18th April

18th April – In todays lesson we practiced the Reggae piece and jammed Green Onions. We found this to better than our previous 12 bar, as it had clearer riff/melodies to work from rather than simply just playing 12 bar blues chords.
We had all practised green onions over the holidays so we had a clear idea of what to improvise over when we cam back. We played over the main pattern each taking turns to solo over the 12 bar blues riff which is in the key of F. To solo over this, due to it being a very traditional blues, i felt the best way to solo over this would be to use the f blues scale. This fitted perfectly over this and with my practise of blues rock licks in this scale I was able to solo over the progression straight away with ease and at times I even reference the original guitar solo in the song to pay homage to the original.

In the second hour we listened back to the recording of our original jam on Sam’s bass line. We continued jamming and established the main themes that would become the A and B sections. A being sams bass line section and B a section based around around a 2 chord progression using arpeggios of an 4 major seven chord and an e major seven chord. We recorded this to keep it fresh in our minds and so we could listen back to it in our next lesson.

My target for next week is to keep practising green onions and to experiment with ideas that work over both the A and B section of our improvised jam song. I will give myself a week to practise and I will practise by experimenting with looping ideas over the chords and layering guitar parts until I faint some interesting parts and potentially even finding parts for more sections of the jammed song.