Lesson

My final this year in improv class is simple. Students will play Have You Met Miss Jones in 4 keys. Head, Solo, Head. Sounds like it could be simple. But for them it proves to be very difficult.

They have to play in time, and they play solo and they have to make the changes. Those three things in combination are apparently difficult. Well no apparently. Those are difficult things to pull off. Keeping everything in time, and making your line sound like the tune and doing it all yourself with no help.

Great stuff. I hope you guys work hard on this and the following videos.

Thought you guys might want to see this. pretty cool stuff.

Your last assignment for the semester:

Pick an etude out of the Friedman: Dampening and Pedaling book and post it here. David Friedman will comment on your posts.

@Harvey - What's the due date?

Ok, let's close this up. There are a lot of lessons now about chords and harmony. For those of you who studied I'm sure you learned a ton.

So now demonstrate it. Work on a tune for a couple days and post something. Play chord melody, play solo, whatever but put it to good use and apply it while it's fresh.

Let's move on to the other side of all this and that's the line.

Post your 'final' here!

I think I've posted this before but I'm not sure. This would make a great EOTM (Exercise of the Month). Might not be as easy as it looks. The left hand plays the double stops.

This piece is the 1st movement from Bach's violin sonata # 1. There's lots of opportunity for mallet dampening. The goal is to get it to sound full and resonant, but very clean. As you move from chord to chord use good dampening and/or pedaling to make sure no notes from the previous chord ring into the current chord; making it sound sloppy.

The tempo is really slow, with an 8th note set to about 50 on the metronome. A pdf of the manuscript is included HERE