View Single Post
Old July 25th, 2009, 06:48 PM   #20 (permalink)
warmingtone
Tele-Holic
 
warmingtone's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: australia
Age: 51
Posts: 563
"Chord Chemistry" was very influential to me reading it, playing and understanding it over and over. I also have "Vol 1&2 Single Note Soloing" which has a tremendous amount of material but I found it less practically useful. The kind of thing that you go to when you want to sit down and "study"...I like to understand principles over endless examples and progressions that I might not play that much.

With a lot of chords in progression stuff...what you are really looking at are not "blocks" of sounds but multiple lines that move and generally in predictable ways to produce smooth progressions. That means being able to create voicing that say have the b5 in a ii chord fall to the root of the V chord, or a b9 in a V chord to the 5th of the I. I am not sure if 'chord chemistry' covers that (it has been a lot of years since I have studied it) but there is a danger in learning a "chord dictionary" kind of approach without understanding progressions.

Still...it did make a big influence on me and clarify a lot of things at the time and that amongst a host of other approaches allowed me to see these connected lines and chord structures and functions. The understanding of how chords are built and how they connect one to another in a progression is vital to a host of improvisation styles.
warmingtone is offline   Reply With Quote