b5, E-7b5sus, FminMaj, GbMaj7#5, Ab7#5, and both a Bb7 and a BMaj7.

The key of C Lydian #5 Add b7 has a CMaj7#5, D-7, E7b5, F#-7, G#-7b5, AminMaj7, and either a B-7b5, a BbMaj7#5 or both depending on what you want to do.

The key of Melodic Minor b2#5AddNat3 has CminMaj7#5, DbMaj7#5, Eb7#5sus, both FMaj7 & F7, G#-7bb5, AminMaj7b5, B-7b5sus.

The key of Lydb2#5Addb7 has CMaj7#5, DbMaj7sus, E-7b5sus, F#-7b5, G#-7bb5, AminMaj7, and both a chord spelled Bb Db F#A and B Db F# A however you want to interpret those.

The key of Mix#4#5 has C7#5, D7, E7b5, F#-7b5, G#-7b5, AminMaj7, BbMaj7#5.

The key of Melodic Minor Add b2 #4 b6 has CminMaj7, DdimMaj7, EbMaj7#5, both a F#dimMaj7 and a F#-7b5, and both a G7b5 & a GMaj7b5, an A-7b5, and a B-7b5.

Lastly the Mixb2b5AddNat6 key has C7#5, DbMaj7, Emaj7sus, FminMaj7, GbMaj7, and both an Ab7#5 & AminMaj7, and both a BbminMaj7 & a Bb-7.

Next, I had the thought of how people should have a way to structure their knowledge. Actually that’s how I came up with the idea of having two different forms of a scale; one for playing eighths and another for playing triplets. So I applied it to an existing idea.

If you look at “Duple and Triple Letters Categorization.” You can see that I’ve shown how I play letters and numbers and how many pitches are contained in each one. The letters/numbers that have 2, 4 or 8 pitches are jhnolt5ux. And the letters which have three or six are abcdefimprv27.

It’s interesting to me that it’s the first six letters of the alphabet followed by the abbreviation for improvisation aka “imprv.” abcdefimprv is very easy to remember. So, we can whip those out when we want to pick up speed after finishing a string of eighths continuing with tripla, tripla, tripla, tripla on those letters if in 4/4.

I’ve practiced the letters rotated left, rotated right, and rotated 18O degrees so that adds to the number of motives I have at my disposal. “abcdefimprv” is 11 letters but with the rotated variations is 44.

I also play them writing the letters backwards so that’s 88 and I’m working on playing them with serial permutations so starting with the second pitch in the letter “a,” for example, and proceeding from there with the rest of the “a” so ending with the first pitch of the letter in that case. Then, I start with the third pitch in the letter. It kinda gets hard to remember where you are on each letter though.

Anyway, left, right and reversed are easy peasy but upside down was a lot more difficult as was serial permutations but still possible.

Moving on we come to the image titled “Inside Outside.” Once when I was searching all over the internet for transcriptions of fusion lines I came across a site that talked about basing ideas around quartals like approaching each note in a quartal chord by a half step from below, half step from above, alternating between approaching from below and above, fifths etc...

I also noticed when I want to play something moving diagonally or horizontally along the strings, I quickly run out of space and have to return and still haven’t played anything interesting.

There’s also a video of Holdsworth playing where I see he’s moving his index finger across the strings starting a three note pattern on the sixth string twelfth fret, for example, then playing another three note pattern on the same string but a half step higher. He repeated this process on all the subsequent strings as well. Of course his three note ideas often skip strings but anyway, the concept of playing twice on one string has stuck in my brain.

If we stop talking about my crazy shape and linear gobbledygook and come back to actual musical structures, I saw a transcription of a Holdsworthian line in Guitar Player magazine where the writer said Holdsworth was a consummate improviser and in the analysis of Holdsworth’s lines it was something like four notes of a tetrachord with the order shuffled, followed by a four note arpeggio with the order shuffled, followed by a different four note tetrachord with a different order, followed by a four note quartal rearranged plus with chromatic approach tones, a fragment of a fractured pentatonic, again out of the linear order etc…

All of this reminded me of Shorter’s approach. Both of them can do anything, anywhere, all the time.

I composed a bunch of music that way previously and shared it on the forum here. Listen to Ashoka at 1:48 http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11761845,

Avatar at 2:12, 3:11, and 3:5O http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11827247,

Maha Maya at :34, 1:55, and 2:44 http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11894440,

Oracle at 1:16 http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11701199,

Parcel Tongue Dharma at 1:3O http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11943784,

Sujata at 2:55 http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11943975, and

Bamboo Ginger Iris at 6:23 and 6:5O. http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=12937064

It’s difficult to play that stuff especially if you’re not stretching your hand to play four finger runs. It’s what lead Eddie Van Halen to develop his tapping style because he was transcribing Holdsworth’s solos and couldn’t dream to play them with only one hand.

But I think if we find the ones similar to what Holdsworth is playing while eliminating all but the ones that fit most easily under the hand, we’ll arrive at something playable for mortals, yet still magical. Though for stick it might also be possible to resort to dropping chords and bass and bringing the normally accompanying hand into the soloing action together at the same time.

There’s still another option however, and it comes from set theory. Have a listen to Romantic Notions at “5:18 and the climax of the solo at 5:45.” http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=13096306. That was composed just avoiding the notes that had already been played recently; no shapes, no structure, nothing. That’s one of the assumptions in set theory, is that what is outside an existing set, makes a set of its own.

So I’ve begun to think if you have some motif such as a known musical structure like an arpeggio, scale, or tetrachord, after you’ve played it, then you can also play the notes around it before moving on. The same can be done with squares, triangles, letters, numbers etc…

If you play the tight square for example that has no notes inside of it or between the dots for you to access also then play any 4 notes around it. The first four 1&2& limit and define the next four that you’re going to play. I think that’s a very fruitful direction to go in because you don’t want to go to the trouble of moving your hand to a new location on the fretboard play a few notes then be looking for somewhere else to move.

You should take advantage of the resources that are still unused in the location where you are at. And you could actually just start playing even without triangles and squares, just avoid notes you already played. You don’t have to think about ANYTHING except that, and what you play will be different each time.

I can see making a case that most of the music by these contemporary artists are too obscure for mainstream. But I think you could still use these ideas now and then for intros, endings, or bridges. Just as other tools in the tool box.

I also wanted to mention that the reason to study Parker and all the generic bebop stuff is so you never have to play it and can know when someone else is playing it. That’s another generation’s music.

Corea was soooo great. He wanted to sound like the romanticists but made it his own combining it with rock/electronic instrumentation and Spanish influences. Coltrane was soooo great. He wanted to find freedom like in Shoenberg’s and other modernist’s music but he didn’t stop there combining it with Africa, Indian, and Asian currents.

Holdsworth is also great. He emulted the impressionists in his chord work but went beyond them. In his improvising, he wanted to sound like Coltrane but didn’t stop there and found something often better of his own. Now, of course learning the basics helps you keep it together at the gig and everyone appreciates that.

If you’ve learned everything your teacher taught you and learned it well that really is something to be proud of…when you’re 18. Of course if you just came to the stick and are still struggling with the mechanics of the thing then that’s different. I just think that you can’t leave the audience and the other players wishing for something more which is what I always feel when I hear Parker type stuff from mature artists. Yes, it was hard to get there but the work isn’t finished in my opinion.

I have an acquaintance who is a professional artist from America living in Bali and he said it took him three months to figure out the cute little turn of the legs of the tiny, scrumbled figure hiding in the shrine in the center of the design on the canvas hanging in his gallery.

He painted it again and again and again not trying to sell any of the results until he found what he was looking for. And that the turn of the legs is what finally brought her to life…a detail people who are not artists would miss as being important.

This is someone who has been painting for 3O years. For a real artist three months is nothing. If an artist isn’t reaching and constantly banging their head against a wall trying to figure out how to make new and difficult concepts work, which for most everyone else is the pissy, and often obscure little details,

Everyone wants to play three chords and be a star. Copy someone else without making it their own. Or to make the ends of lines rhyme to see how great it makes them look as poets banging out thousands of far too easily created verse. To play the same hackneyed riff over and over again for years SOMEONE ELSE taught them when they were 12.

So, although there might be a shortcut to some things you want to do, it probably won’t be easy to find. Especially not as easy as learning some licks then playing them into the ground. It doesn’t fool the people who matter into thinking it’s great or the average listener either who will probably also be able to sense how bland it is, having somehow heard it elsewhere from many other people before.

When you’ve got the blues progression and your chops together, if you want to find something spectacular to call your own, you can’t look at what everyone has been doing for the last 5O-1OO years and think you’re going to pass it off as great. It’s too lazy.

Likewise you can’t take your failed avant-garde experiments and publish them expecting accolades from the beat crowd anymore either. That’s also too lazy. Those days are over.

Look at Emmett: continuously making small but important improvements on HIS OWN successful experiment over years and years. If there’s a trick. That’s probably it. Fads come and go but the Stick is here to stay. If you’re not doing any experiments, then what pioneering discovery are you going to make? None.

So, when I start going on about playing shapes instead of known structures, or a scale that defies expectations avoiding what the most important scales do and which is different in the second octave than in the first, or playing the diatonic scale diagonally across the fretboard, I’m struggling hard to find a way for stickists to be able to play like Coltrane, Shorter, Holdsworth etc…

My ideas are currently all failed experiments but I’m close. I didn’t publish that stuff on a CD and say listen to hear how great I am. I’m sharing that with everyone on the forum so that something I post here might spark someone else’s imagination where one of you comes back and says, “check this out.” And finally someone has found the final piece of the puzzle, connected things together that I missed, or is using a little bit of everything and can now do something like what I’ve been working towards.

Collaboration is one of the keys to innovation. It’ll be hard work up front but I think there’s a way to do that without an ungodly amount of effort on their part on the back end so that when they get up to play next year, serious musicians will turn their head, stop everything they’re doing with their jaws dropped and think, “That’s a radical transformation of the materials. I never would have thought of that.” Then calls everyone he knows, “Check this guy out if you want to hear the nectar of the gods.”