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This little blues progression is something I fiddle around with from time to time ... it's reminiscent of quite a few old standards, like Stormy Weather, but really, it's just a fairly simple chord progression with a bit of a melody running through it. It's fun to play and nice to listen to.
It's in the key of D, and like many jazz/blues pieces, it deviates from the related chords by simply 'majorizing' some of the minors ... in this case, the E and B chords. They are normally minor in the key of D (being the ii and vi chords). This is just about the most common way for composers to move away from the 'in key' progressions and get that blue/jazz sound. By doing so, the melodic possibilities also move right away from the usual 'in key' melodies that you and fall naturally and neatly into the blues/jazz genres. If you look at the chord structure, there's not a minor amongst them.
You'll quickly hear that the piece is really one passage repeated three times with some minor alterations to each repeat. The passage starts off with an A7 augmented chord that leads into the I chord. Augmented chords have a sharp 5 (5+). As you probably know by now, plain old chords consist of the 1-3-5 of their scale. Augmented chords are not used very often, and they are definitely 'passing chords', chords that don't stand up on their own very well, but do a great job of leading the ear to another, more stable chord, in this case the I chord, the D. They are very 'jazzy' chords. In this case, you can see that the aug chord is A7, which is the V chord. It already has the quality of leading the ear to the I chord, and by sharping the 5, that quality is strengthened even more.
I've kept the arrangement very open and airy in this ... it's always amazing to me how few notes are needed to convey a piece of music. For example, beat 1 of bar
2 consists simply of a 5 of the D chord, but there's no doubt that it's a D chord that we're hearing, the I chord, home-sweet-home to the piece. That's due mainly to the quality of the A7/5+ chord preceding it. It couldn't really be anything BUT a D chord, even if there's only one note ringing. The whole piece is like that, a little chord here, a little chord there, a few double stops and single notes, all weaving themselves into an arrangement that leaves the ear in no doubt as to what's going on ... my ear, anyway.
The movie is pretty clear in this lesson ... should be easy to see what's going on with each hand. I do quite a bit of muting -- choking notes off -- and I do that with the thumb and finger tips of the picking hand. It's a subtle thing, but it adds a lot to the overall sound of the piece. I also do a little bit of vibrato, wobbling the strings ... it's a wrist thing. The whole thing ends with a natural harmonic over a D triad, 7th fret.
I hope you like it!
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