Take Five: the reunion

I am really happy to be working with a mandolin student (I'll call him G.) again.  Not only does it give me a way to help with all the noise in my head, but it gives me an excuse to start looking for repertoire that will be useful in multiple contexts:  performing, technique, theory, and improvisation.

This is where Dave Brubeck's (actually Paul Desmond's) "Take Five" is an absolute masterpiece.  For starters, it's already a masterpiece;  probably the catchiest tune counted in five that most people will ever hear, it's a beautiful vamp with a brilliant chorus, and capped off by an astonishingly beautiful and compact alto sax solo.  But it's also a total treasure trove of examples and illustrations;  if you need to explain a concept in basic music theory,  this tune may well have it. 

Like many string players, I prefer it transposed up a half-step (to Em) for convenience, but a great way to test yourself once you're comfortable with the piece, is to go try it in the original E-flat minor (which is what's convenient for the alto sax).  Most of us find that using all closed shapes takes a real conscious effort, and it's worth testing yourself on.  (I'll consider it G.'s 'final exam' for the piece.  Poor guy.  :-)

So tonight, after a long time away from Take Five (which I first approached with Guitar Craft Standard Tuning guitar, CGDAEG), I sat down with the mandolin and hashed a bunch of things out.  First and foremost:  man, what a fantastic piece of music that is.  Improvising on it is simply intoxicating. 

I worked through the melody in the first two available octaves, and will eventually work into the third.  Here, I let the horn phrasing determine the right fingerings, which can be a little more convenient on the smaller instrument, and it will be good to be able to show G. an example of how you get to choose which fingerings you want to use.

G. is currently working through diatonic triads, and I will probably just use the "trust me" logic in trying to go through the vamp chords (Em and Bm7);  I can't decide whether it would be better to explain the Bm7 itself, or just tell him to play a D chord instead.  (The root-in-bass voicing of the Bm7 is easy;  it's the other inversions that may get confusing at speed.)  At any rate, there are plenty of Em and Bm7 chords available on the neck.

I'll have G. improvise over this simple two-chord vamp;  that alone could take a goodly amount of time and lots of questions.  Not only does he have to figure out where his Em notes are, but he can't fall back on a four-count as a crutch!  (On the other hand, if he can hold in 4, I just might jump in with a 5 and we'll get us a polyrhythm going.  :-)

The chorus, of course, will take a little time;  first we'll work the chords:

Triads first:
C - Am/C - Bm - Em/B - Am - D/A - G - G
C - Am/C - Bm - Em/B - Am - D/A - F#m - B

Then, the chords as written:
Cmaj7 - Am6 - Bm7 - Em7 - Am7 - D7 - Gmaj7 - Gmaj7
Cmaj7 - Am6 - Bm7 - Em7 - Am7 - D7 - F#m7 - B7
(on the mandolin, we do tweak voicings a bit to deal with "only" four strings)

and once he's got that, we can go over exactly what that beautiful descending movement of chords is actually doing.  On the melody side, there's a chromatic example in every measure which is great for listening, and again we'll try it in at least two octaves, ideally with different fingerings.

At some point we'll deconstruct the solo too, especially Desmond's delicious phrasing, and the various techniques that one can use to play that on the mandolin (yes, vibrato is possible on the little beastie, and worth it!). 

It will be interesting to see how he handles it--and I have to remember, myself, not to try and do too much too fast.  First, a score he can read and chords he can see.  Then, setting the vamp.  Then the melody.  Then improv.  Then the chorus, either melody or chords first (don't know which yet) and finally the solo and improv over the chorus.

All followed by E-flat minor, which all but removes his open strings as options.  (I'm a stinker, that way.)

Current instrument tunings

Because it really is kinda funny.  Eight stringed instruments in the house, eight different tunings.  Only one instrument is in its natural tuning.

Here's where they're at:

• Mandolin:  G3-D4-A4-E5 (natural tuning)
• Strat:  C2-G2-D3-A3-E4-G4 (Guitar Craft standard tuning)
• Fretless:  Bb1-F2-C3-G3-D4-G4 (experiment - 5ths with 4th on top)
• Banjo:  G4-G2-D3-Bb3-F4 (experiment - open Gm7)
• SoloEtte:  Bb1-F2-Bb2-F3-Bb3-F4 (experiment - open Bb5)
• Ibanez dreadnought:  B1-F#2-D3-F#3-C#4-C#4 ("Raindigger" tuning - open Bm9)
• Ovation:  C2-C3-D3-G3-A3-D4 ("Aerial Boundaries" tuning)
• Classical:  C2-A2-D3-G3-B3-E4 ("Scratch" tuning:  partial capo on 3fr, strings 1-5)

I guess we'll see what changes first!  :-)

Mandolin video sample

Felt the need to document this somehow. During the same "session" that produced the fretless sample, I also wanted to hear how the mandolin came across in the same recording environment, and wound up recording this.

Annotations:

• No audio or video editing has been done, other than timeline cropping. Prior to what you see here there was a diagnostic sounding of open strings, harmonics, and a few chords. After this there was a very short foray into major mode territory before I got a phone call. :-)
• Video is a webcam (Logitech if memory serves), microphone is a MXL USB.008.
• Recorded with Camtasia Studio.
• There is a really annoying glitch in the recording that surfaces at about 1:05, 2:30, and 3:40. I do not know what it is for sure, but I suspect that it is my evil little Blackberry, trying to find its network. If that is true, I'm not sure why it didn't (seem to) affect the fretless recording from the same session, but if anyone reading this can confirm that's what this sounds like, I'd be happy for the certainty. If nothing else it's a reminder to turn that annoying little beast off when I'm doing something important. :-)
• The synchronization problems between audio and video tracks seem to be less of an issue here than they were for the fretless sample, but there still seems to be a latency in there. More testing, I guess, and I've got a few ideas. If anyone has suggestions, please let fly!
  
• Music: improv, with a G tonic. It appears, in reviewing this segment, that I was on the same vibe here that I was with the fretless. Minor second degree, major third, and most semitones above that at one point or other. Broody, for sure, and mostly intentional. :-) I actually like some of the things that come out, even if I do lose the big downbeat a couple of times and fat-finger here and there. (Need more time for fundamentals!) I'm not sure where a few of those ideas came from; they just showed up when needed, and the romantic in me is pretty happy that I can't fully explain that...

So now it's documented. Next step: recording with Audacity, with this USB.008 acoustic microphone into one channel and plugged in through a DI in a second channel. It'll have to be done piecemeal, but I'll get there.

MLK birthday bash

Man, that was fun.

Tonight was the debut of the duet with Steve Bambakidis, and I think it went really well. Got lots of compliments and inquiries, met a few new musicians, and learned a little about the Homer music scene.

It was a pretty last-minute affair. I met Jenny Martin at an adjunct orientation meeting for the college just over a week ago, and took her up on the offer to play at an open-mic type deal celebrating Dr. King's birthday, after meeting with Steve and floating the idea with him just this Wednesday. We garnered the second slot, 7.15-7.30, which meant that Cathy and Sabre could be there, and (as you'll see) that made me really happy. The venue was Alice's Champagne Palace, apparently a staple in Homer (it was my first time there) with a nice corner stage and an affable sound guy who was easy to work with. I was set up in no time and Steve even faster.

Instrumentation was Steve on 4-string bass guitar, straight into the board, and me on mandolin through an old DOD AcousTEC unit, which applied a smidge of delay, chorus and (most importantly) a notch filter for feedback. The AcousTEC then went straight into the board as well.

We came prepared to play three tunes, all substantially improvised. The first was John Coltrane's "Alabama", which is a C-minor vehicle featuring some very rubato, slow brooding statements followed by a beautiful and haunting chord sequence. (Cm9 - Cm7/G - Cm/D - Abmaj7 - Gm7 - Cm ... Abmaj7 - Bb - Cm) This is the tune I first thought of when I thought of doing something for Dr. King's birthday, and introduced the tune and its context with the statement, "this is for those who will not go to the back of the bus". Given that we had covered the tune together perhaps four times previously, I thought it came off rather well, and we were even reasonably together on the ending chord sequence, which has a lot of blank space in it.

The next tune was based on a really neat bass riff Steve started playing the first time I met with him. The riff (which dresses up alternating C and G chords, with a turnaround of D-E-C) is busy enough, and sounds good enough on its own, that my task as decorator is to make sure that what I do does not detract from what he's doing. We developed a cool unison line for one of his thematic statements, and then I improvised chord decorations (mostly light brushes) a couple of countermelodies, and some scattered note-cluster decorations. I hope we continue using it as a staple, as it's really pretty (a nice contrast to my typical gravitation toward minor modes) and I continue to learn about what to do with it the more we play it. It seemed to go over well, although I definitely had some hesitations that I want to work through.

The third "prepared" tune was another Bambakidis bass riff, this one moving from an alternating Dm - G cadence up to a surprise D major, which sounds really good with a back-cycled A7 immediately preceding the D. (Think I remembered that at speed? Ha! I remembered it just about as we finished up.) I did a lot of chord brushing interspersed with some single-note decoration and even a couple of double stops that were mostly intentional. (One harmony that worked particularly well, against the Dm - G sequence, was Bm7 - G/B.) The audience, bless 'em, seemed to be right with us--watching some of the later acts I think that we held their attention more directly than anyone I saw tonight, so there appears to be hope for improvised music in Homer!

At this point we still had some time left and they encouraged us to play something else, so I warned folks we were going to make this one up on the spot, turned to Steve and said, "what about G minor?" He grinned and came up with an ostinato on the spot, and we were off. Cathy later told me that there was more energy in the last "piece" than in the entire rest of our set, and I'm not surprised. (I had just joked with her not two days previously that I seem to have much more confidence in my own playing when I'm not trying to make it sound like anything scripted, and you can hear it.) I started interacting with what Steve was doing and then ranged all over G minor and harmonic minor (love that major seventh), with lots of different phrasings...Steve was right there with me, even coming up into lead a couple times when I would throw in some chords to contrast the single-note stuff.

It was about at this point that I noticed that Sabre was walking (with only a little of Mom's help) right up to the front of the stage to see Dad.

As far as I remember, Steve and I never broke stride as I knelt down and engaged my 13-month old daughter with the same sort of improv that I've done for her since she was born. (No way I could have done that trying to play a scripted tune. No way. But I was fine, improvising. Weird.) Talk about making my day!

We finished up and the audience really seemed to dig it. That was a charge. (Got a lot of approving comments about hearing some "different" music in Homer. This encourages me greatly.)

Subsequent acts included more traditional stuff; my own favorite act of the night was the tap-dancer. She actually gave a little history of tap as she demonstrated it; both Steve and I were really impressed with her presentation, and when I went to congratulate her afterward I jokingly told her that I'd suggested to Steve that we recruit her to work with us as a "drummer"...

...and she was into the idea.

She had not seen us perform, and I made sure she understood that we were doing mostly improv and possibly odd time signatures, so this really surprised me. Steve was floored when I told him this and showed him her card. (I ran into her while she was talking to the director of the Homer campus, who was discussing her teaching tap as an adjunct.) We'll see what happens of course, but I think it might be really cool to have an act featuring mandolin, bass and tap percussion. Improvised.

I guess that qualifies as another "Homer moment".

In all, a highly satisfying evening. Lots of smiles, fewer nerves than I'm accustomed to, that priceless moment with Sabre, and the possibility of working with another improviser. Nice!

I really enjoy working with Steve. He's very gracious with musical space, easy to communicate with, responds well to what I seem to do and enjoys taking risks. He's got the same sort of aesthetic and aspirations, which is a real plus with work and family considerations. And he's a great player too--I think I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg thus far.

In short, he'd fit in really well with the group of fantastic folks I miss so much back in Colorado. (Dave C, when you get a chance to come visit, I can now say I've found someone here who would be more than happy to work with "those weird Crafty guys". He even seems keen to work with me on Chlorinated Duck! :-)

Here's to as much more of this as I can manage.

Sitting in with the 8 Mile Band

Another first: first, er, "public performance" since arriving in Alaska.

Larry Staehle and the 8 Mile Band graciously tolerated my sitting in with them as they played for KPC's holiday gathering, and it was a good time. Repertoire was mostly cover tunes in I-IV-V type progressions--you know, all the stuff I have next to no experience with. There might have been one tune I had actually played before in a similar context, so I spent most of my time decorating and hoping like hell I would stay out of the way of whoever was in front. Instrumentation was two guitars, violin, flute/sax, bass, and percussion, with me on mandolin, mostly in the second octave. I brought my SWR California Blonde amp but ended up running mostly through the mains anyway, using the old DOD AcousTEC for a little slapback delay and feedback control.

It was the usual array of terrors. If I can hear myself, am I too loud? Am I in tune? Okay, I've found some nice phrases here but am I treading on someone else's toes? Can I try a little chromaticism here before they change chords--and when is that going to be, anyway? Larry seemed encouraging (he was gracious enough to call out keys for every tune) and everyone was friendly to me, but it definitely felt like I had just started to get comfortable by the time it was winding down. I am so happy to understand how to find triads and sevenths anywhere on the board, else I'd have been totally lost!

Probably the best moment of the night (for me, at least!) was when folks started to pack up, and Larry just started a little noodly riff on his own, D centric. I reacted instantly and a minor 'something' happened. I walked all over Dm territory, relishing a couple of nice setups for hanging on a big fat major-seventh, and Larry said, "let's do that again, call a key." I immediately said Gm and started incorporating a few favorite chords (diatonic sevenths and alterations), and at some point I realized that the sax player was joining. Nice! I apologized later as I was ranging considerably over several different scales and she could not have had an easy time figuring out where I was. I went back to a couple of chords that should have settled things down (Ebmaj7 and Bbmaj7) but things broke down about then and the moment passed. Dang. I'm scared witless of the I-IV-V and triadic stuff but give me improv in Gm, with enough space to really hear each other, and I'll go!

It sounds like this band plays area venues quite commonly, and I hope I might get another chance to sit in, even if it's a practice. Going so far out of my comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory is good for me, and I might even get better at learning how to fit in with tunes people know. I'm crossing fingers.

Thanks, Larry, and everyone in the band, for letting me sit in. If we get to do this again, I guarantee I learned some things that should make my next contributions better!

Finding sevenths from the triad

Continuing this theme of using the three-string triad as a template to alter into other chords, I'm starting to see forms I'd never thought of before. I was noodling around for Sabre this evening, trying to think on three-string triads, and wound up making another accidental "duh" discovery.

For those of you who can appreciate stream-of-consciousness thinking, here's how the sequence went: I started by revisiting the first suggested "alter the first-inversion triad to get a dominant seventh" suggestion, on G major. On the mandolin and other fifths tunings, that looks like this:


Well, what about going the other way? If we can take that root down a whole step to get G7, what about going up a whole step to get the ninth? It's probably fudging the point a bit from a Juilliard/Berklee point of view, but that could probably serve as both Gadd9 and as Gmaj9, depending on what notes others are holding down.


And that's got to be so much easier to think of doing, at speed, in an improvisational context. If we consider the mandolin (or the Guitar Craft guitar, for that matter) as but one voice among other instruments, this would promise to be a very effective way of adding color notes with less risk of bumping into others' territory.

From here, it can start to get pretty fast and furious. On that first-inversion triad (third in bass), I just started permuting:


That rather neatly covers those*; then, you could start walking the fifth around as well (for this diagram, read down, not across, to see the permutations):


This could get out of hand in a hurry, but on the other hand (and with apologies to Frank Zappa), great googly-moogly! And that is just the first-inversion triad...I'll try my hand at root-inversion and second-inversion next time, and holy cow, then there's ninths.

I suspect that there are a couple of goals with going further down this approach:

• The real goal here is not just to build a library of chords to memorize, but to become competent at finding a triad and altering it on the spot (and herein is where the value of reducing from four strings to three becomes obvious, saving what must be a fairly staggering amount of complexity)
• With the enharmonic equivalents starting to pop off the page (with just three strings to keep track of, it's much easier, isn't it?), it seems that using this approach will also underscore the need to better understand polychords, both from the standpoint of deliberate construction of polychords by multiple members of the group playing simple chords, and also from the standpoint of reduction of polychords into smaller constituent pieces that a player can grab onto either at speed, or to allow a humane fingering. (I think I'm going to have to chew on that one for a while.)
• One nice thing about using three strings instead of four is that it does leave the player more room to wander about the registers, in effect "playing his harmony with more melody". I suppose that a complete player would want both full voicings and the three-string variants at his disposal, but the potential for improvisation here is pretty huge.
  

Note to self: don't sit down to write the bit on ninths until you have a lot of time. :-)

_______________
* How about the bender of the enharmonic equivalents, as well? That three-string Gmaj7 is also known as Bm, which is a standard third-up substitution...also check out Bb augmented aka Gm/maj7, Bb major aka Gm7 (diatonic third up and relative major).

Finding dominant sevenths from the triad

On the mandolin, my "guerrilla" learning style has thus far been focused on constructing four-string chords, both for a fuller voicing and (let's be honest) to allow the right hand to cruise sloppily.

Structurally, it's been about regular permutations deliberately limited to moveable forms. So, for triads, I carried over what I'd learned on the Guitar Craft-tuned guitar, from a California Guitar Trio exercise: one form per inversion, root, first (third in bass), and second (fifth in bass), with the other strings advancing diatonically up the neck as well. So, for A major, the three inversions with A, C#, and E in the bass would be:

This proved to be so helpful in my learning that I sweated out the same thing for the diatonic sevenths...again, one form per possible inversion, advancing up the neck, moveable forms. Translating directly from the guitar, for Amaj7 as an example, the forms for A, C#, E, and G# in bass, are: The really geeky may notice that in first inversion I altered the triad, flatting the root to the major seventh; this allowed me to use the root on the top string, keep all four component notes in the chord, and have each form truly advance the bass and treble strings up the neck each time. It was an arbitrary choice, but it helped me construct a box that really helped me to "see" the chord forms advancing up the neck.

On the mandolin, I ran into another problem: some of these forms are simply too tight to work well on the smaller instrument. (By contrast, stretches like the second-inversion maj7 voicing are very workable on the mandolin while being a real workout on the guitar.) I realized that I would eventually need to find other convenient voicings for the mando.

Somewhere in there I ran across Jethro Burns' outstanding book, which advocates the concept of the three-string chord (even for chords with more than three tones) on the basis that it can be altered more easily than a four-string chord. True, but that introduces an unintended problem for the beginner: how can you understand what chord tones you can omit, before you've got a good grip on where the possibles are? I ignored the three-string approach at the time, staying with my fours and developing some confidence (this was a good decision, at least for me), but how funny what comes back in due time. With a good grounding in where all those notes actually are, and watching Mike Marshall articulate the same advantage of alteration in one of his excellent video resources, I actually started to "get it". In working with a couple of David Grisman tunes, the three-string chord really started to show its value, and with that came another revelation: the three-string chord is much, much easier on the tightest fingerings.

Great. So I've started to explore the three-string chord concept, with an eye to building a library of chords for my own use. And, quickly enough, the "omit tones" problem rears its head, to wit: how does one intuitively know where to find a three-string chord that omits the root?

As with many things I've learned about music so far, at least one example turned out to be a "duh" moment. I was playing around with the four suggested inversions of a three-string dominant seventh, as noted by Burns. Going up the neck, this is A7 with G (7th), A (root), C# (3rd), and E (5th) on top:

Now you may notice that the note A only appears once in those four chords, as the top note of the seventh-in-bass inversion. So: how the heck do I quickly find an A7 that doesn't even have an A in it?

I found myself noodling a bit on this, and stumbled on creating the seventh out of each triad inversion, by flatting the root note by a whole tone. Whoa, there they are!


Then, what really bent me is that suddenly I also recognized that these root-omitted dominant seventh chords are enharmonically the same as the diminished triad build on the chord's third--in each inversion. That is, A7 with no root (C#-E-G) is also a C# diminished triad. This makes complete sense, of course, since a dominant seventh is nothing more than two minor thirds stacked on top of a major third, and if you omit the major third, what you're left with is two minor thirds--or a diminished fifth. Quo erat duhmonstratis. (Okay, maybe it takes a geek to appreciate that, but sue me, I love this stuff.)

Excepting the form with root on top, then, which kind of lives "in between" the third inversion and the first, I can now find any dominant seventh by finding the appropriate triad and altering it. This three-string chord thing may have some value yet!