This lesson will introduce polyrhythms to your student and show how they can be used in improvisation. The exercises will focus on helping the student learn to play different polyrhythms and understand how they are formed. Rhythmic displacement is also covered and explained in the included Teacher's Guide.
This is a great lesson for any student who is starting to learn improvising. Quite often the student will start to improvise then hit a plateau when they realize they're playing the same stuff over and over. They may feel like everything they play sounds the same and even if they try different scales it all sounds the same.
The solution to this problem is to teach your student how to use passing tones to add 'color' or 'flavor' to their improvisation. This lesson will introduce passing tones and show the student in various exercises how they can incorporate passing tones in their playing. The included Teacher's Guide will explain the best approach to this content and will help you explain in simple terms how the student can use passing tones. Although an understanding of music theory will definitely help, the lesson is written in a way that the student doesn't need to fully understand scale theory.
This lesson will teach your student how they can create and incorporate themes into their solos and improvising. This can be a huge 'aha' moment for intermediate students as they learn to create catchy and interesting solos for the first time. The process is broken down into steps which makes it easy for you to teach.
Your student will learn to:
Before attempting this lesson, the student should have a basic grasp of improvisation and feel confident with stylistic techniques such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends etc.
Guide tones will help your student transform their improvisation skills to a whole new level. Using guide tones can help the student target notes that will bring out the interesting qualities of the underlying chords. If your student is getting bored with basic Pentatonic Scales and doesn't feel like they're creating interesting sounding licks, this lesson will give them something new to work with. Most students will understand guide tones without much explanation but it's still a good idea to explain the theory in a lesson before looking at this content. This lesson plan contains a chord progression using guide tones and then gives an example on how the student could apply the guide tones in their music. The included lesson instructions clearly explains the concept in simple terms.
This lesson plan will help your student:
This lesson plan will give your student three different scales they can use to improvise over a blues progression. Each scale has an in-depth explanations from the SCA series so this lesson plan focuses on how to apply the scales in different keys. Your student will learn the unique characteristics of each scale and when to apply them. This lesson should be used in combination with BLU-03 as it will show them exactly what to improvise over. If your student wants to learn the blues, this lesson plan will help them achieve a big part of playing blues.
A new lesson plan has been added to the Lesson Materials Section on the 'Memphis Scale'. The 'Memphis Scale' is actually just a nickname for a certain way of improvising and it isn't a scale. This is a great way of learning to improvise and if your student has trouble coming up with musical sounding phrases and ideas when using the Pentatonic Scale, they will love playing using the Memphis Scale. The included lesson instructions will explain everything in detail so even if you have never heard of this before you can quickly learn it and teach it effectively.
More lesson plans on improvisation can be found in the Lesson Materials Section here.
The 'Memphis Scale' is a way of improvising using the notes on two strings and positions that form sixths. The name 'Memphis Scale' is actually just a nickname because any scale can be used. Guitarists like Mark Knopfler use this idea a lot and if your student wants to achieve a similar sound, this lesson plan will be perfect. This lesson plan will teach your student how to improvise using the Memphis Scale and clearly shows how to improvise using the method.
The included lesson instructions will explain everything and help you teach it to your student in the easiest way possible. So even if you have never used the Memphis Scale before you can quickly understand it and teach it effectively.