Feed Your Ears: Wayne Krantz (and thoughts on trios)

#11-transcriptions over on YouTube just dropped a lovely transcription of Wayne Krantz's solo on "Whippersnapper" from 2 Drink Minimum. It reminded me that Krantz is, for my money, one of the very few truly original voices on guitar to emerge since the '70s.

From a "Hidden" Augmented Triad to an Exotic Scale

I stumbled across this while playing around with augmented triads on minor chords and thought it was at least a little bit interesting, if only because it led me to a scale I haven't come across in a musical context before.

From a "Hidden" Augmented Triad to an Exotic Scale

I stumbled across this while playing around with augmented triads on minor chords and thought it was at least a little bit interesting, if only because it led me to a scale I haven't come across in a musical context before.

"Days of Wine and Roses" Variation

Yesterday I had a Cm7 vamp in my looper (I was practicing these) and happened to glance over at the music stand, where my repertoire book was open at "The Days of Wine and Roses" (I like opening the book at random and playing through something to get warmed up). As a consequence, this happened.

Learning the Maj 7 b5 and Maj 7 #5 Arpeggios

These are two chord/arpeggio structures that come up pretty often once you stray far from the major scale. They also sound great, so they're well worth committing to memory.

Superaugmented Scale Ideas

The Superaugmented Scale is a major scale with every note raised by a semitone except the 1 and 7: 1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 7. It came up a couple of times in the lines in my recent Scriabin-inspired post so I thought it might be worth digging deeper into.

Lines from Xenakis's "Mists"

I had more fun than anticipated with the results of raiding Scriabin for vocabulary, so I did it again with another piano piece I'm very fond of: Xenakis's "Mists".

Some Random Scriabin-Derived Lines

Hit by a bout of insomnia last night I ended up listening to Scriabin's Piano Sonata No 7 and stealing bits from it to turn into jazz lines. Here are the slightly deranged results.

"Star Eyes" Harmonic Major Reharm

Yes, I'm on a reharmonization theme at the moment. Here's one using the Harmonic Major subs suggested in this post. In each case the original chord is subbed with one or two chords made from the appropriate Harmonic Major mode using the ones in the mode that aren't in the original chord.

"Have You Met Miss Jones" Reharm

All the hip cats are playing "Have You Met Miss Jones" because the B section has major third root movement very similar to "Giant Steps". That's fine but the A section is pretty vanilla. Here's my attempt to spice it up with the same kind of movement.