Autumn Leaves and a beginner lesson on the song
At about 17 minutes in, I say the G is doubled...I meant F#.
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hello facebook this is jamie slater here uh i'm gonna play you some jazz guitar
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and then i'm gonna give you a little bit of a lesson uh about jazz guitar just i don't know
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maybe you can if you're looking for guitar lessons and perhaps uh you feel like what i'm teaching may
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be able to help you then you know we can uh please get in touch we can talk about it
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um if you notice i'm wearing black for the first time i'm wearing black
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um uh we've got a lot to kind of be thoughtful
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about aside from uh george floyd
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uh which way back when when all that first kind of went down uh
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during the blackout day i was gonna make a lesson and for some reason in my black shirt i just
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got sidetracked every possible which way i had problems with sound
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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
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and um then i got i started again and i got a
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phone call right in the middle of it that screwed it up then
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something happened there was some text alarms or something that went on i just had some issues that night but uh
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tonight i'm wearing black for a more personal reason a friend of mine from high school
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has passed away and she was 49 years old and um she had been battling cancer for
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the past few years and um i'll be 52 this year
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so and honestly i feel the same as i always have i feel the same as i did in my 20s
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and every time i look in the mirror i'm like oh it's my dad you know but
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[Music] yeah i remember her being a very kind person and uh very pleasant
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smart and cute good looking person and uh
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i'm not real close with her but i have friends on facebook in common with her that are
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close to her and so i want to send out condolences to her family
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uh today and um a third reason for my black shirt today
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is that we've had 1200 more kobe deaths which brings our total up to over 160
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000 people and our infection rate is uh still
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really high we've got over you know coming close to i think last time i looked close to five
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million people infected with this virus so let's all be thankful hopefully everyone
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within the sound of my voice and my guitar is uh doing well
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so jazz guitar so how you lay out the neck as a jazz
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guitar player is kind of important and i'm gonna play a very basic basic
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basic jazz guitar song um that everybody who's ever even
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started to learn jazz guitar knows but i'm going to discuss some things
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about my philosophy of using this song to teach and the song is autumn leaves and
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we're going to play the real book key of e minor uh the relative major would
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be g major rather than the g minor version which is commonly heard
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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
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i played some you know [Music]
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walking bass lines and some chords to accompany myself with uh so i'm just gonna start the tune up
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[Music]
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do [Music]
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mmm [Music]
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do [Music]
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so [Music]
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foreign [Music]
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so [Music]
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do
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[Music]
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[Music]
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okay so that was autumn leaves and i like to teach it in this in the
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key of e minor because the relative major is g major now when i started jazz guitar i've been
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playing rock guitar for a really long time and what i find is a lot of students
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come from that background so uh in rock we play a lot of
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minor in a lot of pentatonic minor in a lot of pentatonic scales and i think learning to play major
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and it be effective is uh is is i think a really a really good
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idea for jazz because um one thing i've always tried to avoid is
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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
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the the notes without taking too many chances there and then there's outplaying where you
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get to do some things that maybe sound a little more controversial okay
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my opinion is you should learn how to play in and then learn how to take it out a little bit
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so one thing about this tune is that it really stays very close to
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the key except for a couple of little moments which are pretty teachable you know so
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you can make little adjustments now
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the way that the guitar is laid out it makes it a rather archaic instrument
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you know and uh i love it but it's archaic okay which means you know you sit down
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on a piano all your white keys are your natural keys all your black keys are your sharps
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and flats on a guitar there's not a whole lot that's differentiating a sharp or flat from a natural note you
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have to kind of learn those over time and so in the beginning of teaching jazz
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guitar i try to make it as easy as i can for people to try to figure out where they are on the
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instrument okay so the the most basic scale that we deal with in in all
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of music is the major scale and you've heard it you know as what sound of music i think
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right so on guitar we have a lot of repeated notes you know
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if i wanted to play that g that first note okay
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you know it's all over the place plus an open string so we've got gs all over the place same
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thing with every other note in this scale the notes in the scale are g a b c d e
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f sharp g so that key has one sharp f everything else is just a white key on
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the piano just a natural note okay so in this area of the neck
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it's played but look i got a lot more to go in that
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in this part of the neck all right there's the second octave of
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that scale and then if i want to just add a note that i can reach i can play an a okay so
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g a b c d e f g a b c d e f sharp g a because i can reach it okay
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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
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fifth fret i'm going to start on a g a now i'm going to start on the second note in this scale
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a b c d e f g a b c d e f g a b c now there's a lot of different
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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
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you can stretch and that allows you to stay in position
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it's just everybody's got a different fingering for scales okay and uh it's good to know
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all of them you know some people that first skill where i'm doing this they're doing this
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[Music] you know there's a lot of ways to do it
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but for me those two scales are there now i start here at the seventh fret and
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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
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a b c d same notes different part of the neck [Music]
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back where i started just an octave higher so what you end up with is kind of you know five positions
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but they start to meld together after a while now in those five positions if we just
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take the first note or should i say the first octave of every scale to
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g a b c d e f g and use them all for a chord
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whoops we get this
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and we can do it in every scale [Music]
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and the reason why i teach this stuff this way is because it allows the student to use
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some basic chords and those root position in other words if it's a g major seven chord the g
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is the lowest note a minor seven the a is the lowest note so i can also do those chords instead of
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doing a position i can just kind of do it down a string g major a b
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c d e getting hard f sharp
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g now if i take that first scale again go to the first note that i find on the b string i get a
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i'm sorry the a string i get a b note a minor seven c major seven d seven
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[Music] and so on so what that means
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is uh for that chord progression that we did the autumn leaves it goes a minor seven d7
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g major seven c major seven f sharp minor seven flat five or half
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diminished b7 e minor seven okay or e minor
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that'll work okay that chord progression can be played inside of each one of
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those scales okay so and it's just because we know we we need to learn how to play
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all the common chords with a root on the e string a string d string this is how we start later on we get
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into inversion and it's and we do the same thing with inversions we put those inside of the
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scale but this is the basic way to get a student up and running quickly
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so if i wanted to play that autumn leaves chord progression that i played in this part of the neck if i wanted to
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do it down here it would be very similar it would just be [Music]
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if i wanted to do it in the next scale
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and the next scale
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or uh e minor there it is okay so we can do it
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[Music]
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we can do it in every one of those skills so if i see an a minor 7 on a page
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i've always got a scale i can play over it
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not that you always want to play a scale but the right notes are generally going to be found in the in the scale
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even if you don't think of them as the scale the reason why i lay the neck out like
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this is the scale is kind of everything it's all the chords
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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
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[Music] now we're playing what four five notes there
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five notes but there's some repeats the g is repeated twice in that
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particular form but it's really only a four note chord
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now that arpeggio is straight from the scale
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same and same note as the scale
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it's all the same
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[Music] and you can do it
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you can do it in all the scale forms
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okay so this the and it's only just a few forms it's it's a lot of repeated material things
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that you can do so by the same token you saw me do the chords down the guitar
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on the e string and down on the a string we can do it on
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the d string as well we're going to get to the e the sixth note in the scale
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and that kind of helps you to pull your scale together in a way that's going to be very useful
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um quarterly with the arpeggios and with the scale forms themselves i
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use this information to allow me to have melodic continuity
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um so what i mean by that is that it allows me to not be stuck in
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a box ever so i can start anywhere over this tune and end
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anywhere and what i generally try to do is try to practice from one end to the guitar to the other
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and try to make the melodic ideas make sense i had a student write me
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about my video i did yesterday asking me if i sing the lines and yes
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i do sing my lines in my head because i don't really think
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you want to hear me sing them but all of this stuff that you translate
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to the fingerboard allows you to use the force
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and the force is just it allows you to quit thinking about technical things and it
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allows you to start playing the guitar as if you're listening to someone else play the guitar and
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whatever you want to hear come out you know now
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um you can be chicken or egg about this thing in other words
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you can come up with a lick and sing it and try to figure it out or you can try
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to sing what you already know how to play but translating them through some sort
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of framework on the fingerboard is going to allow you to to get a better grasp of the fingerboard and kind of
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know where you are so over the first chord
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so i kind of screwed that up [Music]
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you start to know what's going to happen kind of no matter how you move your fingers
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[Music]
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right not a great singer but you get the [Music]
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point so you start to be able to sing whatever
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you want are playing or or maybe even come up with a line
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that's that's you know you've never done before and it's just a matter of kind of
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hearing tensions and being able to release that tension but i always go from i try to practice continuity
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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
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going to work my way uh backward towards the headstock and you can you can kind of see
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what i'm trying to do and i'm trying to make my lines make sense together
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you don't want to just have a no no you know just a bunch of notes you want to have some sort of
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single quality and you want it to swing time-wise and that's another lesson but
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but here we go
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[Music]
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so [Music]
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you [Music]
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so you get the point so we're trying to use those skills and we
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can do the same thing with the chords i mean we can
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now i'm going to go this way
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[Music]
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so all i'm doing is just i'm using the chords and the scales and the arpeggios
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all at once to be able to go from one end to the neck to the other and once you get i drop my
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pick down here into the abyss all right into the lava all right so once you get kind of
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the idea of doing that it allows you to be really free on your instrument
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and this freedom is what we're looking for that's the force that's when you start to just get an
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idea of what's going to happen no matter what you do
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do
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so we have to play and we have to play the right stuff if you play these skills enough and you
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play these chords enough and you just try to tie it all together using songs
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uh basically you develop a sense of rightness in your playing where it becomes after a while more
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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
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start working on the sounds of different scales that say maybe bend your ear a little
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more like melodic minor
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a little different right and then you know the for the first chord in that
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it's got a sound to it kind of dark you know um but uh really interesting
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uh one song that used this was uh uh what it's probably me by sting it was
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on the soundtrack of a movie back in the 90s where you heard this uh here it is
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uh that was like the first chord in the song and it really set up the darkness of the
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of the tomb um so getting the sound of these different
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um scales these different sounds getting them under your fingers you just stop having to think about
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things the way that you do in the beginning um your musicianship is built in and
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right now i'm trying to you know in my own personal journey to learn how to play the upright bass and
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i'm trying to translate all that to the upright bass which is not for the faint of heart i'm
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going to tell you it's it's a big instrument and
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so if you have any more questions about anything that happened today if you have any questions about is as
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far as the music uh if you have any questions about jazz guitar or jazz guitar lessons it could be
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something as stupid as you know what are you playing through what what's your amp
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what are your effects whatever what kind of guitar is that um just let me know i'm more than happy
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to answer any questions send me a dm i do give private lessons and i do them
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by facetime now and um so it's been pretty successful but i could
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always use a few more because the gigs are not rushing back um so jamie slater signing off
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and once again my heart goes out to the family and friends of shelley
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noisette and to everyone who's lost someone from kobet
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or recovering from coven and uh
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we're gonna get through this just keep a smile on your face and trying to remember that to keep
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going is why i'm starting to make videos again because after you make a few of them and you're
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playing here by yourself and you you know the biggest part of jazz is the interaction
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it really starts to get you feel like you're giving people diet
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jazz to a degree but the instruction is still good and i'm gonna
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keep trying to help anybody i can help to do that and hopefully things will come back
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so thank you and take care jamie slater signing off and uh if
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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
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