One way to do that is to take a single phrase and then start composing lines using that phrase and in that way get it to fit into your vocabulary. Something that will really help you sound like Jazz when you improvise. These building blocks are what you want to get into your own playing and doing that is perhaps one of the best things you can take away from the book. This keeps the entire solo moving forward and since the target note is almost always a chord tone it also really helps with connecting the melody to the chord progression, so nailing the changes One thing that is worth noticing about the solos is that Joe Pass is constructing lines with building blocks that are mostly a few notes with a direction to a target note. Playing these dense 8th note solos is technically more demanding and if you are performing then that is probably not how you want your solo to sound since it has no rests, no room to breathe.Īnd yet, almost any Jazz guitarist will tell you that this is great material to study and most certainly worth your time, so let’s look at how you can work with these phrases? The Building Blocksīesides playing the exercises and getting these types of melodies into your fingers and ears, which is already a great exercise in itself, then there is a lot more you can use this material for. On a side note: the chord symbols are sometimes really off and not a very strong analysis in my opinion, but that is not so important for this video. But that can certainly be a great exercise to work on. It also sounds like he is suggesting that you actually practice improvising like this as much as you play his solos, which is not how I hear most people use this. I don’t think that he means straight 8th notes as opposed to swing 8th notes, just that it is one long stream of 8th notes. My interpretation of this is that he is saying that playing continuous 8th-notes forces you to play the changes clearer with more logical melodies and that it is more difficult to rely on licks you already know.
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8th-note studies also tend to avoid the practice of playing memorized licks.Ĭhord symbols are for your analysis, not necessarily for accompaniment.” By eliminating rhythmic variety, you force the ear into building better melodies. When it comes to the dense 8th note lines then Joe Pass explains it with this:
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This book was just made before tabs were really something that was common. But even if you have to spend some time deciphering where to play these solos without tabs then they are actually worthwhile, and almost a reason to learn to read. One of the two complaints I hear the most often is, of course, “There are no tabs” which is true. They are mostly just streams of 8th notes. Joe Pass is obviously an expert when it comes to Bebop on guitar, and the solos are filled with great phrases that are clear and sound logical without being predictable or formulaic.Īs you can see, the solos are very dense:
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Playing these solos will give you some great examples of super-strong basic Bebop vocabulary and teach you a lot about improvising over chord changes, using chromatic phrases and Bebop melodies.Īnd, of course, it is also good for your reading, technique, and fretboard knowledge. The part of the book that I worked on and that I also use with my students is the 2nd half of the book that has some written-out solos that you can work on playing.
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When it comes to learning some really solid building blocks fro Bebop vocabulary, then one of the best books that I know is “ Joe Pass guitar style“, and I am far from the only one to recommend it, both John Scofield and Mike Stern have mentioned studying it and when I was studying then most of my teachers gave me homework from that book.īut it does have a problem and maybe not the one that I hear people mention all the time, and that is what I want to talk about in this video. Jazz solos are not improvising every single note, we use building blocks to construct phrases, similar to how words are used to form sentences and you don’t spell each word in the sentence, you just put them together to make a statement, and that is also how you want to improvise.