I remember playing solos by simply learning the scales and randomly shredding. Although this may look and sound impressive to many, I don’t really think that it is too musical. This type of soloing is very common with guitarists since they can hold the fret positions in a key and quickly shred notes, escpecially on …
I am late posting this but we had a live event in Ginza on July 17th and it was a great turnout. We did 11 songs in total and one included a guest singer. My setup was my Nord Keybaord, Komplete Kontrol S49 MIDI controller, Steinberg Audio interface, AKAI APC40MK2 and a Laptop. The sound …
I will be playing live in Ginza Tokyo on July 17th as a member of the group Mellow Tonin’. Mellow Tonin’ consists of myself on the keys and beats. Also a rapper from L.A. by the name of Geno. We have both been living in Japan for a long time and have done various music …
As mentioned previously, I am working on a pack of easy to follow 60 second R&B / Neo Soul tutorial videos. These will hopefully be released sometime in June so do check back for updates. Also see below for the first sample video This is explaining how the 2-5-1 chord progression works. This is one …
I normally use my hardware for playing the keys, I use a Nord Electro 5D. However, for a change of sound I often like to use a VST. My favourite is definitely the Velvet 2 VST by AIR Music Technology. For such a cheap price it has five electric pianos each with seventy awesome presets. …
Soulful sounding bass notes Here is a very useful trick to make your bass compliment your chords. Normally if you play a chord e.g. C maj7 the bass would normally be a the root. this is perfectly okay but you can make the chord sound much deeper if you play the 9th key as the …
Using Diminished Chords As a reminder, a diminished chord is the 3rd and the 5th flattened. So the D dmin would be D, F and Ab. Now if we add the seventh it would become Half dimished, D, F, Ab and C If we look at the chords again for a particular scale e.g. C …
How to use Dominant 7#5 For this tutorial let’s look at a type of chord that is often used in R&B. The chord is a Dominant with a sharpened 5th. For example C7#5 would be the keys C, E, G# and A# as per the below diagram Simply by playing this chord you can instantly …
Inversions You may have heard of inversions before however, how do you use them? And what role do they play in R&B music? What is a chord inversion? Well basically it is playing a chord with the root key in a different location (other than base). For example lets take a look at the chord …
In Part 1 I explained that a more soulful sound can be achieved by borrowing chords. I discussed switching from Minor to Major and vice versa. Hoopefully you have experimented on various combinations. Some sound better than others, but it’s the trail and error part which is important. Using a 2-5-1 progression We can actually …
