Author: Gianni C.

Posted in Tips and Online finds

The Legacy Of Ted Greene

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By searching inspiration for new lessons on youtube, I stumbled onto this great channel that shares some great jazz guitar videos, and I wanted to pass them to you. Quite interesting those about Ted Greene, some close ups of probably some of his famous private lessons in 1993. This is one of them:

 

This the channel, thank you to jazzguitarfanatic for sharing these videos:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jazzguitarfanatic#p/a/u/0/R4tKUkF_ONE

If you have never heard of Ted Greene you want to find out about him on his tribute site: http://www.tedgreene.com/

He was not only a phenomenal player, but a very influential teacher and author, most famous for his books

Chord Chemistry,Jazz Guitar Single Note Soloing, Vol 1 and Modern Chord Progressions: 1, always considered indispensable by all guitar students of all genres (Steve Vai mentions often Chord Chemestry as one of his favourite guitar manuals).

This is material that will change the way you play guitar, I guarantee you.

Posted in Tips and Online finds

5 Great Sites to Improve Your Music Reading Skills on Guitar

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Music reading skills and sightreading are a fundamental skill for all guitarists/musicians nowadays. Not only it is necessary to have a deeper understanding of your instrument, but it is a great way to share your music, and get good paying gigs (trust me, there aren't may well rounded guitarists out there that can sightread very well nowaday). These are five great resource sites that will help you with your music notation reading skills.

1. Practicesightreading.com

this is a great site where you can automatically generate measures of rhythm, in different levels. I feel this is a fantastic tool to challenge yourself, regardless of your level.

http://www.practicesightreading.com/index.php

2. Fretboard note finder

this is a great little page where you can find out where the notes are on a guitar tuned in standard tuning. When you click on a fret they show up on the upper right corner of the screen in standard notation.

http://www.eythorsson.com/en/Fretboard.aspx

3. Statens Musik Bibliotek

A collection of music pieces from the music Library of Sweden. The only way to improve your reading and sightreading skills is to read new material every day.

http://www.muslib.se/ebibliotek/boije/indexeng.htm

4. International Music Score Library Project

Same as above…more scores!

http://imslp.org/

5. On sightreading music for guitar players

A fun articles about sightreading and why learning traditional notation is more important than tabs.

http://keithmoore1.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/sight-reading-music-for-guitar-players/

 

Posted in The Jazzy stuff (but good for every style!)

Note Choice

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I always found the 'Aebersold style' chord scale relation ship quite limiting, because it shows you what notes you have available, but not which ones are important and what function each note has…(so to speak, what effect a note has when played against a chord at a specific time).

Of course all the material that follows has to be used tastefully and with strong melodic and rhythmic sense! Even though every note you play is justifiable in a way or another, this does not mean that you can play randomly. You need to know the rules before breaking them, so that you can control what you play, not you are 'played by your instrument' or (even worse) you pretend you are playing free jazz…

The two following have to be read from the bottom up. Check out the example: at the bottom you have the chord, followed just above it by the chord scale. The strongest, most consonant notes are the chord tones, and at the opposite end of the spectrum there are the 'out' notes…very dissonant, to be used to create a lot of tension. Try to apply to all chord types.

 

Function:

 

'out' (everything else)

Tension (b9's and so on)

extensions(color)

target chord tones

mode(scale)

Chord

 

 

Example:

 

G#

Bb B# Eb E# (ext – tension)

B D F# (extensions -color)

A C# E G (chord tones – target notes)

A B C# D E F# G (mixo mode)

 

A7(dominant 7)

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Posted in Special Topics

Layers

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This lesson about layers is pretty self explanatory…being in HD you can read the layers pretty well in the video, I think. get in touch if you want me to post them on here.

Good luck!