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Interesting – i just posted a link to YOuTube, but the forum has embedded the video. Works just fine for me.
Yeah, scales is the wrong word. I’m thinking more of, say, the ‘master’ zig-zag-zig-zag pattern, one enormous Fm7, going right along the keyboard. You reach in and grab whichever section of it you need.
There are so many. But ‘I Remember Clifford‘, by Benny Golson is a hauntingly beautiful tune that I discovered through something Suds must have said or recorded.
Here’s Arturo Sandoval absolutely killing it. Amazing. (I could do without the naff keyboard in the background mind):
ps. I realise that YouTube didn’t really exist the last time I was Sundow-ing.!
David – to your point about ‘shape+melody note’ — it’s true, isn’t it. I sometimes try to visualise a ‘chord’ not as a single chord but as a scale. All you’re doing is playing the melody note and whichever notes on the ‘scale’ fall under the rest of your hand.
Works well for Maj7 and Min7. Works less with for Dom7th obviously, as there are way more choices.
Interesting thread. If I think about it, I think this is probably my goal too, this time round. Last time round I learned a lot of dot songs, then voiced a whole load of songs myself which I then committed to memory. I was spending the lion’s share of my time on the ‘on time and perfect’ side of things. Which was right — my hands just needed to learn to move around a keyboard in a certain way. (I remember when I’d being doing Sundow for about 3 months, having a one-off lesson with a really good jazz pianist. He was amazed by the sounds I could play, but our lesson couldn’t really go anywhere: he’d say ‘try this’ and I just physically couldn’t get my hands to alter their positions quickly enough in real time. Forget voicing ‘on the fly’ — i couldn’t even move my fingers ‘on the fly’.
But it does feel different this time round: there are a bunch of familiar shapes (hello the ‘zig zag’ of Fm7, the ‘on-off-on-off’ of Dm7 and Em7, the crunchy little squashed-up Bb7 turnaround…); I feel more ‘anchored’ around certain ‘home’ positions on the keyboard.
So – I’m thikning out loud here – I thought my return to Sundow would necessitate me getting a few dot songs back in hand, to convince myself that I was ‘back again’. But perhaps I don’t worry about that*, and all the remembering/forgetting malarkey. Perhaps I just dive straight into voicing on the fly, not worrying about anything other than being immersed in the doing of it for 20-30 mins a day.
* Except for ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, the dot song of which is straight up one of the most beautiful bits of piano music I’ve ever heard.
Hey Angelo – good to ‘see’ you again.
Ah, the forgetting. The constant forgetting! Yes, I know that well. It seems incredible to me now that I had over 20 songs at my fingertips. I’ve just found a recording of me playing ‘betwitched, bothered and bewildered’ over on the Students’ Play section, and I can’t even begin to remember what I was playing.
It’s been the same with the ukulele for me: I’ve spent two or three weeks learning a new song, playing it literally hundreds of times, only to take a week off and return to find I’ve forgotten big chunks of it. How does that happen?
And I’ve got friends who learned languages – did degrees in French and Spanish, who lived abroad for a year – who tell me that they’ve forgotten most of it now. Which makes me feel bad for them, but relieved that it’s not just me. And, of course, music is a language innit.
What I do know: that every time I practice and learn something new, I might ‘forget’ the piece, or lose two or three chords at a certain place, which makes it feel like the whole thing is useless, but *something* always sticks: my technique improves, a chord shape becomes part of my repertoire – something. And if I want to ‘relearn’ the piece, it doesn’t take nearly as long.
And: if I keep it up, little and often, — just a few minutes a day — that can keep the whole thing trundling along.
So, my aim with Sudnow this time — is to get to voicing on the fly, however badly, and just keep that up, little and often.
Hey Cheri — good topic! What is it about scales, arpeggios etc that you ‘believe’?
I’ve tended to use a mix of both (I found chromatic ‘scales’ of diminished chords really helped my ability to quickly change chord shapes, for example. And three octave major scales helped me be more mindful of ‘efficient’ fingering.
But I do believe in Suds’s philosophy: learning in context is where you make the real progress, in any skill. It’s comparable to language learning — you can study verb tables and practice conjugations, but the truth is you only learn to speak a language by diving in and having conversations. (And it also occurs to me now that I’m usually being quite intentional about what I want out of ‘drills’. I don’t do them for their own sake.
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