I really like this style of phrasing, take some great examples like McCoy Tyner, and a lot of the ‘hard bop’ jazz cats. The basic idea is this: take a scale, in this example I will use a C major scale.
Now play all the diatonic fourths contained in C major:
In the video I am playing on a Dm (Dorian) vamp, but you can use this phrasing technique on any scale, mode…have fun.
I was lucky enough to study with Vic Juris in the early 90’s. Today I stumbled into a couple of great lessons on youtube and I wanted to share them with you. He is a great jazz guitarist, if you don’t know about him, check out his music: http://www.myspace.com/vicjuris
In this lesson he talks about some very cool (and incredibly easy) applications of the standard box pentatonic shape:
Here he talks introduces his book Modern Chords:
Advanced Harmony for Guitar (Mel Bay’s Private Lessons)
I cannot recommend enough to check out this incredible musician!
Giant Steps has always been a challenging standard to play, in this video I give a few tips on how to approach this famous tune.
The Chords (from the fake book-as far as I know it is not copyrighted material so I am posting the original):
One good ‘pattern’ to start familiarising with the progression in playing 1235 for every chord (meaning the 1st,2nd,3nd and 5th of every chord). For the original key it would be B,C#,D#,F#(Bmaj7) then D,E,F#,A (D7), G,A,B,D (G)and so on…
It’s all about getting used to keep your brain engaged at any time. A great exercise!
In this video I show how to use the Superlocrian mode (nothing more than the 7th mode of a minor melodic scale) to improvise over altered chords. On C7 the choice would be C Superlocrian C, Db,Eb,E, F#,G#,Bb (also known as Db melodic minor starting from C). Listen to a few examples of resolution from C7(alt) to F major and to F minor in the second part of the video.
Altered chords are a flavour of dominant chords, where we add certain extensions: #9,b9,#5,b5. In the example on the video I use C7 as basic chord and add the extension D#,Db,G#,Gb also as combinations.