http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8ndtWhFOLk&fmt=18 for stereo, but you knew that. This is my arrangement of one of George Duke's signature tunes. This version is largely based on the one recorded in 1971 on the album "Inner Source." I transcribed this from that album. He later recorded this on other albums, including "Brazilian Love Affair," which is probably where you heard it if you know it. There's also a killer live version on Youtube that you need to check out. I'm playing Rhodes over a bass synth part and drum track that I played, recorded, and edited. The 1971 version was played on a detuned piano with acoustic bass and drums. Here the emphasis is on the chord changes and the lush sound this makes on Rhodes--this is one of the most complex pieces of music I've analyzed in terms of chord progressions. It's very hard to voice lead these chords well--they don't follow any of the usual circle-of-fifths relationships. I transcribed this because the harmony is really unlike most of what you hear.

Tags: jazz piano soul fender rhodes trio bossa nova george duke fusion inner source

I'm back, and I've got something to say. So turn it up. In this episode I am ably assisted by my good friend slickback on drums.

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion funky funk improv improvisation bass keyboard drums groove

I've mutated. Have you? Stereo/HQ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44suNrAfo94&fmt=18

Tags: synth jam loop improvised beat

Just listen--everything I have to say is in there. Now with annotations!

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion stereo funky funk loop improv improvisation zawinul miles davis weather report

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R4hnxYlk-o&fmt=18 (please watch this video in HQ/stereo, click the link above, and using the beta player also helps) This is my arrangement of a composition by Don Grolnick, recorded by Steps Ahead. I used to play this on the gig 20 years ago with a fantastic band. Here I have only my computer to play with. It may not be entirely clear since I'm shown playing Rhodes throughout, but I'm playing all the parts. (Drum parts have some significant editing, but I played it.) Go ahead and turn your speakers up. I think the stereo/HQ version of this is some of the best quality audio you can get on YouTube. This is by a long shot the most complicated production I've posted. I hope you enjoy it. ++++ Tell YouTube that stereo should be default: (musicians, I'm talking to *you*) Please copy this letter and email it to suggestions@youtube.com Dear YouTube engineering: I really work hard on making nice sounding stereo mixes. I would really be happy if YouTube didn't transcode all my hard work to mono. Determined musicians can get small FLV uploads through in stereo if they're resourceful enough to figure out the undocumented steps and requirements, but it adds a ton of additional work (multiple format conversions, checking after uploading and hoping for the best) that adds nothing whatsoever to the end result, it just prevents senseless degradation of our work. Sometimes. Consider this: at a very minimum, stereo should be default audio format for every musician account. The audience deserves to hear our work in the format we created it. your name here

Tags: fender rhodes "fender rhodes" jazz fusion stereo don grolnick steps ahead high quality "high quality" HQ

hey you guys, I have a couple projects that will make it necessary for me to be a little scarce around here for a couple months--here's one last jam to hold you over until I get back. My Rhodes is going to be put away for a little while, along with the rest of my studio. But I'll return after a brief pause. However I'm here now to *fonk* you a little bit. The necessary format conversion makes the audio a little crunchy right at the beginning, but things settle down right away. What's that? You'd like to have a high-quality MP3 file so you can rattle the windows? All right then, here you go: http://stashbox.org/104557/interlude.mp3

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion stereo funky funk loop improv improvisation

More from the loopy groove department. I would enjoy seeing someone dance to this. I know I'm not a great drummer but I have a lot of fun beating on things. Also I usually wouldn't touch a phase shifter, but this tune just seemed to want one. Aren't you glad there's a stereo backdoor in YouTube? When I watched this video it looked time shifted to me (especially the end), so I expect to get some comments about that, but this is the real tempo, 248bpm.

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion stereo funk loop improv improvisation prog

I'm not real familiar with dance music, but my friend Ryan turned me on to this particular YouTube video by way of presenting it to me as one of the artists he admired most. And I liked it quite a bit too, so I just decided to do a quick mashup with it. The original is by Olivier Portal and you can check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_dXK8-n4Bc I pretty much just laid a Rhodes track over it because I really liked the 7/4 feel and the whole groove just kind of caught me up, and I had the recorder going, so you get to hear the result. I did another more radical version where I busted out the bassline and got all fiendish with it and pushed this thing into an entire other realm, but I think this less aggressive version suits the original better, and my intent is to pay respect to a great track here. I actually did this several months back and never posted it.

Tags: Olivier Portal Chicago house music mashup fender rhodes improv

This is sort of a first. For several months I've been using Ninjam http://www.ninjam.com/ to play "live" with other musicians over the Internet. I can't explain it here, so click the link and read about it if you are interested in this idea. Anyhow, this is a video of me playing along with a prerecorded jam (which I was playing along live with at the time). This Rhodes track was done especially for YouTube, but I was sending the rest of the musicians here my signal "live" at the time (so they heard me and reacted). There are two bass players, a drummer and a synth player in this "band" playing along with me. More or less we all kept time to a metronome and agreed on a four bar phrase that we expanded into what you hear here. I like playing with live humans a lot more than playing to loops, and even though this is quasi-live, it's still a good example of why. The changeups and dynamics you get with real, talented players who are really listening is awesome. And I'd never played with these guys before. The live version of this went on for nearly two hours (over just two chords, but it never got boring). This music is created and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, so allow me to attribute my collaborators, known only to me as: MadHatter Trib_Bass SYLDAU ninjaz All of whom did a great job of listening and making this a superbly musical ninjam.

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion stereo funk ninjam improv improvisation live jam

More loop jam. I had a moment of revelation where this groove manifested itself to me. I sat down at my drum kit and banged it out, then spent a while just feeling around for some chords, and this is pretty much what the result was.

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion stereo funk loop improv improvisation

I'm back at the grand for a veritable anthem of bebop by the inimitable Bud Powell. This tune is a real chops buster. On the plus side, you get to hear how my piano really sounds without the sound being brutalized by my video camera. Sound was direct to my laptop from a pair of Behringer ECM-8000s in a Jecklin array configuration, so you get a tasty stereo image in addition to being hi-fi. It's a Jamey Aebersold backing track, and the bastards speed up by about 10% over the course of this tune. I time compressed the backing track to get it going at more of a Bud-like tempo than the 200bpm that the track is recorded at, but that puts the ending at about 240, which is close to the speed limit for me. My performance here is presented at the tempo I played, just to be clear about that. There's some recordings of Bud going faster, but his better solos are on the ones that are closer to this tempo here. Anyhow, it isn't anything special. There are a few awkward spots in my blowing, but there are also a few really great spots, so I figure it all averages out. Kind of like the tempo averages out to 230bpm. This is a take where I am having fun and just enjoying playing this thing. (I did another take where I was burning away and the phone rang right in the worst possible time...) Sorry about the camera angle--the stand I use to do the overhead POV shot was being used to hold my microphone array. I need to get another stand I guess. The spazzcam move at the beginning is just an accident, I think my pooch bumped into the improvised camera stand. J'ai un petit voiture rouge.

Tags: jazz piano solo bozo bebop bop bud powell parisian thoroughfare fast

This is a Ralph Towner composition, not the tune by the same name recorded by Kansas. I have a detailed analysis of this composition on my blog: http://music.linear1.org/2006/09/02/analysis-icarus/ If you have any interest in musical analysis, this is quite a subject for study. But if you don't then it just sounds good. In anticipation of the requests, I have placed a high-quality MP3 file here: http://stashbox.org/87438/icarus.mp3

Tags: fender rhodes jazz fusion stereo ralph towner

Okay, I know I will get asked, so let me get it out of the way right up front. The bottle you see is Rihaku Dreamy Clouds Nigori Sake. I recommend it. Ginjo sake is a Good Thing. This is my Rhodes version of the classic Jobim tune. I was just in the right mood tonight to do it, and I have very little in the bossa nova category, so it seemed appropriate.

Tags: fender rhodes tom jobim wave bossa nova brasilian jazz

The Eddie Harris classic. What time is it? It's Cold Duck Time. Three four-letter words that tell you to look out for the impending funk. There are dozens of versions of this on YouTube, including the version that got recorded on Swiss Movement. Make sure you check that out. I do a few things in my version that specifically reference that version. I worked hard with this recording to build in more dynamics than you hear in many of these playalong-style tracks. Since I recorded (and played) all the backing track parts, I had a lot of room to expand into dynamically. I recommend you turn it up nice and loud, because it sounds good. It builds up to the end of the Rhodes solo, but then drops back down to a more laid back place for the head out. But trust me, it won't blow your speakers out if you do turn up. It may however blow your mind... I recently made some adjustments that improve my Rhodes' playability in the softer end of the dynamic range. This tune spends a fair amount of time in the quieter end of things so I can show some of that work off. I hear a lot of Rhodes demos where people are wailing away--it's pretty easy to get good tone when you play hard, but getting a reliable good tone when you play soft takes some serious attention to setup. I spent time recently aligning tines to pickups much better. While I was in there I also tuned and fixed a couple problems (mainly in notes you don't get to hear in this recording).

Tags: fender rhodes suitcase 73 electric piano bozo fusion funk soul jazz improv improvisation stereo

Thank you YouTube viewers for 300,000 views, and thank you to each of my 500 subscribers. This is another milestone post. To celebrate 300k, you get another original composition; this one was written about 18 years ago. Similar to G Wiz, this got played a lot on the gig with a large number of bands over time. Once we even took this into a studio and recorded it (the engineer flattened it into a lifeless elevator tune). Here you get my version featuring myself on bass and drums. And Rhodes of course. If you're the kind of person who like to analyze music, there's a couple interesting things going on here. The form is AAB. The A section is 10 bars long. That's kind of weird. Even weirder is that the last bar of the second A becomes the first bar of B in what is known as a phrase elision. B is sixteen bars, in four four-bar phrases, which is ordinary enough. The A section bass part was composed so that the snare drum hit and the melody figure fit into the spaces in it. I had to always point this out to bass players, who have a tendency to invent their own part instead of playing mine. But the interlocking is a part of the composition. And, yes, it's in s - t - e - r - e - o :P

Tags: fender rhodes suitcase 73 electric piano bozo fusion funk soul jazz original composition improv improvisation stereo

People seem to like the format of playing over funky loops. Guess what, I like it too. Here's more from the "not too complicated" book. What the hell happens at 1:33? I don't even know what to say about that. I'm continuing to work on raising the audio quality. A lot of work goes into making this sound state-of-the-art. In fact I recommend you close your eyes, the video is just superfluous. Bass flute is one of the most wonderful sounds in the world. Fender Rhodes is another. Find out what happens when they get together. Mmmmmm. Turn the volume up, it will be alright. Thanks to advances in the capabilities of my studio, I am playing all the parts now. The piano is my 1976 Fender Rhodes suitcase, and it remains the core of my sound. The drums are a mix of one-shot samples from my library of downloaded crap. I'm entering my patterns now by playing on a Alesis DM5 kit, which beats the hell out of tapping keys. The bass flute I created myself from samples downloaded from a University of Iowa project. I had to edit, loop, and tune about six dozen samples to get the full range of pitch and dynamics you're feeling. Shortcircuit (sampler VSTi) made it all pretty straightforward though. And the bass I played live into my DAW using an excellent free MiniMoog VSTi called MinimogueVA. Part of that track got looped later on. All tracks were recorded and mixed in Reaper, which is excellent and rapidly getting better. *programming note--I posted this earlier, but it got converted to mono. This is a repost to get the full stereo love, because you all are worth it. Thanks to those of you who voted/commented on the mono version, I hope you like this one even more.

Tags: jazz funk fender rhodes soul improvisation loop jam stereo

This is a little thing I did and I called it ain't no thang because it ain't no thang.

Tags: jazz funk loop fender rhodes improvisation

my version a few different ways to manipulate tension and release "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." --Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Tags: fender rhodes smooth jazz piano bozo modal so what miles davis improvisation improv free bandwagon obscurantism

Yes I already posted this tune. This version is substantially different though. My robo-band is backing me up here. This tune is one of my absolute all time favorites, so excuse me for doing it more than once. Section for the music theory geeks: I use a couple interesting voicings here. One is a sus chord voicing that also includes the major 3rd. You'll hear that on the quick "stab" accent. It pops up again elsewhere. This is a Herbie sound, no two ways about it. I also use a "phrygian chord" as the last chord of the first phrase. Consider this a reharmonization. Housekeeping: Drum samples were obtained from freesound and are available under a CC Sampling plus license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/) The drum sounds are attributed to TicTacShutup, so if you see him tell him I said thanks, especially for that kick drum. This project was my first recorded and mixed in Reaper, and I'm very much a fan. If you need a better DAW than what you have, check out http://reaper.fm and see what you're missing.

Tags: fender rhodes jazz soul funk improvisation ron carter

Okay, there's a whole lot of videos of people playing their ass off on YouTube. I am here to show you that you don't need to be a crazed shredding monster to be funky. In fact, listen to the real guys on the albums, and they are mostly playing really simple shit, locked in tight so the groove takes over. We are going to hit it with a one chord funk lesson. you are going to see several techniques in action. those techniques are: call and response, varying your entrances, mixing short and long notes, using your left hand to support your right, repetition, leaving space, and a little turn that adds something to the pentatonic minor scale. Here's the thing: this is simple. You can do this. I'm going to make you learn one scale, but it is a _money_ _scale_. Get this one right and take it to the gig. First part shows you the pentatonic scale and the one chord we'll use. I'll give you a short exercise to get this under the fingers. Then the beat starts and we'll lay out some simple but powerfully funky stuff, with notes to show you how it all works. Go get the loop and play along: http://music.linear1.org/mp3/b7-loop.mp3 Also: I know I'll eventually get this comment from some pointy-headed theory geek, so check it: I know that the #9 of a B7 chord is actually C double-sharp. But in this context, I deliberately use the enharmonic spelling D. That's being considerate of the audience. You and your theory professor can have a wry chuckle to yourselves.

Tags: funk funky soulful soul jazz tutorial lesson simple fender rhodes pentatonic minor