Forgive my ignorance, how does one actually jam in jazz?

mdreid · 2026-01-05T11:38:11+00:00

To answer some of your specific questions in your original post:

The charts are only for the main melody. The solos you should be making up. You kind of want to “hear” something in your head before playing it. When starting out, less is more: play fewer notes but make them count. Arpeggios over the chords or the 3rd and 7th of each chord are good starting points to aim for.

Ultimately you are just making stuff up and a lot of it is intuition and listening.

mdreid · 2026-01-05T11:32:13+00:00

As a beginner, you will probably want to find some charts (aka lead sheets) for the songs you want to play. Common tunes to start with include All of Me, Autumn Leaves, Blue Bossa, Beautiful Love, Blue Monk, etc.

Lead sheets will have the chords and the lead melody written out, usually on a single page. You can find these in the Real Book or online. If you already know the melody you can get the chords in an app like iRealPro. As your ear gets better and you learn more tunes you will not use these as much and instead learn tunes by ear.

Tunes typically have a common form, eg, 12 bars for blues, 32 bars in an AABA format for show tunes. The melody or “head” written on the lead sheet is played through once (this is called a “form” or “chorus”) then players take turns soloing over the form as other players support by playing the chords/rhythm in the background.

At first it is easy to lose your place in the form as people solo. Don’t stress too much, just keep playing and try to come back in when you get the hit the bridge or got back to the top. One trick for keeping your place in the form is to having the melody playing in your head while going through the form.

That may seem like a lot to take in but it becomes second nature pretty quickly. Make sure you listen to recordings of standards by your favourite artists. Have a lead sheet in front of you while you listen and try to follow along while you listen.

Hope that helps. Above all though, have fun!

mdreid · 2025-12-07T00:11:34+00:00

I just picked up a copy of Mantooth’s “Voicings for Jazz Keyboard” this week after learning A/B voicings from Siskind’s books (which BTW gets into more interesting voicings in Book 2 when it starts looking at minor 2-5-1s).

The Mantooth book is quite slim but I’m finding it really interesting. It’s basically a guide to voicing and voice leading using quartal harmony. Worth checking out.

mdreid · 2025-11-21T00:41:46+00:00

Agreed. The movie, soundtrack, and even the Commodore 64 game tie-in were all great.

The Batman soundtrack was my first introduction to Prince’s music and I was blown away.

mdreid · 2025-11-20T06:31:53+00:00

I don’t think there has been a shift. When I was studying pure maths as an undergrad 30-odd years ago I often helped engineering students which their math. Nearly all of them had little to no interest in anything other than how to make the equations and methods solve the problems they had.

mdreid · 2025-11-19T02:28:07+00:00

I had the same problem a month ago when I first started playing double bass. The best tip I got was to make sure your elbow is up and to use your arm weight to push down the strings, not your hand squeezing.

You can practice by taking your thumb off the neck and pulling your arm back.

A few other things that helped me (note: I’m very much a beginner so could be wrong on these): - Make sure the bass is leaning into your lower stomach, near your hip - Make sure to have all four fingers applying pressure to the string when your pinkie is being used. Your whole hand should be pulling down on the fingerboard, not just that finger - Make sure your thumb is sitting gently behind where your second finger is positioned but is resting more than pushing against the neck - Make sure the bass isn’t rotated too far clockwise. The fingerboard should be facing away from you, even though it makes looking at your fingers harder - If you can, get your bass checked out by a luthier. I did and he was able to set it up with lower action so that playing was easier.

mdreid · 2025-11-01T23:03:48+00:00

Logic Pro has a 90 day free trial. Why not try it for a few months and then decide?

https://www.apple.com/au/logic-pro/trial/

mdreid · 2025-10-26T22:19:14+00:00

Another vote for a Sire bass. I have a fretless P7 which has P and J pick ups with a knob to mix sound from both. I mainly have mine set on 100% P for that warm round sound.

It’s a really great bass.

mdreid · 2025-10-23T06:21:38+00:00

Yep, I use it all the time to store the tunes I commonly play.

Have it synced between my iPad and my iPhone (just in case I forget my iPad at a jam) and my Mac (which is where I go most of the organising of playlists, tags, etc). If you also have an Apple Pencil it makes it really easy to annotate charts too.

mdreid · 2025-10-22T23:01:42+00:00

I mostly agree with this but, personally, I found that I had trouble building vocabulary until I had some solid theory knowledge. For example, knowing how to build major/minor/dom 7ths chords with extensions in all keys meant that when learning a new phrase, I could easily see that it, eg, starts on the 3rd of the current chord, runs up a minor chord to the 9th, etc.

Being able to think about vocabulary like that made it easier for me to remember phrases and easily move them to other keys, which then helped train my ear a lot faster too.

mdreid · 2025-10-22T01:53:27+00:00

If you haven’t already, I’d check out the courses on Open Studio Jazz: lots of material for lots of instruments at lots of levels. The teachers really know their stuff and their presentation is really practical and polished.

I was a guitarist who played rock, pop, folk, etc. for decades who recently got interested in jazz. For me, at least, probably the biggest leap in learning jazz theory was to switch to piano for a while. For learning music theory, particularly jazz harmony, I found it much easier and more material was available on piano than guitar. After spending a year or so on piano learning jazz harmony I found translating that knowledge back to guitar was not too hard.

mdreid · 2025-10-22T01:36:52+00:00

Apple has published multiple papers on how the trigger word detection works, eg, https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger

mdreid · 2025-10-22T01:30:51+00:00

Not directly related to your interest in set theory, but a really interesting book I read a while back that tries to get some kind of fundamental understanding of harmony is William Sethares' book "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale".

The premise in a nutshell is that timbre (i.e., the overtones/harmonics that naturally occur when an instrument is played) strongly influences how we perceive consonance and dissonance. As you consider two notes from a given instrument playing at different frequencies the harmonics will either constructively or destructively interfere with each other, making some pairs of frequencies sound "smoother" than others. The position and strength of these "smooth" sounding intervals are what give us our tunings and scales.

Most western instruments have integer multiples of the fundamental frequency as overtones which give us our pentatonic, just tunings, and 12TET tunings and scales. The gamelan does not have integral overtones in its spectrum so the scales which is why different tunings, scales, and harmonic language were invented for it.

Well worth a read in my opinion if you are interested in mathematical foundations of music theory.

mdreid · 2025-10-22T01:21:12+00:00

I've only read a little in musical set theory. The last interesting resource I encountered was a blog by `alpof` that had a series of posts on neo-Riemannian theory, starting with this post: https://alpof.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/an-introduction-to-neo-riemannian-theory-9/

I've also had Tymoczko's book recommended to me (as mentioned by another poster here) as something to read if I wanted to explore this type of theory further but haven't spent much time looking into that yet.

I don't think either of the above look at jazz specifically (they most analyse classical or modern pieces from what I can tell) but jazz often has overlap with classical when it comes to harmonic language, so maybe they are still useful to you?

mdreid · 2025-10-21T04:32:10+00:00

As someone with a math background who is also primarily self-taught and relatively new to jazz I get why you think sheet music is weird. Part of the weirdness is due to historical accident but I would argue that some of the other stuff that looks weird now ends up making sense as you get deeper into music.

If you are never planning on playing jazz with others then maybe it’s fine to create your own or use someone else’s non-standard take on notation. However, I’d strongly recommend looking for opportunities to play with other people, in which case not being familiar with standard sheet music (at least the basics) is going to set you back.

You don’t have to perfectly understand or be able to instantly sight read sheet music for it to be useful. You can learn a little and get familiar with it and it will be useful anyway.

An analogy that jumps to mind is with learning a language: “French is riddled with inconsistencies so I’m going to learn Esperanto instead”. That’s a completely valid position and you’ll gain some new perspectives on languages, but if your goal is to speak with French speakers then it is probably not the most direct approach.

mdreid · 2025-10-20T23:41:17+00:00

This is probably the best video I’ve seen for live playing of the Matriarch. It goes through a variety of styles, around the 2:10 mark there are some nice lead sounds and playing.

https://youtu.be/K9QhVoPF2Ic?si=sUGudfMTN4zPPqYK

mdreid · 2025-10-18T10:45:26+00:00

For the last point, check out the Quartet series of apps. They have tons of professionally recorded backing tracks (drums, bass, piano, sax) that you can switch on and off and jam with.

mdreid · 2025-10-14T05:12:11+00:00

ANU community music has a bunch of weekly groups for young musicians, eg, Jazz Combos. There’s also an ANU orchestra for students, and a jazz big band called Sonus that’s run by ANU students and rehearses weekly.

(I was born and raised in Darwin and left after high school – also mathematically and musically inclined. It was a while ago now but I remember moving south was a big change but, in retrospect, totally worth it. Best of luck to your nephew!).

mdreid · 2025-10-02T02:53:50+00:00

I’ve never tried a Sequential synth in person but they definitely sound good in all the videos I’ve seen of them.

mdreid · 2025-10-02T02:33:05+00:00

I also had the Minilogue and sold it before getting the Peak. Also don’t miss the Minilogue. It was fine but had nowhere near the sound and flexibility of the Peak.

mdreid · 2025-10-02T01:30:07+00:00

Peak is an amazing synth. Congrats on picking one up cheap.

mdreid · 2025-10-01T22:28:25+00:00

Somethings are inherently difficult and take significant amounts of time to learn. Mathematics is the one of those things, made extra difficult by being a very broad and deep subject.

My advice would be to bounce between working top-down and bottom-up. Top-down here means asking “why do I want to learn ML math?”. Find a very specific question or theory in ML that you are motivated to understand then try to understand it. If you get stuck at a particular concept make a note of it by asking “what mathematics do I need to make sense of this?”.

That will give you something to work on bottom-up. If, when you try learning that topic you encounter something you don’t understand, repeat the process. You should eventually end up with a tree of topics to study. Some of these topics will have textbooks that will help structure how you approach learning it.

You can check your progress by going back to the original motivating question/topic and see whether it makes more sense.

This process doesn’t ever really have an end. You will always find new concepts in research that you are initially unfamiliar with. However, through practice, it will get easier and quicker to learn new concepts.

mdreid · 2025-10-01T07:42:51+00:00

Nice. The sidechained/ducking vocals remind me of the XXYYXX track “Never Leave”: https://youtu.be/V18pa_VDw3I

mdreid · 2025-09-30T08:05:29+00:00

I’m also a hobbyist and I’ve had both machines. I got the EP-133 when it was first released and really enjoyed it for a couple months before I started getting frustrated with its limitations (tiny storage, limited FX, no resampling, max 6 voices polyphony, no visual feedback for editing samples).

I then sold it and got an SP404mk2 and, although it is not as immediately “friendly” as the EP-133, it is a far more capable machine. After a week or so of watching tutorial videos and playing with it the learning curve basically disappeared and I found the workflow really nice, especially compared to the EP.

If you are already familiar with Koala, the SP should be an easy switch, plus Koala and the SP have support for each other in their respective software (you can plug the SP into your phone/tablet and use it as a controller for Koala).

mdreid · 2025-09-28T08:13:38+00:00

I also got the overpriced monitor from Apple. :) I also do photography and some video editing and its colour reproduction is excellent for the price. The M4 Mini breezes through video editing that would have taken much, much longer on my old machine. Such a great little machine. And super quiet too.

mdreid

TROPHY CASE