Sorry! And back with some recommendations…

Well, that was a long delay. I thought I’d ease back with a couple of links.

First, Leo Valdes fantastic Charlie Christian site, Solo Flight which contains a comprehensive discography but, more usefully perhaps, a load of transcriptions of Christian solos.

The transcriptions are here and are well worth a look. Valdes has transcribed these with ‘Christian’ fingerings which aren’t always, to my eyes, the most logical or straightforward fingerings. In a future installment I might have a go at presenting one of these with what I see as more logical fingerings.

Continuing with Charlie Christian, the Stan Ayeroff book is great and also contains a wealth of solo transcriptions. These are in standard notation, with no TAB, but Ayeroff’s analysis of Christian’s technique and harmonic/melodic sense is really useful and interesting.

Stan Ayeroff: Swing to Bop: The Music of Charlie Christian: Pioneer of the Electric Guitar

In the next installment I’m going to look at improvising over minor chords, so let’s take Django’s “Minor Blues” as an example to practice over. There are several sources for the chords for this online. Try:

http://www.grilles-manouches.net/Html/blues_en_mineur.html

The progression is a minor blues in G.

The excellent Nouages De Swing site has both a ‘grilles’ showing the chord, and also a good basic MP3 backing track to play along with.

http://nuagesdeswing.free.fr/jouer/minor_blues_ok.html

The backing track is here: http://nuagesdeswing2.free.fr/sons_playback/blues_en_mineur.MP3

Have a go and then I’ll look in a week or so at what might work over these chords.

Minor Chords and Inversions

Following on from the earlier posts on major chords: the minor triad is made up of the root, flat 3rd and perfect 5th. 1 b3 5.

Like the major chord we could play these notes as a simple barre chord. Here’s Am.

A minor barre

As with the major barre chord, several notes are repeated which tends to be avoided in jazz playing, so here’s an A minor chord with the root note on the 6th string.

A minor triad

As is typical, the A string is muted and no note is played there. Instead, we stretch back a couple of frets to play the 5th on the D string instead. This may look a little awkward but it makes more sense as a swing voicing [see below]. As well as putting the root on the low E string, we can also play the standard inversions with the b3 on the bottom.

A minor (b3 on bottom)

Note that the root note is on the D string, so we can work out which fret to play this inversion by locating the root on D. Finally, we can play the 5th on the low E string, the root note would be on the 5th string. It’s not played, but you can remember which fret to play at by aiming at the fret where the A would fall on the 5th string.

”]Again, this is a fairly ‘stretchy’ chord voicing. The extra semi-tone shift from the 3rd to the flat-3rd makes most of these voicings a little more ‘open’ in terms of fingering, but this tends to be less noticeable with swing voicings, minor 6ths or minor 7ths. Note: Minor 6ths and 7ths will be the subject of the next post.

As with the major and major 7th chords, in swing music it’d be typical to omit the B string, so all of the chord voicings are made up of three notes on the E, D and G strings. Here are the swing versions of the above chords. First with the root on the bottom string:

Am swing

Then with the b3:

Am swing (b3 on bass)

And finally the 5th:

Am swing (5 on bass)

For me, personally, I’m less proficient with minor chord inversions, they fall less naturally under the fingers than the major inversions, so tend to stick to just the versions with the root on the bass and the 5th on the bass. Something I need to work on for the next video post, possibly.

Next time: minor 6ths and minor 7ths.

Some Youtube Links

There’ll be a quick ten day break on the blog. Next post after this one should be at the end of the month. In the meantime, here’s a couple of nice youtube links.

Tiny Grimes – Stomp Stomp

Oscar Moore [with Nat King Cole – tremendous solo on this, too]

T-Bone Walker [great guitar sound]

When I’m back, minor chords and dominant 7ths.

Video: Improvising over major chords (part 2)

This is the second part of yesterday’s video. Chromatic passing tones [b9s, #5s] and some Charlie Christian inspired licks using the 4th and the minor 3rd.

Video: Improvising over major chords (part 1 of 2)

This is a first attempt at posting a video. Split into two and the second part will be up tomorrow.

The video very quickly reprises the chordal stuff of the previous couple of posts and then shows how to improvise over the chord using triads, major arpeggios, 6ths and major 7ths. The second part covers chromatic passing tones and other ways of adding interest. Apologies if the quality is poor.

Major 7ths and A Wee Bit More Theory

In the earlier theory post I talked a little about triads: groups of three notes formed by taking every other note from a scale. There are four basic triads: major, minor, diminished and augmented. In the previous post I looked at making chord shapes and playing inversions based around the major triad. In later posts I’ll look at minor and diminished triads.

Major chords using just the root, major 3rd and perfect 5th can get a bit boring, especially if you are sitting on one chord for more than a bar or two. Adding in inversions can add a little movement, but it’s still harmonically quite ‘sterile’. One of the standard things to do is to play 7ths to add a bit of interest.

If we take our basic triad and then keep counting in our ‘every other note’ pattern, our chord consists of the root, 3rd [major or minor], 5th [diminished, perfect or augmented] and a 7th. There are three types of 7th interval.

Major 7th: the interval of a major 7th is 11 semi-tones, the major 7th is a semi-tone (or one fret) below the octave. With a G chord, the major 7th is F#.

Minor (or dominant) 7th: the interval of a minor 7th is 10 semi-tones, the minor 7th (or dominant 7th) is a full tone (or two frets) below the octave. With a G chord, the minor 7th is F.

Diminished (or double-flatted) 7th: if you lower the minor 7th by another semi-tone you get a note a full-tone below the major 7th. This double-flatted 7th is enharmonically the same note as the major 6th. With a G chord, the bb7 is E (or Fb).

Seventh chords are built from a triad plus a 7th. The usual 7th chords you’ll see are:

Major 7th: [maj7, M7 or Δ7] major triad + major 7th – 1 3 5 7, e.g. G B D F#

Dominant 7th: [min7 or m7] major triad + minor 7th – 1 3 5 b7, e.g. G B D F

Minor 7th: [m7 or min7 or -7] minor triad + minor 7th – 1 b3 5 b7, e.g. G Bb D F

Minor 7th flat 5: [m7b5 or ^Ø7 or -7b5] diminished triad + minor 7th – 1 b3 b5 b7, e.g. G Bb Db F

Diminished: [ °7 dim7] diminished triad + double-flatted 7th – 1 b3 b5 bb7, e.g. G Bb Db E (or Fb)

Despite what you’d expect, chords notated with a plain 7 are dominant 7ths [with the b7 or m7] not major 7ths.

In this episode, I’ll stick to illustrating some basic shapes for the major 7th chords, which you can use as an alternative to the major chord to add harmonic interest. All of these shapes could have been used as alternates to the major triads and inversions in the previous post. Note, that whether a major 7th or a dominant 7th is the appropriate expansion of a major triad depends on which scale degree the major triad is built on. In the key of G for example, G major and C major are major 7ths and D major is a dominant 7th. I’ll explain why this is in a later post. For now, here are the shapes:

G major 7th – four possible inversions

root third fifth maj7th

Just like in the previous post you can play swing versions of all of these, omitting the B string.

root third (with 7th) third (no 7th) fifth maj7th

I’ve shown two swing versions with the 3rd on the low E-string. One where the major 7th is played on the D string, and one where the root/octave is played there. The one without the major 7th is easier to play.

Note, major7ths aren’t used much in classic 1930s swing chord progressions although they are heavily used in be-bop and later jazz styles. Instead, what you’ll see used to add harmonic interest is the major chord (just the triad notes) being replaced with a major 6th chord — the major triad plus the 6th. Here are some 6th chord shapes.

root third fifth sixth

Again, all of these chords can be played as swing voicings, omitting the B string.

root third fifth sixth

You’ll notice that the swing chord shapes with the third on the bass are almost the same above — this is because that particular shape has the 6th or 7th on the B string, and it gets left off. You’ll probably also have begun to notice that some of these shapes look a lot like shapes you know by other names. This will be a subject for another post, but this interchangeability of simple shapes – G6 is the same as Em7, for example — is part of what makes playing fast chord progressions with lots of changes possible because you can play lots of chords while sitting at one fret (and not leaping about all over the fingerboard). If you had a progression that went from G7 to Em7 you could play that change by moving one finger, one fret and if it then went from Em7 to C7 you could play that by moving a different finger, one fret again.

More later. Minors, diminished and their 7ths for a future post.

Major chords and inversions

In the last post I discussed triads and talked a little about the major triad, i.e. any chord built with the following formula: root, major 3rd, perfect 5th

Most guitar players probably know a few ways of playing major chords — chords using just the notes of the major triad. Usually, at a minimum, most people probably know how to play half a dozen or more open position chords in the first position (using the first 3 frets). You can play C, D, E, F, G and A major chords easily here.

On top of that there are ‘barre’ chord shapes formed by barring the first finger across 5 or 6 strings an effectively creating a new set of ‘open’ strings that can be moved about up and down the neck. The E shape and the A shape are by far an away the most commonly used.

These two movable barre shapes are going to be completely familiar to any rock player and most will have the notes on the E and A strings memorised so that they know where to play, for example, an Eb major (11th fret with E-shape barre or 6th fret with A-shape barre) or an F# major (9th fret with A-shape barre or 2nd fret with E-shape barre) and so on.

Jazz players, however, don’t really use barre chords that much. Why? There’s a practical reason: it’s just easier to play non-barre chord shapes when you are playing at speed, especially if you are going to be playing chords with sevenths and extensions — 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, etc. There’s also a musical reason: barre chords often repeat the same note more than once. In the E-shape the root note is played 3 notes — on the 6th, 4th and 1st strings. From the point of view of outlining the harmony of a tune, these are redundant, each note only needs to appear once, and the note repetition can make the chords sound ‘busy’ and out of place in a fast moving set of changes. We’ll see in a later post that you can outline the changes to a tune pretty effectively playing just two notes per chord — the 3rd and the 7th — and the root is often redundant when played just the once, never mind played 3 times!

So, here’s a more ‘jazz’ shape [still based around the E-shape above]:

This shape still repeats the root note but it’s more mobile and much easier to work in the 7th or extensions, something we’ll see in a later post.

Just playing this chord could get pretty boring, though. A lot of swing or jazz tunes can feature up to four bars of the same major chord and just chunking along on one chord shape can get tedious. Here’s an mp3 with 4 bars of G played with this shape.

G major – no inversions

One way to make the basic major triad more interesting is to play inversions, chords with a note other than the root note on the bottom. Here’s a standard inversion of the G major chord:

This chord has the major 3rd on the bottom [B played at 7th fret on the E string]. An easy way to remember the position of these chords and to know which one to play is to look out for the root note on either the E, A or D string [the ones most guitar players will already know the note names for]. For this inversion the root is on the D string, 5th fret.

Here’s another:

The easiest way to remember this one [which has the 5th in the bass] is to remember that this chord is played at the same fret as the A-shape barre. The G root is at the 10th fret on the A-string. the note might not be getting played, but knowing where it is helps locate the chord.

Here’s the same four bars using these inversions to make sticking to one chord more interesting.

g_basic2.mp3

Finally, swing players don’t usually play the full chord. It’s too slow, and generally the chunky rhythm sound sounds best playing on just the four lowest strings. Here’s the same inversions but with the B string left out.

The basic 3-note swing voicings are central to getting that rhythm sound down, also, because they are easy to play they make it possible to play fast chordal passages with lots of colour notes — 6ths, 7ths, etc — added in [something for a later post].

Here’s the same four bars using simple 3-note swing voicings and randomly choosing one of those three shapes.

g_basic3.mp3

Add in a couple of colour notes — the 6th and sometimes major 7th — these inversions and a few passing chords and you can play interesting stuff over a single major chord for ages. More later!

Chord Names: a wee bit of theory, part 1

The basics make a lot more sense if you understand just a small amount of the theory that lies behind how chords are made: from triads, 7ths and extensions.

The basic harmonic building block is the triad. Take any scale, pick a note. That note is note 1, count up the scale until you get to note 3, then count again until you get to note 5. Those three notes, every other note in the scale, form a triad, and basic chords are all derived from triads.

So, the C major scale is: C D E F G A B

If we count 1, 3 and 5 from C, we get C E G. Those three notes form a C major triad. Major because the interval between C and E is a major 3rd (or 4 semitones, or 4 frets on the guitar neck). You might play it:

What happens if we count from a note other than the first note in the scale? In the C major scale if we count from D we get D F A. This is a minor triad because the interval between D and F is a minor 3rd (or 3 semitones, or 3 frets on the guitar neck).

The interval between the 1st and 3rd defines whether a triad (or the chord built on that triad) is a major or minor chord. There’s nothing more to the major/minor distinction than that.

What about the interval between 1 and 5? If the interval is a perfect 5th (7 semitones or 7 frets on the guitar neck) then the triad is just a major or minor triad, depending on the first two notes.

However, if the interval is one semitone (or one fret) less than a perfect 5th, the 5th is said to be diminished and the combination of a minor 3rd and a diminished or b5 is a diminished triad. If the interval is one semitone (or one fret) more than the perfect 5th, the 5th is said to be augmented and the combination of a major 3rd and an augmented 5th or #5 is an augmented triad.

If we count from B in the C major scale above, we get B D F. A minor 3rd and a diminished or b5. So a triad built on B in the key of C is a diminished triad.

You can’t get an augmented triad from a major scale. There’s no note in the scale where counting from that note will give you the combination of a major 3rd and a b5.

As an example, though, you could play one like:

Since basic jazz and popular song harmony is based around the harmonies built on the major scale the three key ‘flavours’ of triad are major, minor and diminished and all the standard chords, no matter how many extra notes are stacked on top, retain a major, minor or diminished tonal quality.

To recap:

major triad – major 3rd + perfect 5th: 1 3 5

minor triad – minor 3rd + perfect 5th: 1 b3 5

diminished triad – minor 3rd + diminished 5th: 1 b3 b5

augmented triad – major 3rd + augmented 5th: 1 3 #5

In the next part, I’ll look just at simple major chords — those that contain nothing but the 3 notes from the major triad — and look at fingerings, inversions and ‘swing’ voicings.

Basics

Getting started in swing-style playing doesn’t require a huge amount of theory knowledge, or technique, but it does require some. I’ll put up posts on each of these basics as we go on:

1. Chords: major (maj), minor (m), dominant (7) and diminished (^o) and half-diminished (m7b5) plus these chords with the appropriate 7ths and ‘extensions’ — normally 6ths, 9ths and b9ths. Swing playing typically makes use of a lot of inversions (the same chords but with the notes in a different order) so that the propulsive rhythm can be kept up at high tempos and with a lot of chord changes. Using inversions means that less jumping around the neck is required. Learning inversions can be intimidating at first, I certainly struggled the first few times I tried to learn, but once you understand how swing guitar players voiced chords [see a future post on 3-note ‘swing’ voicings] it gets a lot easier. Each of these chords should be learned in ‘swing’ and normal forms.
2. Scales: swing players don’t really make a lot of use of scales in improvising. When you approach modern jazz guitar material it often seems like the approach is ‘first learn these two hundred scales and modes, then learn each of the half-dozen chords you can play each mode or scale over, and then you can improvise’. It looks like months and months of study before you can jam over  a simple blues progression. Swing material isn’t like that. If you know the major scale and some chord shapes, you can play. If you know a couple of minor scales and the major pentatonic on top of that, you’ve pretty much got all the material you’ll need to know. Even the scales tend to be approached as if they are arpeggios with some extra notes filled in so you can make use of the chord shapes you already know.
3. Arpeggios: swing improvising makes heavy use of arpeggios. This can seem intimidating but once you realize that if you know the chords to play the progression you already basically know the arpeggios, too, it gets a lot easier. A future post will illustrate just how easy it can be to play over a progression using just simple chord shapes.

These basics plus some understanding of the basic rhythms and you’re good to go. No need to know 7 different modes of the melodic minor, how to make the super-locrian work over 7#5 chords, twenty-five different ways of using the lydian, and so on.

Swing guitarists

The mid-to-late 30s through to the very early 40s were the hey-day of classic swing guitar playing with guitar players replacing banjoists who’d been a key part of the rhythm section in earlier big bands and small groups. Lots of the well-known groups of the day had a guitar player as part of the rhythm section, often laying down a driving, propulsive four-to-the-bar groove, and some of these players also featured as soloists. The Classic Jazz Guitar page is a good resource with profiles of lots of guitar players and even some links to audio recordings. Here are a few of the names to watch out for and, where they exist, some youtube links:

Eddie Lang (http://eddielang.com) -One of the most influential of all the early jazz players. Almost predates what we’d think of now as ‘swing’ and pretty much invented a lot of what we think of as jazz guitar. Began playing in the 1920s and died tragically in 1933. Best known for his guitar duets with Lonnie Johnson and others, and his work with Bing Crosby and violinist Joe Venuti. Especially, check the clip below with Carl Kress for an example of how impressive he could sound. His mixed rhythm and lead sound is really distinctive and technically really impressive and was a formative influence on the likes of Django Reinhardt and others. Here, with Joe Venuti: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu2CK8_jZvw. Also, here’s a nice clip with him and Bing Crosby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0qmKjBaFtA&feature=related

Carl Kress – another classic swing player known for his chordal style. Nice audio clip with Eddie Lang here, amazing sounding for 1932, a must listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtMz3pGhHTU

Django Reinhardt – no introduction needed. Great Belgian guitar player, hugely influential improvising style that spawned an entire genre [gypsy jazz]. Primarily known for his acoustic lead playing with the Hot Club of France but was developing a more bop influenced electric sound at the end of his life. Very rare high-quality youtube clip, here. A must-watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v-6AH-S8L8

Oscar Aleman – great Argentinian guitar player, contemporary of Django Reinhardt in Paris and with a similar style. It’s striking how much the music on this youtube clip, which doesn’t feature much guitar unfortunately, has something of the sound of early rock’n’roll. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpfw1i4lydU&feature=related

Charlie Christian – played with Benny Goodman, hugely innovative improviser who anticipated and influenced some of the later bebop innovations. One of the most important players in the history of the electric guitar. This youtube clip is audio only with a slide show but a truly amazing piece of soloing from Christian at an after-hours jam session at Minton’s Playhouse in 1941. These jam sessions are often credited with being a formative influence on be-bop and you can also hear the sound of early rock-n-roll players. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLz4vYCW97Y

Eddie Durham – one of the first, or possibly even the first electric guitar player, his electric guitar recordings predate Charlie Christian’s. Worked with Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Glen Miller, Jimmie Lunceford, and others, as a guitar player, musical arranger and trombonist.

Freddie Green – much imitated monster rhythm guitar player with the Count Basie band and another incredibly influential guitarist. A lot of players have spent a lot of time trying to master his four-to-the-bar rhythm style. Here’s a really nice clip of him with Basie. The way the sound of the band changes and begins to swing when he starts to play is so nice.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3a1-ay2tnE