A great reply - and for a start, it's JIMI not JIMMI, and secondly, as I said - I personally would stick to powerchords UNLESS you have mastered the rest of the chords.

And I have not a freakin CLUE why you said that jimi plays the 7#9 in Purple Haze - it's also nicknamed the Jimi Chord - I woulda thought you woulda known that?

I'm saying that mastering the chords should be a priority. They are practically essential to improvising with any capacity. You don't need to master every voicing of every chord, but that is a far cry from simply being able to play common extended chords like 7#9. Sticking to the power chords will make it hard to follow a guide tone line seeing as you won't be playing either of them. It will also kill the dissonance of the chord seeing as you'll be playing neither the 3/b7 or the 3/#9.

I'm not sure what the second sentence is about; the 7#9 chord is commonly referred to as a purple haze chord in the rock lexicon, hence me referring to it as such in that post; are you disputing that or agreeing with me? It's unclear. Also, Purple Haze chord yes, Hendrix chord maybe; I've never heard it referred to as the "Jimi Chord" once in about ten years of taking jazz harmony. Granted, I'll give you that it's not usually referred to as anything other than seven sharp-nine or seven aug nine or something to that effect in the context of jazz seeing as people had been using 7#9 chords long before Hendrix started doing it, but that is certainly not a common name for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrix_chord

Thats what i meant. Hendrix chord, jimi chord, both mean the same thing and i've always known it as the jimi chord.

And I never said that hendrix started that chord you are speculating and twisting what i'm saying buddy.

Oh, I never said you did either. I was stating that for the purpose of illustrating that you criticizing me for not identifying it as a "Jimi Chord" is fallacious because traditionally ALL Hendrix-related names for the chord are uncommon within the jazz harmony lexicon, where the 7#9 is at its most notable.

It's supremely pointless, however, as it's merely nitpicking. The fact remains that soloing over a power chord as opposed to the actual chord gives you an almost unmanageable amount of options, many of which will be invalid/horrible sounding if they clash with the actual played chord. It also may step on the toes of the played chord if that chord does not contain a natural fifth. You also completely lose the tonality of the chord when playing a power chord, as that is the intent of using the power chord. And finally, the power chord contains only the fifth, which, as previously mentioned, is nearly inconsequential to a soloist: The third and the seventh provide much more fodder (hence the title "guide tones") as do the sixth and extensions, where available. Why would you want to make it more difficult for yourself by doing this?

holy fuck, i regret not keeping up with my piano studies... never learned my theory... i got to gr 6 conservatory and didn't do theory at all... fml
thank you so much Me2NiK, i read every word and it seems like I need to do a lot of studying on my own. I guess the only way to improvise is to understand music...
both of my friends whom I spoke about in the original post are great musicians who both understand music and know their stuff... as for me... I play guitar using numbers written on 6 lines

You know more than me about music theory, thats a given. I'm self taught - everything i've learnt I've had to adapt - and because I do not understand notes and the depth that chords can go, I simply find a power chord and then play in that key. I wish I had your knowledge, but unfortunately I don't - so forgive my ignorance - I have only ever heard of the chord as the jimi chord - and I agree that it can be horrible sounding if you hit a note that clashes with the chord - but thats part of the learning process right?

DD - Listen to this man - he knows his shit.

i know what hes saying, but because i dont knowenough about this stuff, its taking a very long time to figure everything out. i need to learn theory.
guitar scales method has been downloadedd and hopegfully within a few months, i will have my shit togther.

Yeah, I didn't mean to jump on your neck or anything. I'm just saying that doing this is actually making things more difficult for you, so you may want to take the time to sit down and play the entire chord because it will give you notes to work off. As I've said, the problem with the power chord is that it contains so little information that you can go in a lot of different places with it. This sounds like a good thing, and sometimes it is, but when you have the rest of the band playing more than just power chords, they've already gone places, and when you go places that contradict the places that they've gone while they're going there, you're going to get some really crappy sounds. So if you know which scale tones have already been defined for you, you can take a lot of the thinking out of improvising.

A quick example, using the 7#9 chord...

An E7#9 chord contains the notes E G# B D Fx. The E power chord contains the notes E B. This means that, going off the power chord alone, you can't possibly know that there's a major third (the G#) or a minor 7th (D) or an aug9 (Fx). I mean obviously you could listen to the song and hear those or do a harmonic analysis of the song and make conclusions, but if you just had to hit the ground running, you're making it a lot more difficult to do that by stripping out three of the five notes. Knowing the whole chord allows you to think to yourself "okay, if I work my way to a G# here, it'll sound good, because that's the third of the chord"; with the power chord you're forced to think "is it a major third? A minor third? Is it a suspended chord?" and you have to play off of the band instead of the band playing off of you. It also makes it easier to extend the chord if you know what's already there, because it tells you which extensions you have available to you. A popular addition to the 7#9 chord is a nat13. You can also produce an altered chord or a diminished scale sound by adding a b9 (this works especially well on #9 chords played on the V-of-vi subdominant -- in the key of C major, that's E7#9; if you're wondering why I can give you an explanation). There are other choices as well -- almost any time that you can add a nat13, you can also add a b13, for example -- but those are just some common ones.



Don't worry about any deadlines like that. The great thing about improvising is that with any amount of work, you will start to produce decent-sounding music pretty quickly; scales exist explicitly for this purpose. On that note, what I would suggest that you do is start out learning the major scale, and then the (natural) minor scale, and then the modes of the major scale. Don't just learn how to play them (although that's certainly important): Aim to understand how they're made and learn how to form all seven modes in all twelve keys without your instrument. You want to naturalize these basically as much as possible, because the key tenant of improvising is that you have to make it up. The implication of that is that you need to be able to find and work with the key without going to yourself "durr well D is here and F# is here..." and so on. This sounds like a daunting task but it's not, as you'll discover quite quickly that everything scalar is built out of some real simple patterns.

My main instrument was the piano and my ear has always been what has allowed me to go so far into music. I cannot read music, nor do i understand it much, but whenever my teacher named a scale, i was able to play it on the piano by simply starting on the root note of the scale and whether she said it was major minor (harmonic/melodic) i was able to play it because I know what they are supposed to sound like.

Who needs scales or theory? There is right brain improvisation:



This post was edited by Superchum on Jul 26 2011 07:44am