|
Playing (from the Heart) Over Changes
Native flute players often like to hang out in one key. We might even be happy in one chord for a song, or a day, or even our whole playing career. G minor flute ... G minor chord, singing our heart song through our flute, and the music is sublime. We share this one-chord preference with a lot of other music genres and world music cultures - trance music, Kirtan singing, and many forms of East Indian music - many of which seem to focus on that sublime aspect. At the other end of the spectrum are genres such as Bebop that are constantly, almost frenetically, moving through chord changes. They zig, zag, and zing through major, minor, seventh, diminished, suspended, and augmented chord progressions, dazzling our senses into harmonic ecstasy. Most of our culture's music lies somewhere in between: moderately paced and (after a verse and chorus) fairly predictable chord changes. The songwriter's mantra: "Three Chords and the Truth" has been at the center of many of our culture's most popular music. When a Native flute player first encounters an accompanist - typically a guitar or keyboard player or a background track - we are often at a loss for how to handle playing over chord changes. From our listening experience we understand that melody somehow "tracks" those changes in harmony in a kind of symbiotic harmony-dance. But without any experience moving between chords on the flute, we have no idea how to handle "playing over changes". This article describes a very simple technique to achieve this symbiosis in harmony. It extends the idea of "playing from the heart" and "one-breath solos" to include chord changes, while avoiding the head-space music theory and charts that typically crop up in this area. The next History section describes how this technique developed. Feel free to skip it and go right to The Technique section that follows ...
History
I tried for about 10 years to facilitate "Playing over Changes" in flute workshops. Some sessions had moderate success. Most were abject disasters. Some of you reading this article were in those sessions, and I can almost see a smile on your face.
The general format was to work with a guitarist or keyboard player - Eric Miller, Dave Jorgensen, Adam Page, Peter Dubner, Ron Volkman, and many others - all outstanding accompanists and all very familiar with Native flutes. They would play a typical straightforward accompaniment chord progression and we would all try to identify (eyes closed) when each change in chord occurred. That typically worked well.
I would then proceed to derail the whole session by launching into music theory. The One, the Four, the Five, the Relative Major, the Major one step down from the Minor, the Circle of Fifths, and on and on and on down the Rabbit Hole. My early failures at verbal descriptions of music theory gave way to charts, tables, diagrams, slide shows, and finally videos. There was even a slide chart. These also failed miserably.
Then came Flute Haven 2013. We were near the end of yet another of these "going downhill" sessions. Amid the confused faces and head-scratching, long-timer participant Pat Kay asked:
Clint - how do YOU play over chord changes?
I was dumbfounded. Why hadn't I thought of this? I had played a concert the evening before - entirely improvised - and had never thought about music theory. But I also had never verbalized how I do improvise over chord changes ... so I just blurted out:
"I play any note I feel like and, if it sounds right, I hang out there. If it doesn't sound right, I move up or down one note. Both notes - one note up or one note down - will work harmonically. So it doesn't matter which way you go. And ... I've learned to use ornaments and effects to make it sound like that's what I had intended all along."
The group stared at me and someone asked "That's all you do?" I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach until someone in the back said "Cool!"
And then ... they all did it. Everyone seemed to get it. First time - first shot - all the way around the room, playing over a guitar who was now progressing through all kinds of wild chord changes. And it sounded great. We had come back to the home-place of this instrument - long tones, playing from the heart, ornaments, and listening.
The Technique
Here is a general outline for "Playing (from the Heart) Over Changes". You can customize it for your own personal use, one-on-one teaching, or facilitated group sessions.: 1. Listening Exercise: Identifying Chord Changes. You can do this with live or recorded music (such as the sample background tracks provided below). You can do this any time - even listening in your car. It's best to listen to music genres with occasional, clear chord changes such as most Country , Blues, 50's Rock, Western Pop, Acoustic Folk, and many others. The exercise is simple: nod your head at each chord change. At first it is reactive - recognizing that a change in harmony has happened. Then it becomes predictive - nodding right on the downbeat of an expected chord change. 2. Rhythm. Tap your foot slowly. Nod your head on every fourth foot-tap (every fourth "beat"). You can count "1 - 2 - 3 - 4 -" to yourself, but this isn't really needed since we can feel a four-beat so easily. 3. Four-beat Long Tones. Play long tones with full breath. (This was the subject of an earlier newsletter - see "One Breath Solos"). Play the long tones while tapping your foot. Every four beats, change your note to another random note. You don't need to take a breath between notes. Play as many four-beat notes as you reasonably can in one breath. 4. One-beat + Three-beat Long Tones. Instead of holding the same note for all four beats, play your random note for only the first beat. Then, after the first beat, move either one note up or one note down, and hold that note for beats 2, 3, and 4. 5. Combinations. Combine four-beat long tones with One-beat + Three-beat long tones. You can start alternating and then work towards doing one or the other, randomly, almost without thought as to when you hold your initial note for four beats or move up or down after the first beat. 6. With Accompaniment. Now play over a simple accompaniment that is in the key of your flute. "Simple" usually means that it has few chord changes and they change regularly. Background Tracks Here are some example tracks. These were developed on an iPad in Garage Band (on headphones while on an Amtrak train!) and recorded on the Recording Kiosks we now use at workshops. No processing or cleanup was done (since our computers are down), so they are a bit "raw" at the start and finish. They are MP3 files, so you can either play them by clicking on the links, or using Save-As to download the tracks. All tracks are licensed as CC-BY (Creative Commons - Attribution), so you can use them for any purpose (even commercial) but you need to credit Clint Goss: Playing (from the Heart) Over Changes in A Minor Playing (from the Heart) Over Changes in G Minor Playing (from the Heart) Over Changes in F# Minor First, get in sync with the rhythm. Then bring your flute up to tune with your breath pressure so that it is consonant ("in tune") with the backing track. On some flutes, this might take substantial breath pressure, so you might need to play surprisingly loudly. Now try the Combinations technique described above: Play a note and, if you like the combined sound, "hang out" there. If not, move up one note or down one note and "hang out" there. At the beginning, "hanging out" can be just a long tone. With more experience, and especially with different music styles, you can play around with ornaments and even little melodies centered on the "hanging out" note. Here is a track I did to demonstrate the technique. It's a bit rough since I was playing GarageBand and my flute at the same time and mixing it directly to the recording with no post-processing. The first 2 minutes are the "straight" technique and then I get a bit more experimental using some melody lines and ornamentation. By 3 minutes, it starts to feel (to me, at least) like a "real song". Clint Demo over G Minor backing track With experience, you will find that you will start hearing where the harmony is going. You will also start to bring in ornaments and transitions that create a complimentary melody over the chords. It will begin to sound like "everything is as it should be" ... and all done with no sheet music, no music theory, and from the heart.
|
