Townes Van Zandt “Dead Flowers” – Video + TAB + Music Notation
One of the best ways to learn how to improvise is to start by transcribing solos. Learning by ear is the preferred method, and while it is not necessary to actually write down the solo with rhythmic notation that helps as well. It can be a painstaking process, but it will strengthen your rhythmic foundation and give you greater insight into the creative choices the soloist makes.
A student of mine came to a lesson several months ago wanting to learn ‘Dead Flowers’ by Townes Van Zandt. Originally performed by The Rolling Stones, the TVZ version is a whole step lower in the key of C and fully acoustic. It is hard at times to tell the guitars apart, but I managed to pick out the notes for the solo and transcribed them in the video below. You can also click here for the transcription on Soundslice. There are some great double-stops, slides, cross-picking, and rhythmic variety throughout.
I have just added some office hours on Tuesdays from 4-7 pm to catch up with all of you Guitar Shedders. With my teaching schedule, I don’t always have time to check in with our students and I really enjoy hearing what you are working on. These office hours are an opportunity to talk about your lessons and experience at Guitar Shed. All feedback is welcome and you can register (free of charge) in the student portal.
We get lots of questions about using the Student Portal. Maybe you have never logged in before or misplaced your login information. We can help with that! We can resend your login info and give you a quick tutorial at the Shed on how to use the portal. Read on for all of the things you can do. Jump on in, the water is fine!
What should I use the student portal for? Good question! The student portal is our central hub of communication for everything related to Guitar Shed. Current students are able to sign in and do the following things:
Sign up for performances (student showcases and recitals). Our showcases and recitals are based on availability and fill up quickly. To sign up, just click on the date and click “Register.”
Cancel lessons. When you cancel a lesson in the student portal with at least 24 hrs. you will be automatically issued a makeup credit. This is also the quickest way to cancel within 24 hrs. and notify your teacher. If you cancel within 24 hrs. you will not receive a makeup credit. The student portal is best used for canceling lessons in the current month. We ask that you email us if you would like to remove a lesson from a future invoice so you are not issued a makeup credit.
Reschedule lessons. If you have a makeup credit, you can register for a makeup lesson by viewing the calendar and clicking “Register” on an available time slot.
View teacher availability. Interested in switching lesson times permanently? You can view your teacher’s current availability and let us know if you’d like to make the switch.
Log practice time. This is a great place to keep track of your practice habits and share them with your teacher.
View billing history. You can view past and future payments and update payment information easily. Click on “Account and Invoices” or go to “Settings” to update your payment info.
View teacher contact information. Need to reach your teacher directly? Click on “Studio Info” to view their contact information.
Download stuff! Visit our “Online Resources” to view a number of charts, mp3s, and teaching materials. You can also view past lesson notes and repertoire in the corresponding sections.
It has been a busy month at Guitar Shed and we are looking forward to our upcoming Winter Recitals! Our Kids Winter Recital on 12/9 is full, but pleaseemail usif you would like to be added to the waiting list. The Teens and Adults Recital on 1/13 is filling up fast, so make sure to register in the student portal to guarantee your spot. Tickets are now on sale for both events. We encourage all of our students and families to attend, even if you are not performing. We would love to see you there!
We’ve got a specialGuitar 101 workshop this Saturdayfrom Brandon Marsolo. Great for all of the beginning guitarists out there! Also, Halloween is just around the corner and if you wear your costume to your lesson you get one of our cool new Guitar Shed holographic stickers!
Some of you may have noticed our new “Birthday Board” in the lobby. We have two teacher birthday’s coming up this week! Nichelle’s birthday is on Tuesday and Brandon’s is on Friday. Make sure to wish (or sing) them Happy Birthday!
Let’s face it, middle school is tough even for the most well-adjusted emotionally intelligent pre-teen. It is a time of transition, where kids are taking on more responsibility, a busier workload, balancing a busy schedule and trying to fit in. No they are not kids any more, but not young adults either. Tweens are certainly in between. After talking with some of our parents, I got the sense that several of our middle schoolers were having a tough time adjusting to the new school year. Especially our girls. And our girls are awesome, they play every instrument at Guitar Shed and they continue to impress me with their creativity and work ethic. I spoke with my wife, and she immediately said “Why don’t you do a girls night?!” (whenever she is in need of some friendship a “Girls Night” always does the trick…and gives me an opportunity for some alone time). I said, “great idea” and “Girls Night” was born! This will be a time for girls age 10-16 to let loose and have some fun with fellow Guitar Shedders. This a free event with pizza and karaoke. Nichelle will be in charge of the karaoke and you’ll get to hear her belt out some great tunes as well. Trust me, she can SING! Space is limited, so email us or RSVP in the student portal to guarantee your spot. Girls are also welcome to bring a friend.
Looking ahead, we’ve got a busy fall at Guitar Shed with several great events coming up. This year is the first year we will be participating in Oakhurst Porchfest with both our Teen and Adult Bands performing. Brandon is teaching a Guitar 101 Workshop in late October and we have just announced our Winter Recital Dates!
Signup begins for the Kids Recital (only open to ages 12 and under) on October 1st in the Student Portal. This recital is limited to 70 performers, so make sure to signup early to guarantee a spot! Let us know if you need us to resend your login information or if you have any other recital questions. We are very excited to be back at City Winery and looking forward to having our Teens and Adults Recital at Venkman’s as well in January!
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Our Fall Student Showcase is Saturday, September 15th at The Pullman from 2:00-4:00 pm. Registration is limited to 30 students and you can sign up in our student portal. This is what we like to call an “informal” performance opportunity, (performances that don’t include a big stage and a big audience). Other informal performance opportunities could include playing for your friends and family, at an open mic, in a song circle, at a campground of a music festival or for your significant other. With each performance, our hope is that students become more comfortable playing music in front of an audience. This is also a great platform to test out new material that you have been working on.
Scheduling performances give you a concrete timeline and goal to work towards. This time of year, students and parents are working on getting into a new groove and establishing a practice routine. I recently listened to an interview with Yo Yo Ma on NPR about the value of incremental practice. He describes how he has been playing the Bach Cello Suites since day one (his first lesson when he was 4 years old). Not that practicing is akin to homework, but he does mention that there are days that the homework is a bit harder and days when it is easier. I encourage you (and your children) to establish a practice routine with the new school year that is realistic and works well with your schedule. I don’t like to quantify practice sessions, but playing your instrument several times a week is a good goal!
With much of our lives focused on instant feedback, whether it is getting instagram likes, taking a test at school, playing a video game, there are fewer and fewer meaningful long term goals that we have to work towards. Playing music is a lifelong pursuit and I am still playing the same songs that I played when starting out, Twinkle, Oh Susanna, When the Saints Go Marching In, and other folks songs. Not only am I still playing these songs, but I am still learning them. Learning how to interpret them in different ways, learning how to teach them and learning the history of them. Have you ever read a book as a child and then re-read it again as a teenager and then as an adult? Even though it is the same book, your relationship with it and interpretation changes with each read.
Children are always modeling the environment around them, so next time you tell your kid to practice… pick up a book, pick up an instrument, paint a painting, write in your journal, build something, or cook a meal… use that time do something for yourself as well. Go forth and create!
Parker is teaching a Guitar Workshop on Saturday, March 31st from 10:00-11:30 am. The workshop is titled “Exploring the Fretboard” and is great for intermediate to advanced teens and adults.
This session will focus on how to use five open chord shapes to map out the entire fretboard using the CAGED system. This chord based approach to soloing is helpful for the beginning to advanced improviser. If you are tired of playing the same licks or if you are looking to improvise for the first time, this is a great opportunity to learn among fellow Guitar Shedders.
Differences between harmonic concepts, practice techniques and ear training will be discussed. Below are the details…
Saturday, March 31st at Guitar Shed
10:00-11:30 am
$30 for current students
$40 for new students
Limited to 20 students
To sign up either send an email to [email protected], or register in the student portal.
Marc-Andre Seguin is the webmaster, “brains behind” and teacher on JazzGuitarLessons.net, the #1 online resource for learning how to play jazz guitar. He draws from his experience both as a professional jazz guitarist and professional jazz teacher to help thousands of people from all around the world learn the craft of jazz guitar. Marc-Andre was kind enough to reach out and create a custom blog post for our students at Guitar Shed. I mentioned to him that one of the main things our students are struggling with is being able to keep the form of a song. Read on for some very insightful tips and advice. Thanks Marc-Andre!
Tips to Learning Chord Progressions
Learning a new song song, especially the sequence of chords, can be a long and daunting task. Here are a few tips to help you memorize the order of chords in any song you wish to play. Although the first suggestion is quite simple, the rest of the article is really something you should take your time with. If you manage to incorporate this into your musical understanding, you will reap the benefits in the long term and have an easier time understanding music in general.
Break the song up into sections
If you take the time to divide the song into sections and then smaller chunks if needed, you’ll have a much easier time remembering the music as a whole. For example, take the time to identify the choruses as opposed to verses. Usually, these will have different progressions and will have lengths of 4 or 8 bars. It will make things a lot less daunting and easier to chew on. Some songs have also bridges to consider.
When starting out, it’s a good idea to actually write the chords out on a piece of paper. Draw out a grid with 4 bars per line (I simply draw 5 vertical lines with even space between them to make up the 4 bars). Then, making sure you count the beats, write in the chords. For every beat that repeats the same harmony, write a single slash to keep track of the harmonic rhythm, which is simply a nice way of saying when the chords change. Keep track of each section and label them when needed. Once you’ve written out the whole song, seeing the music in parts like this will help you memorize the music by breaking it down to smaller, more manageable pieces. Here is a short example to illustrate a simple chart:
Verse
| G / / / | C / / / | G / / / | D / / / |
Chorus
| G / / / | / / / / | D / / / | / / / / |
At this point, if you are a beginner or simply having trouble committing songs to memory, it’s a matter of memorizing the chords, by name, until you can play each section by heart. It’s a tedious process, but it’s part of the bigger picture which will enable you to see patterns and accelerate the learning process.
Calling the chords by roman numerals, rather than by name
Eventually, once you’ve spent enough time simply learning songs chord by chord, it’ll be time to enhance you’re theoretical knowledge to eventually help you learn faster and even transpose music quickly.
The first thing that you’ll need to be capable of doing, is identifying the key of a song. A fast and almost foolproof way of doing this is checking out the last chord of the piece. To be sure though, the simplest way at this point is to first write down all the unique chords present in the piece of music you are looking at. Then, starting from the root of each of those chords, write down the corresponding major or minor scale that start from that note. If you have a 7th chord in a piece that’s not a blues song, chances are that the key won’t be from that scale, so you can skip those. Once you’ve written out all the notes, compare each and every note in the scales you wrote down with the roots of the other chords in your song. If something is out of place (for example you might have a Bb chord in your list when you write out the C major scale – that scale doesn’t include B flats) go to the next chord until you find the perfect scale that fits the roots of all the chords.
Once you’ve determined the scale you are in, you will now be able to attribute roman numerals to the chords and effectively perform musical analysis to explain the music you have. Simply attribute the numerals to each chord in the progression relative to their position in the scale. For example, if you determine that the song is in C major and you see an F chord, that F would be IV (being the fourth note in C major). Repeat this procedure for the rest of the chords. If you wrote out the song in sections like mentioned previously, you can focus on sections and learn the progression in smaller chunks. You might end up with something looking like this for a particular section (with the respective harmony of your music):
| I / / / | VIm / / / | IV / / / | V / / / |
Eventually, this type of analysis will be made in your head and will come very quickly, especially if you do it often. On the guitar, it’s easy to then perform these sequences if you play with bar chords, streamlining the learning process to simply remembering the changes as jumps corresponding to the scale tones rather than a sequence of seemingly open random chords.
Another advantage of this type of analysis and playing is that once you become faster at recognizing the harmony changes as numerals, transposing music will be much simpler. By simply applying the numerals to the new key, it will be easier to call upon the correct chord this way than transposing each and every chord in the progression.
Recognizing common progressions
The more you apply roman numerals to chords, the more you will start to see recurring formulas. Although music itself is limitless, the progressions aren’t and our ears seem to gravitate towards a handful of sequences, preferences that are usually explained with theoretical concepts. You probably have come across a very famous progression called the blues. This relatively simple progression spans 12 bars and visits the IVth and Vth chords of a scale and inspired countless of songs, melodies and solos. Here it is in it’s simplest form:
You should be able to play this at any key and visualize each change before it happens. This kind of rigorous learning will cross over to other progressions and make your life learning things a lot easier. Here are a few other common progressions you should be aware of:
Although there are a lot of things to learn, you should definitely invest time in teaching yourself to identify song keys quickly and break down the chord progressions into numerical grids. You’ll be surprised how fast your understanding and ear training will develop and help you anticipate harmonic movement.
Art of the Jazz Duo: Where Chamber Music Meets Improvisation
Duets offer an unparalleled opportunity for two musicians to converse in an intimate, exposed setting. Many jazz musicians have used this to their advantage, creating works that sound closer to modern chamber music. Presenters Greg Byers and Parker Smith will explore the rich history of jazz duets, demonstrate strategies each half can employ, and outline how students of any ability level can listen and interact with a partner.
Exploring the Fretboard – Improvising using the CAGED system
This session will focus on how to use five open chord shapes to map out the entire fretboard. This chord based approach to soloing is helpful for the beginning to advanced improviser. Differences between harmonic concepts, practice techniques and ear training will be discussed.
Great job in the Fall Student Showcase at The Pullman everyone! At Guitar Shed there is a performance opportunity for each season. We have a Spring and Fall Student Showcase as well as a Summer and Winter Recital. Keep an eye out for more performance opportunities in addition to these soon!
At our Fall Student Showcase this past weekend we had some first time performers as well as seasoned veterans. All of our Guitar Shedders played beautifully! Thank you for having the courage to perform in front of a live audience. I encourage you to treat each performance as a unique learning opportunity and treat them objectively. It takes some effort to be able to objectively view both the positive and negative aspects of your performance. Make sure to use all aspects of your playing as a tool to keep your ego in check.
There is much to be learned from the performance process and a variety of internal and external factors can affect your desired outcome. By performing regularly, you are able to diminish performance anxiety and grow exponentially as a musician.