Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Tag Archives: chromatic patterns
MOVES to the rescue !
You would have thought that the bass guitar was one of the most logical and intuitive instruments around. It even beats the 6-string guitar because its tuning only uses fourths (=5 halfsteps), while the guitar slips in a stray major third … Continue reading
Posted in Mappings, Moves notation, Music Theory
Tagged bass guitar, chromatic patterns, diminished scale, Nicolas Slonimsky, Slonimsky
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Why Saxophonists are so Annoying
Last week a friend, who remembered me from back in the day when I used to play saxophone, invited me to come on a gig with him in Paris. I wondered how come he didn’t know any sax players in … Continue reading
Posted in Moves notation, Musicianship
Tagged chromatic exercises, chromatic patterns, Coltrane Licks, John Coltrane, Slonimsky
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The Science of Licks
Continuing from my recent post on the philosophy of licks, one of the measures of a good lick is how it messes with the listener’s cognition and fries his brain. It arrives too fast for you to take it all … Continue reading
Posted in Music Theory, Musicality
Tagged chromatic patterns, Coltrane Licks, exotic scales, hot licks, John Coltrane
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Musical theorems: a bluffer’s guide
The idea of musical theorems is all about drawing simple conclusions from your basic knowledge about notes, and putting them to use in your playing. An example. You know every major scale contains three notes from one wholetone scale and … Continue reading
Visualizing the Seven Dwarfs + Cinderella
No I haven’t suddenly taken to designing embroidery patterns for Romanian shirts. I used this old toy I found in the basement to show you how the player of the double-wholetone-row xylophone or wholetone panpipe player visualizes Messiaen’s seven “modes … Continue reading
Anyone trying learn the bridge of Jimmy Rowles’ sublime composition “The Peacocks” will end up consciously or otherwise doing a MOVES breakdown of the patterns it contains. In the illustration you can see the bracketed patterns are {-1 -3 -1 +3} and {-9 … Continue reading
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 