dliiacg

I had two nice gigs this weekend. I had great time playing, and it was good to feel my arm getting better.
From my perspective, I was a little dissapointed with the lack of chromaticism in my playing, especially on how the weekend before it was effortless pouring out of me. That raised a question: Why am I no longer using approach notes?
I sat down this evening to figure it out. I worked exclusively on the Joe Pass Blues Etude I've been working on these past weeks. I had a lot of fun with the loopstation, and switched between looping a chord progression and a walking bass line.
I played the etude several times, altering the rhythm and improvising of the reharmed chord changes. My big breakthrough of the evening came when I took my eyes off the paper and just thought about the changes going by. For some reason, not reading made it easier. It was almost as if reading the changes was taking up too much brain energy to really improvise and interpret the music. When I closed my eyes, or looked away from the paper, I found that I could influence my playing a lot more.
I did a lot of experimenting and found some good uses of the altered 5 and approach tones to the downbeat of a new chord. When things were going well it was exciting. When things were going bad, it was just because I was distracted or couldn't concentrate.
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