Organizing Licks

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#1

So, I’ve been thinking how I could better use the material presented here and I’ve got a suggestion that I think might be helpful for working through the licks.

It seems like the examples tend to fall into two different categories.

  1. Licks: Musical phrases that you might actually play in a solo/improvisation. This would tend to be considered more musical and melodic.

  2. Exercises: Supporting examples intended to zero in on particular portions of a given lick to help develop a skill that is required to master a given lick.

I think it could be helpful to organize the examples in that way such that each one is clearly labeled as either a lick or an exercise. The idea would be you could take a lick that you would like to learn (the unltimate goal) and identifiy the difficult portions of it. You could then utilize the excercises associated with that lick to build the skills to master that lick. Ideally, I think it would be most helpful to have a single PDF for each lick/exercise combination that starts with the lick and then also includes the supporting exercises. I think that might be easier to work with than having everything be in individual PDFs.

Anyone else think that this might be helpful?

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#2

for whatever it’s worth, and I apologize that this is a little off-center of what you’re asking, but more or less what I wind up recommending to students is:

  • Take a figure that you would like to be able to play/perform/record - it might be your own creation, something transcribed from someone else’s solo, or something from a book/website etc,

  • figure out what kind of attack and accents you want it to have in terms of sound

  • isolate the section, transitions, etc, that are most difficult and problem solving what might be needed to get it up to proper tempo. sometimes it’s a ‘strategy’ issue of where to slant, where to use a slur, downstroke vs upstroke, etc, and sometimes it’s a physical limit issue where there’s a movement that needs to be improved

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#3

Thanks for the response. I agree and think that’s great process to follow which is also something that I’m trying to work for my self since I didn’t a fair amount of time practicing stuff that doesn’t seem to stuck. I’ve been reconsidering how I approach practice overall. If only I knew in my teens what I know now.

Anyways, I’m just trying to figure out how to organize the various files from each interview on the site in a way that’s most intuitive. I find it a little difficult to work on the licks when the files are split into clips and tabs and I also think it would help me to have supporting exercises filed away with their respective licks. Do I think my plan is to merge the tabs and clips folders and then create subdirectories for each lick which also includes supporting exercises.

For instance, I would have a folder that contained the following files from the Andy Wood interview:

Ballad of Ricky and Cal.mov
Lick - Ballad of Ricky and Cal.pdf
Exercise - Ballad of Ricky and Cal Arppegios.pdf
Exercise - Ballad of Ricky and Cal Double Stops.pdf
Exercise - Ballad of Ricky and Cal Pentatonic.pdf
Exercise - Ballad of Ricky and Cal Rolls.pdf

The idea being that everything for a given lick is in one place including the clip for reference. I’d start with the lick itself and then use the exercises as needed to improve technique.

I was wondering if anyone else has given it any thought.

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