FretDojo
FretDojo
Welcome to the Fret Dojo podcast with Greg O’Rourke – where we interview master jazz guitar players from all around the world. Get the insider secrets for the mindsets, practice approaches and tools that have taken master jazz guitarists to the top of their field. Make sure you check out our website FretDojo.com for more awesome resources, free jazz guitar lessons, and practical tips on how to take your jazz guitar playing to the next level!
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Top 10 FretDojo Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best FretDojo episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to FretDojo for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite FretDojo episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
06/10/20 • 22 min
On today’s Podcast, Carl Orr, FretDojo’s current Artist In Residence, shares his insights into the magic of chord melody and the power that comes from tapping into the strength of guitar as a solo instrument. Check out the podcast here and listen to Carl’s story, as well as some very moving chord melodies he plays throughout the show: Join FretDojo’s online jazz guitar academy here Carl Orr Carl has performed and recorded with some of the finest musicians on the planet including Billy Cobham, George Duke, Ernie Watts, Randy Brecker, Gary Husband and Bennie Maupin. He is a regular at London’s legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in his own band and as a member of drummer Mark Fletcher’s supergroup “Fletch’s Brew”. Carl has taught guitar at The Australian Institute of Music, Brunel University, Middlesex University, London Centre Of Contemporary Music and The Academy of Contemporary Music. A prolific composer, Carl has recorded eight albums as a leader and is featured on albums by Billy Cobham, Fletch’s Brew, Geoff Eales and Nathan Haines. His latest album, Forbearance is a dramatic departure from his jazz and fusion recordings of the past and with the aid of producer Tim van der Kuil and arranger Grant Windsor, Carl has crafted a truly unique acoustic guitar-based album exploring pop, rock, folk, Americana, and classical styles. He regards his music as his public contribution to creating a peaceful, harmonious world. “It is not enough for me for my music to merely be a manifestation of the chaos and disharmony of the world, but instead it must be a potent influence on creating peaceful relationships between people. My aim is to make the listener feel calm, optimistic and invigorated.” ~ Carl Orr
04/03/20 • 10 min
In this episode of the FretDojo.com Podcast I want to talk about three reasons why playing guitar is good for you – especially at the moment given the impact current world events have had on our lives. I’m recording this at the start of April, 2020 and there’s some pretty stressful stuff going on as well as facing living in never-seen-before circumstances. It’s important at times like these that we set aside time for a calm, creative pursuit. And there’s some pretty compelling reasons why playing an instrument right now is a strong contender... Join FretDojo’s online jazz guitar academy here Transcript: Greg O’Rourke: Hi guys, Greg O’Rourke here from the FretDojo.com Podcast. In this episode I want to talk about three reasons why playing guitar is really, REALLY good for you. Okay, so playing guitar is obviously a cool thing to do. It’s fun, it’s creative, it sounds great, you can play with other people, you can jam. There’s a lot of reasons why playing guitar is fantastic. But specifically in this episode I want to talk about specifically the reasons in how playing guitar can help you in all sorts of ways and can actually protect you from some of the issues that come along with ageing as we all get older. So let’s talk about some specific proven things that playing music (and especially, I guess, guitar goes along with that) can help you in your life’s journey and why it is a very important thing to maintain. Obviously, I’m recording this at the start of April, 2020 and there’s some pretty interesting stuff going on in the world right now. I don’t really want to reference it too much because that’s all we’re hearing in the news and so forth. But obviously with the pandemic as it is, people are getting very stressed and I think it’s important at times like these that we set aside time for a calm, creative pursuit. Reason 1: Playing Music Can Make You Smarter So reason number one, music can make you smarter. I think music is the ultimate brain game basically. I think the reason it is so powerful is because it works out a lot of different sensory functions at once, like the auditory function, the visual, the kinetic function. And I think because all these processes are involved at once, it involves a very powerful brain stimulation. I was looking at an article on inc.com about this and neuro physicist, Catherine Loveday is quoted saying here: “Music probably does something unique. It stimulates the brain in a very powerful way because of our emotional connection with it.” So you know when you try to play these brain games, they’ve been quite popular in recent years, like puzzles and things like that online. But there’s nothing quite like playing an instrument because it’s a very rich and complex experience. And because of the intertwining of all the sensory application when you’re playing an instrument like sight and touch and the oral sense as well, this really can change the brain in long lasting ways and it’s been proven to do so. So it says here, “Brain scans have helped to identify the difference in brain structure between musicians and non-musicians.” And the corpus callosum, which is a big bundle of nerve fibres connecting the two sides of the brain, is larger in musicians and also in the areas involving movement, hearing and the visual abilities, they appear to be larger in the brain in professional keyboard players for example. So the brain is significantly altered and developed by playing music and it can help protect your brain as well. So brain scanning studies have found that anatomical change in musician’s brains is related to the age when training began. But even brief periods of musical training can have long lasting benefits. So you can increase resilience to any age related decline in hearing. Learning to play an instrument can protect the brain against dementia. So Loveday says: “Music reaches parts of the brain that other things can’t.
02/07/20 • 22 min
In this episode of the FretDojo.com Podcast, lets dive deep into a topic that’s critical in your development as a jazz guitarist: The importance of jazz vocabulary – and how to go about learning it! Check out the podcast here: What made Joe Pass such an incredible jazz guitarist? Sure, he had great swing, a tasteful sense of how to shape a solo, and could play any hundreds of jazz standards at the drop of a hat. But for me, there’s one thing that stands out in particular when it comes to Joe Pass. It was his complete command – and sheer amount of – jazz vocabulary that he had at his disposal. Which is the topic of today’s post, and why mastering vocabulary should be priority #1 when it comes to practicing jazz guitar. Why Learning Vocabulary is So Important Learning jazz without learning enough vocabulary is like learning a foreign language without learning many words. The result: You won’t be able to ‘speak’ jazz. Your musical conversation will be the equivalent of ‘Tarzan speak’. Taking this analogy further – improvising is like having a conversation with the harmony of a jazz standard. And if you don’t know to ‘say’ the right thing at the right time, you won’t leave a good impression! To ‘converse’ with the harmony effectively, you need to not only know enough jazz ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ (more on this in a moment), but you also know how to use them in ways which clearly communicate your ideas. Different Types of Jazz Vocabulary The word ‘vocabulary’ is a pretty broad term when it comes to jazz. There are several types of vocabulary, such as: Pitch Vocabulary – such as melodic patterns and phrases Rhythm Vocabulary – different subdivisions of rhythms, rhythmic motives, familiarity with starting phrases on different points of the bar Articulation Vocabulary – I.e. the way you play the notes on the guitar, such as slides, accents, staccato, and vibrato Chordal Vocabulary – knowledge of different chord qualities and voicings. I would also class substitutions as vocabulary as well, I.e. knowing how to apply melodic phrases in harmonic contexts different to the phrases original chord progression. But that’s another huge topic... Anyway, a competent jazz improviser will have a large ‘stock’ of knowledge to draw from in all of these areas, that they then combine spontaneously in a solo. If you feel like a ‘deer in the headlights’ when it’s time to take a solo, it’s likely you don’t have a large enough ‘stock’ of vocabulary – OR perhaps you do have enough vocabulary but are not familiar with it enough for it to be useful for spontaneous improvisation, as I’ll detail below... Common Mistakes When Learning Jazz Vocabulary Mistake #1 – Skimming rather than Diving Deep Here’s the thing: You don’t need to learn a lot of jazz vocabulary to be a competent jazz guitarist. It’s far better to dive deep on just a few elements that really appeal to you. One teacher told me once that ‘Just keep learning loads of transcriptions and vocabulary, and then see what sticks to your playing’. But, I now don’t agree with this – it’s not an efficient learning approach, to ‘throw a heap of stuff at the wall and see what sticks’. You are much better of selecting a piece of vocabulary that you like, and then really working on incorporating it deeply in your playing, so it firmly becomes part of your language. Mistake #2 – Attempting to increase vocabulary just by learning full transcriptions of solos Although learning to play a full transcription of another jazz musicians solo is an excellent way to teach you about many aspects of jazz such as overall feel, appreciation of how to structure a solo etc, it won’t directly teach you vocabulary that you can spontaneously incorporate into your own solos, in and of itself. You need to go further than this with a transcription if the aim is to increase your vocabulary,
11/05/19 • 60 min
In this episode of the FretDojo.com Podcast, I had the great pleasure of speaking with one of the world’s top guitarists Carl Orr, who shares the deep insights gained over his long career in music and important practice tips for any aspiring jazz guitarist. Check out the podcast here: Thanks guys, let me know what you thought about this interview by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page. Cheers, Greg from FretDojo Carl Orr Carl Orr has performed and recorded with some of the finest musicians on the planet including Billy Cobham, George Duke, Ernie Watts, Randy Brecker, Gary Husband and Bennie Maupin. He is a regular at London’s legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in his own band and as a member of drummer Mark Fletcher’s supergroup “Fletch’s Brew”. Carl has taught guitar at The Australian Institute of Music, Brunel University, Middlesex University, London Centre Of Contemporary Music and The Academy of Contemporary Music. A prolific composer,Carl has recorded eight albums as a leader and is featured on albums by Billy Cobham, Fletch’s Brew, Geoff Eales and Nathan Haines. His latest album, Forbearance is a dramatic departure from his jazz and fusion recordings of the past and with the aid of producer Tim van der Kuil and arranger Grant Windsor, Carl has crafted a truly unique acoustic guitar-based album exploring pop, rock, folk, Americana, and classical styles. He regards his music as his public contribution to creating a peaceful, harmonious world. “It is not enough for me for my music to merely be a manifestation of the chaos and disharmony of the world, but instead it must be a potent influence on creating peaceful relationships between people. My aim is to make the listener feel calm, optimistic and invigorated.” ~ Carl Orr
03/01/17 • 2 min
I’ve got something special to share with you today. To kick off this month’s series on jazz guitar blues, you’re going to learn a complete transcription of highly acclaimed jazz guitarist Mark Whitfield’s solo from The Blues, from Way Back: a track from his classic debut album, The Marksman (1990). In today’s post, you’re going to learn: The reasons why studying transcriptions is so important for any jazz guitarist How to play the complete transcription of Mark Whitfield’s first solo from the recording of The Blues, from Way Back A general overview of the types of approaches and concepts Whitfield uses in this solo. Cool Bonus: Get access to a FREE print friendly PDF version of The Blues, from Way Back transcription by Mark Whitfield, complete with notation, TAB and analysis. First, let’s have a brief discussion on why to learn a transcription in the first place... Why Learn a Jazz Guitar Blues Transcription? Learning transcriptions of master players is one of the most important things you can do as a jazz guitarist. The reason? It gives you a complete all-around jazz guitar workout. Here’s how it works: Usually transcriptions are tough technically, so learning a transcription is a great way to build up your technique. You’ll learn a wealth of jazz vocabulary that fits well together, giving you plenty of new ideas to bring into your own playing. Learning a transcription is the best way by far to train your ears – especially if you transcribe a recording from scratch. By playing a transcription along with the original recording it was transcribed from, you’ll get a sense of how to add shape to your own solos – i.e., how to structure the rise and fall of a solo in order to tell a captivating musical story. The last point is particularly important. If you just learn jazz guitar licks in isolation, without listening to the lick in the context of the full solo it came from, you won’t get a well-rounded picture on how to the lick effectively as you improvise. Here’s the thing: Even if you end up only delving into a few licks from a transcription after you learn the full solo, these licks act as a kind of ‘trigger’ in your mind for the general vocabulary and approaches contained in the complete transcription. So, learning a transcription is a very effective way to learn a huge amount of jazz vocabulary in a short space of time. Convinced? Good. So let’s now dig into the transcription itself... The Blues, From Way Back The Blues, from Way Back is a track from Mark Whitfield’s debut album The Marksman, which catapulted him to international recognition in the 90s after he graduated from Berklee College of Music. Why did I want to transcribe this recording? This solo is probably the best example of jazz guitar blues I’ve come across, so I was keen to study this one intensely in order to get a more authentic jazz blues sound into my improvised lines. Here’s the original recording of The Blues, from Way Back on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/HtG9zqlnACk What I particularly like about this solo is how seamlessly Mark Whitfield weaves traditional blues ideas between sophisticated bebop vocabulary. Learning this solo has also been a great technique builder for my own playing. Both the bluesy licks and the bebop lines are classic pieces of vocabulary that are really worthwhile to work into your own playing. Presenting The Complete Jazz Guitar Blues Transcription! So here it is: The complete transcription of Mark Whitfield’s first solo from The Blues, from Way Back. Watch the video to get a demonstration of the fingerings I used to play the solo, then read through the notation and TAB of the transcription below. (Hint: If you want a print-friendly PDF of the transcription,click here to access it now). Note: Fast-forward the video to 5:00 in for a close-up slow-motion view of my hands as I play the solo (if you nee...
08/29/23 • 54 min
On today’s podcast, Greg and Vin interview one of jazz guitar’s leading player and educator, Sheryl Bailey.
09/22/20 • 42 min
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jy48Sn3ZTm8 In this fantastic session, Ant shares some tips and inspiration for jazz guitar players of all levels and lets us in on his unique way of playing with his guitar tuned in 4ths! Ant’s been described as “An innovator” and “A gamechanger” by The Guardian. Based in the UK, Ant lives in London where he leads the Ant Law Quintet. In 2013 their debut album ’Entanglement’ was released to great acclaim, followed by ‘Zero Sum World’ (with Whirlwind Recordings) in 2015 and ‘Life I Know’ (with Edition Records) in 2018, receiving 5 star reviews and airplay across the UK, Europe, and Australia. Ant plays in Tim Garland’s band with Jason Rebello & Asaf Sirkis, featuring on various albums including ‘ONE’ which was shortlisted for a Grammy and won the Jazzwise Best Album award. He has worked with other notables Cory Henry, Thomas Gould and is featured from time to time in “Total Guitar”, “Guitar Techniques” & “Guitarist” magazines. In the latter he recently made a list of “10 Astounding Virtuosos”. Ant’s fourth album was just released this year on July 24th, “The Sleeper Wakes“. Check out this interview either watching the video at the top of this page or in the audio version below: Audio Only Version: Stay up to date with all things Ant Law! FB live streams on FB artist page: https://www.facebook.com/AntLawGuitar/liveNEW ALBUM: https://orcd.co/sleeperwakesOther albums, sheet music, backing tracks: https://antlaw.bandcamp.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAy_Wjp5adEDQMsNVDyX8fQInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/antlawguitar/
05/08/20 • 10 min
Here’s a simple but incredibly effective strategy that I’ve used over the years when I have been busy, but I still need to make time for my music. Check out the podcast below where I share it with you: Join FretDojo’s online jazz guitar academy here Transcript: Greg O’Rourke: Hi guys. Welcome to fretdojo.com. My name’s Greg O’Rourke and it’s great to have you listening along today. This website’s all about the rapid path to mastering guitar and to build your skills to get you to the next level in your playing. So visit my website for a whole bunch of free lessons and courses and everything you need for a step-by-step instruction on building your skills with guitar and especially jazz guitar. So here’s a simple but incredibly effective strategy that I’ve used over the years when I have been busy, but I still need to make time for my music. I don’t think you need to assume that to still make progress in guitar, you need to practise for hours and hours every day. Obviously, if you can that’s fantastic, but sometimes you can make excellent progress, simply by using what I call the Five-Minute Miracle. There’s nothing groundbreaking about this really. All I do is grab my mobile phone, which has a countdown timer on it, and I set the timer for five minutes. And then I just grab my guitar, I don’t even bother to tune it. If it’s reasonably in tune, that’s great. And I just get straight into the next thing on my list that I need to develop. So for example, if I’m trying to learn a new jazz standard, I might spend a bit of time learning one or two phrases from the melody. If I’m interested in learning how to solo over a particular tune, this is something I often do, I’ll just put on one chord from the progression and jam over it for a while. Building things up like this step-by-step, can be very effective because what it does is it presents your mind with a problem in a very constrained way. So for example, soloing over a G13 chord in the progression. And then, you can just focus on that single chord. And then maybe the next day, you might revisit that for say, 30 seconds, and then go to the next chord in the progression. And then on the third day, you might practise those two chords together. And I find a looper pedal is incredibly useful for this kind of technique. So what am I talking about here? Let’s give a real world example. I’ve just set the timer for five minutes. I’ve grabbed my guitar. I don’t really care if it’s perfectly in tune or not, and I’ll just lay down quick pattern like this on my looper. Here we go, it’s a nice G13 chord. And so, this is one of the chords out of Take the A Train or something like that. If I’m looking at that standard and I see this chord, I’m just going to practise messing around over G13. Okay, here we go. Okay, so can you hear how... what’s great about this practise is, it’s instantly satisfying, and also it’s a great step-by-step building block for say, focusing on a jazz standard, because rather than getting overwhelmed with all the different chords in one practise session, you just focus on one chord. And even if you only have time for one chord in one of those five minute miracle sessions, then gradually over the course of the week, you can actually cover quite a lot of different chords and combinations of them. So for example, in the next practise that I’ll do the next day for five minutes, I might combine that with another chord and loop that around. And so, in this kind of very embryonic step-by-step way, you’ll actually be very surprised on how fast you can develop your skills over a standard. And what’s interesting is that it’s actually very highly leveraged because what you’re doing is, you’re presenting your mind the problem, and then you’re going away from it and you’re going to sleep and then you coming back, consolidating it quickly, and then adding another chunk. And then, if that’s all the time you have, then you go to sleep the next night.
04/30/20 • 18 min
In today’s topic, I want to talk about something important. How hard is it, really, to learn jazz? Check out the podcast below where I answer this question: Join FretDojo’s online jazz guitar academy here Transcript: Hi guys. Greg O’Rourke here from the Fret Dojo Podcast. Visit my website, www.fretdojo.com to get your guitar playing to the next level. In today’s topic, I want to talk about something important. How hard is it, really, to learn jazz? Because there’s a lot of differing opinions on this, but a lot of them seem to gravitate to the point of view that jazz guitar is incredibly hard to learn, will take a large chunk of your life, definitely you can’t focus on any other aspect of your life to get good at this. Kind of like the Whiplash kind of approach. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that movie. I actually don’t really recommend that for the fainthearted, that movie, which is basically about a jazz student that goes to more extreme and extreme levels of dedication in the face of quite an intense and violent teacher that kind of puts him through hell basically to learn jazz. Now in particular, I want to talk about an article that one of my readers sent into me with this question. How hard is it and how long does it take to learn jazz guitar? It’s on guitarprinciples.com and the web post name is How Long to Learn Your Style of Guitar. It goes through a few different styles, but then it comes to jazz guitar. Now I won’t read this whole thing obviously on the podcast now, but I just want to pick out a few tasty morsels here. So here’s a few things that this article says. “The jazz player needs a vast and extensive range of tools, because the music they play is based on sophisticated scales, and those scales are used to generate extremely complex chord structures. There are hundreds of code forms to learn and a great number of scale forms all over the neck in every key.” So already, you can kind of hear that there’s a lot of complexity going on with jazz guitar and most people would be put off by that first paragraph here. They talk about here, in terms of the amount of study required for a jazz guitarist. Five years of study, averaging two or more hours a day, hopefully more, are required to get up and running as a player in the jazz genre. Then it takes about 10 years of three or more hours a day to fully acquire the use of those tools and a lifetime of continuing study and refinement if you want to be among the greats. A high degree of refined technique must be developed as well. So you have to decide, do you want to be a brain surgeon or a jazz guitarist? Probably becoming a brain surgeon will be a bit less of a commitment. Well, if that isn’t the most off-putting thing I’ve ever read about wanting to study jazz guitar. I’m going to let you into a little secret. I haven’t spent that much time studying jazz guitar and I can still gig and improvise, and I have a whole website about it. So I think this is really, really misleading, this point of view. But it’s a pervasive point of view that you hear about when it comes to studying jazz in general, that it’s really for people that want to do nothing else in their lives and they need to spend their whole day on it, it’s the most completely overwhelming form of music to study, but this simply is not the case. I think we need to talk about what your goals are as a jazz guitarist. Sure, do you want to be like the next West Montgomery? Then probably, yes, you do need to spend a large part of your life refining your style. But you don’t need to get to that level to still enjoy playing jazz to competently solo and play in the band and do gigs and all that sort of thing, you don’t need that much time. I think it’s a kind of a psychological thing. If you think something takes a certain amount of time, you’ll find it will. So, the way we think about something kind of creates our reality. I think when you read something like this,
Today I want to share with you a fabulous conversation I had with Greg Stott, Associate Lecturer and Resident Jazz Guitarist at the Australian National University. In this podcast, Greg delves into: The biggest mistakes jazz guitarists make when it comes to practicing Greg’s thoughts on jazz online education and how it compares to more traditional university based teaching A sneak peek of Greg’s brand new albums coming out soon and much more... We also talk about the latest FretDojo Academy jazz guitar comping course that Greg Stott and I collaborated on, and the reasons for why mastering comping is an essential requirement for anyone wanting to call themselves a pro jazz player. Thanks guys, let me know what you thought about this interview by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page. Cheers, Greg from FretDojo Greg Stott Greg is an Australian guitarist and teacher. He teaches jazz and contemporary guitar at the Australian National University and has been a featured performer at numerous events including the New Zealand International Jazz & Blues Festival, the Sydney Olympics Festival, the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the National Folk festival and a number of international sporting events. He has also played for Australian Prime Ministers and foreign dignitaries and performed original compositions for national broadcast on ABC FM. Greg has returned to study and is currently completing his PhD at the Australian National University but still maintains a busy performing and recording schedule. In addition to performing with The Greg Stott Band and the Utopia Collective, Greg has performed or recorded with a range of jazz, classical and pop artists including: Hetty Kate, Grace Knight, James Morrison, Andrew Gander, Tim Kain (Guitar Trek), Tim Strong (USA), Don Johnson, Miroslav Bukovsky, Brendan Clarke, Wayne Kelly, Craig Scott, Gery Scott, Craig Schneider, Ra Khahn, The Idea of North, John Mackey, Mike Price, Eric Ajaye, Col Hoorweg, James Greening, Dave Panichi, Ben Hauptman, Peta Gammie, Jackie Love, Rhonda Birchmore, Hayley Jensen (Australian Idol), Steve and Rae Amosa, Kirrah Amosa Gabby Birmingham, Elana Stone, Meg Corsen, Adam Sofo (The Voice, Silverchair, Guy Sebastian), Robbie Zootster, Steve Allen, The RMC Duntroon Big Band, and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.
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FAQ
How many episodes does FretDojo have?
FretDojo currently has 25 episodes available.
What topics does FretDojo cover?
The podcast is about Music and Podcasts.
What is the most popular episode on FretDojo?
The episode title 'Crazy 4ths Guitar Tuning and More – Interview with Jazz Guitarist Ant Law' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on FretDojo?
The average episode length on FretDojo is 38 minutes.
How often are episodes of FretDojo released?
Episodes of FretDojo are typically released every 34 days, 7 hours.
When was the first episode of FretDojo?
The first episode of FretDojo was released on Mar 1, 2017.
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