Here's a cool lick I came up with, while playing around with a bunch of intervallic ideas.

I call these "Backwards Arpeggios".
Basically, I take a chord, and play the notes in reverse.
For example, take a GM7, and reverse the order of the notes. You get F# D B G. Play the F# as the lowest pitch, and the G is the highest pitch.
This will yield some larger intervallic jumps. But, all diatonic.
F# to D is an augmented 5th. D to B is a 6th. B to G is another augmented 5th. Pretty big intervals.
Run through all of the chords in any key, and you will have some great patterns to pull from.

Also, try arpeggiating a chord progression, this way. Let me know what you guys think.

That's nice man. And freakin' difficult too. Thanks. One more thing I should practice.

Kind of Pat Metheny 'esque. I like it.

quote:

Originally posted by klasaine:
That's nice man. And freakin' difficult too. Thanks. One more thing I should practice.

Kind of Pat Metheny 'esque. I like it.

Thanks. I've been having fun with the whole "Backwards Arpeggio" concept. Still trying to get a handle on it, though. It'll probably take me another 5 years, just to get really fluent with it! But, I'm diggin' it.

Here's another one:

Take any phrase or line, and change 1 of the notes. Just take the chosen note, and substitute a note that's a 6th. away. Or, a 4th., 7th., an Octave, etc.
If you change the last note, it can often change your point of resolution. This can lead to modal types of sounds.

Cool stuff Swain, thanks for the tip.

One of my brighter and more curious young students is way up into the "math" of music, and he can't seem to get enough of it. Over the past couple of weeks, we've been harmonizing various scales and modes, and checking in with their correlating chords and arps.

Earlier this eve, we harmonized an E harmonic minor scale, and laid out the root and first inversion arps. I then had him fish around for the notes within this scale for one of my pet melodic sequences: up the 1-3-5 of the I chord, down the 5-3-1 of the II chord, up the 1-3-5 of the III chord, down the 5-3-1 of the IV, and so on, with a triplet feel.

I had him run the arps and inversions and sequences over my rhythm, military style, about 10-12 times, and then I yelled, "hey man, take off, play whatever you like." It was extremely cool to see this fifteen year old guy's eyes light up as he stumbled upon new and exciting sounds, sometimes seeming to watch in disbelief as to the noises that his fingers were making.

As a teacher, this is the sort of thing that makes my job worthwhile and fun. He'll totally dig your idea, I'm sure.

Corleone,

That's great! It really is
cool to be present, when someone gets it. Especially when you've actually had a hand in it.

Here's another cool idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YJ2P1fvYhw

I like that too. His ideas are easier than yours swain What's up with that?