Playing Off The Melody Stella
Playing Off The Melody Stella is a course that teaches you how to bring more compositional elements into your improvisation; in other words, playing more off the melody of the song that you are improvising over. Improvisers frequently create these kinds of compositionally related melodies through permutation or rotation. There are three previously published books on permutating 2,3 and 4 note melodies in the Modal Sequencing series.
Permutation problems arise when you have a melody in which the main theme is more than four notes. In this situation the use of permutation gets out of hand pretty quickly. For instance, a six note melody has 720 permutations (or 8640 permutations if we consider octave transposition). In order to work with larger themes, rotations are used. For a six note melody there are only 6 rotations. This is a much more workable number for a musician to practice and gain fluidity with. Even with only six rotations the amount of exercises that can be derived is enormous. Exercises are given using treble and bass clef plus there are bass clef versions for 5 and 6 string bass. Factor in all 3 different types of exercises, and you get a whopping 8016 pages of exercises!
This course works with the first six notes of the jazz standard Stella By Starlight. You will find from playing through the three different types of exercises found in this course that the melodies created are really useful and sound great! This course is comprised of three main exercises. First, the exercises concentrate on one rotation at a time and starting it on every eighth note of the measure. Second, you work with changing between the six rotations throughout the song, again on every eighth combination. Third, you change the rhythm and the rotation throughout the song. Working on these three levels will change your playing almost immediately. Playing the melody through minor 2nds, major 2nd, minor 3rds, major 3rds and augmented 4ths are also included. All exercises are presented in all 12 keys. This gives you the “old school” approach to learning a jazz standard. Learn it in all keys and then you REALLY know it.
All exercises found in the Playing Off The Melody Stella course have midi files. This will allow you to not only hear the melodies but also check accuracy as you practice. There are also MP3s with piano, bass and drums, at 3 different tempos, and in all keys, so that you can play the examples with real music. A PDF is included that talks about each exercise and how it is organized as well as practice tips and application ideas. Whether you dive head first into these exercises right away or not, it is important that you understand the power of rotations which this course will supply. You will be really surprised by how just a couple of minutes a day reading through these examples will affect your playing. Seriously folks, rotations will change your playing dramatically and quickly.
Here are a few examples from the course. A complete list of the different types of exercises can also be found below.
Additional Information for Melodic Rotations 012345:
Man Bruce this is Dope! I never knew what rotations were before this course and now I see that they are the key to the kind of playing that I’ve always striven towards. These exercises are like perfect solos. By just improvising a few more notes in the rests I have a great solo that is so closely related to the song. Y. Songland
I’ve been searching for a course like this my whole life. I hope Bruce puts out courses like this for many jazz standards! G. Idi
Not only is this a great idea for melodies but my phrasing has changed within days. R. Bellham
I’m a 5 and 6 string bass player and also have the Melodic Rotation 012345 book which I’m enjoying quite a bit. This Playing Off The Melody Stella book takes things in an entirely new direction. It makes me realize many new things that I can do with the Melodic Rotation 012345 book but also is really helping me to get the basics of soloing over jazz standards together. A. Newton
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