Etudes are a great way to learn new ideas, phrases, concepts and vocabulary. This is a short 12 bar etude I wrote and have been digesting over the last 6 months or so. Memorizing the etude is just the beginning, you can derive material from it for a long time if you put it through keys, displace different phrases, understand the underlying concepts and improvise from those concepts. In this video I go over this specific etude and how I think about it and several ways of working with it.
How to work with an Etude:
The process I use is outlined below:
- Decide on a one chorus etude. You can write it, use a solo transcription, use a pre-written etude, create a amalgamation of various transcribed ideas from multiple sources.
- learn to sing the etude by singing along to a recording of it. You can play it by reading it or make a midi/mp3 file or, if it’s a transcription, sing along with the original recording. Slow down the recording to get all the pitches in your ear.
- Once it’s memorized, begin to memorize the fingerings along with with sound, you should be able to memorize the entire chorus before practicing it on your instrument. You should know how every single note functions against the chord of the moment without exception.
- Play the etude on your instrument hundreds of times slowly without any mistakes until you can play it effortlessly at any time.
- Begin to deconstruct the etude by taking each phrase through the keys, displacing the rhythms and improvising with the concepts and note sets contained in the etude.
- Play the etude in all 12 keys.
~Enjoy!
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Lesson 155: Blues Etude using Diminished and Triad Pairs
