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Howdy fiddlers! Welcome to the third instalment of my bluegrass improvisation blog.
Today I felt all the scale work beginning to pay off. I’m now in month two, which I’m dedicating to the key of C – in fact, to the chord of C only. I think I’d bitten off more than I could chew when I vowed to tackle the I, IV, and V chords of a given key each month. I’m taking things a bit more slowly now and I feel much more on top of things.
I’ve also ditched the major pentatonic and am just sticking to the blues scale. This is simply because I find the blues scale so much more difficult; I know I can easily catch up on the major pentatonics at a later date.
So, whereas I had been working on six different scales at a time (I, IV, and V, major pentatonic and blues) I am now focussing on just one. The added bonus to this system is that it frees my time up to work on licks and improvisation! Yeah!
After warming up with a few long bows, trills, and the first two bars of Kreutzer no. 2 (I know this makes me sound like a snob but it really does set my fingers up nicely - I've got pinky issues, remember), I’ll get stuck into the C blues scale. First I’ll do a slow, back-and-forth tuning exercise to make sure the intonation’s right. This is how I was taught to do scales by my classical teacher and I find it really helps to “open my ears”. It goes like this: Slur the first two notes of the scale, repeat, then do the same with the second and third notes, repeat, and so on.
Next, I’ll go up and down the blues scale with a shuffle bowing, along with the metronome. At whatever speed I’ve chosen, I have to make it up and down the fingerboard three times in a row with no mistakes before I ramp it up a notch. The other rule is that every day I have to better my previous day’s speed.
Then for the fun stuff. With my fingers now attuned to my scale of choice, I start messing around with licks. At first I was just learning licks out of a book. (I can hear the cries of indignation!) I know that freeing your mind from the dots is part of what it’s all about, but I thought just to get started I’d take a few riffs from “Hot Licks for Bluegrass Fiddle”. This was fairly helpful; I memorised several licks which worked in both C and G and sped them up each day. The problem was, although I’d committed them to memory, I couldn’t recall them without a quick peek at the dots.
This brings me to an interesting question: When building up your library of licks, how the heck do you store all this information in a way that it can be instantly recalled? Do you give little pet names to them? Or do you recall the players you stole them from? Do you record yourself playing them all and then listen to them while commuting to work?
I soon realised that reading licks off a page was like reading slang from a script. It just felt wrong. So yesterday I started actually improvising – yes indeed, just playing around, walking up and down the scale, jumping around, trying different double stops, incorporating things I’d learned in the past and inventing new stuff. I did this along to the metronome too, just sticking to eighth notes, then adding faster and slower notes, generally just spewing out whatever I could. Most of it sounded like a whole lot of meaningless notes, but I did come up with a couple of cool little licks – and then swiftly forgot them! This brings me back to the question of mental lick storage. I shall start a forum topic on the subject this very minute!
Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your views!
2 comments on “Bluegrass Improvisation Blog 03: Blues Improvisation in C”
gepeto Says:
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 @5:07:27 AM
Your program sounds great.
I would just add : listen to the old masters like Bobby hicks, Kenny Baker, Vassar Clements (and many others...). Not only the breaks but also the backup.
bj Says:
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 @8:29:58 AM
Re your questions-- I think you're running into the differences that happen with right brain vs left brain learning when differentiating between playing off the dots (and maybe not recalling it later without a peek) and learning by ear.
I suggest you might put together some simple tunes from those dotted licks, write them down if you have to, then play and record them. Then, when you're driving or riding on a train, or doing other things where you can be listening, play them on endless loop at low volume in the background. That will allow your brain to internalize them by ear. You should then be able to play them on your fiddle either as a whole piece or in pieces, but you might find they just pop up in your playing spontaneously, rather than at will. And that's the goal, right?
I read that workout you're doing and the word that popped into my head is "masochist" LOL!
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