Lesson 23
Notes to Lesson 23
Lesson 23 is the last lesson Mickey has devoted to rhythm guitar, chord substitutions, strums, and harmony theory. This is Mickey's biggest lesson to date, comprising 11 exercises. The exercises are chord substitutions of common 8-bar and 16-bar harmonies. Not only is this lesson important as a rhythm guitar lesson, but in Lessons 45 and 46, we'll write solos against them. That makes this lesson very important, not to mention an awful lot of work, surpassed only by the amount of fun it is. After rereading what I just wrote, I'll sure there are some that believe I must have been a used Chariot dealer in a previous life. But I stand by it. It's justification for the taking the course and we can think of it as a final exam.
If I might be a little more critical than I have a right to be, I believe that those of us taking this course with TablEdit are so much more fortunate than previous students going through the course. For the sake of publishing size, these lessons, especially Exercises 8 through 11 are extremely hard to read, especially when comparing the "new" to the "standard".
With all those caveats, let's have fun with this exercise. Mickey's taken chord progressions from some of the most famous standards and used them as the basis for his exercises. See how many you can find, taking into account that many tunes share harmony structure with others. Just to get you started, one I discovered was "How High The Moon". Bump the tempo up to about 1/4=180 for each exercise, and listen to the exercises. Then listen to a collection of Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli with Le Hot Club de Paris. You'll be amazed at the "research" Mickey must have done.
As you download and read the TEF's of each exercise, you'll note that there are three modules for each exercise:
Standard (in the center of your speakers)
New (Mickey's original variation to the left in your speakers)
Bonus (A variation I created to the right in your speakers).
The additional Bonus module is an attempt to create another example of the exercise by using chords from the other group, or sometimes, another substitution that differs from Mickey's original exercise, but is in the spirit and from our previous study. Some of the exercises sound great with all three modules playing in the MIDI playback, and a few sound better when either the new or the bonus is isolated and played with the standard or alone. What the bonus modules give us is 154 exercises instead of 77. By adding them to each exercise, I've helped with the download.
If 77 exercises aren't enough for you: What I'd like to do is encourage you to attempt to create even more modules for each exercise. Also, we can transpose them to the guitar friendly keys of D, A, and E. And also, don't forget to arrange rhythm parts for some more tunes as we started in Lesson 17. By now we should have a pretty fair amount of standards we've written rhythm parts for. As you're probably expecting, I'm offering to post any original creations that you may wish to share.
Just keep it FUN!