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Tutorial - Playing Outside
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Playing Out - Introduction

Tom Quayle 164 lessons

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Hi Guys and Gals!

Welcome to this months tutorial which is all based on 'outside' playing. Now I'm not suggesting that you all find a nice field somewhere and play in the fresh air. Rather the way in which fusion and jazz guitarists (and these days many rock musicians) play phrases and ideas which are unrelated to the key they're in at the time.

But why on earth would you want to do that? Surely that'd sound terrible playing notes which don't fit in the key we're in. Well...not quite true - although some of the sounds I'm going to present today may take some getting used to if you're not familiar with their sound.

Music is all about tension and release. This is something we've looked at before in my Melodic Minor tutorial. Without creating tension or dissonance in our music we end up with bland, boring sounds which have no movement or purpose.

When we're improvising over one chord vamps it's often difficult to create tension and release as there's very little harmony to play off. We need some methods which will help us create this feeling of movement over this single chord.

I'm going to present five different concepts which I use to create this tension and release by playing outside, giving us tension notes which will then resolve giving us this feeling of movement and purpose.

Move onto the next video for concept number one.

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