The Steel Guitar Forum

If you're like me, you appreciate and enjoy the jazz theory discussions by folks like Jeff Lampert and John Steele. This is one of the great things about this forum -- that we can discuss these things and educate ourselves in the process.

However, speaking for myself, I know I sometimes get dazed and overwhelmed trying to digest the info in these threads. It's hard to visualize the concepts sitting at the computer, and I print the thread out only to have 10 pages of more "stuff" to sift through to try to somehow integrate into steel playing.

Well, no more. This book: http://stores.yahoo.com/sher-music-books/jazztheorybook.html

has it all in one place. It makes it real clear and strightforward, and it ain't just jazz -- it's music theory in general. For instance, the book explains the theory relevant to that recent thread on the "4th as an avoid note."

Maybe a lot of folks already know about the book, but I didn't. Highly recommended.

One of the reasons theory and harmony is enjoyable to talk and debate, besides proving how much we know or don't know, is because we're verbalizing abstractions. Music is more abstract than art, and there are numerous publications devoted to talking about art. Math is a contender to be as or more abstact than music. There, on the lower levels, numbers (abstractions) are used to describe things or events. Whereas talking about music uses words to try to describe the ethereal and theory and harmony becomes the anatomy of the abstract. So is it any wonder that it's sometimes difficult to comprehend?

WHAT'D HE SAY!!!!

Hey Dirk,
Mark Levine is considered a great theorist and I'm sure there will be some revelations in that book. Perhaps you could return the favor of some of the contributions we have made to the Forum. If you read something in the book that really grabs you, and opens some doors in your playing, maybe you can share it with the Forum. No rush, or anything like that, just whenever you feel like it. How does that sound? .. Jeff

Sounds good to me, man.

Duplicate post. Time to update my web browser.<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Dirk B on 11 October 2002 at 04:15 PM.]</p></FONT>

Hey Dirk,

Thanks for the tip. I went to the website and bought the book. There's more good stuff there, as well.

For anyone wanting to learn a little theory, a good thing to do is to learn how the keyboard is set up. Anyone can do that pretty quickly - like 30 minutes. After that, any instument can be related to the keyboard. It makes things clear and simple.