So, I continue my efforts on being able to produce something worth listening to…I know my wife would greatly appreciate it
Because of my current lack of theory knowledge and soon-to-shed over-reliance on transcripts, I am plagued by dead spaces in my playing. I have uploaded here my attempts at making My Foolish Heart have less dead spaces by re-arpeggiating over the chords just played. I am interested on your take on this “strategy”…can it be used as part of a bag of goodies or am I using it excessively which may lead me astray from better paths?
Here is the upload:
Feedback from anyone is welcome. (Please ignore the obvious tempo issues…still very much a newbie overall.)
Thanks for sharing the snippet of your playing. It sounds like the chord changes and the melody are becoming comfortable for you. Keep revisiting it each day and cycling around the form and the chords and melody gradually become more intuitive to play.
Yes arpeggios are a very useful tool when creating fills. I’d say it’s important to have variety in our fills so that we don’t use the same fill style every time the melody or harmony rests.
That said, when starting out with jazz piano or practicing a new concept like you are doing here, it’s a good idea to try to apply the fill throughout the song. This is great for practicing the fill technique and understanding how it can be applied over different chord chord types and in different harmonic situations.
During performance I’d say it’s better to have more variety, but for practice time it makes sense to set yourself a challenge of say “apply arpeggio fills throughout My Foolish Heart”.
Here are some other ideas for filling in the space:
Melodic embellishment such as adding grace notes and turns are very effective to personalise a melody. I demonstrate some of these embellishment techniques in the final beginner lesson on “My Foolish Heart” (see the 5th chapter).
Rephrasing the melody is one of the main ways that we can personalise a jazz standard. If you take a listen to the songs in the playlist below (there are 18 versions of “My Foolish Heart”) you will hear that each musician phrases and embellishes the melody differently.
Choose the recording(s) that you personally like best and try to emulate the phrasing, fill techniques, and the melodic embellishments.
Inner voice movement is also a useful tool. This involves moving notes by half steps (usually the internal notes of the chord). This often creates a little more dissonance and tension than arpeggios. Here’s a short lesson on that technique where I give examples and apply to jazz standards:
Finally chromatic passing chords are very useful as a harmonic fill. We can do this to balance melodic fills (arpeggio based for example) with harmonic fills where the fill is adding an additional chord instead of something melodic. Here is a lesson on chromatic passing chords:
I hope that helps Nivaldo - remember that listening and emulating our favourite recordings is the best way to develop ideas for fills and melodic embellishments and so check out the playlist I shared above.
Huge help @Hayden ! So many varied and yet quite relevant aspects to take in…encouraging and challenging at the same time…perfect…thanks for taking the time…I’m always quite moved by your gracious disposition!!
