RIFFS:
It’s an issue.
YouTube videos,
instructional books,
and especially music school
…are mostly focused on the WHAT of music.
By “WHAT,” I mean all the things that are related to pitch:
keys,
scales,
chords,
harmony,
progressions.
That’s not an accident.
The WHAT of music is important.
But we’re neglecting the WHEN of music.
The WHEN of music:
the tempo,
the time signature,
the groove,
the feel,
the number of chords in each bar,
the number of bars in each section,
which beat we all hit together as a band,
and what the melodic rhythm is.
The WHEN is the framework that the WHAT lives inside.
If we focus on the WHEN first, we create a place to store the WHAT.
Let me say it again:
the WHAT of music is so much easier
if we organize it inside the framework of WHEN.
RECS:
I loved this 12m clip of Adam Levy talking about practice:
Five things that jumped out at me:
If you don’t care about progress, that’s fine! There’s no shame in just wanting to fool around with guitar to unwind.
But if you want to be a better guitarist, you’ll need the consistency of ritual and the focus to ignore shiny objects. “Draw a circle around what’s important to you, and make all of your practice time about that. You’ll make more progress by doing fewer things and being systematic.”
Adam doesn’t work on technique much. Instead he focuses on making the time feel great—10-15% of his practice time is spent just trying to “get into the time.”
What’s the best kind of practice he’s done? “I think playing along with records is the most beneficial thing you can do.”
What’s been his biggest waste of practice time? “Arpeggios get a huge amount of emphasis in music school. I use them. They are part of music. But I don’t think they’re that big of a deal. Someone else might say the same thing about the modes.”
CHARTS:
Last week we learned Let It Go from Disney’s Frozen.
It’s in the piano-friendly key of A♭, but I transposed it to the guitar-friendly key of G.
This week I’ve got another piano-based A♭ → G song, Don Henley’s The End Of The Innocence.
Here’s my chart:
You can grab my files in this Dropbox folder:
SMARTS:
1/ quick hits & quirky bits
TEMPO, METER, & KEY:
~116 BPM
(not recorded to a click)
4/4 time
in A♭, but I wrote it in G
(capo I to play along with the original)
FORM:
I V1 PC1 C1
RI V2 PC2 C2
SOLO
(I omit this section in my arrangement)
V3 C3 O
(no PC between V3 & C3!) 👀
2/ TAB for that INTRO riff
3/ the timing of the INTRO can be disorienting
The piano comes in by itself on the + of 3:
In the Ableton file, I added a count in that sounds like this:
And you can see that counting voice notated here in the TAB:
That’s all I got this week.
See you next Wednesday,
Josh