What are those blogging boys up to?

 Peter (that very old guy who calls himself The Curmudgeon) got up through the night to watch a football final. I don't expect we'll be hearing much from him today. I think he's trying to relive the days when he played for a crack cracked football team at school. In those days, at Catholic schools in this country, you were expected to play rugby and you needed a medical certificate to play 'soccer'. Okay, Peter was half blind, but I think he was the only kid in the team with two working legs and arms who didn't have an extreme weight problem. He was the star of the team.

He was also quite a cyclist.

Robert the quite a few different things has been practising improvising over on his blog (you can use the LINKS service over on Richard's Bass Bag* to find the blogs of Robert and The Curmudgeon, if you're really bored). He likes to call it 'making up shit'. The next step for him is to move to 'making up nice stuff'.

Robert the quite a few different things

His next step is to think about phrasing and the use of harmonic approximation. What is harmonic approximation, I hear you say? Well, let's say the piece you are playing is in C major. You use the notes from the C major scale to play over all the chords in the piece. If a 'funny' chord pops up, you might get some interesting sounds but just move to the next note. You might want to try adding other notes that are not in the scale. This might sound good, or not so good. Hey, but you have to take a few risks. Remember that good phrasing will be your friend in this type of improvising. Try using the rhythm from the tune, or another similar tune. Buona fortuna Rob.

To finish here's an interesting little blast from the past.

Have a good week.

* the original bass bagging site