My Favorite Things/Pure Imagination: Trying to inspire my students to learn music theory through annotated versions of popular songs with re-harmonization, improvisation, and advanced rhythmic material.

Thanks /u/Salemosophy! I would more attribute my re-harm style to just using my ears and experimenting with different basslines to see what sounds good. One thing I do to develop my ears in this way is to play a lot of jazz standards and hum basslines as I play them. If I can't hum the bassline like I can hum the melody, then I only know half the tune. I also think of the tones in term of solfege syllables instead of trying to hear intervals, it is much more immediate. If you do this regularly, you will start to "hear" new variations of the bassline while you are playing/experimenting and some reharms will come naturally in this way. After I've got a melody and bassline, I simply "fill in" the middle with a chord that has the melody on top and root as the bass.

Also, sometimes if you want to push the boundaries you can try a bassline that is totally outside of the original tonality, and what I like to do is eventually bring it back to the original tonality via a dominant or a half-step resolution.

As far as your ability to play different voicings, you have to develop each one through practice if you want to be able to play them in a performance setting. There is a trick that I use to learn new voicings, and that is to play the root, 3rd and 7th of the chord (using some combination of both hands), and then fill in other color tones using my other fingers, trying to minimize repetition of notes. Then when I move to the next chord, I will try to move my fingers as little as possible to get to the next chord and colors. The trick is to practice the chords until you have mastered them (you play them effortlessly). This would be best explained in my teacher Kenny Werner's video here: http://jazzheaven.com/how-to-play-jazz-videos/improvisation-lessons/kenny-werner-effortless-mastery-melody-harmony-rhythm/. I'd highly recommend it.

So there really is no secret to practice, other than practice until you have mastered each small piece of information before moving on. Kenny says most people see practice like it's a full deck of cards spread out and they're constantly looking to the next card and not concentrating on one. He sees it as a stacked deck, so he only sees one card at a time. You don't need to spend 25 years to develop something sophisticated, you just need to concentrate on exactly what you're trying to develop at the moment (I like making these vids because it focuses my attention on developing one tune to a very high level). Once you're done developing that, you can move on to your next exercise/project and you'll be a little faster at it.

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