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Anyone have a particular approach to practicing triplet lines? Not whatever happens in the heat of improvisation, but rather how do you work on it in the shed?
Say, 8th note triplet lines or perhaps the quarter note triplets in a tune like East of the Sun? Say, medium tempos, where the triplet is really heard as three individual notes, not 16th note triplets at fast tempos where obviously it's a ornament, and almost always slurred.
Alternate picking and let the up and downstrokes fall where they may?
Repeated downstrokes at some point in the line?
Slurs?
Matt
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08-02-2014 08:50 AM
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I practice triplets with a downstroke on every downbeat. Otherwise I lose the integrity of the triplet sound. Either Down, UP, UP or Down, UP, Down patterns.
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It depends on the line, doesn't it?
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Of course, but my feeling and experience is most guitar players I know just play them anyway they can. They're hard. But if I'm just PRACTICING triplets I do them the way I described above. It gets me prepared to play them with the accent on one. If the line or tempo is too fast it's impossible with me to articulate it that way. But I still try to keep the integrity of the triplet by accenting even if it's on an upstroke, unless the accent happens on a weaker part of the beat.
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I agree it's hard. In the old Mel Bay "Technic" book, several triplets exercises are to be picked down up down, down up down and then repeated with down up down / up down up... The second way is faster but as Henry says, you lose the feel of triplets. They roll out in sixes---which is fine for when that's what you want. But getting triplets to go down / up / down, down / up / down came hard for me. Worth doing, of course, but there was some doing goin' on!
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I'm focused on getting the time right especially anything above eighth note triplets so whatever the right hand does is fine by me.
Funny I'm a big fan of Emily Remler and I was just watching her videos hadn't watched them in a year or so. After this and other threads on picking and stuff now I know where my attitude came from. In Emily's video she says stop worrying about your right hand. Too many people spend too much time focusing on their right hand, if the notes are coming out clean don't worry about it.
So to the OP if you done or doing your practice on eighth note trippets on scales and etc, you've been practicing starting triplets on down strokes and upstrokes. If you're playing scales in eighth note triplets and they are in time and even, can adjust dynamics then time to work on some music with triplets and listen to yourself. Judge if more work is needed. You have to get to where you just have to trust your technique to handle things.
One thing GIT taught in the Howard Roberts days and that learning to stopping practising things and by setting a time limit be it minutes or days. After you stop then let your playing over time decide do I need more work on this. Doing this taught two things, first how to learn faster. As you shorten those times you learning things faster. Howard would quote "The task increases with the time alloted". In order to learn faster you discover real fast you need to learn to focus all your attention during that time span. Learn to control your focus is a great asset especially for a musician.
Okay time for more coffee.
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Yes. I never think about my right hand. That's why I've developed exercises - so I never have to think about it. I've been doing the exercises so long, I just do them. When I play, I just play. I never think about up strokes vs downstrokes. Never. But I have practiced to achieve a kind of independence so I don't get hung up on technical things. I think Emler's exactly right. But at some point I have had to put attention on it so I didn't have to think about it.
I took seminars with Roberts. A lot of that stuff sunk in. I wonder where it came from until it's mentioned here or on other forums the kind of things HR would say or write. And one of my first teachers was a HR acolyte. So he taught me everything HR taught him. I would suppose my whole method of practicing came from HR - at least indirectly.
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Howard called it Learning Cycles and it was something he studied, but not sure what all his sources were. He said it was about how we learn things, and more effective ways to learn. He was also into visualization like out of the old Maxwell Maltz book Psycho-Cybernetics. He talked a lot about time limits and how the subconscious in background of reviewing the data we learned, and how if something wasn't clear to it would prompt you to think about it. He said that is why you could be watching TV and suddenly you think what's the 13th of C7? Howard said a big problem what learning things like playing an instrument is we are trying to learn two things at once a physical skill and a mental skill. He said if you split them up in the learning process you learn faster overall. Last he was big advocate of perfect practice, to practice as slow and necessary to perform something perfectly. Howard said that the brain only knows data, it doesn't know good data from bad data just data. So if make mistakes the brain remember those as well as the correct times. Example a C major scale we've played a zillion times, but still make a mistake now and then, that is because we made that mistake somewhere in the past and the brain remembered only as something we called C Major scale. Howard had a lot of great ideas about teaching and early GIT implemented them. Of course some students didn't understand and complained so over time Howard's methods slowly disappeared.
Originally Posted by henryrobinett
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A couple of things I incorporated from drums that I use for practicing accents more than anything else.....
A bit mechanical....and the notes are only to show the exercise....can be anything obviously
All alt picking....
4 note pattern (CAGE) in triplet rhythm.....Accent underline bold
1) C A G E C A G E C A G E
2) C A G E C A G E C A G E
5 note pattern (CAGED) in triplet rhythm.....Accent underline bold
1) C A G E D C A G E D C A G E D
2)C A G E D C A G E D C A G E DLast edited by djangoles; 08-02-2014 at 08:27 PM.
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I appreciate all the replies guys, thanks. I appreciate the understanding of my point about the difference between what you practice vs. what happens when you're playing and not thinking about it.
I still feel the need to think a lot about the right hand in my practice sessions. I've only been taking right hand picking study seriously for about 3 years now. My many, many years playing before that, if there was a pick in my hand, it was pretty much whatever happened. (I did study the right hand carefully when I studied classical). Playing trad blues years ago I probably bent as many notes as I picked. Working towards bebop-stytle improv is taking a great deal of "corrective" right hand work.
Djangoles, that looks interesting, but I'm a little confused. Strings? Fingerings? Of wait, I think I do get it. It can be any 4 notes, the point is simply 4 different pitches against the triplet rhythm, so the accents keep falling on a different pitch. Right?Last edited by MattC; 08-03-2014 at 07:51 AM.
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Djangoles, just spent a few minutes trying 4 pitch triplet exercises like that. Cool. Felt like I was playing a part in one of those "minimalist" Steve Reich phase pieces.
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If "the brain only knows data" and there is a difference between 'good data' and 'bad data' (which the brain cannot know), then the brain is less than the mind. (The mind would be that which knows, among other things, 'good data' from 'bad data.') What did Howard say about the mind's role in learning and playing music? Originally Posted by docbop
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Alternate picking all the way. I used to practice 3 octave scales, including chromatic scale, in triplets.
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Not sure what your getting at? He did talk about visualization as I mentioned and taking advantage of the mind not knowing the difference from a physical activity and a visualized one. That comes out of the Maxwell Maltz book and years of similar books on visualization. Is that what you mean by mind? Joe Diorio had similar things in his talks on practising creativity I've mentioned those in threads over the years. Joe would recommend books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and Free Play and others. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
One of the instructors at GIT I had for a technique class would have his saying when learning new things "See it, Feel it, Make it your own".
Me speaking.... Most people just don't think about our brain just know we have one and we remember things. If you start learning how to work with the brain you can learn to do more with it. My talks with Howard and Joe led me to other things on learning to control our mind. That's as much about that as I want to say.
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Originally Posted by MattC
yea it can feel like that sometimes....
Like I said the notes/strings are really up to you....works well with 7th arps across three or four strings also. Makes for a challenging picking/accent exercise.
I prefer to use repeating patterns of 4 or 5 notes only so I can focus on the accents. It gets too complicated keeping track of accents and picking if I'm trying to play over changes with this stuff.
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[QUOTE=MattC;448225
Djangoles, that looks interesting, but I'm a little confused. Strings? Fingerings? Of wait, I think I do get it. It can be any 4 notes, the point is simply 4 different pitches against the triplet rhythm, so the accents keep falling on a different pitch. Right?[/QUOTE]
yes that would be one way....then there is accenting same pitch (all C all A etc) and keeping same triplet rhythm...Same with 5 notes.
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this is worth highlighting as a general point. Originally Posted by docbop
it's true for a lot of things outside of music, too.
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It's simple. Howard said the brain only knows data, not whether data is good or bad. But clearly Howard thought there was a difference between good data (-a scale played correctly) and bad data (-a scale played incorrectly). So that idea was not something he got from his brain. Either that, or the brain knows more than just data. ... Originally Posted by docbop
I remember reading Psycho-Cybernetics when I was a kid. Interesting stuff to me then but I think the field has come a long way since then. I'm surprised that in all the talk I hear about Howard's approach, there seems to be very little data offered to support it.
Don't get me wrong, I loved his playing. But I think if he were around today, he would not talk this way about learning.
I do agree with him that Parkinson's Law is a good rule of thumb: "work expands to fill the time allotted for it."
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Have to agree to disagree. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
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Well the problem then is what and where's the difference between the repository of data (what he's calling the brain) and the one who decides whether the data is good or not?
I'm not necessarily in disagreement. But terminology needs to be better defined.
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Like a computer it only knows data doesn't know good or bad, a program decides on what the data is and what to do with it, but the raw data is still raw data. A lot of that is hidden in modern computers, but back bare bones programming you saw data was in one area of RAM, code was in another area of RAM, the the CPU executes the code that uses the data. Brain has different areas it does different things with. Back to computer for a second thing of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) you have overloaded functions meaning a pieces of data is sent to it, and it decide which function to use to process it. Or the English language is full of words that sound alike and have different meanings. So you hear the word data, and decide how to process it. Originally Posted by henryrobinett
Oh well I'm just throwing out my opinions no one is has to agree with me, it's just to offer a different point of view.
Now to get back to ATTYA in spread triads, Bach would be proud or would he?
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I think you're missing what I'm saying but that's ok. I was being . . . Maybe rhetorical. Most people think of themselves as their brains. If what HR is saying is true then there have to be at least two "minds." One that stores data and the other that decides what data is valuable.
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i don't expect jazz guitar instructors to have a tight grip on the cutting edge of brain science, much less the related debates in philosophy. much of the debate in philosophical research over whether or not "mind" can be usefully reduced to "brain" has developed in the last few decades. it doesn't seem to have much to tell us about pedagogy. whether roberts said "brain" or "mind" doesn't matter much to the basic point for us, fortunately, although it's fun to think about.
some of the recent work in neuroscience and cognition, though, does seem to support the idea that serious musical training has salutary effects on other kinds of intellectual activities. if folks really care about this, stuff, this website, from society for neuroscience, does a pretty good job of introducing folks to the current literature.
Explore the Brain and Mind - BrainFacts.org
oh, and i had to go sit down and slowly work through a bunch of triplets to find out that when i pick them, i usually use down-up-down. no idea where i learned that pattern. didn't even know i did it until i read this thread.
reading these threads has been really helpful-- it's especially interesting to leanr about the differences in training that folks have had over the years
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That's my point! Originally Posted by henryrobinett
For many, the mind may be reduced to the brain. Or, in other words, there is no mind, just brain. I get that. (I disagree with that position but I understand it.)
But people inclined to that view cannot say "the brain only knows data, not whether it is good or bad." Think of the problem this creates: if you realize you made a mistake it's not through using your brain! Or consider the practice of an athlete shooting a basketball: who would say the the brain doesn't know whether a free throw was made or missed? It's a startling claim.
Be that as it may, Howard's teaching ASSUMES a difference between 'getting it right' (-playing a scale correctly) and 'getting it wrong.' He argues that a musician at practice should be attentive to mistakes. This assumes a musician can recognize them. But such recognition cannot come via the brain because the brain 'knows only data.' What assesses the data of performance into the categories of 'mistake' and 'correct practice'?
I think one reason Howard's teaching fell out of fashion is that the 'brain-as-computer' analogy is less compelling than it used to be.
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I think the brain as a computer - physical computer, holds. As far as now, science doesn't know where consciousness is. So latest conjectures of science be damned. They still don't know shit about it. And until they do, I'll suspend critical judgement on the issue.
There certainly IS unconscious awareness. There are way too many data to be conscious of when shooting a basket or playing a solo on rhythm changes, with substitutions at 300 BPM. There certainly DOES seem to be a repository of data being stored somewhere beyond one's own conscious awareness of it. And there certainly are decisions being made about what is useful, pretty, aesthetic, artistic, useless, horrible, swinging, funky, awkward. This is why I maintain that THINKING is too slow to be able to decipher and shift through all of this data. One doesn't talk with a mental Websters or Oxford dictionary looking up just the right word, usage and definitions. No. At some point that data is learned and stored.
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