Don't use 7ths, use 9ths!

hey everybody today we're checking out viewer submissions and listening to them with a critical but compassionate ear to give our best good faith critiques in other words we're trying to figure out just how to get good at music with that in mind let's check out our first submission which comes from a band by the name of burgundy let's check them out [Music] nice cool [Music] really in the pocket [Music] [Music] okay riff oh it just sends wow that was awesome the band sounds great very in the pocket it's grooving very hard the song's fantastic the singer sounds great if i had to like nitpick one thing it would be what the guitarist is doing the guitarist is kind of playing the vocal melody alongside the singer and i honestly think it would be a little bit better if he was playing more fleshed out jazz voicings seventh chords the kinds of things that you might find on you know neo-soul instagram in other words i think the guitarist should check out people like isaiah sharkey for example this amazing guitarist but beyond that nitpick the band sounds incredible i think my main problem with this is just the audio quality it sounds like it was just recorded with the camera audio now you can sometimes get away with this but whenever you have a drummer in a live sounding room no matter how dynamically the drummer is playing it can be kind of a problem because nuances of your playing get missed and the band doesn't sound as good as i know you actually sound so i would strongly suggest investing in some kind of home recording situation whether it be a zoom recorder or whatever but there are some diy hacky gorilla ways of recording yourself and getting better audio quality without actually spending any money one hilariously diy trick that i like is to use your phone believe it or not so if you have five members in the band you have five phones and you have five different locations where you can place phones around the room if you're playing quietly and dynamically enough the phone can actually capture a fair amount of nuance from things like guitar amplifiers or bass amplifiers believe it or not also drums you can then take those five signals from the five different phones combine them together into a free program like garageband and you instantly get a far better recording than the kind of recording that would come out of the camera obviously it would be way better if you recorded it for real put some microphones on the drum set and then recorded direct in for the vocals and the keys and the bass and guitar but sometimes you can get very creative with the audio engineering tools that you have available to you that are totally free now i think it's very important to have good quality audio because that's a representation of you as a band and you as artists and you should do everything in your power to have the best quality audio you can as a musician this is the thing that communicates the idea from you to your audience but anyway it sounded fantastic thank you so much guys for your submission the next submission comes from will easley who is playing a two-based version of overjoyed by stevie wonder let's check out will [Music] get that octave up effect flat two reharm [Music] like the articulation okay intermoving lines [Music] all right oh very nice super cool will i love the arrangement i especially like the chord voicings that you're using in the accompanying bass part we'll talk about that in a second but i first wanted to address that octave up effect that you're using on the melody sometimes bass players will want to use this octave up effect to kind of imitate the sound of a guitar because i mean let's be honest bass guitar sometimes doesn't cut that well as a melodic instrument and so by adding that octave up effect bass players like michael league of snarky puppy can use their bass to project more melodically now the problem is is when you digitally alter the signal of a bass to go up an octave the sound that comes out sounds kind of brittle and digital and metallic it's kind of hard to make it sound musical at least in my experience so what a lot of bass players do and i suggest that you try this is to mix in a little bit of the dry signal of the bass to add more warmth and body to the sound now you can take advantage of the brittle quality that metallic quality of that soloed octave up effect it sounds kind of creepy there's a song off my old band inside outside's first album called desert of the real where i kind of use that effect where it's breaking up and it's glitching out so that's an option but i don't think that's really what you're going for here now i like the chord voicings that you're using on the basic hum number part and the reason why i like them is because you aren't really using any major sevenths in the chord voicings and whenever i hear a major seventh on a bass guitar there's this kind of restless warbling sound it's a very moving kind of interval listen to it there's this beating that you're hearing that's the interference pattern between the top note and the bottom note this d and this e flat now you might like that sound this is an e flat major 7 but i kind of like more resonant stable sounds out of my bass guitar chords and so what i do is i replace the sound of major sevenths and also minor sevenths of chords with the ninths of chords so instead of this d on an e flat major seven i'll play an f creating kind of like an e flat nine chord there's a lot less movement in the sound than this sound it's a subtle thing but it's an important thing to talk about with bass guitar chords because bass guitar can get kind of muddy once you start adding more and more notes to individual chord voicings anything you can do to make the chord sound stable and resonant will go a long way to making the chord work for accompanying parts like the part that you're using here in this arrangement of overjoyed by stevie wonder anyway keep it up thank you so much for your submission let's check out the next one this comes from frederick nielsen this is called totally not chameleon it's not chameleon [Music] nice [Music] feels like a interstitial music for hey arnold great job i like the multi-tracking i like the arrangement i like the fact that you recorded everything with just an sm58 it's a very versatile microphone i would say though be careful recording bass with an sm58 because it does have a frequency cut off at about 100 hertz that basically means it doesn't do the greatest job of capturing that pillowy low end that the upright bass is known for that makes it really work well as the foundation of the band but you know you do what you can and it sounds pretty good on the subject of bass by the way you might want to experiment a little bit more with different articulations right now you're playing all the notes very long but generally speaking when people play this they play with a little bit more of a punch and more of a staccato when i say this by the way i mean the song chameleon i know it's totally not chameleon.mp4 but anyway the other thing is that in the arrangement you're always hitting beat two and i think you could explore different syncopations rather than hitting b2 every time maybe hitting some of the upbeats like i don't know something that just is off the beat a little bit more like um something that is playing off the beat a little bit more than just hitting the second beat of the measure every single time you'll get a lot more mileage out of that it will be dare i say funkier but yeah i really enjoyed it thank you so much let's check out the next submission which comes from agnes and she did an arrangement based on sungazer's tune ether hey my [Music] it's a music kind of ostinato it's a really interesting ensemble bass cello accordion recorder i love it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wild all those kinds of articulations on the [Music] recorder [Applause] [Music] yeah wow i mean like what a wild sound i feel like the recorder is not blending so much with the rest of the ensemble which could be considered a good thing because it's kind of like the featured instrument but you know it's also kind of wild hearing a recorder that's not like you know beginning recorder the thing that you normally associate with the instrument now compositionally you took it into some pretty interesting places uh harmonically there's some cool moments for sure i know it was like kind of just loosely inspired by sun gazers ether i will say that we wrote ether specifically to avoid the 5'4 clave that feeling of the mission impossible rhythm and you guys were definitely in mission impossible territory with how you were interpreting the groove but i didn't mind that at all because it kind of fit that folkish kind of vibe almost like the balkan additive meter of three plus three plus two plus two i dug it i know for some people that recorder might be a bit of an acquired taste and i think that comes down to the fact that it doesn't blend with the other instruments in the same way that a traditional transverse flute might i'm not really quite sure what the fix for that is but that is definitely something that i notice anyway thank you so much for their submission i'm very honored that you used one of my pieces of music as inspiration for yours let's check out the next one this one comes from quasi stampley or k-stamp let's check out quasi she really wanna talk and get a cameo and for my haters when they see me i'mma let them know i can fix your problems let it go let it go it's the path that i [Music] consuming all the poisons out here dancing with the cobras i can see the enemy i'm eyeing this persona i can tell you fakie wearing masks but not cause of corona [Music] we are in jazz territory now [Music] let it go let it go oh wow i like it man the first time that we hear that guitar part with the descending chords and minor thirds it kind of comes from left field definitely took me off guard but because you keep repeating it over and over again in the same place i think it really works i think this is probably one of the best examples i could think of of the age-old maxim repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition legitimacy repetition it's kind of like you took a sample from like an old jazz record and then threw it next to a trap beat that has a tonality that doesn't really match that sample but the difference of course is you're literally playing that and then developing more material more jazz material alongside it which i think is super cool if i was to critique this i'd say that the pad is very muddy that you're using in the trap part there's just a lot of unnecessary low end material that's kind of getting in the way of the sound of the bass guitar can't really hear what you're doing on the bass try boosting the low mids specifically around 350 hertz it's a great place to be able to hear the bass in dense mixes i also feel like you could use more of your chest voice when you're doing more of the song parts because right now you're affecting this very raspy sound and i feel like you can support it a lot more let it go let it go versus let go let go i'm not a singer but that is something that jumped out at me uh cool it's wonky it's weird i like it keep going keep going with this idea it's uh it's something that's unique i think let's check out the next one this one comes from brian sanders a short piece written while i was in the back of a car with an arguing couple let's check this out [Music] okay uh yeah that was a fantastic piece like uh beginning middle and end like rising action uh the screen came about like 5 8 the way through a lot of times people say that the climax of a piece of music should occur roughly where the golden ratio would be in terms of time elapsed and the scream happened there so this is a beautiful piece of music like more importantly the dissonance and the wonkiness is serving a function it's telling the story of an arguing couple and you can really hear it it really does sound like the soundtrack it sounds like the emotional core of what the experience actually was if you're trying to do that through music you did a very good job i would say go even further with it expand it like write a series of miniatures about various uncomfortable situations that you find yourself in uh because the tapping technique man exquisite fantastic i loved it this one comes from nick rousseau and this is an excerpt of a solo guitar version of i'll be seeing you let's check this out [Music] very nice [Music] [Music] that's a cord [Music] doesn't sound like a guitar man that sounded fantastic nick uh i liked it because it didn't sound like a guitar it sounded like you were using a guitar to perform a piece of music and just absolutely beautiful now if i was to critique this i would say that you could probably stand to use more dynamics in your performance as it is right now you have a very flat dynamic curve you're treating it like an etude but i think the whole piece could stand to have more crescendos and decrescendos and swells and you know that sort of thing would give it more life i'm sure you're familiar with julian lodge's version of the song i'll be seeing you live at the blue whale in los angeles and julian lodge is an absolutely virtuoso guitar player who uses dynamics like crazy he's a very dynamic player and i think that's a big part of what makes him such an engaging guitar player and such an engaging improviser he doesn't play all at the same volume he sometimes plays loud and he sometimes plays soft and he goes very quickly in between so i like it man maybe play loud sometimes or play soft let's check out the next one this one comes from ivan pierre who is studying jazz at the conservatory let's check this out [Music] okay [Music] okay i'm gonna stop you right there i can hear you thinking about the chord progressions as you're going through it which means that you're playing a lick and then the chord changes and then you play another lick and then the chord changes so my suggestion for you is to walk a bass line over this chord progression and what is a walking bass line well walking bass line is nothing but just quarter notes and so if you can just play quarter notes in time without stopping without stopping to think and to always be thinking ahead that's going to get you a lot more connected to these chord progressions so it doesn't feel so disjoint when you improvise this is just fundamental stuff that will get the chords into your fingers a lot more so you can focus on the real stuff the music making that said i do like your tone and i do like the backing track but i think walking a bass line is a good exercise for you so let's check out maybe one more okay so for this last one we're gonna check out anton elmvick and uh let's see what anton has in store for us [Music] ah yes okay maybe if we just break it down i love this language melody thing syllable at a time okay so repeat after me is the bill works font okay [Music] i love it i love this kind of thing i can't really offer any like critiques because the aesthetic for this kind of art honestly because this is a new form of musical expression hasn't truly been defined yet so whatever the hell you want to do with it it works it's internet meme content but to me i think it's also a very special kind of music making like there's definitely this rhythmic sound to the kinds of melodies that you come up with when you're trying to imitate people who are talking in like various media that doesn't occur in normal music making or at least music making that is more on the grid okay let's just let's try it one syllable at a time like that line like something about the super staccato nature of it it just is not something that would naturally come to really anybody writing music but i think it's pretty cool that you're taking the rhythmic characteristics of something non-musical and turning into something musical and yeah sick make more of it there needs to be more of this content more internet memes please anyway guys thank you so much for watching there are over 1 000 people who submitted for this version of how to get good at music so my sincere apology is if i cannot get around to reviewing everybody's but thank you for everybody who submitted this was a very inspiring thing for me to see everybody creating music in a very honest and forthright fashion i'm glad that i have the opportunity to look at everybody's wonderful music because this was a fantastic experience so thanks so much everybody for watching and until next time

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 716,710

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: SkYLBWOYVZk

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020