Archive for the ‘improvisation skill’ Category

4. Grace notes

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

A grace note is subsiddary note you play just before a main note.

Typically a grace note is one scale tone above or below the main note.

If the main note is a C, for example, you could lpay either a B or a D as the grace notes.  There is no hard and fast rule; grace notes can be any note within the underlying scale.

You add a grace note to lead into and emphasize a key tone in the melody.

The grace note is typically played right up against the main note, not precisely in rhythm, which is why it isn’t notated as a normal sixteenth note.

It’s almost like a little flip just before the main note.

A grace note can be a singlenote, or you can play multiple grace notes, typically in a run up to or down to the main note.

For eg. when you lay a turn that starts before the beat, the notes of the turn are grace notes.

Just make sure that the grace notes are played before the expected beat, and that they don’t delay the main melody note.

3. Turns

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

A turn is like a trill that goes both up and down.

Typically, its a 5 note deal

You start on theoriginal n ote, go up one scale step, back down to theoriginal note, donw one scale step, and then end up on the original note again.

if melody is A:

A B A G A

The turn can eitehr stat on the same beat as the original note or precede that note as a type of grace note phrase.

2. Trills

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

A trill is kind of ike a lot of little pitch bends played all in a row.

Instead of playing a long note straight, you rapidly alternate beetween theoriginal note and the next scale note up — either a half step or a whole step, depending on what sounds best.

  • A trill can be as short as 3 notes (original, up one, original)
  • or last as long as the duration of the original note

You can play trills as straight 16th or 32nd notes or play them ‘out of time’ as fast as is appropriate.

Just make sure that when you are done trilling, you end up on the original note of the melody.

1. Embellishing melody — Bends

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

One primary ways to embellish a melody –> to slightly alter the long notes in the melody.

Reason: long notes provide more space fo ryou to lay around with

— to fill in this space is a way to show your musical creatiivity

To make a long note less boring –> bend the pitch.

Pitch bends come quite naturally on certain instruments, esp guitars where you bend the pitch by bending the string away from the fret with your LH.

Embellishing the melody

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

To embellish the melody:

  1. vary the melody with bends, trills, and turns
  2. add grace notes, passing notes, and approach notes
  3. repeat motivs

First approach we learned: vary the rhythm of original melody.

2nd approach we learn now: next step is vary the melody itself by  means of melodic embellishment and ornamentation

Melodic embellishment — the act of changing some of the notes in a melody

  • instead of playing melody as written, add some notes of your own, thus creating your own unique solo based on the original melody

There are different ways to embellish a melody.

–some will come natrually to you

–some will take a little work

–they all involve adding notes before or after the melody’s key tones

Remember — even though you are embellishing the melody, you still want to empahsize themain notes of the original tune

5. adding notes

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Add notes into the rhythm.

This is most often used to embellish the pitches of the melody, it is possible to add new notes ont he same pitch as surrounding notes in the melody.

This approach takes a static melody and makes it more dynamic, adding movement where there was not much.

4. Solo – front phrasing

Friday, April 17th, 2009

The opposite of back phrase is front phrase.

You start a melodic line before where it normally occurs.

This technique is more difficult than back phrasing and is used less frequently.

A front phrase….start the melody on beat 4 of the previous measure.

You then need to stertch a note or two to get the melody back on its normal track.

3. Solo – Back Phrasing

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Back phrsing is a type of synocpation but applied to an entire musical phrase.

When you back phrase, you play the melody notes as written but you play them later than you are supposed to.

This creates a dramatic tension as the listener is waiting for the melody bu tyou hold it back and then release the tension when you let forth a beat or so later than expected.

The more you back phrase, the faster you have to play those notes of the melody that you held back.

You also have the option of dropping some notes out of the held back melody; this is more common with heavy back phrasing, where you might not have enough space to throw in the entire melody.

2. Solo – syncopate rhythm

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Synocopate a rhythmically simple melody.

this can make a boring melody sound hip.

Many melodies are written relatively straight; using quarter notes and 8th note staight with a minimal amount of synocpation.

Can spice things up in the solo.

take a smooth melody and make it more angular, by turning straight quarters and 8ths into syncopated rhythms.

how?

— take a note that’s on a beat and place it on the off beat, or take straight 8ths and place them on the ‘e’ and the ‘ah’ of the beat

1. Solo – Simplify the rhythm

Friday, April 17th, 2009

First rhythmic device: simplification.

Remove notes from the melody, to make the melody less complex.

Key: picking which notes to remove and which notes to keep and to emphasize\

How to do this?

  • analyze the melody and dermine which are the key tones and which are passing tones
  • look at the notes durations
  • the imp notes are often the longer ones
  • the shorter notes are the passing tones

1. look at beat 1 and beat 3, strong beat, take out the others.

2.simply by keeping the chord tones

3. eliminate the syncopation by turning the off beat rhythm into straight 8th or quarter notes

Simplify the melody: you create a solo that sounds familiar yet is subtly different from the original