Yeah..now I remember where I read that quote from; I knew I had read it somewhere (at least you know I really am going through your Killer blues course LOL) It’s funny you mention how we’re using nothing but 5 notes on Brown Sugar…that’s was a real eye-opener. I noticed the same thing you mention as I started working on it. So I started listening to other solos like “Urgent” “The Logical Song” “Smooth Operator” and the solo I learned last year “Tequila”…every single one of these solos use only a handful of notes and that’s it…amazing. That would be great if we could download the track for part 2 of your Pentatonic lesson from your homepage Johnny–I wanted to do an upload with it a few months back but couldn’t download it. I did made a post a few asking about it; not sure what happened with that post.
For my Green Onions on Tenor that I will upload within a week (my custom MBII for the Tenor comes this week so just waiting for it to arrive, it’s in-transit on the shipping) the things you can do with a song like this are endless, but it gets to a point where you just have to know when “enough is enough”. There’s lots of places where all I play is the chord of the scale and that’s it, but there were a couple of places where a flat 5 fit in nicely. I think a flat 5, when used properly, really adds a lot…even though it may be a “Devil’s” note 🙂 In light of what I learning right now, I think The Green Onions is a perfect track to work with because it’s great for applying your techniques in Killer Blues. I can change the key of the track and that makes me work on Improvising in another scale which I plan to do for both Alto and Tenor. I have had A LOT of fun working on this song, everything feels just right about it 🙂
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