Description

This 2nd lesson on Blues comping on an F blues is based around using riffs and developing a way to take riffs through the form. If you listen to piano players like Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver or Red Garland you will often hear them take a specific pattern and repeat it to create an interesting groovy background for a soloist.

Using Riffs for Blues comping

This lesson is for the biggest part about creating and using these riff rhythms, but to make it easy to work with them I have included a small part where I go over how to reduce the chords to their 3rd and 7th + one melody note. This way of playing the chords yields a lot of voicings and we can still think about all these voicings as basically the same 3rd/7th with different melody notes.

In developing the riff there are 2 sections. One is a basic rhythm exercise that demonstrates 3 different rhythms that are strong choices to make riffs with. These are demonstrated in 3 choruses on the backing track.

The 2nd section is a 6 chorus demonstration that I have written out. This example demonstrates a lot of different options in playing riffs and in the lesson I discuss how the different examples work and why I play them the way I do in my comping.

The download includes:

• 6 chorus Performance with transcription
• 3 Chorus rhythm exercises
• 33 min Video Lesson with analysis
• PDF/GuitarPro Transcription of 6 choruses
• PDF/GuitarPro Transcription of exercises
• Mp3 Backing track
• Mp3 Performance track
• Performance Notes

Some topics I discuss:

• Creating Riff’s and using them on a Blues
• Numerous chord voicings from one chord base
• Rhythmical phrasing when comping
• Using rhythms to influence intensity of the song
• 1 and 2 bar comping patterns
• Using polyrhythms while comping
• When to stick to a riff and when to leave it

I hope you can use the lesson, exercises and transcription to get some inspiration for new comping ideas. I think this repeating riff idea is a good way to lay down a good groove for whoever you are playing behind and it is also a useful way to work on getting a larger rhythmic vocabulary.