I really like this style of phrasing, take some great examples like McCoy Tyner, and a lot of the ‘hard bop’ jazz cats. The basic idea is this: take a scale, in this example I will use a C major scale.

Now  play all the diatonic fourths contained in C major:

In the video I am playing on a Dm (Dorian) vamp, but you can use this phrasing technique on any scale, mode…have fun.

You’re in Gardonyi’s, looking over a piece of music that seems interesting and you want to get the gist of how it goes. Your sight-singing is impeccable so that holds no problems, but what’s that in the corner of the page? – ’120 bpm’.

Can you guess what the tempo of the piece is? One way to do it is to look at a clock and count the rate of the seconds – that’s obviously 60 bpm [beats per minute]. Double it if you need 120 bpm; half it if you want 30 bpm; triplets would move at a rate of 180 bpm. And then, is it a little faster or slower than one of those? Great, but what if there’s no clock?

Well, make a tempo map. Pick some very memorable songs that you can easily imagine and map their tempo. Start vague and get more detailed as you go on. Ideally, they’d be songs that everyone knows, definitive versions, for it to work. And you have to have a pretty accurate mental image of the song at roughly the right tempo.

I started out thinking I’d get a list of ‘the most popular songs of all time’ and work out the BPM. But I think what you really need is:

1. a really memorable song that you know very well and can easily imagine.

2. a way of linking the BPM to some content within the song. Or, any way of memorizing the tempo that’s quick and doesn’t involve rote memorization.

I found this great site http://djbpmstudio.com, which is a list of thousands of songs and their tempos. On that site, you can look at all the songs at, say, 120 bpm and then just choose the song you know best at that speed and then come up with a way of memorising the tempo. For example, it’d be great if ‘When I’m 64′ was actually 64 BPM, or 128. But it isn’t, so forget that. But you get the idea, eh?

Ok, so now you have the problem of memorising which songs go with which tempo but maybe that’s where you can get all creative in service to the common good by somehow linking a tempo to a song, Tony Buzan-style

So, maybe you’re a massive Queen fan. Of course you are! If so, I’ll start you off. Here are some Queen tracks and their rough BPM. Can you think of a clever way to memorise the tempo?

40 bpm: Somebody to Love – 40 bpm is from ‘Find’ and ‘Body’ in this song. (I’m allowing this kind of fudging the rules). We Will Rock You and Save Me also work. Maybe you could think, 40 bpm is the first thing on the metronome and the first thing you need in life is Somebody to Love That’s a terribly lame example but I am sure you are WAY better at this than I am.

50:

60:

70:

80:

90: Fat Bottomed Girls

100: Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy

110: Another One Bites the Dust

120: You’re My Best Friend

130: Now I’m Here

140:

150:

160:

Use this site to test your tempo memory powers:http://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm Can you nail 90 bpm? Try it…

Other games to try if you’ve got no friends or are pathologically bored: Try and name any tempo and hit the bpm and nail it straight away. Or, try to keep the tempo the same for more than two beats.

So the question is: Are you geek enough to make a tempo map? Do you instantly know the tempo of a particular song? Why? How? Why aren’t you sharing your knowledge here? Or maybe it’s just me…

The original was posted on January 5, 2009 and I think I did this mod (if you can call it that) during Christmas 2008. This is the original video I posted on youtube back then.

and this is the materials I used:

POT: 16mm B10K
DPDT switch
1/4 in stereo jack open

Of course some wire, soldering iron and a small gold enclosure (a used box of candies!)
It’s basically a volume pot in a box where the switch inverts the external tags of the pot and allows you to double the amount of presets on your Line6 MM4 and DL4 ( and should also work on AM4 and DM4) using the ‘Expression pedal morphing’ feature that already exists on this series of pedals. For the switch to work together with the pot, the pot has to be at ’0′ or ’10′.

I did use an external enclosure as I did not want to ruin the original box, but I have seen on youtube some guys that did this mod by drilling the enclosure at the top and placing the footswitch directly onto the case. Other further mods include adding a Status LED (you need a battery and a 3PDT switch for that. If you drill the case you should be able to take the power from the unit itself).

This is the rough diagram I uploaded a while ago, still valid:

I am still using this box with my MM4 but as I need more space in my pedalboard I am now using a smaller enclosure:

Not the cleanest wiring job, but it has been working flawlessly for over one year, so I am going to leave it as it is…if it is not broken, don’t fix it!

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Line 6, I did this for personal use and enjoyment. If you decide to do this, I will not be held responsible to any damage to your equipment or injuries.

In this lesson he talks about some very cool (and incredibly easy) applications of the standard box pentatonic shape:

Here he talks introduces his book Modern Chords: Advanced Harmony for Guitar (Mel Bay’s Private Lessons)

I cannot recommend enough to check out this incredible musician!

Giant Steps has always been a challenging standard to play, in this video I give a few tips on how to approach this famous tune.

The Chords (from the fake book-as far as I know it is not copyrighted material so I am posting the original):

One good ‘pattern’ to start familiarising with the progression in playing 1235 for every chord (meaning the 1st,2nd,3nd and 5th of every chord). For the original key it would be B,C#,D#,F#(Bmaj7) then D,E,F#,A (D7), G,A,B,D (G)and so on…

It’s all about getting used to keep your brain engaged at any time. A great exercise!

I love viral video stunts from companies that look into different ways to advertise their product. This is from the company that makes Powergig, a game like Guitar Hero, a game that uses a real guitar as a controller instead a plastic toy with five buttons.

In this video I show how to use the Superlocrian mode (nothing more than the 7th mode of a minor melodic scale) to improvise over altered chords. On C7 the choice would be C Superlocrian C, Db,Eb,E, F#,G#,Bb (also known as Db melodic minor starting from C). Listen to a few examples of resolution from C7(alt) to F major and to F minor in the second part of the video.

Altered chords are a flavour of  dominant chords, where we add certain extensions: #9,b9,#5,b5. In the example on the video I use C7 as basic chord and add the extension D#,Db,G#,Gb also as combinations.

The last lesson I posted was about the Diminished scale…I stumbled onto this great video where guitar player guru Larry Carlton Talk about the diminished scale. He is one of my favourite guitarists of all times …if  had to suggest any records, just check out ‘Sleepwalk’ or ‘Strike twice’ or any of his work with Steely Dan. Notice not only the notes he plays, but HOW he plays them…notice how sometimes he put a much more dramatic accent on notes that might sound ‘out’, like a b9, to make them stand out. Just listen to how he plays in the next video and notice the dynamic (soft/loud) and the way he attacks each note.