To start with, we did Dolphin dance, his mid tempo swing classic. This tune represents a challenge in makin coherent phrases through the rather challenging chord progressions and modulations. To assist me, I did a full transcription of the original solo of Hancock’s album Maiden voyage (1965). The learning experience of transcribing the piece was great, since I was able to reveal the link between the material of the phrases and the chord progressions.

Next, we did Maiden voyage from the same album. The choice was made to add modal jazz to the repertoire. I did not attempt at transcribing the original solo, but aimed throughout my own solo to sparsely implement the idea of playing outside my moving to levels thirds above the underlying chords. I will try to pick up ideas from some of Herbie’s solos on this tune at a later stage.

Thirdly, we did Chameleon from his album Headhunters (1973), to move to the electric funk area. As a fifth element in our quartet, we added my laptop running the synth bass riff of the opening part of the tune, triggered as a clip in Ableton Live.  This riff, I have captured from a bootleg recording  of Hancock and stripped down Headhunters band. It is actually a broadcast concert from the Ultrasonic studios in Hempstead, New York on October 1st 1973. As you can hear from the demo, some applause from audience is audible as part of the end of each cycle of the loop. I made 2 presets on my Yamaha S80 to resemble Hancock’s real Fender Rhodes piano. The first preset is a Rhodes patch with my footcontroller connected to the filter cutoff parameter, This way I can imitate Hancock’s wah-wah effect. For the solo part, on the chords Bbm7 - B/Db, I use the same S80 Rhodes patch with added delay and distortion.

We also taped One finger snap from his album Empyrean isles (1964).

The demos:

Demo recording of Dolphin dance

Demo recording of Maiden voyage

Demo recording of Chameleon

Below is my transcription: 

I will use digital tools in my attempt to learn to play the songs in a convincing style. One idea is to record the rehearsals and publish excerpts here in my blog. Hopefully, over time, this will document an improvment and stylistic developent of the band both in terms of comping and soloing. I will also explore how digital tools such as the applicationWavelab, or any other audio editor can be used as tool for transcribing the original music.

For preparations for rehearsals, I will use Ableton live, Cubase or Band in a box to create accompgnement for the selected songs. This will enable me to pratice in the right key, time and groove and to listen to my acheivements. I believe listening to one self is a majour source for learning.

At our first session, we quickly ran through Maiden Voyage, Speak like a child, Dolphin dance and One finger snap. In august we will make another demo featuring the four songs and a modern style tune where we will integrate digital music tools such as Ableton live running on a lap top. This is a requirement to play tunes from the albums like Diz is da drum. We will also consider playing the mega challenging Actual proof  from the album Thrust (1974). 

Maiden voyage – first attempt, recorded on Minidisk in Jan Tore Ness’ basement studio on June 16th 2009

Dolphin Dance – first attempt, recorded on Minidisk in Jan Tore Ness’ basement studio on June 16th 2009

footprints

Play rap!
 

Within the field of jazz and improvised music, music technology allows the musician to create a customised harmonic and rythmical musical setting. This may on one hand represent a “safe” rehearsal space as part of preparations for a live gig. It may also be particularly designed to targed standard concepts within jazz theory, such as leaning the standard key changes shuch as “Rythm changes, “Coltrane changes” og other standard progressions.

The music technology lets the learner practice in a customized musical settig and listen to what s/he just played. The possibility to use one’s own ears to jude and assess one’s owen musical performance is just one advantage which the music technology represents.

As an example I have recorded a few rounds of piano solos on the already made backing track. A musical challenge is to create more open tonal space in a tune which is composed only by using minor and major tridads with no references to jazz.

I opened up the character of the chords by suspending the thirds of all chords. By playing all chords as 11ths, I got the sound which I associate with 70s jazz rock idiom.

Chord progression is added to the movie in a separate overlay.

Go to church – piano solo!

In this video, I will step by step add different musical parts that belong in the arrangement of Ice Cube’s “Go to church”. The work is done within the environment of the popular sequencer program Steinberg Cubase which is linked to Propellerheads’ Reason.

The sound sources are software synthesizers, software samplers, hardware synthesizers and the recording of an acoustic melodica. The software instruments are triggered by an external synthesizer via MIDI, and what I record in Cubase is not the actual sound of the synthesizers, but the MIDI data. Examples of MIDI data are keystrokes, velocity and the use of pedal. Once MIDI data is recorded, I am able to change what software instrument the recorded musical phrases should be directed towards. I can change the timbre after the recording is done.

The recording of the melodica represents a different approach to digital recording. The melodica is recorded as audio on to the hard drive in the same fashion as if the hard drive were a tape deck.

If the video does not appear below, please click here!

Chorus of Ice Cube’s Go to church