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.

~ by Matt on July 26, 2009.