A NOTE FROM DICK GROVE

Our September issue is a very important one for us. We are announcing many new and important developments with the Dick Grove ‘School Without Walls’. I hope you take the time to read the complete issue and we would be happy to discuss any aspects you would like to call us about. The articles this month include another good one from Dana Rasch, his Part 2 on the Dominant Pentatonic Series. My articles include a discussion on the importance of developing your ear as the critical step in becoming a better performer and creative musician and some short cuts to learning chord extensions!

In August we announced my new CD reissue of ‘Big, Bad & Beautiful’ big band recording. Many of you have ordered it and I hope you will like to obtain a copy This month we are very proud to announce that it will now be possible to earn college credit through the ‘School Without Walls’. This will apply to those of you who have already completed courses, or are currently working on a course, or who plan to enroll and would like to receive college credit for your efforts. There is an extra per unit charge for this benefit, so  you should call me for details if you are interested in considering get credits through us.

As of January 1, 1999, there will  be a price increase on all of our courses, so it behooves you to consider starting courses before the price change. We are sending special flyers and Emails to our entire mailing list with details on all of the above, but particularly, there will be a sensational 1/3 off offer for a limited time only.   Check your Email from us!

I will also be coming out with a brand new, dedicated improvisation course (for all instruments) Each segment will include my video lesson, supported with play-along practice tracks, text and Assignment books (for the key or clef of your instrument). Call me if you are interested!

Again, we invite you if you have questions regarding the articles this issue
to call me at (800)994-7683!

Musically -

Dick Grove

 THE IMPORTANCE OF MUSICIANSHIP

I’m a lucky duck! My career in music has allowed me to do just what I have wanted to do,  the way I wanted to do it! Not a bad goal - I think you would agree! As a keyboardist, arranger, composer, orchestrator, conductor, author, publisher, teacher and friend to thousands of  musicians and students I have been in a position to get a very objective and comprehensive point of view about how we all pursue our emotional musical goals.

You can’t have this kind of experience without seeing a pattern and common denominator to the ‘process’ of each of us finding a direction in music and then working towards our potential. One’s evolution as a creative performer / composer / arranger / singer / songwriter is a process in which we travel to a goal, driven by many things. Love of music, greed, total absorption, the pleasure of doing ‘our’ thing, relaxing from the pressures of today, finding out how good we can be, finding our ‘voice’ as a creative artist, etc., etc., etc.

I can also state unequivately, that everyone has a different story! We all have a different history of our musical experiences, opportunities, talent, environment and time frames. It is this  constantly contrasting equation that attracts and energizes my work with all of you in the School Without Walls.

Most musicians I come in contact with are trying to improve themselves, by themselves. It is a very difficult challenge to do on your own. It is very much like going somewhere without a map! Being your own teacher usually means taking whatever information you happen to ‘bump’ into and trying to absorb and learn from those sources. You might read ‘how to’ articles in music magazines, take a lesson once in a while, buy a book or instructional video, jam with friends, listen to CD’s, sit down and ‘discover’ things, etc. You can end up with a room full of books, videos, lesson notes, lead sheets, music folios and a head full of frustrated feelings! The problem of course with this unorganized approach is:

Your biggest asset (whether you know it or not) is your ear. Now we all have an ear, but it needs to be an ‘educated ear’ that can hear what it sees, and knows what it is hearing. It takes a period of conditioning to be able to develop this more musical way of using your ear.

Approaching eartraining as an isolated subject usually doesn’t work well in a practical sense. We make our music in a context of playing spontaneously so unless the eartraining experience is linked to Modern Harmony and you can relate eartraining to melody, harmony and rhythm, you are not really able to apply this ability in a real way! We are after developing a good ‘relative pitch’. Perfect pitch is a condition that you are either born with or not. Having Perfect pitch however, doesn’t mean you know what notes to play or write. One of my interested students once said to me “well, I don’t think I need to start at the beginning because I have Perfect pitch”. I answered “ well that’s great - but tell me, what is it you would like to accomplish?” He said “ I would like to learn how to improvise!” My reply was “well if you have Perfect pitch, why can’t you improvise?” So you see, being able to identify a note that you hear doesn’t tell you what note to play! – it is an entirely different matter.

We all need to become well grounded musicians with a solid foundation. This means that you need to understand how melody and harmony really work, how to hear them in context to moving phrases and chord progressions, relative to the different contemporary styles we deal with in this day and age. Once you understand the foundation, you have a real way of dealing with all styles, from Dixieland jazz to fusion! Once you have the answers, then you can ask any question and be able to relate to the goal you are after!

You will find that even attending a local college or university will not give you that practical foundation you need. Most all of the school curriculums are based on the European approach to music and even though you will get information and details of that information, it has little if anything to do with playing on a bandstand or writing a contemporary song that is memorable!

Our courses and the School Without Walls in general, represent an alternative to going to a professional music school. Our courses get right down to it, they cost you a fraction of the cost of a college, and you can do it at your own pace and continue your job, life and family commitments all at the same time! It is called having your cake and eating it too! If you check out our Educational Tree on the web site you will see how all our courses link to each other and will take you as far as you would like to go.

Once your ear is working right, you will find that the process of growing as a musician is ten times faster and easier. This is another way of saying that until your ear does work well, you are compromising yourself without realizing it! What our courses do are actually explain and show you how to focus your ear so that you can hear those musical aspects you need to hear.
In the process you learn how progressions really work, how to create good melodies, and have a realistic way to relate to the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of our different musical styles.

Musicianship is one of those words that can mean something different to everyone you ask! It is an ‘umbrella’ term that includes all of the following (here is a short list):

Even though you can spend a life time working with your music, it is important to realize that just ‘doing’ exercises is not what it is all about, if fact just playing your instrument is not what its is all about. There are great concert pianists that once you take the music away, cannot spontaneously create music and they have spent a lifetime playing their instrument! You can spend years working at your music, assuming that what you are working on will solve your problems, only to find out down the road that you still cannot get to your potential!

There is a basic logic that takes the infinite possibilities of music and condenses them into a handful of basic premises from which everything is taken. Once your brain understands these concepts and your ear is trained to hear these underlying aspects of melody, harmony and rhythm, your learning experiences will never be the same. Learning from the ‘core’ of the music makes the entire process ten times faster and easier. This is why being involved with the School Without Walls gets such dramatic results. It is what and how you are taught that gets immediate results, enabling you to grow and have the capacity to evolve from one level to the next for your entire life!

Studying music is supposed to make your participation easier. It should not be a matter of simply talking about aspects of music and then expecting the student to figure out how to learn, absorb and apply the techniques for themselves. That should all be figured out by the teacher, then under his guidance you personalize and absorb the information. This basic logic reveals how music works in a straight, connected line, wherein each aspect logically is connected to the last premise and you end up with a solid understanding that your ear recognizes, your brain knows, and with which your musical ‘operating system’ can help you create your own music with authority and confidence.

The Grove School of Music, which I founded in Los Angeles in 1973 and led for almost 20 years, was known all over the world for turning out superior graduates that could compete in the business of music and who could make their own musical statements. We did it in one or two years of intensive study. Basically we offered them more in two years than they could receive in 4 or 5  years at a college or university, plus what they learned they could from our programs they could apply!

You could say that learning these basic premises is the key to solid musicianship and faster development. You could have a doctorate in music and never have it explained to you. If you go down a road step by step, you can enjoy the trip and go farther than you ever imagined! It is the great musician who makes the great music - no matter what the style or context - it always holds true!

Your musical goals, modest or top level, can be accomplished better and faster by first getting your foundation of musicianship together. Then the application of that musicianship is much more rewarding when we show you how to apply that foundation to your playing, writing or teaching goals. The best part is that the longer you do it this way, the farther you can take it and more creative you will become - age is not relative, so whether you are 16 or 76,   you will experience the difference.

You are more than welcome to call me at (800)994-7683 or Email me at dana@beyondchops.com and I can show you how this concept can change things for you! Till then - think about all of this and what you have been doing the past year or more. Any frustrations you have had with being in a rut, taking lessons and not getting what you need, going to a college where they don’t understand the problem, or realizing that you can never take a year and $25,000.00 to try to get your education, can all be resolved once you get on the ‘road’ to getting it together.

We pull things together for people - all it takes is desire and some discipline. Our courses are so structured that even if you are so busy you can only do a handful of hours a week, you will still get great results and quality progress because of being in an organized plan. Our one-on-one support is your safety net. We can customize your course to fit any weird angle you have, and remember - I have a lot of experience and have dealt with every conceivable situation you might throw at me before. Take advantage of that experience and commitment I have and get a coach on your team that actually wants to spend some time with you - listening to where you are coming from and to where you want to go.

Remember, the point here is to feel good about our music and ourselves making music. You are going to be able to experience those good feelings once you make yourself a plan, with our help, and just get started. The worst that can happen is that you might have to hock your instrument - but with good musicianship all is not lost - you can still hear it all in your head!

Hope you find this interesting and relate it to where you feel you are!

Dick Grove

DOMINANT PENTATONIC SERIES PART 2

by Dana Rasch

Try playing up and back in each key seperately until you feel familiar with all 5 keys, then try going up in one key and come back down in another. We see now that we can play in 5 keys starting off of the same one note. By moving 1 fret higher or one fret lower we will be able to play in 10 more keys (5 keys by moving 1 fret higher and an additional 5 keys by moving 1 fret lower). This means we can play in 15 different keys without moving more than 1 fret in either direction.

This idea is called minimal movement and has a tendency to help you create more melodic ideas as opposed to jumping all over the neck.

In all styles of music we can find a common progression called the Harmonic Circle of 5th’s. The II V I progression (Dmin7 G7 Cmaj7)for example moves in the Harmonic Circle of 5th’s.

A way to start developing your abilities with Dominant Pentatonic is to think of playing over Dom 9th chords moving in the circle of 5ths. (C9,  F9, Bb9, Eb9, etc.)

As we have discussed before, the Dominant Pentatonic scale is a horizontal form of a 9th chord

Try laying this progression down on tape at a slow tempo or faster tempos with each chord receiving more bars (either 2 of 4 bars per chord)

Using the concept of minimal movement as discussed above, play over the following 5 chords starting with "C" as your root

Exercise 1

In the case of the first 3 chords we were able to find the Dom. Pent.scale needed, starting on the note “C”. “C” is the root of”C, the 5th of “F” and the 2nd of ‘Bb”. When moving to the last chord we moved up a half step to “Db.” (“Db” is b7 of “Eb”) After you feel comfortable  with Exercise 2 practice starting with the other 4  shapes of “C” Dom. Pent. as shown in Exercises 3 through 6.

CHORD EXTENSIONS

By Dick Grove

Chords are the use of multiple scale degrees, organized vertically. Here is a basic way to think of them. Chord symbols are only a ‘code’ to represent tones that create impressions of harmony as being either ‘resting’ in character (requiring no further movement or resolution, or ‘active’ in character (requiring the resolution to a following chord of a chord progression.

The source of the tones in a chord are the 7 or  8 notes of a scale. The melody of a song represents the same scale horizontally, and the supportive  harmony comes from the same scale organized vertically. Utilizing the same scale is what allows the harmony to fit the melody. If all the tones of a scale are possible melody notes, then when the chords are created by using the scale source vertically it stands to reason that we have to account for all the tones in the scale course.

To accomplish this, we choose scale tones basically in 3rds (taking every other tone of the scale), and by measuring the distance from each note of the scale source to the tonic of the scale, we arrive at the Root, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 1th and 13th. Each of these function now have to be qualified as  a:

Starting with the basic major, minor, augmented and diminished triads and continuing through the 7ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13ths, every musician will learn a given amount of these chord forms in most keys. The most popular keys will come first, and then the less used key centers complete the required vocabulary of chords. With all of these possibilities, they can be divided however into two main categories: BASIC CHORD FORMS and the CHORD EXTENSIONS. This simply means the higher chord functions of the 9th, 11th and 13 are considered ‘extending’ the chord into the tone a greater distance from the root of the chord. It also follows that the high chord extensions are more difficult to learn, particularly in the more difficult keys.

Much of our contemporary music is harmonically simple, meaning that the melodic tones of these compositions are almost entirely based on the first four tones of a chord (Root, 3rd, 5th and 7th). The result of this restriction that you notice when listening to this music, is that there is little tension in the melody and there is a stylistic lack of color or chromaticism in these songs. We are talking about Rock, HipHop, Funk, Rhythm & Blues, Country, Pop, Reggae, Rap, etc.

Styles of jazz, fusion and more progression contemporary music utilize not only the extensions of chords but altered extensions (as listed above). For any of you interested in getting a better handle on knowing all the chords in the larger forms, read on!

The purpose of this article is to give you a short cut to learning your chord extensions in all keys, with the goal that you can visualize and name the extensions rapidly. This will also help you in hearing melody tones that are high extensions in songs. If you are into understanding jazz better, it is important to know all your chords, through the 13ths, and in altered as well as diatonic forms. In the natural construction of chords, the high extension tones (9th, 11th, 13th) are presented in order, with generally a major or minor third between each. The least effective way to relate to these tones is by counting up from the root each time you wish to find a specific tone. In fact, if we only look at the extensions, we can see them as a self-contained triad built from the tone a whole step above the root of a chord! This presents an easy to visualize simple triad which then can be thought of as the upper extensions of a chord.

The following examples will give you an illustration of this upper extension triad in relationship to all chord types (resting and active/diatonic and altered) of contemporary music.

Example: Major 13th(+11) chord stack / D major triad shape built from 9th / Chord Functions

Using Example 1 as a model, you can work out with this ‘short cut’ to learn your high tension extensions in all keys. I would suggest that you work with these solutions in the following ways:

Good luck with your extensions and your wisdom teeth - see you next month!

Dick Grove

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