Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Bluesy Time

Time to start the same exercise I did for Satin Doll, this time on the blues.

I will play a walking bass line with RH chords. Most likely 3 choruses. Again, in 4 random keys. Well not totally random. It's the blues, so I just have to at least do it in F and Bb. The other two will be random.

I chose to extract the bass from a tune called 'Blues for Rhonda', played by Gene Harris on his Maybeck album. The album is a real treat, and very accessible as well. On this specific F blues, Gene plays a great walking bass during the entire tune.

I'm not going to even attempt transcribing Gene's RH, so I'll come up with RH comping based on his changes.

I'll start my matrix and start recording in a following post. At this time, I am writing my arrangements with pencil. I intend to share my work here, so for readability, I may type it in some software, I'll see... In any event, when you practice stuff like this, I don't recommend transposing on paper and sight read. That would be missing the point.

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