Pat Donohue Teaches St Thomas Part 2/2

Pat Donohue Teaches St Thomas Part 2/2 Now, I’ll show you how I play the theme of this song. It goes a little bit with a chord progression and there are some moving bass lines in it and I’ll kind of describe that as I go. The baseline goes. [Demonstration] And when you put the nullity and add some chords in it, it goes like this. [Demonstration] And then, it’s pretty much a restatement of the intro that I did and then I do it up to speed. And this is kind of an interesting move. This is F#m7 to B7, and this chord movement is very common in jazz. They call it the 2/5 progression. Without getting too theoretical on you—it would look like this normally if it wasn’t a drop D, that would be F#m7 that would look like this. But I have to kind of compensate that. I don’t know what chord this is to be honest with you but that’s how I play it. And here, this is an Asus. Up here, we played it down here before but it happens to work nicely up here too. And then I lift my pinkie off of there and it gives you that release, that resolution there. That’s pretty much the same as it was in the opening introduction. So, let’s take that section. I do it twice when I perform and do it in split screen. Before I do that, I wanted to mention one other thing. The second time I go through it, I do a little bit of a pickup note there. [Demonstration]. It sounds kind of sporty to me so I thought I’d bring that to your attention. Here we go with the split screen. [Demonstration] Now, for improvising in a tune like this, I really have taken quite a few liberties with the overall chord progression and I’ve paired it down. You could play this chord progression like we did in the theme which should be [Demonstration]. Certainly, it’s possible to improvise with the ___ but a lot of times, what I do is just strip that down to a few bars of D and a few bars of A. For instance, [Demonstration]. This part, you do after a B7. If that one works well, this one also works very well. Now you know what you got to do. Now, I’ll do something along these lines in just a second to E7. So over those kind of chords, it’s a little easier to come up with ideas on the spare of a moment when you’re not trying to think of such a fast chord progression. So I’ll try and use those different chord forms that I was just playing for you and I’ve come up with a little improvisation here. [Demonstration] Here, the chord is A7 but I’m doing some double stops here. These are 6’s, I guess, these intervals. But in the scale of D, there’s a whole scales that you can play of a two-note chords like that and it’s worth separating that little concept right now right there with the two-note scales and the one that you have to play in a bunch of different keys because they really come in handy as improvisation tools in D for instance. [Demonstration] And that was what I was doing there. When I’m playing the A7 chord, I was just improvising in the key of D and using those. I could have gone up here, or I could have started from any point on any of those. That’s what makes them so neat there. It always kind of fit if you just know where to put them. So anyway, I’ll continue on with this improvisational idea that I was giving you before. [Demonstration] And one of the unwritten rules of improvisation is that you can end up in the right chord or note, you’re halfway there. You can make the things that you have played before sound better if you just make sure that you end up on the right thing, you can take some chances in the middle. But anyway, that’s kind of how I approach improvising over a song like that, a very basic chord progression. [Demonstration]