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One: Patch up your jazz drum kit and get cookin'. We know that a mellow
jazz beat has little in the way of kick drum. It's used to add a little crescendo or punch at will. Put the sequencer
on record, get your click track up and start bangin' away at your best
interpretation at a mellow jazz beat. Go nuts. Take as many liberties
as you'd like. Get into it. Record five to ten minutes of it. Then go
back and do another track. Do fifteen minutes if that or twenty. Have
fun. once you think you've gotten your best riffs in, go back and listen
to what you've got. The sequencer program will allow you to tag bars at
will. Tag those areas of your drum track that you find appealing within
the mood you are seeking to fill. What I do is preview the track and once
I hear something I like, I delete all that came before it. This solves
one of the main drawbacks to composition that is this easy. If you don't
train yourself to edit ruthlessly right from the start, you'll be muddled
down in saved tracks up to your ears in no time. Seize the fleeting creative
moment by the tail and hang on. As you're listening and tagging the good
stuff form your drum riffs separating it from the bad, take note of how
many measures fill up the 88 seconds you're after. Start to fill the framework
as planned. Look for a peak in your drum track that you can cut &
paste to the 65 second marker for your crescendo.
It should be easy at this point to arrive at a drum track that is
within the clock time and peak diameters already decided upon. The next
step is to decide upon a group of instruments to use. Let's say, upright
bass, acoustic piano and saxophone. A basic jazz quartet. We'll throw
in vibraphone for a little sweetening. You can go one of a few ways
at this point: You could go right for the melody using your hybrid scale
and lay down the harmony or chord changes thereafter, or, you could
lay down a bass track first, or some chord changes, or It really doesn't
matter which you do next. Let's say we can't wait to start jammin' with
our hybrid scale. This may be a good place to begin as this scale will
likely suggest a harmony and the phrasing of the melody will probably
yield a chord pattern or form (ABA, ABC, etc.; A being the first part;
B being the refrain or release, and C being a bridge of ending).
So we're going to create a melody over our drum track with our hybrid
scale. The first step is to start jammin' over the drum track while
recording your fumblin through your hybrid scale. You can continually
loop the 88 seconds of drum tracks automatically while you record on
another track that is not looped while inventing your melody with your
saxophone patch. Same deal as the drum track invention. Just play around
with it and be creative. Start by feeling each of the intervals. A good
way to maximize on your sensitivity to the intervals is to close your
eyes. When you close your eyes you INSTANTLY hear more and I believe,
feel more. Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder do it ALL the time! Start with
an interval. Bathe yourself in that feeling, that mood. Get into the
rhythm of the drums, pop on the headsets, crank it up and FEEL that
interval. After a few minutes of that you'll have enough fodder to go
back and pick out the part of your improvisation that appeal to you
and define the target emotion. Cut and paste those parts to fit into
the given 88 second framework.
Once you devise a melody you find pleasing, you can then harmonize
it. A good way to begin this step is to determine the form of your hybrid
scale/cut and paste melody. Decide the obvious phrase boundaries and
determine if it repeats at all. If so, tag that portion to repeat at
that point. If not, don't! Keep in mind that not only is this fun, it's
totally free form. How else could you learn how to create? If there
were exact rules, it wouldn't be creating. It would be rule following.
What I present in this book are guidelines on a method that works for
me and will work for you. After you've done it this way even once, you
should be primed to do it again and after a few tries at it, your method
will evolve and grow and become your own. That's the fun of creating.
You get to express yourself on your own terms. Anyway, back to the piece.
Let's say the melody you've devised has an ABC format. The A part
of the melody turns out to be 28 seconds long, the B part is 20 seconds,
and the C part is the remaining 40 seconds. You may next want to do
the bass track. A method you might use to determine the bass line or
root progression is as follows. First however, let me go over a point
clarifying the relativity of the concept of root or tonic note. The
"root" or "root motion" is the bass line of the
chord progression assuming that the bass were to play the tonic, or
lowest note of the chord of the moment. Note that this is relative.
Lets say the piano is playing a triad of A, C & E. This is a simple
A minor chord. If the inversion of this chord were modified by shifting
the A up an octave leaving you with C, E & A, this could be labeled
a C6th chord. Therefore officially, the bass note would be C. This could
be done again by shifting the E up on top and leaving you with E, A
C which could be labeled as an E Augmented Sus 4 chord. The bass note
would once again officially speaking, be E. Each time you invert the
chord, you infer that the bass note or root of the chord changes-or
maybe not. This is a creative decision left up to you and your ears.
There are no rules and the only guidelines are those that we've set
for ourselves which is the 88 second jazz quintet with a hybrid scale
that peaks at 65 seconds and ends abruptly. Let's say we want to use
what is called a pedal tone. This is where the bass stays on a given
note despite the chord change. This is another one of those creative
decisions that you must make. There is no right and there is no wrong.
You simply follow your ear and your musicality. Back to the one method
I was going to get into before I sidetracked with root motion and inversions.
You've got phrase boundaries at 28 seconds and 22 seconds. Let's start
with the A part or the first 28 seconds.
Let's say we identify the first note of every other bar and designate
that as our bass note for now. Keep in mind that this can and likely
will change once we get into it, but for now give this a shot just to
move forward. Let's say we've picked a clock or tempo that yields 12
bars for the first 28 seconds. That means that we have 6 chord changes
for these first 28 seconds. This to me is a little too predictable.
Given the target emotion of concern, I think we should trim that down.
Let's say we take out the third, sixth and ninth chord changes. The
root movement over our hybrid melody should now look something like
this (I've used X's for note names & percent signs for repeat measure
symbols):
X / / / | X / / / | % | X / / / | % | X / / / | X / / / | X / / / |
% | X / / / | X / / / | X / / /
First an obvious but definitely important point about bass notes.
Once again there are no rules, but I think this is an aspect that certainly
must be considered. We spoke about inversions, or voicings as they are
sometimes alternately called, on the piano-how you could juggle the
order of the notes which in turn changes the "name " of the
chord which also changes the "color" or sonority of the sound.
We mentioned how you could follow the lowest note of the chord and use
that as the bass note. This is the most obvious choice for bass note.
The second most obvious choice would be the fifth. The third most obvious
choice would be the third, and finally, the fourth most obvious choice
would be the seventh, if any, of the chord of the moment. Ideally, in
traditional jazz, the typical type of bass line that compliments the
typical drum rhythm is a walking bass line. This means that the bass
moves in usually quarter notes either up to the next note or down depending.
So you now have a drum beat, a melody, and root motion in the bass.
We must now harmonize the melody. One simple way to do this is to start
with the bass note as the lowest note of our chord of the moment. To
arrive at a chord, one method would be to pick key notes from the melody
that happen during that particular bar and play them simultaneously
as a chord. If this sounds horrible, subtract a note or two or three
until you arrive at a chord that works for your ear. Again keeping in
mind the target emotion. If the purpose of this piece were pure creativity
I'd say stick with that dissonant chord if you like it. This brings
to mind a friend, Joel Settel, with whom I used to play in a band many
years ago. He was the kind of guy that would go for the dissonance every
chance he got. That was Joel. You must, as a composer, go with what
is tight for you, while keeping within the aforementioned boundaries
you've given yourself, if any.
So, you've trimmed your chord down for the first bar of music and
removed any unwanted dissonance. This should set the tone for the chords
to come. Let's say that we want to resolve our first 28 seconds or twelve
bars with the same chord as we began with. With all those repeated measures
that we've allowed ourselves, we've now come up with 2 of the nine chord
changes we need for the first 12 bars of music.
You could continue on to arrive at subsequent chords using the same
method, or, you could decide upon a traditional "mode" from
which to draw your subsequent chords. This would yield the more conventional
sound-using expected and familiar chords, that is. Once again this is
a creative decision left up to the composer. For sake of this exercise,
let's continue with devising the chords using melody notes from the
given bar.
You may at any point along the way change your melody, or take a liking
to particular section and deem it worth repeating so as to take up a
portion of the previously identified B part. That's OK. In fact, I encourage
it. I recommend this type of approach. The tools at hand allow for such
total flexibility that it is almost insane not to take advantage of
it. Take the course of least resistance. If the melody wants to repeat,
let it repeat. If you as the composer wishes it so, then so be it. If
nothing else, this gives you a sense of control that I think we as humans
on planet earth lack. It's good to exercise control over something and
it might as well be your art.
So we have a drum beat, a melody, root motion in the bass and chord
changes on top. That's a pretty good framework. Now we get to the color
or jazzy phrasing of the both the bass and the piano. Let's get that
bass out of the root motion mode and into walking. A good place to start
is one note per beat or quarter notes. Let's say the first note for
the first bar on the bass is G and the first note for second bar is
C. Connecting these two in walking fashion is easy. As easy as 123.
Simply think alphabetically: G, A, B, C. If the A in the melody is either
flat or sharp, ditto for that on the bass. Same thing with the B and
C (yes, you CAN have a C flat! Likely that you'll have a B flat too).
Let's say the first bass note of the third bar is D. There is only one
note between B and C so you obviously can't walk up in scale intervals,
so you go down. If you wanted to up though, you could very easily. You
could play: C, C#, C, C# going to the D on the first beat of bar 3.
Remember, you could do anything you want. YOU ARE IN CONTROL.
You've finished your walking bass line for the first 12 bars, but
you have this boring piano playing these oddball chords every measure
right on one. You say to yourself, "This is not happening"
What you need is style brother! Here's a way to spice up the piano.
Once again, the dream machine to the rescue. Let's say you're not that
hot of a piano player and you have to "cheat" using the tools
at hand. That's OK. That's why this system is a dream. You can fake
a good piano part with a little bit of work. Identify key phrasing within
the melody. Tag those points that rhythmically stand out and grab your
ear. Use those as "punches" or accents for the piano chords.
Let's say the melody hits a high note on the and of two on the second
bar (a very early teacher of mine, Nick Tartell, weened me on one-ee-and-uh;
two-ee-and-uh; three-ee-and-uh, and so on. Using this has always made
it easy to verbally identify a specific point within a bar of music).
Have the piano punch or accent this point along with the melody. You
may want to add a little drum riff here as well.
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