Autumn Leaves

hello facebook this is jamie slater here uh i'm gonna play you some jazz guitar

and then i'm gonna give you a little bit of a lesson uh about jazz guitar just i don't know

maybe you can if you're looking for guitar lessons and perhaps uh you feel like what i'm teaching may

be able to help you then you know we can uh please get in touch we can talk about it

um if you notice i'm wearing black for the first time i'm wearing black

um uh we've got a lot to kind of be thoughtful

about aside from uh george floyd

uh which way back when when all that first kind of went down uh

during the blackout day i was gonna make a lesson and for some reason in my black shirt i just

got sidetracked every possible which way i had problems with sound

you know i did like a 20 minute video or something and the sound was screwed up and since then i fixed my sound situation

and um then i got i started again and i got a

phone call right in the middle of it that screwed it up then

something happened there was some text alarms or something that went on i just had some issues that night but uh

tonight i'm wearing black for a more personal reason a friend of mine from high school

has passed away and she was 49 years old and um she had been battling cancer for

the past few years and um i'll be 52 this year

so and honestly i feel the same as i always have i feel the same as i did in my 20s

and every time i look in the mirror i'm like oh it's my dad you know but

[Music] yeah i remember her being a very kind person and uh very pleasant

smart and cute good looking person and uh

i'm not real close with her but i have friends on facebook in common with her that are

close to her and so i want to send out condolences to her family

uh today and um a third reason for my black shirt today

is that we've had 1200 more kobe deaths which brings our total up to over 160

000 people and our infection rate is uh still

really high we've got over you know coming close to i think last time i looked close to five

million people infected with this virus so let's all be thankful hopefully everyone

within the sound of my voice and my guitar is uh doing well

so jazz guitar so how you lay out the neck as a jazz

guitar player is kind of important and i'm gonna play a very basic basic

basic jazz guitar song um that everybody who's ever even

started to learn jazz guitar knows but i'm going to discuss some things

about my philosophy of using this song to teach and the song is autumn leaves and

we're going to play the real book key of e minor uh the relative major would

be g major rather than the g minor version which is commonly heard

relative major would be b-flat so i'm going to play this tune and i've i've got myself a little loop here where

i played some you know [Music]

walking bass lines and some chords to accompany myself with uh so i'm just gonna start the tune up

[Music]

do [Music]

mmm [Music]

do [Music]

so [Music]

foreign [Music]

so [Music]

do

[Music]

[Music]

okay so that was autumn leaves and i like to teach it in this in the

key of e minor because the relative major is g major now when i started jazz guitar i've been

playing rock guitar for a really long time and what i find is a lot of students

come from that background so uh in rock we play a lot of

minor in a lot of pentatonic minor in a lot of pentatonic scales and i think learning to play major

and it be effective is uh is is i think a really a really good

idea for jazz because um one thing i've always tried to avoid is

cheese you know i don't want to sound cheesy you know i think that there's a there's in playing which is playing the

the the notes without taking too many chances there and then there's outplaying where you

get to do some things that maybe sound a little more controversial okay

my opinion is you should learn how to play in and then learn how to take it out a little bit

so one thing about this tune is that it really stays very close to

the key except for a couple of little moments which are pretty teachable you know so

you can make little adjustments now

the way that the guitar is laid out it makes it a rather archaic instrument

you know and uh i love it but it's archaic okay which means you know you sit down

on a piano all your white keys are your natural keys all your black keys are your sharps

and flats on a guitar there's not a whole lot that's differentiating a sharp or flat from a natural note you

have to kind of learn those over time and so in the beginning of teaching jazz

guitar i try to make it as easy as i can for people to try to figure out where they are on the

instrument okay so the the most basic scale that we deal with in in all

of music is the major scale and you've heard it you know as what sound of music i think

right so on guitar we have a lot of repeated notes you know

if i wanted to play that g that first note okay

you know it's all over the place plus an open string so we've got gs all over the place same

thing with every other note in this scale the notes in the scale are g a b c d e

f sharp g so that key has one sharp f everything else is just a white key on

the piano just a natural note okay so in this area of the neck

it's played but look i got a lot more to go in that

in this part of the neck all right there's the second octave of

that scale and then if i want to just add a note that i can reach i can play an a okay so

g a b c d e f g a b c d e f sharp g a because i can reach it okay

now i'm going to play exactly the same notes that i just played there only this time i'm going to start at the

fifth fret i'm going to start on a g a now i'm going to start on the second note in this scale

a b c d e f g a b c d e f g a b c now there's a lot of different

ways you can figure this stuff instead of shifting position like i did you can see it there and then i had to shift back

you can stretch and that allows you to stay in position

it's just everybody's got a different fingering for scales okay and uh it's good to know

all of them you know some people that first skill where i'm doing this they're doing this

[Music] you know there's a lot of ways to do it

but for me those two scales are there now i start here at the seventh fret and

i play the same notes b and so this time i'm certain on the third note of the scale g a b b c d e g a b c d e

a b c d same notes different part of the neck [Music]

back where i started just an octave higher so what you end up with is kind of you know five positions

but they start to meld together after a while now in those five positions if we just

take the first note or should i say the first octave of every scale to

g a b c d e f g and use them all for a chord

whoops we get this

and we can do it in every scale [Music]

and the reason why i teach this stuff this way is because it allows the student to use

some basic chords and those root position in other words if it's a g major seven chord the g

is the lowest note a minor seven the a is the lowest note so i can also do those chords instead of

doing a position i can just kind of do it down a string g major a b

c d e getting hard f sharp

g now if i take that first scale again go to the first note that i find on the b string i get a

i'm sorry the a string i get a b note a minor seven c major seven d seven

[Music] and so on so what that means

is uh for that chord progression that we did the autumn leaves it goes a minor seven d7

g major seven c major seven f sharp minor seven flat five or half

diminished b7 e minor seven okay or e minor

that'll work okay that chord progression can be played inside of each one of

those scales okay so and it's just because we know we we need to learn how to play

all the common chords with a root on the e string a string d string this is how we start later on we get

into inversion and it's and we do the same thing with inversions we put those inside of the

scale but this is the basic way to get a student up and running quickly

so if i wanted to play that autumn leaves chord progression that i played in this part of the neck if i wanted to

do it down here it would be very similar it would just be [Music]

if i wanted to do it in the next scale

and the next scale

or uh e minor there it is okay so we can do it

[Music]

we can do it in every one of those skills so if i see an a minor 7 on a page

i've always got a scale i can play over it

not that you always want to play a scale but the right notes are generally going to be found in the in the scale

even if you don't think of them as the scale the reason why i lay the neck out like

this is the scale is kind of everything it's all the chords

it's all the arpeggios and it's all the scale so when i say arpeggio what i mean is if i take this g major chord

[Music] now we're playing what four five notes there

five notes but there's some repeats the g is repeated twice in that

particular form but it's really only a four note chord

now that arpeggio is straight from the scale

same and same note as the scale

it's all the same

[Music] and you can do it

you can do it in all the scale forms

okay so this the and it's only just a few forms it's it's a lot of repeated material things

that you can do so by the same token you saw me do the chords down the guitar

on the e string and down on the a string we can do it on

the d string as well we're going to get to the e the sixth note in the scale

and that kind of helps you to pull your scale together in a way that's going to be very useful

um quarterly with the arpeggios and with the scale forms themselves i

use this information to allow me to have melodic continuity

um so what i mean by that is that it allows me to not be stuck in

a box ever so i can start anywhere over this tune and end

anywhere and what i generally try to do is try to practice from one end to the guitar to the other

and try to make the melodic ideas make sense i had a student write me

about my video i did yesterday asking me if i sing the lines and yes

i do sing my lines in my head because i don't really think

you want to hear me sing them but all of this stuff that you translate

to the fingerboard allows you to use the force

and the force is just it allows you to quit thinking about technical things and it

allows you to start playing the guitar as if you're listening to someone else play the guitar and

whatever you want to hear come out you know now

um you can be chicken or egg about this thing in other words

you can come up with a lick and sing it and try to figure it out or you can try

to sing what you already know how to play but translating them through some sort

of framework on the fingerboard is going to allow you to to get a better grasp of the fingerboard and kind of

know where you are so over the first chord

so i kind of screwed that up [Music]

you start to know what's going to happen kind of no matter how you move your fingers

[Music]

right not a great singer but you get the [Music]

point so you start to be able to sing whatever

you want are playing or or maybe even come up with a line

that's that's you know you've never done before and it's just a matter of kind of

hearing tensions and being able to release that tension but i always go from i try to practice continuity

so i'm going to play that loop of the chord progression and i'm just going to kind of start high in that fifth scale form and then i'm

going to work my way uh backward towards the headstock and you can you can kind of see

what i'm trying to do and i'm trying to make my lines make sense together

you don't want to just have a no no you know just a bunch of notes you want to have some sort of

single quality and you want it to swing time-wise and that's another lesson but

but here we go

[Music]

so [Music]

you [Music]

so you get the point so we're trying to use those skills and we

can do the same thing with the chords i mean we can

now i'm going to go this way

[Music]

so all i'm doing is just i'm using the chords and the scales and the arpeggios

all at once to be able to go from one end to the neck to the other and once you get i drop my

pick down here into the abyss all right into the lava all right so once you get kind of

the idea of doing that it allows you to be really free on your instrument

and this freedom is what we're looking for that's the force that's when you start to just get an

idea of what's going to happen no matter what you do

do

so we have to play and we have to play the right stuff if you play these skills enough and you

play these chords enough and you just try to tie it all together using songs

uh basically you develop a sense of rightness in your playing where it becomes after a while more

difficult to play a right a wrong note than it is to play a right note so uh then and at that point you can

start working on the sounds of different scales that say maybe bend your ear a little

more like melodic minor

a little different right and then you know the for the first chord in that

it's got a sound to it kind of dark you know um but uh really interesting

uh one song that used this was uh uh what it's probably me by sting it was

on the soundtrack of a movie back in the 90s where you heard this uh here it is

uh that was like the first chord in the song and it really set up the darkness of the

of the tomb um so getting the sound of these different

um scales these different sounds getting them under your fingers you just stop having to think about

things the way that you do in the beginning um your musicianship is built in and

right now i'm trying to you know in my own personal journey to learn how to play the upright bass and

i'm trying to translate all that to the upright bass which is not for the faint of heart i'm

going to tell you it's it's a big instrument and

so if you have any more questions about anything that happened today if you have any questions about is as

far as the music uh if you have any questions about jazz guitar or jazz guitar lessons it could be

something as stupid as you know what are you playing through what what's your amp

what are your effects whatever what kind of guitar is that um just let me know i'm more than happy

to answer any questions send me a dm i do give private lessons and i do them

by facetime now and um so it's been pretty successful but i could

always use a few more because the gigs are not rushing back um so jamie slater signing off

and once again my heart goes out to the family and friends of shelley

noisette and to everyone who's lost someone from kobet

or recovering from coven and uh

we're gonna get through this just keep a smile on your face and trying to remember that to keep

going is why i'm starting to make videos again because after you make a few of them and you're

playing here by yourself and you you know the biggest part of jazz is the interaction

it really starts to get you feel like you're giving people diet

jazz to a degree but the instruction is still good and i'm gonna

keep trying to help anybody i can help to do that and hopefully things will come back

so thank you and take care jamie slater signing off and uh if

there's anything i could do to help you in your journey of music please let me know i'll do the best i can for you