Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
January 2007
Rick Mandyck on "Shape Shifting"

Click here to listen and download audio clips of Rick playing examples of these ideas.

Guitarist Rick Mandyck has been a mainstay of the Seattle music scene since he arrived here in 1978. His career has had many incarnations in the past 25 years as have his musical collaborations. He has recorded or performed with a who’s who of local musicians including Barbara Donald, Burt Wilson, Gregg Keplinger, John Bishop, and Hans Teuber, as well as Mark Murphy, The Elvis Show, Billy Hart, and the late Carter Jefferson. His ability to create intensity while improvising is legendary. In this edition of Practice This! Rick talks about how he practices what he calls “Shape Shifting,” or developing a solo.

One of the most exciting things you can experience as musician or as a listener is a great improviser developing a solo from very small ideas and elaborating on them to create a full and complete story, a journey that the improviser takes you on. What I practice are the elements that you can use to create that intensity, or to tell the story, or to change things from one vibe to another. There are basically four elements I use to develop as solo:
– The touch or tone (or sound) of the instrument
– Phrasing, going from simple to very complex
– Harmony, again from simple to complex
– Register, from low to high

The touch or breath can be an electronic effect on guitar or varying the airspeed of a wind instrument – anything to alter the color of the sound. You can practice using a very flat or normal sound in the beginning of a solo and gradually changing the color of the sound to make it more intense. You can also use dynamics to achieve a similar effect. In practicing phrasing, I start out playing over a tune using very simple (almost child-like) melodies and work on developing them into across the bar-line phrases, phrases that last longer that one bar or phrases that end on odd beats. With harmony, it’s much easier. You can begin a solo with very straight chords, and playing “inside.” Then you can work on gradually altering the harmony, or using substitutions to bring the vibe up. The same is true with the pitch. Practice staying out of the upper register of the instrument until you need to create excitement in the solo. Going from low to high is one of the easiest ways to create excitement.

All of these things, of course, depend on the rhythm section being receptive to them. But if and when it all comes together, there is nothing more fun or more exciting than a soloist and the rhythm section taking you on a journey. It’s just about the most fun you can have standing up!