You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Fingering: Getting Out of It

Episode Date: May 28, 2019

Today, it's an episode all about fingering - specifically, what to do when improvising a solo.One of the helpful resources mentioned in this episode (and many other YHI episodes) is the MacFerren Scale and Arpeggio Manual, which you can purchase here.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Pete. Hey, man. Yesterday's You'll Hear an episode was a bit long, eh? It was very long. We should go really quick today. You'll hear it. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Daily Jazz Advice, coming at you. Coming at you today, sponsored by Open Studio. Of course, we have our great deal still, our offer on the All Access Pass. Yes. Don't sleep on that. We'll get into that towards the end of this episode, which is only going to be an appropriate length today. How about seven minutes instead of 27 minutes?

That was long. I mean, we get passionate about marketing, though, and we're kind of in the thick of it right now. We're in the thick of it. But I think that, I mean, please let us know in the comments below on YouTube, because Adam's in there every day checking them. You know that. But, I mean, hopefully we provided some value. We felt good about it.

We were kind of shocking. We heard from our illustrious producer, Andrew, at the end of the episode, that it was 27 minutes long. So if that's too long for y'all, let us know. On the other hand, you can also just stop listening at the appropriate time. It's a daily podcast. There's going to be one tomorrow that's like seven minutes. No, but we're very passionate about providing value to you guys.

So the times when we do stretch, I mean, I guess it probably depends on if that was interesting or kind of on people's mind or useful information. I think if people are interested in that, you know, marketing their own gigs and stuff as we do, as most musicians do, hopefully it provided some value. All right. Today, oh, we have a question from an email and it's kind of long. Okay. 27 minutes long. It might take 27 minutes just to read this. I'm going to try to do a.

Truncate it? Yeah. Okay. Hi, Peter and Adam. Thanks for keeping the top-notch podcast going after April Fool's. Ah, that's a reference to our April Fool's prank that was so popular. I'm going to skip all the accolades. It's a whole paragraph.

A little context. I've been studying some classical music as a youth. The last few years, I've often visited a local blues jam with guitar faces and solos out of this world, the streaming of one day, improvising on stage together with others. And recently, have transitioned to playing piano. I've bought and practiced the sheet music for Canelope Island, Take Five, Misty, Take the A-Train, all the things you are around midnight, in a sentimental mood, et cetera.

I love the et cetera came after like 10 titles. 10 classics. I love playing these beautiful songs. The score can be useful to get basic voicing ideas and cool riffs, but I'm trying to break free of the score. Good. And make up my own improvisations and voicing. Maybe I also need lick vocabulary going.

Okay. Here's my question. What are your tips for improving free improvisation with proper fingering and making up melodic? pleasing lines played clearly over light chord stabs in real time in a jam situation. He goes into the chords that he loves. So I thought for this one, we get this question a lot.

So he continues on with is watching online tutorials and speeding down the video of, say, Oscar Peterson, a recommended approach. I've never heard it called speeding down. That's an interesting way. Getting transcriptions and trying to figure out good fingerings on one's own. Yeah. So we get this question. This is really just kind of a general question that we get all the time.

Yeah, fingering. Specifically about fingerings when improvising. And I think this comes from a lot of people with a classical background. Yeah. Because, I mean, this is a way to learn a piece of classical music is you can learn it all by the fingering patterns. Right. I mean, and just kind of memorize that and let that lead you in your technique. And we have sort of evolves our fingering.

ideas, I think. Or devolved. Or devolved. Answering some of these questions by email and video. And so, I don't think we've ever really covered it that intensely on that you'll hear a podcast. No. You should talk about it. This is for, this is for, this is for pianists today. Right. It's to anybody else. But this is, if you're not a pianist, you might not understand that, but

classical music, there's, fingering is a huge part of it. I mean, the act of like, the deciding on your fingering for most pianists. Well, and I would say just for playing the piano in any style. Yes. It actually is. I think in classical music, it's so much easier to kind of quantify and qualify also because the notes are prescribed for us. But there's a lot we can learn. We can glean. We can take. We can apply, I think, from the

classical world to the jazz world. So I would say, for some of you that kind of gloss over and are like, well, I'm just a jazz pianist or I'm a blues pianist or I'm a gospel pianist and I came up playing by ear, know that you have such an advantage on the ear training side, on the improvisation side, on the being able to, you'll hear it side. But you are going to be a little. You're going to be a little bit of a disadvantage on the fingering side, but just know that to me, I don't know, to me, this is the easier side to kind of get a handle on because it's, it really is like specific in terms of like there's certain rules and stuff that anybody can learn. It's true. And the more you address these, you're going to see technical hurdles that you haven't been able to clear,

get cleared pretty quickly. Right. With some good fingering. Yeah. And I think if we think about, you know, conceptually, there being sort of two types of pianists, and obviously this is, this is a little bit barbaric way to look at it because there's all different gradations in between. But if you think about those that are classically trained at any level where like they've learned at least some proper quote unquote correct fingering fingering techniques and rules and regulations versus those that learn to play by ear and don't know those but they have really good ears. So like the ones that learn the fingering don't have great ears and the ones, you know, and we do see this a lot. Yeah, we'd see it all the time.

So obviously the goal is to have both. And that's where the magic happens. And that's where when we talk about, remember we had the question the other day was like, what makes a great jazz panace? All those people that the greats, I think, what do we call them? The greats or the monsters or whatever.

You know, the Herbie Hancock's, the Oscar Peterson's. The masters. Like, they're going to all have all this. Yes, you know, and then some. But the good news is you can get this. It's a little bit different than dealing it with pre-written music. And that you actually have to practice improvising with good fingering. Yeah.

Because you don't want to be thinking about it. it as you're playing. You want to be thinking about nothing, but you want to just let the music happen. And hopefully you've developed these good habits fingering-wise so that there's no hiccups in your technique. Yeah. Not only do you not want to be thinking of it, you're going to get to the point when your ears get developed to a greater stage, or maybe they're already there, that you're not going to be able to think about. You're not going to have time to think about it, even if you wanted to be thinking about those rules. So they have to be automated. They have to be habitual. And, you know, look, a habit is just something that's either good or bad or in the middle that you do over and over again.

Yep. You know, a lot of people are like, I don't have good fingering. Okay, well, you have to do the things to give yourself good fingering. You're not only have to learn them, you have to do them. So that means practicing them in this case. And then you have to repeat it. It's not just a matter of intellectually knowing or trying it once. You have to do it over and over again.

Some people get it twisted, as they say, and that they'll see somebody relatively young and be like, oh, my God, they have such great technique. They have such great fingering. They have such, they're such great runners. I mean, they're such great, I mean, it could be anything. And then that kind of discounts the fact that like, well, maybe they took some technical things about their craft and did them over and over again to the point where it became a habit so that they could start to be creative of them without losing the technical things that come into play. So true. So true. So for the piano, it's just fingering.

And I think the reason we do get this question so much and we're thinking about it and, you know, helping people with it. is that it's such, it's not the only part, but it's such a big part of piano technique. Whereas, say, for the saxophone or the trumpet, it's not that big of a thing. Finger, you learn the fingering, but there's not that mean, there's alternate fingers.

Yeah, there's not that many choices as we have. So let's get right to probably the most important part of this, which is the basics that you can cover can be found in one really great book that I know we both love, and that's the McFerrin. Oh, sorry. Oh, which one? That too.

The McFerran scale an arpeggia map. Oh, yeah. So Andrew, why don't you put a link to the McFerrin scale and arpeggio manual here? And this is like a Shermer, you know, one of those cream-colored books that we all grew up with or whatever. But if you go through this book and the scales, the arpeggios, the thirds, all the ways that McFeran has you go through this in McFerrin's fingerings, so much of this is going to be revealed to you. Right. The fingering, it's not just the fingerings of scales, although that's very important. But I remember a few years ago when I really went through this,

seeing like when I practiced scales in octaves and on the black key in octaves, my fourth finger is on the top note, not my pinky. And having a light bulb go off of like, oh, and then I can move to the white key with the pinky and it sounds so much smoother, like these little technical things. Or moving up in thirds in the way that he has you finger,

all those, I mean, it just makes such a huge difference. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's where you should start. If you don't have that kind of basis, get it. It's on Amazon. It's not that expensive. I think it's like $12 or something.

Yeah, I think it's maybe not a copyright. And look, this is the thing. If some of you are like, oh, I've been working out of this other scale book or scale in our Pedyo book, that's fun. Don't switch over. Yeah, there's not one way to do this. Like, because many people will be like, well, I know such and such. You know, Oscar Peterson to work out of that. So this is one of those things.

Don't get into analysis paralysis. And it's also like this is going to get you 80% there for fingering. For sure. You know, but some other. books might get you 84% and some other 72 it doesn't really matter yeah just get one yeah and even if like one is maybe a little better or a little worse for you

versus someone else it doesn't matter like you're gonna kind of figure that out just get going with it it's kind of like if you're gonna lift weights well what brand is bad that doesn't really matter it's the amount of weight you know but we will link to that one which is our recommended yeah it's great it's great it covers a lot of basis for you now then there's some more jazz specific

things like there's not really a lot of great material on like blue scale fingering on the piano. We're going to do that. It's on our list. No, yeah. Actually, so for our jazz piano technique course, that'll be out in the fall, hopefully.

Yeah. That we're going to have the definitive blue scale fingering. But here's what I will say, and this is true for anything. Figure out what works best for your hand. Yeah. Realize there's some basic principles, like try to keep your thumb off the black keys. Try to maybe keep your pinky off the black keys if you can.

Yeah. And figure out what works. I remember just going through all the black key blues scales and trying to find the best fingering and I still have all those fingerings and it works great for me. Well it's always fun in me because I have heard from people like well yeah I you know what is like they'll try to find something say

that isn't in the McFerrin well like what about this? And my thing is like go through that whole book like that's going to give you more than enough. Like if you never learn an official fingering for a blue scale because I never did because I didn't have that. I didn't even really know what the blue scale versus the secret

what we call the secret blue scale was but I did have a good foundation there and it's served me pretty well. Like, show me somebody that really can nail that and maybe the Phillips and there's churny and hand and then other exercises that are the manifestation of these kind of fingerings.

Show me somebody that has that and has no official jazz fingering. And I'm going to show you somebody that if they because this is the other thing. The other part we talk about the ear that's just as important or really more important. It's more important. You want to get this out of the way. Yeah, you want to get this out of the way. Get yourself 80% there. Get your ears together and you're going to be

well upon your way. And the great thing about that is then you can be like that's all I need and when you go to play jazz you're not having to think about it that's going to automatically come out those rules it's so true like when you go through the arpeggios and the McFerrin even though they're all just triadic arpeggios it's not like jazz arpeggios how we play it gives you those tools yeah then when you want to apply that to jazz arpeggios which are a little different you still have these sort of unofficial official rules about where your hands should be how it feels how good fingering feels right and uh hopefully you apply that to the same thing with like the half hole scale or something, which isn't in the classical books.

Right, right. You need to find the way that works best for you, but use those classical rules that we've, you know, learned from other sources. Yeah, and I mean, you know, this is all about habits. And so by repetition, you're going to develop those good habits that McFerrin or whatever scale book you're doing. Tomorrow, I don't know if you know about this. We're going to be talking more in depth than habits.

So we're going to leave it there for now. Excellent. But we're going to get into habits and the kind of the other side. So make sure to tune into that because that'll be able to apply to this kind of practice, but I think to a lot of other practice. And it's something that we've mentioned in passing, but it's going to be fun to kind of dive into a little deeper. In the meantime, though, if you want to save $77 off an annual membership to the All-XIS pass from Open Studio,

which is every course we make and will make for the next year, simply... Oh, I do want to do it then. Sorry, now you sold me. Simply go to Open Studio Network.com, get the annual membership to the All-access pass, and then in the offer code field at checkout, put in, you'll hear it, one word, and, yeah, you're going to save 77 bucks. And this is our biggest, you know, savings we've done here on this. So this, we did it, maybe was it last year or six months ago. So this is only going to be good for this week.

So, you know, take your time. But don't take too much time because it's going. It's going. So we'll see again tomorrow then, I guess. Yeah. You'll hear it.