Sunday, 3 February 2013

Bill Evans Licks slowed down

I've began recording videos of licks I've started transcribing.  The main difficulty is finding chord progressions which allow me to use the longer ones in them.  Most of my blogs will be posted at once, but I will date them back to when the video was recorded as proof of my ongoing work throughout the year.

Most of the licks are from a very old Bill Evans recording that I got free with a magazine - I don't know the track name so I can't link it!

I'm getting surprised at how 'simple' some of what I thought to be complicated licks are.  For example, a lick I thought was full of notes outside of the chord turned out just to be a straight broken C minor 2nd inversion chord going up and down, but when it comes down an Ab is played in front of every G.

The third one is basically just a Cm7 chord with chromatic run downs dotted at certain points to piece it together - this is something I've started using A LOT in my solos (probably because playing down a chromatic scale is the simplest thing to do when you feel like you need to put a fast run in somewhere, tee hee).

Since I don't know what the track is, I can't find chord charts for it, meaning I'm unsure what chords exactly he's playing these over - Evans tended to change the chords completely when he solo'd, so what I hear in the track may be completely different to what he's actually playing.

Anyways, here is a video of me playing the licks very slowly - the thing I always find interesting is how when slowed down, most of these licks sound ridiculous and just like random notes, but when played at tempo and with the right rhythm, they sound beautiful, complex, and well thought out.

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