New Member - Just saying Hello!

[knopfler74]

Welcome knopfler. Enjoyed your enthusiastic introduction. Nice 157, I love mine. BTY, what is sidestepping?

 

It's a pretty basic way of getting "outside" the changes to sound more "modern"- For example, let's say you're playing over a D Minor 7 chord. I'll use a pentatonic scale as an example-

You could play a basic melodic idea of 8-12 notes using that scale, and somewhere within the lick you would leave D minor pentatonic and move up a half step or an tritone or some other interval and play the exact shape or lick you played in D minor pentatonic. As long as the basic shape of the two licks is the same and you pick a solid resolution note, like the root, third, or seventh of the D minor chord it'll sound like you meant to do it rather than that you played wrong notes.

This concept can be taken to greater extremes with chromatic lines, interval sets connected by chromatic half steps, and several other mind melting methods. Trumpeters Woody Shaw, Clay Jenkins, Ingrid Jensen, and well a ton of others use this technique to great effectiveness in their music. This is WAY easier to do on guitar because of the lay out of the finger board and the same holds true for piano. Saxophone, or 'bitch whistle' as I like to call it(sorry for the dirty language), also lends itself to this type of lick due to the relative ease of jumping registers and executing large interval leaps. Doing this on trumpet or trombone is a lot harder because executing interval leaps isn't just a matter of pushing a valve or key down or moving the slide(trombone), it also takes embouchure control on a brass instrument.

Hope that helps!

Peace

[smurph1]

Great Story..Welcome aboard..

[smurph1]

 

It's a pretty basic way of getting "outside" the changes to sound more "modern"- For example, let's say you're playing over a D Minor 7 chord. I'll use a pentatonic scale as an example-

You could play a basic melodic idea of 8-12 notes using that scale, and somewhere within the lick you would leave D minor pentatonic and move up a half step or an tritone or some other interval and play the exact shape or lick you played in D minor pentatonic. As long as the basic shape of the two licks is the same and you pick a solid resolution note, like the root, third, or seventh of the D minor chord it'll sound like you meant to do it rather than that you played wrong notes.

This concept can be taken to greater extremes with chromatic lines, interval sets connected by chromatic half steps, and several other mind melting methods. Trumpeters Woody Shaw, Clay Jenkins, Ingrid Jensen, and well a ton of others use this technique to great effectiveness in their music. This is WAY easier to do on guitar because of the lay out of the finger board and the same holds true for piano. Saxophone, or 'bitch whistle' as I like to call it(sorry for the dirty language), also lends itself to this type of lick due to the relative ease of jumping registers and executing large interval leaps. Doing this on trumpet or trombone is a lot harder because executing interval leaps isn't just a matter of pushing a valve or key down or moving the slide(trombone), it also takes embouchure control on a brass instrument.

Hope that helps!

Peace

Hey..i do that stuff all the time by accident..Except for landing on the tonic or root note..does that count?

[knopfler74]

HAHA, that's awesome smurph1 ! Hey, it's jazz. If you play a wrong note, just move a half step and you'll be cool!