Simplify! (how to get good at music)

so art might be entirely subjective but music is more than just an art it's also a craft and like any skill musicianship can be improved upon and it can be critiqued with that in mind we're going to be checking out some viewer submissions that were submitted over at my Instagram last week over 700 people submitted thank you and we're gonna be giving our best good-faith critiques of their musicianship we're gonna be teaching them how to get good at music our first submission comes from max Adams who submitted a bass version of isn't she lovely let's check it out bass chords can't looping heading the bass line alright alright very cool very cool so it seems like you're taking your arrangement from Victor ruins version of isn't she lovely and I love that version there's a couple of things though I want you to check out about how Victor Wooten plays the notes that he's playing but he is playing this groove he is accenting all of the offbeat's and articulating them very very short and then playing all of the downbeats rather quietly but articulating them along that contrast between long unaccented down beats and short accented off beats helps gives us the feeling of this swung groove Victor Wooten talks all the time about feeling the groove but paying attention to these fine details goes a long way to being able to embody it yourself one other thing that you can learn from Victor Wooten is how he moves his entire body and time with the music it's subtle but the movement is coming from the torso not just the head and not just the feet when we check out what you're doing you are tapping your foot which is good but I feel like more movement can come from basically the whole body just to like maybe bounce in your seat you don't have to go crazy with this but for me I feel like the the music gets more congealed within my body if I'm bouncing up and down just a little bit thank you so much for your submission let's check out the next one which comes from Zoe camera ready alright let's check out Zoe's [Music] very 80s fusion Holdsworth kena situation [Music] so I think the same thoughts about subtly moving your body up and down in time will help at least solidify some of the rhythmic ideas that you have and I think you might need to simplify some of your scalar choices over this vamp which has two chords which are not in the same key we have an E major 7 and then we have a G major 7 and I think would be nice to hear more of that chord progression within the melodic material that you're improvising on your guitar so once again so maybe for the E major 7 you play some emajor pentatonic material doesn't have to be that complicated but you want to be able to hear the sound of the chord in your melodies the same thing goes for the G major 7 maybe you play some G major pentatonic stuff that kind of thing right now you're sort of obscuring that sometimes there was a moment where I heard you play like an E minor pentatonic lick over that a major 7 like right there I'm not telling you to not play outside but I think starting from a simple clear and concise melodic palate will do a lot of good here so thank you so much for your submission let's check out the next one which comes from David O'Grady [Music] we're very cool this kind of reminds me of the homework that I would get in jazz counterpoint class with Bob Pilkington when I went to Berkeley it's kind of amazing how much harmony you can get from just two voices like we start and kind of C minor territory and then a minor 6 e flat a flat 7 D flat a flat E flat major 7 - f major 7 all of that communicated with just two voices kind of crazy you know in an age with like 5,000 Logic Pro tracks or what a harmony is very inexpensive and it's nice to see it being used very frugally here oh hey Adam from the editing booth here no shade - Jacob Collier he's amazing just wanted to clarify that my critique is it sounds like a homework assignment you get an a on this homework assignment but I want to hear it develop you can say so much more with this idea you start in C minor go to Mir good F maybe you go to C sharp minor after that or maybe D flat major I don't know are you re much D flat major anyway a lot of stuff to be explored thank you so much for submitting this one is from miss Sacha Lubitsch F ski let's check them out just a little ways like that was a that's not a b-flat seven that's a B seven how dare you all right sorry in a dick [Music] I'm losing my mind just a little [Music] yeah yeah I liked it a lot I think this song is really good for reharmonization because it centers mainly around the fifth of the key this case B so you could go back and forth between emajor and E minor and the B would fit perfectly well in both keys I'm thinking that you could probably simplify some of this stuff like this a seven D seven C seven F minor seven ad for situation you might get away with half that number of chords if I was reharmonization for both sections of the melody not switch it halfway through even though that switch to an E major seven was quite nice I feel like having a lot of harmonic information takes a little bit of time to fully digest and by repeating it you might legitimize and by repeating it you might legitimize it so the second time you hear the chords you might try orchestrating it a little bit differently maybe it's just guitar and voice for the first time and then you add the full band for the second time hearing the same chords but I really dug it so thank you so much for submitting let's see what else we have okay so this one was submitted by Gustav from the band The Lost cassette [Music] like an Andalusian Indian trap [Music] at rhythmic unison that was a very very Indian thing super super cool interesting I love it texture of the Tablas works extremely well with acoustic guitar I mean we've known that for a long time with like the collaboration between Zakir Hussain and John McLaughlin shakthi this particular fusion of like you know more Spanish Phrygian kinds of sounds it works I love it I could use a lot more bass guitar in the mix of course you might not be able to like control the mix because this is so far sounds but one of the things that I've noticed whenever I've played with tabla players which is very infrequently is the fact that since toddlers are pitched and there's different tones that you make with the table the mid-range frequency is very similar to the mid-range frequencies that the bass guitar produces so there's always gonna be some weird clash there I'm not sure what the best solution is to be honest maybe just being very conscious of it and really trying to stay away from the tabla player if you're the bass player but it is something that I was noticing here super cool thank you so much for submitting let's check out the next one which will be from shams Illyria's playing sequence start which is a piece of music that I wrote like to be distorted to it's a great job you're 75% there obviously the question is is how you get to the full 100% speed which is a lot faster originally I actually couldn't play it at speed and the recording was like some Frankenstein take of like a million versions I mean just like failing over and over and over again now I can actually play it I can barely play it and the reason why I can play it a little bit better than I used to is because I adopted strict alternating in my right hand I always alternate between index and middle finger no matter what which poses some problems because the pieces in quintuplets went up let's our odd numbers and this is even number of fingers so it alternates which fingers starts the quintuplets every time it sounds like it's gonna be harder and in the beginning it actually is to strictly alternate no matter what even with these quintuplets but over the long run that definitely helped me get a lot cleaner and a lot more comfortable just apply that strict alternating to your playing and sequence start and you'll be able to play it at speed in no time okay so next victim is Nyree joseph who is a steel drums player who is improvising over sync Thomas let's check us out [Music] Fulton scale and steel drums including the melody chromatic scale dang that's super cool I know what steel drums can do in jazz I was a huge fan of Jaco Pastorius word of mouth album and Jaco is really big and incorporating steel drums into jazz music but to see somebody do it it's pretty awesome I guess my advice is to try and transcribe some modern jazz saxophone players like maybe Chris Potter or Michael Brecker knowing what you can do on steel drums hearing how modern jazz saxophone players apply that jazz vocabulary in different ways might give you some interesting ideas I know as a bass player I get the most ideas from saxophone players and horn players not other bass players when I'm looking to play melodically and improvise it's always looking to other instruments when you're delving into this vocabulary that I have found the most inspiration but that was awesome and thank you so much for submitting alright so let's check out Celia and neuen there we go hey there four of you [Music] all right we would close herbal chords without vibrato it's really pretty [Music] I was really pretty I think the thing that would take this to the next level is experimenting a little bit more with dynamics what if you added some swells like some crescendos and gaper shadows I think more attention in care put into dynamics and some kind of arc with the dynamics will make this piece feel even more vibrant than it is already attention to detail like dynamics and other things like articulation are really the things that I feel like make music come alive they'll show your personality and the things that make you feel connected to the music those are the things that really give music its juice and you know that's what we really want juicy music so thank you for your submission let's check out the next one oh no microtonal jazz hip hop from Alberto delle pietre what if I done how God alright let's do it oh no when tablets swing of course [Music] going back and forth between the two keyboards tuned a quarter tone apart it's like a maroon fives Sunday morning but really weird so so so goofy so it seems like what you guys are doing or just playing to five ones in the key of D major but every second chord is a quarter tone sharp which is funny and I appreciate the Mema tential for all of this the sunglasses are very nice touch I've had the most luck with this kind of system with chords resolving down by a quarter tone maybe you take the tritone substitute for a7 which would be an E flat seven what up let me tune that real quick B flat seven and resolve it to D major seven there's a clearer if then with the micro tonality in that case so even though the joke is funny kind of like how Polly tonality was initially a joke there might be some potential to take this into some interesting musical places so thank you for your submission all right the next one comes from I'm actually going to compare two entries because I think it's kind of interesting there's a band from Armenia and then there's a band from Long Island and they both submitted things in 5a the way that they approached 5/8 is so different and I just want to listen back to back them so this is the Long Island [Music] unified and while the drummer is like really going into playing the punk like sixteenths the rest of the band is playing an eighth note sort of situation this is the band from Armenia [Music] same groove but a very different feeling there even though the grooves are kinda the same the cultural backgrounds of the musicians are very different and they're bringing a very very different feeling to the same basic idea in the same basic genre I know this isn't really a critique for these two bands so I'm sorry but I just wanted to show that and I found that interesting anyway let's keep going on this one is from oli Podge Ihnen [Music] kids are listening to these days [Music] we got that gnarly and our class [Music] jazz [Music] so the playing is great you got the tone dialed in for the jet section but I think for that more fusion each section it might be nice to switch to a slightly different tone something with a little bit less grit and a little bit more low mids those ibanez sound years are fantastic for that kind of mid-range ii fusion growl part of that would involve switching back and forth between pick and fingers because that fusion tone it's a little tricky to get with a pick so just something to keep in mind you definitely have the metal tone totally dialed in I just think that you could spend some time with the fusion east side of the town so anyway thank you for your submission and yeah let's do another one this is Kristian Mitchum and this is them playing bass over a little sunflower let's check that out [Music] the diminishe looks very important okay so my big suggestion for you is I want you to transcribe what it is that you just played be very specific and I bet you'll find that very difficult because the way that you're thinking about music right now is in terms of the scales and the licks that you're playing and not actually thinking about how they fit within the rhythmic grid the way that my friend Sean Crowder drummer extraordinaire for sungazer puts it is it doesn't sound like you're being responsible for the rhythms you clearly can physically play these notes but can you place them that's gonna take your playing to the next level placing them within a grid is very important here anyway guys thank you so much for watching I hope this episode of how to get good at music has inspired you if you want to be kept in the loop about when the next one of these episodes is being filmed definitely follow me over at Instagram because that's where I'm going to announce it you enjoy what I do here on this channel please consider joining my patreon because it's the patrons over at my patreon that allow me to make this kind of content week after week and I am very much indebted to everybody who has donated over there so thank you so much to all my patrons and all of my viewers like you guys and uh yeah stay safe everybody [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 617,380

Rating: 4.9760957 out of 5

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

Id: WbaDPjpz45g

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Thoughtful_Salt]

first