When Ronnie Earl was teaching at the National Guitar Workshop, he had a list of "Philosophies" that he would hand out in class. There were two in particular that have stuck with me. First, "Music isn't sports," a plea for toning down the competitive aspects of playing the guitar.

And second, "Less is less." "People always say 'less is more,'" he would observe plaintively. "I don't understand," he'd continue, "I mean, less is less."

Hard to argue with that. My own efforts to play less often start with an attempt to cut the chord progression down to size. It's intimidating, contemplating all that wide open space at the start of a solo. Eight bars to fill? Twelve? Thirty-two? And you're just supposed to make it all up along the way?

One of my favorite moves is to come prepared with some responses. As in "call and response." For example, if you can find a way to turn four bars of soloing into two bars of soloing and two bars of worked-out chord hits, you've just cut the blank space in half. 

If you did this on, say, each line of a twelve-bar blues, you'd now just have to come up with something to play in bars 1-2, bars 5-6, and bars 9-10. For my money, it's significantly less daunting to come up with a few two-bar phrases than to solo for twelve bars in a row.

The same goes for, say, the eight-bar bridge to a 32-bar song, the kind that, like "I Got Rhythm," has an AABA form. If you had some cool chord moves for every other chord on the bridge to rhythm changes, you'd only have to come up with, again, a couple of two-bar phrases to get through the whole eight bars.

This idea is a lot easier to understand when you actually see and hear it done. It's one of the three ideas I taught in yesterday's live stream on Youtube, so if you missed it yesterday, you can find it here:

Soloing With Freddie Green Chord Hits

I admit I kind of breezed through some of the details in this lesson, like how to finger each individual voicing, and why certain chords resolve the way they do – less is less, right? 

But I'll be going over all of that in much more detail, with complete charts and chord diagrams, in my upcoming workshop this Saturday, Freddie Green Chords: Blues & Rhythm Changes.

To learn more about the workshop and sign up, go to:

Freddie Green Chords: Blues & Rhythm Changes

More soon,

David