An Approach to Improvisation on Guitar and Mandolin
Tim May and Dan Miller (co-authors of the popular eight volume
Flatpicking Essentials Guitar Course and the instructional DVD "An
Approach to Improvisation"), will conduct a hands-on, all-level Guitar
and Mandolin Improvisation Workshop.
The idea of learning how to improvise can be confusing and
overwhelming. Tim May and Dan Miller's workshop will prove to you that
it is much easier to improvise than you think, and now is the time to
start learning, even if you are a beginner to guitar or mandolin! In
the workshop Tim and Dan teach an approach to improvisation that will
put you on the road to improvising a solo on a song in a very short
amount of time. The method that they teach and the skills that you will
learn in this workshop will help really demystify improvisation. In
fact, no matter what your current ability level, you will be improvising
by the end of this workshop, even on a song that you have never heard
before! If you are already an accomplished improvisational player this
workshop can help take your abilities to the next level. If you are new
to improvisation, this workshop will give you confidence in taking that
big step to becoming an improvisational player. Each student will be
given several opportunities to play for, and get direct feedback from,
the instructors.
Speed, Accuracy, and Tone Workshop
Dan Miller and Tim May will conduct a two-hour all-level flatpicking
guitar workshop that will focus on how to use efficient left and right
hand technique and mechanics to increase speed, improve note clarity and
fluidity, and develop good tone and volume. Dan, editor of Flatpicking
Guitar Magazin, co-author of the popular eight volume Flatpicking
Essentials Guitar Course, and co-author of the book "The Guitar Player's
Guide to Developing Speed, Accuracy, and Tone, said, "After
interviewing over 200 professional guitar players for Flatpicking Guitar
Magazine I took all of the information that I had gathered about
developing speed, accuracy, and tone and worked with my good friends
Brad Davis and Tim May to develop a book, DVD, and workshop presentation
that would help players of all levels break through playing barriers
and improve their tone, volume, speed, fluidity, and note accuracy."
Building Interesting Melody-Based Solos:
In this workshop students will first learn how to find chords and
melody to any tune by ear. We then teach how you can use all of a
variety other flatpicking techniques that are available to you in order
to build an interesting solo around the melody. This would be ideal for
those who are working to get away from learning from tab, but would like
to know who to incorporate the melody in their solo. We start with
Carter style and then move beyond that by adding in many other
techniques, such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, drones, double
stops, tremolo, neighboring notes, toggled notes, scale runs (major
scale, major pentatonic scale, major blues scale, minor pentatonic
scale, and minor blues scale), folding scales, crosspicking, and
others. Students will be taught how to come up with numerous
melody-based solo variations to any tune.
Basic Rhythm Workshop:
This workshop provides the techniques of solid bluegrass, Irish,
and Old-Time rhythm (and explores the difference between the three) to
include bass runs, fill licks, alternate strum patterns, developing and
maintaining a good (and stylistically appropriate) groove, ideas about
appropriately supporting the other musicians and the singer with your
rhythm, ideas about moving from rhythm to lead and back. Plus concepts
involving keeping good time, leading the listener's ear to the next
chord change and providing interesting texture to your rhythm.
Advanced Rhythm Workshop:
This workshops is the follow-on to the Basic Rhythm Workshop. Here
we start to get into extended chords, sus chords, diminished chords and
their use in adding flavor to bluegrass, Irish, Old-Time and moving into
Western Swing, swing, Gypsy jazz, and jazz. Since most of the crowd
will consist of fiddle tune and bluegrass flatpickers, we will focus on
how to use these chords to add flavor to your bluegrass and fiddle tune
back up and how to learn interesting rhythm to play behind Western Swing
and swing tunes that typically pop up at a bluegrass jam.
Advanced Improvisation Workshop:
This workshop is a follow-on to the "Approach to Improvisation
Workshop." In the first workshop we focus on diatonic chord
progressions (chords that are "of the key"). Here we start to explore
improvisation of chords that are outside of the key and move on to work
with circle of fifth progressions and how to start improvisation over
swing and jazz changes.
If
you'd like to read a review of the improvisation workshop, written by
Scott Tichenor of mandolincafe.com, click here:
http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/publish/mandolins_001390.shtml
