Jazz Science Guitar Institute

Intro

 

There is magic in numbers, so naturally I was curious when I came across Steve Crowell's "84 Jazz Guitar Equations" on YouTube a couple of months ago.

 

Were "84 equations" going to solve my jazz guitar problems? I was skeptical. Why 84? Why not 64, like the hexagrams of the I Ching? Why not five, like the much touted CAGED system? Were the 84 Equations just 84 clichés that could be stitched together in any old random order to navigate a chord progression? Or were they something more?

 

As I watched Steve play, I could see that he knew what he was doing. His moves were economical, effortless, and swinging. More important, he seemed to be having fun. Paying a visit to his website, easyjazzguitar.com, I discovered that the 84 Equations ("EQs") are part of a broad curriculum he offers through his Jazz Science Guitar Institute, including private lessons over the phone or via Skype for incredibly reasonable prices. That and the tone of the text told me that Steve loves what he does and isn't in it just for the money. He is something of a true believer, and the 84 EQs - his discovery - is the heart of his gospel.

 

But could there be anything musical in a system based on a number, or in any systematized approach to an art form such as jazz guitar? That was the question.

 

As a former editor for Guitar Player magazine and the author of two books - one on guitar technique and one on musical composition - I am a somewhat more sophisticated critic than most. At Guitar Player, I wrote feature stories and reviews and edited several instruction columns, including studio jazz guitarist Tommy Tedesco's "Studio Log," and "Howard Roberts on Jazz Improvisation." I have studied with some of the best guitarists in the world and have been reviewing and editing guitar instruction books continuously for four decades. Currently, I write a blog for American Songwriter magazine and a few other online columns on guitar, and teach around fifty students.

 

In short, I was an open-minded reader, but not a naïve one. Steve would have his work cut out if he was going to convince me that "84 EQs" was new and worthwhile, and not a rehash of old ideas.

 

To be fair about it, I decided to look at Part 1, The 84 Jazz Guitar Equations, first, even though I thought I could probably skip it and go straight to Part 2. That proved to be a wise decision. The "84 EQs" was indeed a cornerstone, and even better than its claims. Within a month, I acquired Part 2, Formulas for Jazz Guitar Improvisation, and Part 3, Jazz Guitar Power Soloing.

 

By the time I'd finished reading and playing through these books and listening to the accompanying CDs and DVDs, all of my doubts had vanished. It was like discovering J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy for jazz guitar, or Harry Potter's complete manual of jazz guitar wizardry. Steve's concept turned out to be more than I had ever dreamed. Together, these three volumes constitute a Rosetta stone for jazz guitar. They make the fretboard completely comprehensible in a new way, and they lead the conscientious student from fear and bumbling into confidence and creativity.

 

The three books and the accompanying CDs and DVDs do make up a system, but it is not a restrictive system, weighted down with rules. Rather, it encourages creativity by giving you a complete set of tools and then showing you how these tools adapt to a variety of circumstances. Many guitar methods might make similar claims, but if I could take only one jazz guitar method to a desert island, it would be this one. It is by far the most logical, elegant, thorough, and useful of any that I've encountered. Moreover, it is bound to make any other jazz guitar course you might undertake that much easier to understand. The 84 EQs is a way of thinking, a key that unlocks doors, and emphatically not a collection of random licks for rote memorization.

 

Steve's site features a number of enthusiastic testimonials, and since I'm aware that I now sound suspiciously like a true believer myself, I want to take some time to give you a few concrete whys and wherefores.

 

Part 1, The 84 Jazz Guitar Equations - Arpeggio & Scale Formulas in All Keys

 

Have you ever tried to improvise over a ii-V-I progression in the key of Db at, say, the ninth position (ninth fret) on the guitar? Higher positions and "difficult" keys are the moral equivalent of the deep end of the pool for aspiring guitarists. Mastering them is a rite of passage, and a lot of players never quite make the grade.

 

There are multiple ways you can learn to swim in the deep end. All of them have one thing in common: some notion of "scale forms," or left-hand target patterns projected on the grid of strings and frets. Howard Roberts - legendary jazz guitarist, studio artist, and founder of Musicians Institute - liked to call them "Sonic Shapes," because they were visual maps to musical sound. As improvisers, we engrave these fretboard constellations on our consciousness in order to be able to predict what tonal combinations we'll get when we begin dictating our musical ideas through the fretboard.

 

The gold standard among scale forms is generally recognized to be "CAGED," a system based on five well-known major chords. CAGED was the favorite of Joe Pass, among others, and it is the subject of countless guitar methods online and in books. The five chord-based scale forms interlock vertically up and down the fretboard, spelling the word "CAGED" as they go. You can play in any key simply by scrolling the CAGED forms up or down the neck until they fit the new key. That's supposed to make it "easy."

 

It doesn't. And it's important to recognize that, because the fretboard map you choose will influence the way you play for the rest of your life. Ideally, CAGED would be as straightforward and simple as a piano keyboard. In reality, it is about as far from the orderly lineup of piano keys as a Picasso is from a Rembrandt. The 84 EQs, on the other hand, is about as close to a fretboard Rembrandt as it is possible to get. If there's anything clearer and easier to use, it would be hard to imagine.

 

The 84 EQ system consists of seven scale forms, one for each tone of the major scale. All the forms begin with the index finger planted on a scale tone on string 6. The scale form proceeds up from there with three notes per string. That's all there is to the system: seven forms (one for each note of the scale), three notes per string. The simplicity of this rule-set is part of the virtue of the 84 EQs. It greatly reduces the quantity of data you have to program into your brain, thereby simplifying all your decisions.

 

Notice that the magic number "84" is the product of seven scale forms multiplied by twelve keys (7 x 12 = 84). The number 84 is not intimidating, because once you know the seven forms in one key, you know them in all keys. Transposing the forms - and all the melodies and harmonies associated with them - is simply a matter of scrolling the seven forms up or down the neck until you lock into the new key (just like CAGED). 

For example, if you are playing a solo in the key of F, the seven scale forms fall on frets 1 (F), 3 (G), 5 (A), 6 (Bb), 8 (C), 10 (D), and 12 (E) of string 6. The scale forms proceed in numerical order - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - following the order of scale tones upward from F to the higher frets. 

Now if you want to solo in the key of Bb, you move the index finger to fret 6 (Bb) and the fingerings all move with you. What moves out of sight below reappears above. In the key of Bb, for example, the "F" on fret 1 of string 6 becomes the fifth tone of the scale, and the scale forms are renumbered 5 (F, fret 1), 6 (G, fret 3), 7 (A, fret 5), 1 (Bb, fret 6), 2 (C, fret 8), 3 (D, fret 10), 4 (Eb, fret 11). 

The book presents the 84 EQs in the order of the circle of fifths: 

EQs 1-7: Key of F (D minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 1.

EQs 8-14: Bb (G minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 6.

EQs 15-21: Eb (C minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 11.

EQs 22-28: Ab (F minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 4.

EQs 29-35: Db (Bb minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 9.

EQs 36-42: Gb or F# (Eb minor or D# minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 2.

EQs 43-49: B (G# minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 7

EQs 50-56: E (C# minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, frets 0 and 12

EQs 57-63: A (F# minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 5

EQs 64-70: D (B minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 10

EQs 71-77: G (E minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 3

EQs 78-84: C (A minor). Scale form 1 = string 6, fret 8 

This makes sense because the circle of fifths is an essential tool for all jazz players. It is at the heart of most chord progressions and modulations (key changes). 

Incidentally, scale form 2 is the same as Dorian mode, form 3 is the same as Phrygian mode, and so on. If you're not familiar with this terminology, it doesn't matter. Steve prefers to avoid it, and I have to agree. 

But wait a minute - aren't seven scale forms more difficult to memorize than five?

 

No, because that's only part of the story. Each form overlaps the neighboring form on two notes, which provides a solid visual and fingering connection between them. CAGED has similar connections, but they are not as consistent. Position changes up and down the neck are built into the way you practice the 84 EQs, but they are not built into CAGED.

 

The five CAGED forms sometimes have sometimes two, sometimes three notes per string, which generates complexity for the right hand and for the left. The 84 EQs always have three notes per string, which enormously reduces the complexity for both hands. All you have to decide is "which three notes?" It is not difficult to intuit the answer.

 

There's more. Each scale form comes with four exercises in scales and arpeggios. In the scale exercises, the index finger anchors scale movement, and the third or fourth finger anchors arpeggios (broken chords). The arpeggios move diagonally up and to the right from the fourth finger, while the arpeggio roots jump across four adjacent strings (6-5-4-3), which generates about half of a diatonic circle of fifths (I-IV-vii-iii-vi-ii-V-I), a series that is basic to jazz progressions.

 

Consistency is a hallmark of the 84 EQ system: You always play three notes per string, always anchor scales with the index finger, always anchor arpeggios with the ring or pinky finger, and always march the arpeggio roots horizontally across four strings in a chord progression that is highly likely to occur in real music. Also, the right hand always plays the scale notes with alternating down-up strokes, and always initiates arpeggios with a downward sweep across three strings. In 7th chords, the pinky always plays the 7th of the chord on the same string as the chord 5th.

 

This consistency is far from trivial. It is a major contrast to CAGED and it lends scientific support to Steve's claims that the 84 EQs makes "playing great jazz guitar fun and easy," and "allows you to bypass the normal learning curve." When there is only one way to perform a task, it cuts the decision tree down to one branch, which speeds up learning and encourages habit-formation. The same principle is well understood in user interface design - a point I will return to below.

 

The unification of harmony and melody with consistent technique also makes it easier to find the notes you want when you are improvising. CAGED has some of the same regularity, but the 84 EQs has more - much more. Steve says that the 84 EQs "reveal the correlation of arpeggios and scales on the fingerboard and how they work together as a harmonic family unit." I have to agree. The 84 EQs achieve something I didn't think was possible: They give the guitar a graphic and technical consistency almost on a par with the piano. In some ways, it is better, because the circle of fifths root progressions are so easy to find, and it is easy to transpose by half steps (up one fret or down one fret). Just try similar transpositions on the piano.

 

If you're fortunate enough to start your guitar career with the 84 EQs, you will not have to struggle with the confounding complexity of other systems. If you've already committed other scale and arpeggio patterns to memory, you will not have to throw away what you've learned. Instead, you will gain new insight while enjoying the relaxation and effortlessness that the 84 EQs adds to what you already know.

 

Part 2, Formulas for Jazz Guitar Improvisation

 

The theme of Part 2 is craftsmanship. In Part 1, Steve describes a total fretboard map, applying seven scale forms to all twelve keys. Part 2 opens with seven lessons (roughly half the 156-page book), in which he applies essential technical skills and improvisational ideas to each scale form. There is some overlap of subject matter, but each lesson explores new territory, too, including chromatic passing tones and neighbor tones, the major 7#11 sound, minor 7th chord lines, diminished and augmented colorations, Lydian flat-five-augmented-11 sounds, speed studies (16th notes) and connections between the forms (more about this later).

 

The DVD provides a running commentary on each of the seven lessons. Seeing and hearing an idea demonstrated in the DVD instantly gets the point across, making it that much easier to go back to the printed text and extract the essence note by note. The DVD also contains many new and useful tidbits of knowledge.

 

The latter half of the book considers three technical areas and offers eight transcribed solos with commentary. The technical areas include

 

I. "Solo Development Studies" (17 pages). The first subsection shows the minor ii chord in twelve keys, first in triad form, then with an added 7th, resolving to a dominant chord in various ways, from arpeggios to scale runs. "Chord Consolidation" shows the relationship of the EQs to chord inversions. This three-lesson group (averaging two pages each) shows four-part harmony for various inversions of ii and V chords, including arpeggios and scales. I liked the examples throughout because they illustrated simple "theme and variation" ideas on the ii-V cadence. I could think of a lot more by the time I was done.

 

II. "Tool Boxes" (27 pages). The "tools" cover minor, diminished, augmented, and tritone-substitute sounds a little off the beaten harmonic path. Steve says, "It is up to the student to exploit these tools, learn them in other keys and observe their context when they appear in a solo study. Mixing tools with the EQs will enable you to get a balanced variety of sounds." A section on the standard five pentatonic scale patterns is also included. Part II is a good example of the thoroughness of the 84 EQ method.

 

III. "Intros, Endings, and Turnarounds" (19 pages). This three-part section is an important vocabulary builder, filled with many examples, some of which are stylistic, such as chord melody textures, or a "Count Basie" ending, and some of which cover typical chord progressions and bass lines, such as the "up-a-minor-third principle," or a bass line that descends by half steps, or contrary motion in bass and treble. This section will remedy a common weakness for many players.

 

The eight transcribed solos (30 pages) show how to apply the entire spectrum of skills acquired so far to chord progressions similar to those found in jazz standards. Titles include "Blues in D," "The Girl From Ipanema," "On Green Dolphin Street," "There Will Never Be Another You," "'S Wonderful," "How Insensitive," "All the Things You Are," and "Giant Steps." Between the five-line staff and the tab, you will find written notes that indicate which EQ is being used with the chord. This was particularly useful in figuring out what Steve was thinking while he was improvising.

 

The CD for Part 1 hinted at two themes that Steve pursues in depth in Part 2: the relationship of the EQ forms to harmony, and the connections between the forms up and down the neck.

 

To choose one example out of many, EQ 1 (which begins with scale tone 1, F, on string 6, fret 1) has four arpeggios lined up on fret 5: A minor 7 (beginning on string 6, fret 5), D minor 7 (beginning on string 5, fret 5), G minor 7 (string 4, fret 5), and C7 (string 3, fret 5). The first two arpeggios are "tonic type" (TT), and the second two are "dominant type" (DT).

 

The next scale form, EQ 2, also has four arpeggios. The first two are DT, and the second two are TT. The two TT arpeggios are A minor 7 and D minor 7 one octave higher than they were in EQ 1.

 

EQ 1 and EQ 2 form a giant checkerboard of tonic and dominant zones, which makes for some interesting possibilities. For example, you could solo over a tonic chord (say, F major) by crossing diagonally from EQ 1 (first two arpeggios) to EQ 2 (second two arpeggios) or vice versa. Alternatively, you could pursue a dominant run (C7) from the first two arpeggios of EQ 2 to the second two of EQ 1. Patterned connections such as these exist between all the forms, constituting a higher layer of meaning to the whole 84 EQs. What I noticed about them is that once you see (and hear) these patterns, they are hard to forget.

 

At first, I wasn't sure I liked the classification of chords into only two types, Tonic and Dominant. It seemed like a brutal oversimplification. But in practice, it is a terrific laborsaving device. The human brain prefers simple black-and-white, yes-or-no, classifications (even computers prefer zeroes and ones). When I listened to the examples with the either/or, T or D classification in mind, I started to hear the iii and the vi chords (A minor, and D minor in the key of F) as shades of tonic harmony. Similarly, I started to hear ii, IV, and vii as shades of dominant harmony. The vi chord, which is a tonic-type chord, can also serve as a dominant type, but this caused no confusion.

 

In Part 1, The 84 Equations, melody is restricted to a set of stock exercises. The "extensions" exercises - the most melodic of all - have an interesting mix of arpeggios and scales, but they are essentially the same in every form, just transposed diatonically to new chord roots. I took this as a possible sign that Part 2 would be a letdown when it came to the intricacies of developing a solo. I was wrong. In Part 2, Steve does a great job of amplifying on the ideas in Part 1 with numerous devices and rhythmic variations. In short, the strict patterning in Part 1 turned out to be a virtue because it established a core, intuitive understanding of the intersection of harmony and melody which helped me keep my balance as I began to juggle more and more artistic devices in Part 2.

 

Part 3, Jazz Guitar Power Soloing - An Advanced System for Building Powerful Technique

 

The theme for Part 3 (76 pages) is "More!" - more soloing ideas, more speed, more range in scales and arpeggios, more outside sounds. Many of the examples are written "etude-style," to borrow a term from classical music, including one titled "Perpetual Motion," a nod to nineteenth-century rock-star violinist Niccolò Paganini. Dense with steady, wide-ranging 8th-notes or 16th-notes, they sometimes resemble a violin solo by J.S. Bach.

 

Part 1 (14 pages) consists of 16th-note variations over a I-vi-ii-V intro or turnaround formula. These virtuosic studies require careful metronome work to bring to maximum speed. They are fully notated for the right hand, which I found helpful. The harmonic material becomes increasingly complex, but it is fully annotated.

 

Part 2 (16 pages) covers a variety of soloing devices, such as applications of the jazz minor scale, chromatic lines (very congenial to the 84 EQs), ii-V studies in major and relative minor keys, and a one-page speed study in D.

 

Part 3 (43 pages) features 17 solo studies based on a blues in D, a chromatic blues in Bb, and progressions similar to "Solar," "How High the Moon," "A Foggy Day," "Autumn Leaves," "Stella by Starlight," "Sweet Georgia Brown," "I've Got Rhythm," "Rhythm Changes," and "Summertime." Folks, these are the essential standards, and they will hold no fear after you learn how to handle them here. Once again, interlinear notes explain the EQ and chord choices.

 

Outro

 

For those interested in a scientific basis for Steve's claims that the 84 EQs make learning jazz guitar easy, I recommend The Humane Interface, by Jef Raskin. Jef was the guy who gave us the Macintosh, a landmark in ease-of-use when it comes to computers. (Jef wrote the original 400-page spec, named it the Macintosh after his favorite apple, hired the development team, and led the project for more than two years before Steve Jobs took over. But that's another story.)

 

Jef was also my boss at various Silicon Valley start-up companies over a twenty-year period. Only a few people know that Jef was a brilliant musician in addition to being a genius at computer science and mathematics. Before coming to the San Francisco Bay Area and going to work for Apple, he had been a music professor at UC San Diego, and had studied composition and piano performance with some noteworthy teachers, including Leonard Bernstein and Rosalyn Tureck. I have never heard anyone who could improvise and compose with greater facility than Jef.

 

Why do I mention this? Simply because Jef often used to say that the one instrument he could never play was the guitar. He even went so far as to say that it completely baffled him how anyone could play the guitar at all! I think I know why that was, and it is relevant to Steve Crowell's accomplishment with the 84 jazz guitar equations.

 

One of Jef's design principles was "monotony" - which meant designing an interface so that there was only one way to accomplish any given task. For example, he never liked "beginner" and "expert" commands on the Mac, and in later user-interface designs he created, he went to great lengths to eliminate multiple routes to the same result. The payoff for monotony is habit-formation. If there's only one way to do something, the physical gestures that lead to the desired result become automatic. This reduces any task down to a series of reflexes, leading to tremendous speed and accuracy.

 

The guitar, on the other hand, is anti-monotonous. In spite of the beautiful symmetry of the strings and frets, the tones are distributed willy-nilly everywhere, and the same tone can be found in numerous places on the fretboard, which means that scales and melodies, intervals and chords can be fingered many different ways. Also, the intervallic warp between string 3 and string 2 means that the same interval can have many different fretboard shapes.

 

I think the combination of these elements is what made the guitar seem so confounding to Jef. But I think he might have reconsidered if he'd known about Steve's 84 EQs, because it goes just about as far as it is possible to go to achieve monotony on the guitar, as shown by the list of consistent features given in the fourth paragraph from the end of the Part 1 review above. The net effect is that you really will learn faster and relax more when you're soloing if you use the 84 EQs.

 

Recalling the Lord of the Rings analogy made earlier, it seems to me now that it occurred to me because the three parts of the EQ series fit together like three concentric rings. Each ring builds on the one before it by further elaborating the implications of the original equations. The evolution of thought from one volume to the next writes a whole untitled textbook between the lines, one that inspires the creative use of the tools that Steve designed simply by example. 

Music is the most technical of all the arts, which makes it easy to treat it like math or chemistry, rather than poetry, which it resembles more than science. A balance must be struck, and it isn't easily done. With the 84 Equations series, Steve has done it. 

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