recently my teacher has got me working on an exercise which is objectively, and i can't stress this enough, not difficult. at face value, at least. however, holy shit i am struggling to get through one cycle. the concept is simple enough, play this thing and then move it down a whole step. run through all twelve keys. okay, sure... play the thing, move it down a whole step, repeat, move up when you run out of neck, gotcha, can do. can not do. fuuuu...
okay, let me elaborate. the premise is simple enough, working within a ii-V-I the idea is to say, connect all the 3rds. which takes some work but is achievable in relatively short order. i've run through the 3rds, 5ths, and 7ths, for the past few months and i feel like i have a good enough handle on them. oh wait. that's just major. minor, has been a total slog. even after having to turn the BPM way down there is a bottleneck somewhere in my thinkybits that getting through one key is a challenge. visually i'm disoriented, sonically the harmony sounds strange, the intervals played against the harmony sound foreign and i'm trying to speak the names of the chords as i play. yikes.
i said all this to my teacher and he's like yeah, for some reason minor is a thorn in everyone's side. well that makes me feel better for sure because my goodness i feel like i'm at day one when working with this stuff.
so here's my takeaway, this is a thing that is requiring an inordinate amount of time and thought and focus to get worked out so it is clearly a blind spot for me and likely a lot of other people too. this is a thing that is very much "doing the work" and the payoff will be substantial. it's hard and frustrating and humbling and at times just straight up infuriating. i've already seen the slightest improvement... and i mean slight, but it's there.
side note: recently i feel like things have bumped up a notch. i've been very focused on the fundamentals of walking based on quarter notes. i've been living quarter notes for the past year and and a half. every day. well i was listening to a version of autumn leaves that's a bit slower than i normally play it and the bassist was playing half notes and i was like hello, what's all this about? so when i got home from work i queued up the version of autumn leaves i have programmed in reaper for practice and got to work. well, dang... half notes are the shit. me in all my tunnel-visioned focus have completely ignored everything else. that's a very me thing to do.
well, what i noticed while playing is 1: it sounded WAY more appropriate than what i've been playing right along. way more laid back, fits the vibe of the tune, a more tasteful way to play it for sure. and 2: having done (doing) the work of learning walking using quarter notes i just cut my bandwidth in HALF. suddenly i was playing along and able to very effortlessly add some flavors and flare that i just wasn't able to do with sticking to quarters. toss in some skips here and there it emphasize the swing, occasionally do a quarter note run leading into another section, or whatever i felt like in that instant. this was a bigtime payoff. i felt like i was playing the song and not strictly doing my duty to outline the harmony blah blah. it was fun. this is exactly what i intended to do when i began taking lessons... learn the instrument, be able to know what i was doing, do it, have fun.
