Greg Howe Jammin' on Sunny - www.greghowe.com

Now THIS is how 'shred meets soul'! Awesome phrasing by Greg Howe, playing a great standard: Sunny. Inspiring!

Tony Williams Lifetime- with Allan Holdsworth- Live 1976

Allan Holsdworth Live in 1976 with Tony Williams Lifetime - A great jazz/rock improvisation.

Robben Ford & John Scofield

Go Tell It On The Mountain by Oliver Scott

That's the way to do it! Check out the chords on this urban gospel rendition of a christmas standard...

Bireli Lagrene & Frank Gambale - Invitation - 1991-04-30 Cannes FR (audio)

Again, a few of my favorite players.

This recording features and incredible performance of two virtuoso guitarists.

They match well!

This is an excellent 'early recording' of Frank Gambale with a clean sound.

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Joe Pass & Herb Ellis - Good New Blues

One of my most favorite albums of all time. I always put this on when driving. Also when not driving.

Interview Peter van Weelden

Interview Peter van Weelden

Diatonic Minor Concepts

For the purpose of improvising on a Minor chord form, knowledge of the various diatonic minor scales and their formulas is of fundamental importance.

Here's a graphic I created to give you a quick insight into these minor scale forms. The small differences in the scale-formulas represent big differences in sound.

SWANK THING - JOE DIORIO & ROBBEN FORD

This record singlehandedly changed my life in music. Robben Ford was groovin' but it was Joe Diorio who mesmerised me and lured me to jazzguitar! Joe is by far the superior guitarist in this ensemble. Too bad he is too soft in the mix. Hope we'll get a remixed version one day, but the chances are slight I fear.

The Major Scale - A Complete Perspective Part – 3 - Seven letters, five symbols - A Fairy Tale

The Major Scale - A Complete Perspective
Part – 3 : Seven letters, five symbols – A Fairy Tale

Disclaimer: This article is not completely based on historic facts, but uses allegory, strictly for educational purposes and to make a point.

Once upon a time, long ago but perhaps not so very far away from where I'm living in Europe right now, there were a bunch of guys who were singing all the time, always using the same type of melodies. On of these dudes had a clever idea and suggested that the notes could be identified by using the letters of the alphabet. And since the notes they were using were seven in total, the letters they used ranged from A to G:

A – B – C – D – E – F – G

And after reaching G, it was the same note again as 'A', only higher in pitch!

Everybody was happy and the system worked for a long time. Everybody was happily chanting using the notes of this scale. Until... several hundreds of years later, someone discovered that the distances between each of the notes was not always equal! The distance between the notes A and B, was of a different type than the distance between the notes B and C! They found out that all along they had been cheating music out of a couple of notes, which they were skipping. So after much research and deliberation, they had their notes A – G and five unidentified notes. What should they do?! Everybody was already happily using this system of letters A – G and it worked. It was too late to change that system and start using the letters A – L. 

Then, one of the guys in authority (back then, everybody who was anybody, was a high-ranking church official, and they decided on all matters, including music), who were discussing this issue, had a clever idea:
These five foreign tones, would be seen as the 'neighbouring' tones of the familiar ones. It would be, for example, like looking into a circular street with houses, where you would see the houses of good friends and their neighbours: First there's Adam's house, then Adam's neighbour's house. Then we have Brian's house and then Connor's house. Then Connor's neighbour's house, followed by Dwayne's house. And so on. 

This was of course a silly and inefficient naming principle but back then they were just ignorant about this fact, perhaps even wilfully so. People have always been traditionalists by nature, clinging to the old familiar ways. And why not, if it works?  Well, personally I feel that logic should rule over tradition, whenever it leads to better science.

Now let's get back to the naming of the musical notes. Because people in the music business have clung to the old system of alphabetically naming the notes A – G, we have 5 notes with variations on these letters, identified by a special token next to the letter. And to make matters worse, they thought it would be useful to make a distinction between ascending and descending sequences. When ascending, the neighbouring notes would be considered “sharp” and when descending the neighbouring notes would be considered “flat”.
The corresponding symbols chosen to identify these distinctions, are recognised today as:

SHARP	FLAT

Notice that the symbol for flat, looks like the uncapitalised letter “b”, so this letter will be used for the flat symbol throughout the remainder of this article.

With this system, it was finally possible to summarize the ascension of the 12 notes like this:

A – A# – B – C – C# – D – D# – E – F – F# – G – G#

And when descending the sequence, they would do it like this:

A – Ab – G – Gb – F – E – Eb – D – Db – C – B – Bb

In a sense, the only reason that this system exists today, is that once upon a time, people discriminated the black keys of the piano and regarded them inferior to the white keys.

The only logical naming convention with no distinction between ascension and descension, would be:

A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L

Because I have been programming software for a while and created the guitar software program “FretBoardKnowledge”, I thought about this for a long time and almost decided to switch to the logical system of using letters A – L. I finally decided not to, because it would take more time than I was willing to spend just to get used to this new system, as I was already thoroughly accustomed to the conventional system. Instead, I decided upon a “flats only” convention, generally preferring the “flats” over the “sharps”, because in jazz music and related styles, flats are more common.

So eventually, when we put the twelve notes in sequence and using “only flats”, we get a circle like this:

Since this treatise is part of a series on the Major Scale, let's take a moment to consider again that the notes that were originally grouped by using the letters A – G, are now still being used more than any other grouping of notes. Starting on the letter C, this grouping is identified as the Major Scale. So for further theoretical exploration and in favour of simplicity, we will use the C Major Scale as our subject. The C major scale is made up of the following 7-note sequence:

C – D – E – F – G – A – B

Read some factual information on the history of note names here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note#History_of_note_names

Alexander Stakenburg

http://www.schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl

School voor Improvisatie © | http://www.schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl | info@schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl

The Major Scale - A Complete Perspective

Part – 2 : Church Modes - Gregorian

Gregorian chant music, early Western and Central European Church music, was organized, codified and notated during the 10^th to 13^th centuries.

A broad and very brief glance on the harmonic properties of this music teaches us that the Gregorians typically used a system of categorizing the music into eight modes. As there is some variety in the naming of these modes, I will use the contemporary names as used for the Church Modes.

We can structure the Gregorian Modes into four basic modes, historically known as the “authentic modes” and their variations, which are called the “plagal modes”. These variations are simply the four basic (authentic) modes that have the “final”, or ending note on the fifth note of the scale.

AUTHENTIC	PLAGAL
Dorian	Aeolian
Phrygian	Locrian
Lydian	Ionian
Mixolydian	Dorian

We will touch upon the subject of the Numerical Scale System in future installments, but for those who are already used to this system: The relationship between the Authentic and Plagal modes can be described
as an inverted modal II-V, which is most evident in the case of the Mixolydian → Dorian modes.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_chant
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oktoechos

Alexander Stakenburg

http://www.schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl

School voor Improvisatie © | http://www.schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl

The Major Scale - A Complete Perspective

Part – 1 : Argument of History

There is no empirical evidence that the Major Scale was the first real scale ever used. It is far more likely that people constructed melodies by ear using intervals that were pleasing and harmonious to their ears. From this, major and minor pentatonic scales and the diatonic scale we identify as “The Major Scale” must have emerged.

The historic evolution of this particular musical scale and it's widespread usage and recognition, render this scale a great significance and authority. We are dealing with much more than simply tradition here.  There must be something more about this collection of tones that gives it this precedence above all other scales. Hopefully, we'll get closer to understanding this unique feature of the Major Scale.

On the internet, you can read a lot about the history of the Major Scale. Here's a link with some interesting remarks on it's development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale

Historic research indicates that music in ancient times has been at least to some degree systematic and diatonic. Read a little about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Mesopotamia

For the purpose of this particular treatise, we will not recede too far into the outback of the annals of musical history, we'll pick it up somewhere around the Middle Ages.

And since I am by no stretch of the imagination a professional historian, you make certainly expect me to take a few blatant liberties in anecdotal fashion, for the strict purpose of added educational value.

Alexander Stakenburg

http://www.schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl

The Major Scale - A Complete Perspective

Introduction

The western-type music I grew up listening to, and I'm assuming that most of you who read this article did so also, is primarily based on intervallic combinations which are historically grouped and labelled by the denominator "Major Scale". And it really is..... MAJOR.

I'm estimating that 99.8% of pop music is based on this collection of tones. And since the unextended, unaltered note-collections we identify as the major and minor pentatonic scales, are embedded within the Major Scale, we can certainly extend our estimation to include various stylistically idiosynchratic traditions like Irish music, Country music, Rock music, Classical music, Jazz music and many, many folkloric types of music, including African, Indian, Balinese, Maori and Asian styles. I submit to you that these styles and their derivates are based on the Major Scale in larger or lesser degrees, but based on it nonetheless.

This being the case, wouldn't we be prudent, were we to study it prodigiously, striving to reach the point of exhausting its vast range of harmonic and melodic possibilities?

I think so.

For this purpose, in this series of articles, we are going to make the Major Scale our sole domain. We are going to make it our bread and butter, our scotch and soda, our coffee and tea.
We will make it the window through which we gaze upon the wondrous textures of the landscape of this world called: MUSIC!

(drumroll please!)

I am writing to you from a guitarist's perspective, but the principles are generic and universally adaptable by all musicians.

Let's begin! - Part 1 Coming Soon... Stay Tuned!


Read some more about scales here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_scale

Benefiting from some of the programming skills I obtained during my years in the software industry, I've created my own guitar software application which is intended as a powertool for personal study, particularly for improvising musicians. It is called "FretBoardKnowledge" and an early version is now still available for free on my website. I've recently been working on some powerful extended functionality.

Check it out here: http://www.schoolvoorimprovisatie.nl/?Software