Group 1

Andy Miles I know what you mean. How to eat an elephant, ha! I followed Jeremy's advice and focused this morning on learning the chord progression in only Eb major and C minor. I then ventured into transposing them into all 12 major and minor keys and my brain froze at Fm and Bm. So, tomorrow, another day. He did say that we should spend 3 days just putzing about with the chord progression in order to drill it into our brains. I take comfort in this.

Adena Franz Brain ache, yes Just finished running the major sequence through all keys and started working on the minor.

Douglas McCarthy I'm a flute player too.  The greatest difficulty for me is separating out different actions in each hand simultaneously.  I have to play really slowly initially to ensure that I have the correct patterns. I think it's the problem of all single-note musicians.  We are so used to using all our fingers to make one note, in addition to embouchure, tonguing and breathing, albeit sometimes the fingers are going in opposite directions in each hand.   

Michael Furmaniak Hi Michael I have signed up and started working on the progressions slowly. I am find things a bit challenging too. It would be a shame to walk away when this could be an ideal time to challenge yourself and stretch and develop upon something you didn’t previously get.

‘Secondary dominants are not hard to put your head around just depends on how you think about them.

So I sometimes think about it like this.

Look at the progression and work backwards. Notice it finished on the One - the root. How did it get to the One? Usually by a cadence from the Five or maybe a plagal cadence from the Four.

so in C the C is One and the Five is G. Hence you can bet the last two bars will be G to C - V to I.

The cadence naturally wants to move to the one. But how do you get to that five (G). What if you would like to move neatly to it by another cadence? Well you can. Ask yourself what is the five of G that will be D. Therefore D is the Five of Five giving you a nice transition D to G to C or in this case  V/V - V - I.

So a subdominant is simply a way to cadence to any note using it’s own dominant. 
 

I am not a teacher so that may be a bit waffling but I hope it helps and you choose to stay and expand your horizons.

Good luck,

Steve

Steve Thank you very much Steve. You explained it very well - much better than what I found on the Internet ). I was not sure why this relatively uncommon progression was used for the improvisation lessons - that was what I really meant to say.

Thank you again,

Michael

Michael Furmaniak Here's a PDF I made (just the skeletal version to go with the lecture.... I need to expand it a bit and will repost). In case it is helpful. 

David Thank you very much!!! It is indeed very helpful. I appreciate your work on this.

Michael

David This pdf is most helpful for this intensive and also for building visual recognition of chords for sight readers. Thank you!
Are you working with Musescore?

Michael Furmaniak Here's an updated version in case my notes are helpful (music written with Musescore as best as I know how ). I made my best attempt to be faithful to the Siskind's excellent presentation, but as a novice, know I missed the spirit of several aspects (and perhaps writing too much out is already making too explicit a class on improvisation?)

Adena Franz Musescore version 4 (I'm just learning)

David Your work so valuable and helpful for the group. It should have been done by Tonebase team but you did it much better anyway!

Thank you so much!

Michael

David Excellent!! Superb!

David Thank you David.  Much appreciated.  Would you mind saying what software you used to do this?  My plan is to work through the exercises without a score but your score will be very useful for checking my attempts/

Michael Furmaniak Don't be disappointed.  It's part of the 'plan', surely.  Jeremy's approach prompts the student to dig deeper to discover for oneself, which may make the content more understandable in the long term. 

Also, my observation [check out on Youtube] is that all jazz teachers use theory combined with practice all the time, whereas the theory often comes much later for classical pianists.  This can be daunting at first.  Just take a step at a time.  There are exercises to do that go all around the circle of fifths using secondary dominants. 

You don't have to know that you are playing a secondary dominant when they appear in a piece but I think Jeremy is encouraging us to think where we would take the harmony if we want to move away from the home key - without seeing it in a score.    

David Thanks

Roy James-Pike I think that I understand these issues. I just hoped that (Jeremy said that it was not jazz approach to improvisation) it would be more melody oriented (in ballad style). I tried to learn jazz (I even signed up for a jazz course at a college) - I gave up after a couple of months or so. To be blunt - I tried quite hard but it ended up in failure.

I think that the biggest reason that some classically trained pianists find it difficult to learn jazz is that jazz teachers never give a straightforward answer to questions and just insist on “listening to jazz” and trying. In addition there is the additional need to relearn some theory.