UpTempo Soloing

[chicagodoubler]

yep yep yep

start with small melodic and HONEST phrases

Often overlooked. Nobody cares how hip your lines are if they aren't honest and heartfelt. There are chops cats that can play chainsaw bass solos at 4,000 bpm's but Charlie Haden sells more records.

Ever wonder why?

Nothing wrong with playing a walking solo with hip harmonic ideas either!!!! People love that. Gives you a chance to show off all your lovely walking ideas in the context of a spotlighted feature.


oh yeah I wholeheartedly contest that Ray had burning chops. Transcribe his OP trio stuff on "Exclusivelyfor my Friends" and try to tell me otherwise!

[matthewbrown]

There's a lot of really good advice in this thread; I'll add one more, passed on to my by Vince Maggio at U. Miami: "You can always play the melody if you can't think of anything else to play." That's saved my ass on a number of occasions!

[basbende]

A good way is indeed to take the "Larry Genadier" way of playing up-tempo solo's: Make the quarter notes sound like straight 8th notes, soundwise, but keep the right speed of the chord canges of course.

Like in any solo you can alternate them with triplets (which sounds like a triplet but is a quarternote triplet in the real tempo) and the quarter note triplet (which is the whole note triplet in the real tempo)

It also works well if you use groupings. changing to 12/8 feel in half the tempo can work well too (but again: keep the original speed of the changes!!)

Try to first practice these things with the metronome on 1, or 1 and 3. Then try a play-along cd(unfortunately a lot of those are not very tight though...) The changes tot triplets and 12/8 become extremely difficult with the metronome on 2 and 4, and if you have a good drummer, he will not lean too much on the hi hat so don't worry about that.

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