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🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 14

We’ve covered a lot over the course of this series:

• Guide tones
• Blues comping
• Chromaticism
• Whole tone and diminished language
• Chord melody textures
• Harmonic movement underneath simple melodies

For our final lesson, we bring many of those ideas together using:

👉 “The Intimacy of the Blues”

This arrangement continues the idea of using a relatively simple melody as a framework for richer harmonic movement underneath.

This week introduces:

Hello all!

In this lesson, I discuss the four basic dampening techniques, which can be thought of as different stickings to dampen with. Mastery of these is critical to good dampening application in real musical contexts!

Check out the attached PDF!

I'm working on Monk's Pannonica, which was written for Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Monk spent the last 10 years in the upstairs of her Apartment in New York. 

This is a great tune. I've been working on it for a little bit now. Ballads are great because you can use the pedal more and your sound can be 'wetter'.

Here are two versions of the tune. Of course a Monk version and then a Chick Corea version. He does it a little quicker.

Also is attached is an etude and an mp3 of the etude. I did the etude on my malletkat. I think I have a good vibe sound!

I love listening to guitar players play solo. I can usually imagine playing like that on the vibes. Their approach really lends itself to the vibraphone. 

Watch and study this video and try playing like this on the vibes. There's a line then a chord. If the line is quarter notes, you can play chords through it, but if you're going to play a busy line then no chord, it's too difficult. Get it??? 

I talked about the relationship between the diminished chords and dominant chords, then I'll make a series videos of barry harris and diminished chord, please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions!

rupertlo777@gmail.com

Check out the attached PDF!

I play a tune we all know and talk about it.

Check out the attached PDF!

I talk about using dampening to help make smooth transitions between chords.