Vic Juris All That Jazz Part 3
Okay one thing would be nice. There was a thing that I did in one of my columns where I took a cluster of intervals and worked that against the scale and I got quite a few emails on this. Some people who like it and some people who said there we’re soaking their fingers because they never played such wide spread chords before, so I can relate to all of it.
Now for example, thinking modally and when I'm playing with a bass player, a lot of times when I chord things I try to leave the fifth and sixth strings open a little bit. Not exclusively but that’s the bass players turf, that’s the bass players territory and if you step on the bass players toes he’s going to get mad. Let’s look at them the C scale for example, so we’ve got C major durian, E for a G and F leading etc okay? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cluster on strings four and three, a perfect fourth which is E and A. and then B and G which is a six. Let’s go through each mode, so you now hear Jimmy’s going to be the bass player.
So first of all, let’s hear it C or C major, so what I'm going to do Jimmy’s going to pedal the root which is going to define the mode that rhyme. So if he’s pedaling quarter notes and C like, like this, so now all these clusters are C-Ionian. Now if he goes to D, everything is D-durian normally you’d hear it a chord like this or you can play that. Now all these becomes D-durian and I just get a little more random with it. But I'm not changing any of the voices. There's a Miles Davis composition, so what which is D-durian, so all this stuff which a little more interesting than just playing that all the time or that or something like that.
Now if I want to go to frigging, if he goes to E, now everything is E frigging. Normally you’d hear this kind of sound. It’s associated with a lot of Spanish music. So now all the voicing are E frigging, so I’ll try to make it sound like that. Now that sounds like a whole different thing. Now if he goes up to F now, now if F leading on. Now if he goes up to G, its mixed conidian or G7th normally we’d play something like that or this, G13th or G9th with the 13th. Now all these clusters live in G mixed conidian. No sharps, no flats.
Its have a nice thing to have to play on a blues. Now if he goes up to A minor, so now we’re on A conidian which just an A natural minor scale. And normally we play Am, Am7, so now we got all these. And what I'm doing with each one of these modes is I'm trying to really define the sound of each one from the base because the only purpose to learn modes is for improvisation. And the same thing applies to the copy. Every mode has a character in the sound that the ear has liked the split second to identify it. So you want to be able to hear it.
Now the nice thing about this, if we’re playing modally, what the difference between CM and C—E flat, so if I change any of my E’s to E flat, everything becomes melodic minor so in this. So I mean and that generates all the modes that are there. The same thing with harmonic minor, so you’d have E flat and A flat that kind of sound. It’s get pretty cool. You can get those kinds of sound and chords. I mean you're going to work on it. it takes time.
And if you look at the guitar, all I did was I put a perfect fourth as a starting point on strings four and three and CM which of course no sharps, no flats and then open B to a G is the six. And not every sixths is going to be major or minor, they're going to change. Most of the force will be perfect with the exception of this one because in CM, you don’t have a B flat. You have B natural. And I'm just running that up the scale. Everything moves up once scale of tune. One thing I suggest when you practice stuff like this and I should be sitting a little straighter too is bring the thumb underneath, so it elongates the fingers a little bit because if you bring this too far back, near the stretches, I don’t want anybody to get hurt here.
We’ll talk a little bit about modal playing. One of the best modes to start on when you first getting involve in this is the durian mode. See all these clusters are D-durian. Too many people just pay attention to what the scale is. They have a scale written in the chord and then not really thinking about what the altered notes is. I may start here, that helps me to learn internalize the whole position.
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