Jazz Festivals » Music Genres

Jazz Blues Guitar Lessons

admin2 — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:33:59 +0000

The histories of jazz and blues have a lot in common. Both originated in the African-American communities at the beginning of the 20th century in the southern United States. Since then both evolved in similar manner developing with the music facilities and interactions with other art forms. Both are expressive music genres and focus on life processes and experiences. In terms of musical structure, jazz has significantly borrowed from the blues. The blues chord progressions have acted as a dominant platform for a lot of jazz improvisation. So, if you have developed curiosity to find out how the two relate musically, going for jazz blues guitar lessons will be great.

The understanding of jazz becomes significantly easier if one learns the basics of blues first. Two most commonly used scales in the blues music are the pentatonic scale and the Mixolydian scale – with the added blues notes. When someone refers to the blues scale, it normally means the pentatonic minor scale with a b5 (or blues) note. It is this blues note that creates a certain tension, which provides the “blues” touch the music.

Mastering these scales will prepare you to understand the foundations of jazz in a better way. The first step towards learning jazz will be to learn some new chords. The most common chords in jazz are the seventh chords rather than the basic minor or major chords. You will need to develop command over the five basic types of the seventh chords. Your jazz blues guitar lessons will teach you how to master them.

For playing solos, the basic guitar techniques are hammer-ons and pull-offs, bending strings, palm muting, etc. For jazz blues music, you will also learn how to mix scales; for example, the Mixolydian scale with the blues scale.

Practically all jazz guitarists have some blues in their repertoire. Over the period of time, many different sets of blues progressions have evolved – from the original blues to the modern variants such as bebop and Coltrane blues changes. Listening to both blues and jazz from different periods can provide you valuable insight about how artists have been improvising. This will also motivate you to think in terms of various elements of music and to use them to create good music.

The jazz blues interface offers you a tremendous opportunity to test your musical creativity. It also offers you a great channel to vent your feelings and emotions in melodious ways.

By: Paul Gian

Jazz Electro Songs and Where to Find Electro Songs

admin2 — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:07:47 +0000

Music is a very diverse sphere of specialization that has a lot of youths and adults crying and begging for stardom. There is just something about music and celebrity status that is so intertwined that they two are historically inseparable. Anyway, for anyone intending to have a career in electro music listening to it is fundamental. This article will guide you on how to find electro songs.

Before you go as far as searching for electro music you must have at least figured out what sort of electro music you want to specialize in. This is very important because any musician must at least have an image before he/she has a large following. It also gives you a harder grip on your chosen field of specialization that will definitely help propel you forward.

Generally there are a lot of music stores around. But it is very rare to come across a music store that deals specifically with electro music, even though there are quite a few of them in major cities. A store specifically selling this music definitely gives you the best of what exists instead of the surface coverage of music genres that general music stores give.

The internet is a place where you can get a lot of music, sometimes without even having to pay for it. Go online and surf through the internet to see if you can find a few websites dealing with electro songs. Use the Google search engine to navigate through the different websites as this works better than most. If you do have the right amount of money you can pay for the songs but there really is no need.

A lot of websites on the internet give away free content. It is these websites you should actually work with since they give you time to build up the right financial resources. And sometimes buying original CDs is way better than actually downloading products that could be infested with deadly viruses.

If all these different resource bases do not give you satisfaction I suggest that you find a few electro bands in your town or city. Generally musicians that specialize in certain genres of music normally have catalogues and catalogues of it.

Finding electro songs is not difficult at all if you have the right mind to do it. But if you give up too early on you are going to go nowhere.

By: Kobie Okoma

Finding Obscure Indie Music Online

admin2 — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:30:54 +0000

Have you ever had the classic experience with a close friend who tells you about a great song and is very confident that you will love it just as much as he or she does? Upon listening to it, you begin to question the trust you have in them, and no longer have faith in their musical opinions. I’ve had this experience one too many times and I say let modern technology succeed where friends have failed!

Finding Music Online

There are several online resources available which are much more intuitive than a friend, and can “learn” your music preferences and make suggestions for new music suited to your tastes. These suggestions are tailored to your musical preference history and are pulled from some of the world’s largest online collections of tagged music. Radio stations almost always have to play corporate-backed bands with label restrictions, which makes them a bad avenue to find more obscure music.

Online sources are you best bet for finding the best music available. Pulling from a huge compilation of online music, you have access to tons of new music in the genres you want and based on your listening history rather than getting a random suggestion from some weird friend who has an obsession with a local Rush tribute band who couldn’t hit the right notes even if they were sober. The music-bots are smarter than your friends, and have a slightly different learning capacity. Looking for indie music? Up and coming local and underground musicians get suggested and listed every day and with good ratings from other users, you can use these tools to be introduced to bands and musicians through a new avenue.

What Are My Options?

Pandora is a free online radio project that generates music suggestions based on a profile you create, where you list your favorite artists and genres. Pandora uses a comprehensive database known as the Music Genome Project, to find and match user music preferences with related music. Just go to http://www.pandora.com, create a profile, and start listening.

Last.fm also has a unique way of gathering preferences to suggest new music to a listener. Users download a plug-in application that will make suggestions based on your listening history. It keeps track of the music you listen to (your current favorite artists) in a process called “scrobbling” and creates your individual music profile based off of that information. The profile is then compared with the music listening history of millions of other Last.fm users to find listeners with similar tastes, and suggestions for new artists and bands are given based off of that comparison. Last.fm already has over 15 million+ active users to base suggestions from. Visit http://www.last.fm and let them expose you to the best new music.

Yahoo!’s LAUNCHcast has a similar structure to Last.fm, but lacks a comprehensive music profile list because it has a smaller network of users. LAUNCHcast also seems to offer a more limited library, with more mainstream music than Last.fm does. This seems quite similar to the way that corporate-owned radio stations provide music.

Another resource features unsigned or independent artists that would not be able to reach their potential fan base unless they ended up getting a major record deal and/or corporate sponsorship. Try Pure Volume to get into the online indie scene and of course, MySpace always works too.

Most of these sites also make it very easy to purchase your recently discovered music once you decide you like it, so you can add it to your ever-growing collection of music and turn it up!

By: Jon Sheppard

African American Music: Big Band Jazz Music

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:00:30 +0000

Jazz is the form of music, which has been getting bigger since its inception and Big Band, is a music ensemble, linked with jazz and developed over thirty years. The specialty of Big Band Jazz Music is its feet tapping rhythm, conducive to excite your heart beat. Jazz, Hip Hop, Rap, Soul, Funk, Rhythm and Blues fit in the famous music genres belonging to music umbrella of African Americans, with talented artists expressing themselves. Using their music heritage, they communicated their culture and the American Spirit

African American music based steeply on accent, as well as rhythm that fluctuates in relation with one another revolutionized the European music, which had been deeply rooted on melody. Big Band Jazz Music developed as a result of this merger in around 1898 leading to loose-structured, but unusual rendering of music that was all the rage using different distinctive playing techniques.

Big Band comprise of about 12-25 musicians. The rhythmic “call and response” of jazz music are made into rich music with its rhythmic segment including banjo, bass, vibes and piano, saxophones, trombones and trumpets.

Tools for Teaching Jazz

Teaching jazz is said to be among the most potent methods for learning it. The approach is to reduce fundamental principles to bare bones and teach it without adopting jargon usage. Inventing creative analogies that you come upon everyday is something jazz students can comprehend. This teaching process will aid in getting a deeper perception about intricacies of the subject and stay focused.

It assists in intensifying the comprehension of various aspects (for instance finger style, chords, scales, strumming, rhythms, slides, arpeggios) and numerous concepts and various techniques in Jazz making it much easier for students to pick it up.

Jazz Play Alongs

For jazz music lovers, even a musical idea implementation has got far reaching effect and makes them feel like in a groove. Now days, there are more and more Jazz Play Alongs like books, sheet music like guitar and piano sheet music, guitar scales, as well as tablature, songs sung by some popular artists and CDs with live band, where you get to play along to finish the music piece.

By: Anirban Bhattacharya

Jazz – the Music That Captivates Your Heart

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:16:06 +0000

Jazz is one of the most popular music genres and has its own exclusive style and theme, thereby attracting the attention of millions of true fans. If you fall under the same category of jazz enthusiasts and want to learn this mesmerizing form of music, then here is the chance to fulfill your wish.

Internet has emerged as a useful tool through which you can learn as well as practice jazz music in all forms, including piano, guitar and drums. The online jazz schools train interested people in a systemic manner so that they can have good hold over playing different kinds of musical instruments for playing jazz music.

The best part of these online jazz schools is that you can get well acquainted with intermediate jazz tools. These tools are specially designed for students learning jazz. Under them, you can interact with the trainers in order to learn concepts and basics of jazz. This in turn, will help you in solving all the queries and difficulty that you might face while playing the musical instruments.

The most popular jazz practice tool is jazz midi files as you can learn in depth about the essence of this mesmerizing music. This is regarded as one of the best tools for teaching jazz where you can learn scales, both high and low keys and gain mastery over them.

The best part of about this jazz practice tool is that you can learn even the digital format for free. This is because jazz midi files can be downloaded in your computer and after that you can use this software to your heart’s content. You can learn as well as practice musical notes of jazz. Another major advantage of downloading is that you can even record it in your music system and practice unabatedly. As far as the privilege of enjoyment is concerned, you can play them in parties and dance to its tunes.

After learning the basic concepts, you can also learn all the jazz improvisations in order to play all the fine tunes without any hassles. So, use the jazz practice tool and become a master of your favorite music genre jazz by learning from world popular gurus within short span of time.

By: Akhila Choudhary

Jazz Guitar Tips and Tricks – Learning Jazz Guitar Playing

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:22:09 +0000

Jazz is more complicated than any other music genres as far as playing guitar is concerned. But there are a lot of jazz guitar tips and tricks that you can use to make it easier for you and to help you become a better jazz player and a well-rounded guitarist.

At the top of the list of the important jazz guitar tips is knowing your scales and modes. Internalizing jazz guitar scales is considered to be one of the most challenging part of learning to play jazz because of the many scales to be learned and mastered. These scales provide the basis for the improvisational sound of jazz music.

When it comes to modes, it becomes confusing because many guitar players call modes as scales. Technically, a mode is a scale but modes are used by many musicians to open doors to new sounds. Jazz players rely on the major and minor modes in setting the tone of their music. They use these to get the great flavors of music out of the scales aside from just using the full neck of their jazz guitars.

Other important jazz guitar tips include eliminating the feedback produced by the guitar, using a software to practice improvisation, and using a metronome in your practice to achieve good timing.

In learning to play jazz guitar, you should also learn and memorize the lyrics to help you recall the music better. Recording yourself will also give you a clear picture of how does your guitar playing sound.

And of course, you cannot play jazz guitar better if your guitar itself is not in a good condition. Before starting to play, check first if it needs some tweaking. You will know if it needs a tune-up when it begins to feel tiring to play.

The basic adjustments you need to do are in the truss rod, the bridge, height of the pickups and intonation. To ensure that the strings are on the proper height, you have to regulate the nut. Examine also the high and low frets and level them as needed.

In adjusting the intonation, do it in small increments and consider your ear’s accuracy in deciding the pitch between two notes. For more accurate results, use a highly accurate tuner with analog-style needle display.

Other helpful jazz guitar tips that will bring your performance to the highest level are ensuring the proper location of your guitar and your hands. The strap of your guitar should lift the instrument up to about midway on your chest. It will feel tighter but will give your left hand more mobility. Your right hand should not also exert much effort in picking out the notes.

To sum it up, you should be familiar with the important components of learning jazz guitar which include effective scale usage, harmonization, rhythm, melody and jazz chord improvisation.

Also, learning jazz guitar requires an astonishing skill that you can’t develop by just relying on your music sheets or music teachers alone, so keep in mind to practice and persevere.

By: Carolyn Anderson