Minor Swing 1939

mandocat

I completely agree on the DVD's. The Stochelo Rosenberg DVD is especially impressive. One of the world's best players giving very clear instruction with beautiful accompaniment by Dennis. I think if you just had that DVD and Michael's Gypsy Picking you could go a long ways.

Paul Mehling

Hey folks,

there's a very cool instructional dvd that will clear this and ANY other Minor Swing questions-
Mandino Reinhardt walks you through every note of this solo...I don't know where you can get the DVD but if you look around, I'm sure you can find it!

As for the chromatic passage, keeping in mind that these are TRIPLETS and that most players use the Down Up Down , Down Up Down picking for triplets- you need to organize the notes into groups of 3s.
Suffice to say that you could play this at the octave of G on the G string (12th fret) and work down the string in 3s until you get to the D string and continue the pattern until you get to the open D string (the only open string so far) and work the E7b9 back up.

Truth is, I think we all work on this every day (or we should) but it's still fairly elusive. But worth the effort!

hope that helps!!

Bones

Thanks Pazzo, I'll look for that DVD

dennis

thanks for the comments folks

oasisdweller, I think you're right that he intended to play G#, but the note that came out was an A, maybe Id have to relisten to verify... but i remember it being an A and I decided to go with the note that came out not the notethat he intended...

on the other hand , It's near impossible to tell exactly what django played after the chromatic run... the chromaitc run itself is triplets... so i maintained the whole triplet feel for the entire passage.. and the arpeggio shape is a shape that django often played (diminsehd arpeggio with a missing note)

by the way, even though it is triplets, it is all alternate picked, and of cousre downstroke when you start a new string... it's not Down up down, down up down... that's a common misconception when it comes to the django technique... the down up down thing is generally and mainly done when it's a 3 note sequence/pattern (whether triplets or binary feel) on one string and when the tempo allows it ...

Bones

thanks Dennis and everyone for all the replies. Since this is such a classic solo I figured it was worth a little time to dig into the details a bit.

Jim Kaznosky

I've finally sat down to learn this by ear with 2 fingers and resisted checking any transcriptions out until I was really stumped. Man, that run is hard and I had to cheat just on that section. Nice work.