Best thing I did for my playing over the last 30 days

Bill McCloskey · Posted 1 Nov 2020 9:48 am

I've made pretty amazing strides in my playing over the last 30 day. I'm playing better today than I've ever played.

The trick was absolute focus on one song for a month.

I joined Learn Jazz Standards dot com, which is a supportive community for those that want to improve their jazz improvisation. Each month, the community works on a single tune and shares the results. The site provides the chart, guide tone practice, chord tone practice, backing tracks, etudes based on the chart. A song analysis breaking down all the changes in the tune and tips for improvisation.

This month was the Sonny Rollins tune Doxy.

I've been playing Doxy for the last 30 days and nothing but Doxy for the last 30 days. I broke down all of the chord changes and scales and learned to play them not only across the neck, but up and down each individual string.

I broke it up in patterns and clusters and worked out the head by ear and every day I learned something.

I'm pretty close to getting a recording up.

Just today, I found this great set of places to play over a b7 - 7dim change.

By just really learning this one tune (and I'm not done yet) over the period of a month to the exclusion of almost anything else has made me a better player.

The added bonus is, that since I'm working this all out on the eharp tuning, I'm creating some sounds that probably haven't been played on steel guitar before, certainly not now. It is very cool. Thought I'd share.

Earnest Bovine · From: Los Angeles CA USA

If I play anything more than once (maybe twice) in a day, I get really sick of it.

Dom Franco · From: Beaverton, OR, 97007

I have noticed a similar result whenever I focus on ONE song. This usually happens when I am in the studio working on an album or making steel guitar tracks for other musician friends working remotely.

Then days later when playing that same song at a live gig, the hours of work come back to me, and the little solo parts that I had to woodshed are now easy to play.
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David Matzenik · From: Cairns, on the Coral Sea

Without indulging in false modesty, I would guess I am one of the least accomplished players on the forum. But I practice a lot, every day, usually about three numbers. I think to be a musician, a person has to be obsessed by a piece of music. The trouble is that to develop any proficiency, the over familiarity of practice erodes some of the magic.
What I find is that it takes days and days before I start to find even simple variations. And then, in exasperation, I put them aside and move on to others. Later, I have to relearn them, but they come back fairly easily and then the magic of the piece returns.
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Mike Neer · From: NJ

Cool, keep it up. Itâ€™s a good plan. Bill Frisell once said on Piano Jazz before they played All The Things You Are that he had been trying to learn the tune his whole life. Itâ€™s exactly like that, and why standards are so important. Our interpretations change over time.

I think itâ€™s really important to master the changes of a tune and give yourself strategies for improvising over it. Every great improviser has done this to get to the level that they are at. The more itâ€™s done, the more you start to hear your own ideas and reharmonizations, etc. i do this a lot. I have been playing Giant Steps for years in phases, sometimes obsessing on it for weeks and then letting go for a while and coming back with new ideas.

There are so many tunes that provide great gateways into expanding your vocabulary. One of the tunes that has always been tough for me is â€˜Round Midnight. It isnâ€™t just about making the changes, but trying to be as musical as possible with it. Minor ii Vs are a basic part of vocab but never really easy to be musical with. Half-diminished chords are worthy of as much attention as you can give, but I digress....
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Bill Hatcher · From: Atlanta Ga. USA

a whole month on a tune?? that means you only learn 12 a year....but i guess you know them pretty well!

Bill McCloskey · Posted 1 Nov 2020 5:26 pm

"a whole month on a tune?? that means you only learn 12 a year....but i guess you know them pretty well!
"

ha. well, first few of us have your talent, sir.

But remember. I'm making a deep dive into Alkire tuning at the same time. Here is what I learned:

1. The head: the head is kind of tricky. It took a while to figure out the best way to play it on alkire tuning. And it has some tricky reaches and EVERY chord is a 4 note chord. So getting my hands to stretch properly, and more importantly, at speed, took awhile. Still make mistakes but it is mostly good instead of mostly mistakes.

2. Then figuring out all the places to play a series of four note decending 7th chords. There are multiple grips and multiple locations on the neck to play a seventh chord. Exploring them all and more important, to be able to effortlessly and accurately hit all those 4 note grips, most with multiple string gaps, was a challenge. I'm still not 100% but I can make it intem if I slow it down enough .

3. And then there is learning the neck. I broke up all the chords in the song (and associated scales) and laid them out in a spreadsheets, practicing each string separately. So all the chord changes just on the first string. Then just the second string. Then the first and the second string, all laid out in their intervals so I can examine the change in intervals as the chords change. I then looked at just frets 1-4, 4-8, is 9-12 and made sure I knew were all the notes for each change were limited to just those areas and improvise with that limited pallet.

4. Then changing up the individual parts: playing the melody mixed with chords. playing a chord in different grips up and down the neck, really trying to make the improvisations sound smooth and natural.

5. Then bringing up the tempo, slowing down the tempo.

The idea being that if you really rip a tune apart, you rip all tunes apart. Everything I learn here gets applied to the next standard I learn, which is Autumn Leaves of course.

I lied: I did start working on Autumn leaves as well, using the same method, but I'm still at the beginning stages of mapping out the chords and scales.

Anyway, I've learned a lot and I am a much much better jazz player and improviser today than I was a month ago.

Bill McCloskey · Posted 1 Nov 2020 6:46 pm

Exactly that Mike.

Every time I sit down to play the tune, some other area I haven't explored pops up. I don't get tired of it because I never play it the same way twice. Even the head... I play it in different voicings, grips, rhythms, hint at it, hide it.

But I feel like I'm opening up new areas in my playing. After all, we are talking jazz which is so improved based, the araa I like hanging out in.

Dom Franco · From: Beaverton, OR, 97007

please post some sound samples when you feel it is ready.
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Jim Graham · From: Ontario, Canada

I think this is a great way to up your game, as they say. As you move on to new songs you will inevitably come across technical issues and chord knowledge that you've gained in that one song that you already have down. Each new song adds something more, over time you can nail down a high level of difficultly a song in a much shorter time, keeping in mind it's the journey, not the destination.

Bill Hatcher · From: Atlanta Ga. USA

Nic Neufeld · From: Kansas City, Missouri

When I was learning sitar, we'd spend, on average, about 4-6 months on a single raag. Would exclusively practice it. My teacher noted how much faster we were going than the traditional method, where a disciple might spend a year (or more?) on one raag.

Extended deep dives are fun (and beneficial). I'm not disciplined enough to do that on steel guitar, but I do feel like there are one or two songs that I keep in the forefront of my practice that I just keep refining / exploring.
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Joe Breeden · From: Virginia, USA

Bill, I admire your grit. Joe

Bill McCloskey · Posted 3 Nov 2020 9:29 am

This months tune is Bye Bye Blackbird.

Should be fun.

Paul McEvoy · From: Baltimore, USA

Bill,

I'm working on the same tune, on piano. I think you'd like this Dick Hyman book (I know I know), he's fairly authoritative about the changes, he has another one called "professional chord changes and substitutions" with more tunes.

I realized something that's been really helpful for me lately, on piano and regular guitar. Learning tunes with three notes
1)Melody
2)Bass note
3) one other note that defines the chord and/or voice leads nicely, oftentimes the 7th.

Quite often the 3rd is in the melody, so if you get the root in the bass and the 7th in the middle, you have the chord. But you can also move the bass around and voice lead the middle note. It's a lot easier than moving 4 voices around, and once you see that structure, it's easy to add voices and extensions. It's been really eye opening for me, I've been paring down arrangements I made which were two hard for me to play and they sound better and are much easier. Hard to beat that.

The other thing I was going to mention is the Bruce Forman 10 Mother Tune list. It's from a Guitar Wank podcast. I've been very slowly learning them, as you said, trying to focus on each one. I've been working a lot on Take the A Train, a tune I sort of ignored as being something that beginners hacked away on. But hey, I'm sort of a beginner and I hack away on it too. I'm working on a nice chord arrangement of it and learning a lot from it.

Anyway, his list is good and he goes through each tune and points to what you can learn from it. I would add in Blues, Rhythm Changes and Giant Steps. But if you could play those 13 things in all keys at speed, I think you'd have a pretty good foundation.

https://vincedickinson.home.blog/2019/09/01/bruce-formans-mother-tunes/

Oh and likewise, this article by Ethan Iversen is good...he says instead of transcribing Charlie Parker solos, if you don't know 10 Parker heads, you're better off learning 10.

So long story short, I'm doing something similar to you, taking these standards one at a time and really trying to understand them and also working on a Parker head or two on the side. It's been really effective for me lately.

https://ethaniverson.com/bird-is-the-word/

Moose the Mooche
Ornithology
Yardbird Suite
Confirmation
Nowâ€™s the Time
Billieâ€™s Bounce
Scrapple From the Apple
Anthropology
Au Privave
Dewey Square

Bill McCloskey · Posted 3 Nov 2020 1:50 pm

Thanks Paul.

I ordered the book

Paul McEvoy · From: Baltimore, USA

Btw I love playing that F/A to ab dim as F/A to G/ab (G being a G triad). G/Ab= Ab diminished but thinking about it that way made it a lot simpler to me.

Gene Tani · From: Pac NW

I try to do something similar on other instruments, not on steel, I'm not that good on steel yet. I've never worked one tune for that long, tho, just start with a competent rendering of intro/verse/chorus and improving phrasing.

This article describes a similar process, working one solo at a time. The blog has a lot of good posts, with good insights for practicing jazz

https://www.jazzadvice.com/how-to-practice-less-and-improvise-better/
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Bill McCloskey · Posted 4 Nov 2020 6:12 am

Nice resource. Thanks Gene

Tommy Martin Young · From: Sacramento-California, USA

Bill McCloskey · Posted 18 Nov 2020 4:52 pm

I look forward to hearing more Tom

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