Some current Music Self-Improvement activities

I did not make any New Year's resolutions, but I do occasionally settle on particular topics to focus my music studies.

One of these is increasing my jazz vocabulary on electric violin. I've spent a tiny amount of time messing with some jazz licks on violin. The process of acquiring and absorbing jazz vocabulary is not a fast process for me by any means on the guitar or the piano. This process has been much, much slower on the violin and viola for me, due to the challenges imposed by learning how to use the bow - which has never been intuitive for me - and the fretless fingerboard. I finally bought a fretted electric violin late last year, which dramatically reduced the effort of locating notes in the fingerboard. This is really key because jazz vocabulary includes a lot of enclosures. I find chromatic phrasing like this to be particularly difficult to practice on fretless instruments.

One new activity I look forward to is learning Stuff Smith's After You've Gone solo, as transcribed and taught by Gabriel Bismut here:

I'm not sure if I'm going to bother working all the way up to the insane BPM that Stuff played the solo, but even practicing a few bars from the solo at a time to some kind of metronome should be very beneficial. I also started learning - on both violin and piano - the Clifford Brown solo on Sandu, which is mentioned here:

The solos mentioned in the video, including the Sandu one, appear in Soundslice form on this page on the Open Studio, which is really nice because fast passages are harder to learn than slower one. Soundslice's tools are easy to use to select a section of the solo to loop and reduce the playback speed of that loop so that it is easier to pick out the notes in faster passages.

Freddie The Freeloader is another of the 3 songs mentioned in the Easy Way To Get Good At Music video. Chris Haigh has a pretty good lesson video on how to play it - between his video and the Wynton Kelly Soundslice - we have more than enough information to play this tune and improvise on it.

I still like playing guitar and I'll continue to pick up one of my guitars from time to time. Lately, however, I've been spending more time with synthesizers and keyboards, so it just makes sense to improve my skills on the keys. During Black Friday sales, I purchased several piano courses from Open Studio Jazz, mostly the ones taught by Adam Maness, because I like his teaching style. A generous selection of lesson materials from Open Studio is available for free on their Youtube channel. However, I don't mind supporting them financially by purchasing their courses. Also their paid courses come with Soundslice-enabled features and I think extra PDF files. For now I'm working with the Jazz Chords for Beginners and Bebop Enclosuers for Beginners courses. My primary interest in playing piano/keyboards is improving my chord vocabulary, so the choice of the former was a no-brainer. As for the latter, I think it'll be good for improving my ability to play melodies on the keys, and should also help my violin playing as long as I also practice this stuff on the violin. Stuff Smith "After You've Gone" solo transcription and lesson I'm currently 10:42 into Bebop Enclosures, 9:43 into JCB Rooted 5-note Voicings Lesson 1