Work, with Miles Okazaki

What's up with the G and B strings, anyway? A primer on tuning, harmonics, and practical methods for getting the guitar in tune with any ref

I looked at the first phrase of this Chorale on the recent mailbag episode. Here it is after practicing it for a little while. In another video today I'll go over the fingerings and a little bit of analysis. Sheet music attached.

In this mailbag episode I answer questions from members Juan Carlos Hernandez and Soloist. First I go into how I approach playing all four voices of a chorale at once, finding fingerings and voice leading. See attached image for this one. Then about 16 minutes in I go into some ideas about septuplets. To hear the example I talk about at the end with a full band, go to this link to about a minute in to skip the intro.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

What you have here is a list of musical scales. You can find any collection of notes from 1 to 12 tones somewhere in it. The format is made to be a practical reference or journal. I've been working on it for a while now, trying to make a sourcebook for my own work thatʼs orderly and useful. None of the data in here is new to the world, but the delivery system is something I've designed to be simple and intuitive.

Numbers: There are 351 shapes in the book. This isn't arbitrary - it's what you get when you find all of the unique note formations that are possible with 12 tones (2048) and then group them into families of modes from the same scale. You can arrive at a lower numbers of basic structures if you say that mirror images are sonically equivalent. But if you hear a major and minor triad as qualitatively different, then 351 is the number for you. To make navigation easier, the colors of each page change every 9 days, working through a spectrum of 39 hues.

Why a calendar: There's potentially a huge amount of material to wade through in this type of project. You could write out every scale on a staff with every transposition, the names itʼs known by in various musical traditions, the way it connects to similar scales, examples from musical repertoire, all kinds of stuff. And this has been done in heavy books and endless tables of data. As someone who is easily confused, my goal here is to make the thing as streamlined as possible, with clean pages that don't distract with a bunch of clutter and redundancies. I've always enjoyed the challenge of presenting complex ideas in plain language and minimalist design, and have always been vexed by theory books that require the reader to know a bunch of special jargon and obscure references. Music theory doesn't have to be a private club. So in this book, musical shapes progress in a basic format that everyone recognizes (a calendar) with daily melodic prompts, each one different from those before. There are no rules or agenda - the main goal is to provide the reader an inclusive point to entry to discover raw melodic materials for creative practice.

Here's an idea for creative practice. I play a drone of three notes and improvise on it according what it seems to sound like. Then I change one of the notes, improvise, and repeat.

Last week the New York Times had an article called "Five Minutes that will make you love Jazz Guitar," in which I wrote a little thing about this track, recorded 63 years ago today. Link is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/arts/music/guitar-jazz-music.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nk4.YtfS.b0yowaHFl6O8&smid=url-share

A link to the track itself is here: https://youtu.be/m-mHo8A4x-E?feature=shared

I go through, talk a bit about the history and then listen through the solo with some commentary. Let me know if you like this type of post. They're fun and easy to do, as I like to share my favorite records.

Here's a reading of Chorale 198, as usual one voice at a time. Read along with the attached sheet music.

On Sunday I posted a performance of this piece. Here I go through it bar by bar and talk about how I think about memorizing it and what lessons it has for harmony, form, and composition. Sheet music is attached.

today we go into recent comments from Frank Boons, David Sharki, Cameron, and Jesse. Let me know if this clears anything up, or maybe makes it more confusing! This one ends abruptly because I trimmed it too soon, but there's nothing left except a sign off, so the video is complete as is.

A look at Chorale 166. Play along by looking at the attached sheet music.