Reading Music

All right! You finally got your new Stick and you've been wood-shedding for a month. Probably not ready for a world tour or even a local open-mic. But you are definitely ready to accept an invitation to a casual jam with friends. One problem though. you don't know how to jam. Let's see if we can fix that. Download the following files.

StaffTab: boogie.pdf

MP3: boogie.mp3

One of the most fundamental song forms is the I-IV-V7 progression. When thoughtfully arranged, we have the simplest form of the 12 bar blues (conceived by some rocket scientist, I'm sure). The 12 bars (or measures) are arranged like this: 4 bars of the tonic (I), 2 bars of the subdominant (IV), 2 bars of the tonic (I) again, 1 bar of the dominant (V), 1 bar of the subdominant (IV), and 2 bars of the tonic (I) again. For our lesson, the tonic will be 'C'.

Now, there are thousands of songs written in this form and all of them have a definite beginning and ending. However, what you need to know is that during your first jam session - this progression has one certain beginning and three possible endings.

When jammin', the beginning usually starts with someone initiating the key and the groove. Then everyone else hops on and the evolution takes off. The 12 bars are repeated endlessly until one of three things happen.

1.. Someone gets tired of playing and stops, and then everything falls apart.
2.. One or two players get lost in the tune and everything stops abruptly.
3.. The players communicate to each other that they will end on the 12th bar of the current cycle.

With the Stick, you will probably be responsible for anchoring the groove with a competent bass line. Study the "Boogie Woogie" notation to get familiar with the pattern. This bass line is one of many typical lines used in boogie-woogie styled tunes. Once you are comfortable working the line and progression, transpose to different keys. You will eventually need to be able to play in any key. Two reasons - you don't want similar songs and jams to sound the same and you shouldn't always expect other players to concede to your deficiencies.

The sheet-music shows a simple RH comping rhythm that correlates with the first 12 bars of the audio. In the audio, I play other RH rhythms for the remainder of the tune. After a short while, you should be able to mix up your RH rhythms to suit the jam.

Chris

www.ChrisCrain.com