AquaeGrannus

Creative Heart’s dilligence and dedication are inspiring.
Lately I’ve had to diversify my work in order to make ends meet and it’s really eaten into my free-form, near-infinite practice time. Now I need to apply more structure and dicipline to make the shorter hours availible both productive and enjoyable,(since that’s the point). Your prolific posts are helping to keep me motivated, thanks, “cheers”!

In the interest of “flexing” what I’ve learned so far while improving my “spontaneous” repertoire, (or playing something without dragging my laptop or music stand around)I’m doing auto-transposition exercises…taking songs and 1. using the transpose “button” to change key and working one song through all keys, 2. working through different voicings on the chords, 3. working different octavization progressions, 4. playing the tune in one key while reading it in another so I can develop the ability to accomodate any vocal lead, 5. playing along with the recording using complimentary voicings, scalar riffs, and experimenting with harmonizing in complimentary keys, (like the idigo girls do).
(postscript: reading this back it sounds kind of like a verbiose way of saying, “just playing around”, perhaps that’s what Earl Hooker meant by “messing with the blues”)

All the while ruminating on the spectrum between, and the overlapping of precision and improvisation.

Of course this, with me running all over with work, must be taken in small time slots but I wrote it down just so I can sit down and not wonder: “ok what the hell am I doing?”.

I just noticed that this goal doesn’t have the “How I did it thing”. It will be interesting to see who’s the first to feel that they’ve done it. What would be the definitive points to justifying such a claim? I suppose the music would have to speak for itself.

Failure is a much more common instructor to find. If you only learn from success you seriously deny yourself valuable instruction.
“How To:” instruction has a steeper learning curve than “How NOT to..”. Grace in crisis is an often unappreciated precursor to compassion. Without going into droll detail, this was my lesson for the days efforts and my favorite blogger seems once again to spin on the same planet.