On this day I received my first formal gypsy jazz guitar lesson. My teacher is a very entertaining guitar player named Jason Okamoto who used to play for a local band called The Kung Pao Chickens. Now he teaches guitar lessons at artichoke music as one of their “in-house” teachers.
We started the lesson by jamming to minor swing for about 5 minutes. I wanted him to see how I approached my soloing, and I also wanted to try to recognize some of the arpeggio patterns that he plays. It turns out that it was really hard for me to visualize licks from this point of view.
Jason started me out with some of the arpeggio patterns that he plays. He also gave me a great lesson on “passing notes” or what I would call “vicinity notes”. What I mean by this is that, as you run through an arpeggio, you can play some of the notes adjacent to the arpeggio notes, to create a busy feel. As far as I can tell, this technically should be right on the money about 50% of the time since a diminished run skips every other note, that gives you nearly 50/50 odds that you’ll hit a note in the diminished chord. Its a little bit of magic, but I works fairly well, and it sounded great, watching him do it. With a bit of thought and listening, you could probably up the note success rate to 60-70%.
You might think its funny, how I interpret things that people teach me, but a lot of the time I play devils advocate with myself, and I toy with ideas that I know are not correct, but I hope they will stretch me to some kind of truth.
Jason talked a bit more on how to follow the chord progression and play your arpeggio, based on the chord that the song is on. All in all, he succeeded in enlightening me quite a bit. Its one thing reading about how you should play along to a song, and its quite another thing to see someone do it, and explain it to you.