Django "Rose Room" @ 75% speed

Lango-Django

Hey, I posted this at the bottom of another thread, but thought I'd repost it here.

I don't know about the rest of you lads, but I feel that I'm really learning something when I can play along with Django at 75% speed... there is always something smart there which I can take and incorporate into my own solos.

In the previous thread, I was observing on Django's trick for showing the other musicians that he was going to continue playing another chorus by playing a diminished riff over the tonic chord at bar 31 and/or 32, and as you'll hear, he does that in this version of Rose Room. I made a separate little clip of just that passage, but I think it's played at full speed... but fear not, it's actually quite playable at that tempo.

Django was so good at using these little sweep pick patterns that to me it begs the question--- what precentage of these kind of riffs were improvised on the spot, and what percentage were pre-arranged?

Scrooge

well done. Great to hear someone interested in playing Django's music rather than just slick licks. Once you've learned and absorbed a few of Django's musical phrases I'm sure you'll be able to invent your own on the spot. It's not that hard particularly if you have Django's vocabulary in your ears. Keep learning the entire solos as this shows you how to craft what you hear and play, into a complete composition.

Have you tried using just two or three fingers, really helps you to learn the fret board and understand were Django is coming from?

Go for it.

Lango-Django

Yeah Scrooge, I do try to play some of Django's licks the way I imagine he might have played them, but it's kind of hard to guess sometimes just how much use of his third and fourth fingers he really had... for example, he seems to have had no trouble playing chord melody-style when he wanted to, even with some rather complex and demanding chord shapes...?

An interesting feature in "Rose Room" is Django's use of thirds on the top two strings, for which he uses only the "two frets apart" spacing--- adjusting his fingering only momentarily whenever he passes the tonic F chord at frets 5 and 6.

He does this with such brazen assurance that the listener doesn't really notice whether or not these thirds actually match the chords underneath, which would be the big concern for lesser mortals like me... and come to think of it, if there are some momentary clashes, so what?--- that probably adds some desirable tension, doesn't it?

So I'm going to see if I can use this approach in my playing, too. I like the lusty thick timbre of thirds on a gypsy guitar.