Request - Chord names for transcribed clips/examples

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#1

Hi, I’d find it extremely helpful in terms of working out what’s going on/incorporating ideas into my own playing if some of the clips had the chord changes, or implied changes, noted where appropriate on the soundslice player, especially for jazz lines and comping examples.

While I’m here there seems to be something up with the soundslice player on the Olli Soikelli clips, the…little thingy that should track the point in the clip isn’t tracking properly, is thus just at my end or is it happening for everyone?

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#3

Sorry! We didn’t do the sync points yet for Olli - we have to do that manually, watch every clip, both fast and slow version, and tap the spacebar on the bar lines and then tighten it up. It takes… time! We only did that for Alumiando because it was first. We’ll get to the rest asap.

#4

Ah I didn’t realise that required so much human intervention, please don’t work yourself any harder on my account, I can wait.

#5

I think it’s a testament to how well Soundslice works that you don’t notice. But if you think about it, how would the player know exactly where in the video the bars occur? This is especially true if there’s no real meter, as a lot of these examples are, because they’re just notes or chords from a conversation.

#6

Re: chords, I think that quickly becomes problematic outside of songs where the chords are known. Because in an interview situation, where it’s just solo guitar with no backing, a lot of phrases are ambiguous. The transcriber would be injecting their own idea about what chord goes with what notes, which may or may not link up to what the player is thinking. And the player themselves might even think differently for the same lick in a different mode, musical style, song, etc.

For now, I think in a case like the Olli interview the simple solution is to let the interview be the guide. Because in this interview, specifically, we did a lot of conversation about what chord shapes he uses for different lines, to the extent that he actually shows specifically what chord fingering he thinks of as matching with them. That’s really powerful.

It was tricky to get him to explain how he sees the fretboard because his thoughts are non-verbal. But the key is at one point when he goes “I definitely have certain positions…” and another point when he says “I’m really comfortable in this area” and plays a II-V sequence of shapes. He definitely thinks in terms of chord shapes and once we got the conversation moving he understood immediately what I meant when I asked question about the target chords for each line.

#7

So this is why I’m having trouble conceptualising some of the lines, but I suppose what I’m asking is for someone else to make a possibly arbitrary decision so I don’t have to, and then I can take their word for it rather than thinking for myself, which probably isn’t that helpful for me in the long run.

It isn’t that I want to know “how can I use this line” but “how can I make more lines that feel like this”

#8

I get it, but I don’t want to make those arbitrary decisions for an interview where in a lot of cases I have very little to go on. Like here’s a lick, we transcribed it, what chords do I think he was thinking? Because in reality he might not have been thinking anything, or what he would think might be different whether it’s major, minor, Choro, bebop, and so on.

On the other hand, for a general instructional video about soloing over jazz chords, totally. You might take some example phrases from Olli’s interview and be like, ok, here’s a line that has a swing type sound, and here’s how I would place it over XYZ chords, and maybe adapt it into other lines, so on. Similar to this one that we did:

We’d be happy to even get Olli to come and record something like that. But the challenge I think for a lot of these players is that they haven’t really verbalized this stuff and worked out a way to explain. An example I watched recently of a player who does have a great teaching presentation of this kind of topic is this one by Henry Johnson:

Easy to follow, clear, and hands-on, and not super bogged down in theory like a lot of jazz lessons can get.

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