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Old 10-16-2021, 09:17 PM
JohnW63 JohnW63 is offline
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Default How can I learn to keep the song playing in my head?

I've been working with an instructor for a few years, mostly with jazz tunes, but some of you basic 12 bar blues and other songs of interest. I have spent many hours trying to ad-lib solos over backing tracks or when playing along with songs. I can always do better playing with the track, than when I am with the instructor when we may just have a drum track playing. I have figured out that it's because I don't have a melody playing in the back ground to keep me in the groove and feel of the song. My solos without become plain and it could be many songs in the key that I am playing with. I just can't keep the song playing in my head while thinking about soloing. They must be a way to work into keeping the song going internally when your concentrating on what you are doing.

If you have been here and got past it or you just have some good suggestions, please post them.
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Old 10-16-2021, 09:42 PM
stanron stanron is offline
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You might start by playing the tune, not always as easy as it might sound, and then go on to altering a small bit at a time. Examine the ends of lines. Quite often there are gaps in the lyrics that allow instrumental adventure.
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Old 10-17-2021, 05:09 AM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW63 View Post
I've been working with an instructor for a few years, mostly with jazz tunes, but some of you basic 12 bar blues and other songs of interest. I have spent many hours trying to ad-lib solos over backing tracks or when playing along with songs. I can always do better playing with the track, than when I am with the instructor when we may just have a drum track playing. I have figured out that it's because I don't have a melody playing in the back ground to keep me in the groove and feel of the song.
Well, can you play the melody? If not, why not? If you're given a song to improvise on, why hasn't your instructor started by teaching you the melody?

If he/she hasn't, this is really bad teaching. I can't emphasise that enough. You must play the melody first, and ideally learn it by heart. The chords are important, obviously, but they are secondary. (My apologies to your instructor if they have given you the melody, but you still need to know it intimately, not just read it off notation and then dive into the chords.)

(To be fair, blues is a little different, in that blues melodies often consist of generic motifs, riffs and licks anyway. In blues, it's more important to amass a library of licks and phrases than it is to learn specific melodies. Unless the blues song has a really distinctive melody, of course...)

When you begin improvising, you begin by "embellishing the melody". This is standard jazz practice, going back 100 years or more. Play the melody in your way, as if you were a singer phrasing it the way you feel it. Then you expand out from that into the chord tones.
I.e., the melody is your guide through the chords, like a series of stepping stones. The chords then give you alternative stepping stones, but the melody is your prime resource for phrasing and rhythmic ideas.

Don't take my word for it, here's a jazz prof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NehOx1JsuT4 (The first 30 seconds of ranting is brilliant, but he gets on to practical advice after that.)

Obviously, the better you know the melody, the easier you can have it in your head when you improvise in a much more extensive way. Eventually it becomes a way of feeling the form of the tune, the way the chords "chunk" into 2 or 4 bars at a time, reflecting the melody line.

Moreover, the more melodies you know from lots of other tunes, the more it teaches you how to construct melodic phrasing in general. IOW, a melody is obviously appropriate to its own tune and chord sequence, but has lessons to teach you for other tunes too.
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Last edited by JonPR; 10-17-2021 at 05:17 AM.
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Old 10-17-2021, 08:06 PM
JohnW63 JohnW63 is offline
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JonPR,

Let me give an example. I know the basic melody to this song. With a bit of warming up, I can play it pretty well. It's not really hard.



When it comes to the sections where there is either the guitar solo section or the sax solo section, the solos are over the chords in the melody, but not at all like the melody. Say at the 2:29 minute mark and then starting at the 3:05 mark until the fad out.

If there was someone holding down the melody, I would feel confident. I can come up with something half way decent. But with just the bass ( my instructor ) and a generic drum track, I loose the feel. I think I have spent too much time having the melody being fed to me and I need to wen myself off that habit.
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Old 10-17-2021, 11:33 PM
stanron stanron is offline
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Would it help if you were to consider improvising as 'composing on the fly' or 'extemporised composing'?

Composition usually involves coming up with a musical statement that you can be happy to listen to over and over again. To get to that point of completion you might have to change bits here or there until you think it 'works'. Of course the inexperienced player can't be expected to be able to do this whilst improvising. It requires preparation.

One form of preparation would be to compose melodies that you think 'work' over the chord sequences. Compose more than one.

In improvising it's important to know where you are in the structure at all times. You need to be able to anticipate when the chord changes come and what you will do when they happen, and most importantly you need to know when each section starts and ends.

There are lots of tricks of the trade in improvising, some of them genre specific and some general, but the most important are preparation and perseverance. You've started, good luck.
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Old 10-18-2021, 04:21 PM
Gordon Currie Gordon Currie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW63 View Post
If there was someone holding down the melody, I would feel confident. I can come up with something half way decent. But with just the bass ( my instructor ) and a generic drum track, I loose the feel. I think I have spent too much time having the melody being fed to me and I need to wen myself off that habit.
It certainly does sound like you are overly dependent on the melody.

I look at melody as being comprised of two distinct elements: pitch sequences and rhythmic phrases.

Pitch sequences are everyone's focus, but rhythmic phrasing carries a great deal of the 'recognizability' of most melodies.

In addition to coming up with permutations/alterations of the pitch sequences, play around with using the rhythmic phrasing of the melody but with your OWN notes.

One more thing that helped me when I was first exploring improv: SING your lines when possible. Somehow vocalizing pitches and rhythms can make them flow better while getting oneself out of one's head.

Finally, as a soloist, you would be better served by focusing more on the chord changes instead of the melody.
It's hard to do when your instructor is a bassist, but see if you can find some backing tracks for some of the songs that include a chordal instrument.
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Old 10-18-2021, 07:05 PM
mr. beaumont mr. beaumont is offline
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Thelonious Monk's advice: "pat your foot and sing the melody in your head as you play."

The secret is to not look at tunes as bar to bar, but in 4, 8, and 16 bar "movements." Never play chord to chord...think big picture.
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Old 10-18-2021, 07:55 PM
JohnW63 JohnW63 is offline
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Stanron,

"In improvising it's important to know where you are in the structure at all times.

Bingo! I sometimes lose track on songs that have similar sections and think my solo section is over, when it's not.

Gordon,

While my instructor is a bass player, it's a 6 string bass and he can play all over the melody, if he chooses. Sometimes, I wish his bass solo parts were more melodic and less outside the box jazzy.

Mr, beaumont,

"Never play chord to chord...think big picture. "

Isn't " playing over the chord changes " part of playing jazz, vs the blues where one or two scales will get the job done? I get the big picture idea though.
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Old 10-18-2021, 07:57 PM
JohnW63 JohnW63 is offline
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As a follow up, if you watch Lee Ritenour play, you can clearly see him mouthing the parts he is playing. I need to figure out how to have that until I can "hear" it in my head loud enough.
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  #10  
Old 10-18-2021, 08:15 PM
mr. beaumont mr. beaumont is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW63 View Post

Mr, beaumont,

"Never play chord to chord...think big picture. "

Isn't " playing over the chord changes " part of playing jazz, vs the blues where one or two scales will get the job done? I get the big picture idea though.
You want to get yourself to where you can outline every change, but you don't want to play like that in reality. That's called chasing changes, where the song plays you.

Jazz is best felt in movements...and then you can address every chord, or target a few, or play key centers, or whatever. But chasing changes all the time is a recipe for noodley un melodic playing.
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Old 10-18-2021, 09:08 PM
Gordon Currie Gordon Currie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW63 View Post
Isn't " playing over the chord changes " part of playing jazz, vs the blues where one or two scales will get the job done? I get the big picture idea though.
The destination is definitely beyond 'chasing chords' but that is one of the roads most people (other than mr beaumont) take.

A lot of advice is analogous to training wheels. They get you up and running while you're still figuring something out.
Hopefully you move past the training wheels, but they can serve an important purpose.

Miles Davis supposedly said something like "Learn everything you can about music theory, and then forget that stuff and just play music."
It seems a lot of people only hear the last half of the statement.

It still sounds to me like you are 'losing your way' somehow - and you need some kind of signposts to orient you.
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Last edited by Kerbie; 10-23-2021 at 04:31 AM. Reason: Omit the profanity
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  #12  
Old 10-19-2021, 04:00 AM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mr. beaumont View Post
Thelonious Monk's advice: "pat your foot and sing the melody in your head as you play."

The secret is to not look at tunes as bar to bar, but in 4, 8, and 16 bar "movements." Never play chord to chord...think big picture.
Yes!

"Chord to chord" is a lot better than just "each chord in isolation", which chord scale theory persuades you to think, but the bigger picture is where you need to start.

I.e.,you definitely need to think about the form first: sections of 8, 12 or 16 bars, breaking down into melodic lines or phrases of 2 or 4 bars. The smaller scale - how you negotiate and map out those moves, "beneath" the melody as it were - then comes down to chord-to-chord connections.

IOW, Monk's advice is spot on, but it assumes you know the chords intimately already, as well as the melody. As I've read elsewhere, Monk (and players like him) would spend hours working on a tune before going out and improvising on it. They'd work out all the ins and outs, embedding the melody and changes in their subconscious. That's what gives the freedom to improvise.

It's really like having to give a speech on a specific topic. You can have notes in front of you (the chord sequence), but the more you've studied the topic beforehand, the better you can speak off the cuff, expressing your own feelings and opinions about it. You might barely need to refer to the notes.
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Old 10-19-2021, 07:41 PM
The Bard Rocks The Bard Rocks is offline
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To keep track of where the melody is, hum it (to yourself) while playing. Eventually wean yourself from this once it has become more ingrained and you can "feel" where it is and where it is going.
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Old 10-19-2021, 08:05 PM
JohnW63 JohnW63 is offline
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Nailing the melody is easier in a simple song like Sonny, where the chord changes don't change very much. If fact it's easy to miss the end of parts and start again. I've had to learn to have a finish to the solo for that one.



Tunes like Bahia Funk are tougher because the actual melody is so hidden by the solo sections, it hard to hum anything but the solo. Do you try to figure out the chords behind that to build on?
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  #15  
Old 10-19-2021, 09:27 PM
hatamoto hatamoto is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW63 View Post
JonPR,

Let me give an example. I know the basic melody to this song. With a bit of warming up, I can play it pretty well. It's not really hard.



When it comes to the sections where there is either the guitar solo section or the sax solo section, the solos are over the chords in the melody, but not at all like the melody. Say at the 2:29 minute mark and then starting at the 3:05 mark until the fad out.

If there was someone holding down the melody, I would feel confident. I can come up with something half way decent. But with just the bass ( my instructor ) and a generic drum track, I loose the feel. I think I have spent too much time having the melody being fed to me and I need to wen myself off that habit.
So do you mean to say that you get lost @ 2:29 because you don't know where to place the solos so that you can follow the chord tones as you do it?

If so, one exercise that has really helped me is phrasing simple lines and being aware of the upbeat and downbeat. Learning how to count as you play, done at the same time in real time. You're counting the beat... "One--and--two--and---three--and--four" while tapping your foot and build simple lines as you're doing that. It also helps to know the chords that are being played in the background so you know when and where to target the notes with the chords. Maybe a good exercise is to play the chords, record it at half the time and loop it over and over so it's easier to follow along.

I bought Robbie Calvo's course on Truefire. It's called Power Phrasing and he talks about this concept. He calls it rhythmic displacement and it has helped me tremendously with time feel.

Over time you will get an internal clock and you'll start to feel it. A really good way to practice is to take a looper, play a 2 chord vamp and build off simple ideas over it. I usually follow an ABAC format with really simple pentatonic licks or whatever scale you want, proceed to follow the chord tones with the beat. Then after that I would shift the same solo on a different beat. I could start at the "One" or the "One-and", "Two" or "Two-and" etc.

Someone mentioned "chasing changes" and I fully agree. Take this exercise as it is. It's just for improving time feel. In real life, you may want to hold on to a note longer than usual with less notes. Otherwise your solos will just sound like "dooodly doodly, bibbity bop bop, bibbity bop bop, tripuhluh tripuhuluh tripuhluh"

Last edited by hatamoto; 10-19-2021 at 09:43 PM.
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