Andy Fite

Do your improvised solos sound like scales going up and down? Do you ever feel lost when you’re playing lines? Do you feel a gap in your fretboard knowledge? If you answered yes to any of these, then this latest masterclass from Andy Fite might hold the key to the next logical stage in your playing! Andy Fite continues his logical and comprehensive exploration of the fretboard. Andy distills his years of experience to save you valuable practice time. Learn to master your melodic patterns via their smallest building block: between two notes. Andy shares patterns including ascending and descending 2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths and 7ths. With variations that include: the pattern itself, 2 notes; the pattern as a palindrome, 3 notes; the pattern reversed on the second step, 4 notes. According to Andy: "The purpose of the thing is to develop greater freedom, flexibility and focus in one's melodic improvising." In addition to the core masterclass video, you will also receive Andy’s beautiful composition, ‘Song for the Fifth of April’ notated in both TAB and standard notation. This piece demonstrates the how Andy utilises melodic patterns to create a melodically strong solo guitar piece. 3 Pages of PDF materials in standard notation and TAB. Full video is 37 minutes Soundslice Enhanced

As a jazz musician, my early training (and it seems most people’s training) concerned itself with matching the improvised melodic line to whatever chord is happening, in a strict vertical sense.” - Andy Fite Have you ever felt your guitar playing was like paint by numbers? Use this arpeggio over this chord! Play that lick over those changes! What if you could really hear & control EVERY NOTE over any chord progression? How would it feel like to be in charge of your melodic lines… rather than be chained by cliches? A follow-up to the brilliant masterclass “Into Tonal Beauty: Escaping Chord Grips”, Jazz Comic Philosopher Andy Fite goes deeper into this topic by adding the chromatic neighbors for the seminal chord progression that defines tonal music. Go deeper into tonal beauty as Andy Fite shares: Every possible chromatic neighbor embellishment to the original examples from part 1 of this masterclass (and how to practice the examples!) a) I-IV-I-V-I (closed position) b) I-IV-I-V-I (open position) Prelude No. 8 from his set of 24 from 2004 that paints an exquisite melodic landscape for us to appreciate the musical artistry possible from internalizing this concept. If you want to really hear chord progressions clearly and control the harmonic clarity of your melodic improvisations - this is the right masterclass for you. Take your guitar playing to the next level today. Come and follow Andy Fite into Tonal Beauty once again! 3 Pages of PDF materials in standard notation Soundsliced versions of Prelude No. 8 (standard notation with adjustable tempo, looping for effective practice and study) Full video is 43 minutes

"The chords of a song, I want to say, are NOT the harmony. The harmony is something more like a road, and the chords merely the signs marking the way." - Andy Fite From Jazz Comic Philosopher Andy Fite comes this new elegant masterclass, “Into Tonal Beauty: Escaping Chord Grips”, If you’ve been playing chords using the standard drop chords thinking, this masterclass will help you get out from that frame of mind. Say farewell to chord grips as your fingers fluidly connect the individual voices that harmonize perfectly. On describing the origins of this approach, Andy recalls: "When I went to music school at the University of Pittsburgh many years ago, I was required to take secondary piano. I never became a competent pianist, but the experience did give me an appreciation of voice leading, and that appreciation wound up being a great source of inspiration, and of a richer harmonic conception than I think I could have developed with the chord grips I had learned studying guitar, and with the chord-scale conception that dominated jazz education." Get ready to wander into tonal beauty as Andy Fite shares: A little system for playing any chord in every possible place (this is so simple, you’ll be seeing the fretboard clearer than ever!) The seminal chord progression defining tonal music (and how to systematically examine the possible fingerings for it): a) I-IV-I-V-I (closed position) b) I-IV-I-V-I (open position) The first prelude from his set of 24 from 2004 that presents a beautiful melodic exploration of harmony (our video editor couldn’t stop playing this piece on his classical guitar right after he watched the video for the first time) If you dislike long videos with too much information AND... prefer shorter videos with the right wisdom, delivered efficiently to your mind (and your fingers), this might just be the PERFECT masterclass for you. Why not let Andy help you become a better guitarist in just 28 minutes? Get this masterclass now to find out how! 1 Page of PDF materials in standard notation Full video is 28 minutes

The purpose of these videos is to help guitarists work toward a complete comprehensive mastery of this instrument (certainly of course an ideal goal which can never be totally fulfilled), with the idea that with mastery comes freedom. If we think of the guitar as analogous to our bodies, and the material that constitutes our music as analogous to our first spoken language, we have an idea of what our task must be. Not only the enormity of the thing, but also how we might actually proceed. Ever watch a baby learn to walk, for example? What a process! And you did that! The process of learning English (or whatever language or languages you’ve mastered) is even deeper and more involved, and so it is with music. We listen, learn to make sounds, pronounce words, put sentences together, get hold of the way grammar works, and expand and expand until we can express phenomenal complexity for both thought and feeling, most of the time without giving a thought to the grammar, or searching for a word, or struggling with pronunciation. But none of that happens before every word has been experienced on a level of thought, feeling and pronunciation. Scales on a Single String, which ought to be looked at first, is an idea I first heard about in a workshop with Gene Bertoncini, and at the time I thought it was silly. “When will you ever USE it?” I thought. But the question of use turns out to be an important one, and I would say of all these videos of mine, as well as for anything you might practice (with the great and important exception of repertoire) should NEVER be used. I’ll repeat: Never practice anything with the idea of using it. Play these things for their own fascination, and for the simple pleasure of playing them. Avoid practicing them mechanically, or in a strictly theoretical frame of mind. PLAY them, feel them, as music, for indeed they are musical elements, and if you EXPRESS them rather than practice them, connect with them on a feeling level, they become a part of you, and will be available as you simply turn loose your musical feeling, just as all the words, expressions, grammar and knowledge you’ve picked up over the years is available to you when you sit around a table with a couple of good friends talking about everything under the sun. The purpose I see in playing scales on single strings is primarily to get clarity on where things really are in this puzzle that the fretboard sometimes seems. Keyboard players get this information for free if they just pay attention. For us it’s harder to see what’s going on, and it leads us often to play things mechanically— read tablature instead of music notation, for instance, or learn chords from those box charts and maybe never be fully aware of which note is which, and forget about voice leading! This idea also motivates videos 4-7, Scales in Parallel, a course of study I developed as a way of working toward the dream of getting my hands on EVERY POSSIBLE CHORD! As it turned out, it gave me something even more: not only much greater mobility, but also and especially an understanding of chords as part of a linear (melodic) conception of harmony. Videos 1-3 constitute what to me is a comprehensive experience of the major and minor scales: along the individual strings, in strict positions, and best of all, along the whole fretboard. Number 3, the long scale, opens up mobility, shows where the sweetest spot is for each note, and makes possible a much more song-like phrasing than you can get if you’re stuck in the position concept. The long scale is ever my touchstone. But if you master all three orientations, the note you’re hearing will always be right under your fingers. Running Time: 23 min

Enjoy some Holiday musical humor with this original composition created by Andy Fite.

The purpose of these videos is to help guitarists work toward a complete comprehensive mastery of this instrument (certainly of course an ideal goal which can never be totally fulfilled), with the idea that with mastery comes freedom. If we think of the guitar as analogous to our bodies, and the material that constitutes our music as analogous to our first spoken language, we have an idea of what our task must be. Not only the enormity of the thing, but also how we might actually proceed. Ever watch a baby learn to walk, for example? What a process! And you did that! The process of learning English (or whatever language or languages you’ve mastered) is even deeper and more involved, and so it is with music. We listen, learn to make sounds, pronounce words, put sentences together, get hold of the way grammar works, and expand and expand until we can express phenomenal complexity for both thought and feeling, most of the time without giving a thought to the grammar, or searching for a word, or struggling with pronunciation. But none of that happens before every word has been experienced on a level of thought, feeling and pronunciation. Scales on a Single String, which ought to be looked at first, is an idea I first heard about in a workshop with Gene Bertoncini, and at the time I thought it was silly. “When will you ever USE it?” I thought. But the question of use turns out to be an important one, and I would say of all these videos of mine, as well as for anything you might practice (with the great and important exception of repertoire) should NEVER be used. I’ll repeat: Never practice anything with the idea of using it. Play these things for their own fascination, and for the simple pleasure of playing them. Avoid practicing them mechanically, or in a strictly theoretical frame of mind. PLAY them, feel them, as music, for indeed they are musical elements, and if you EXPRESS them rather than practice them, connect with them on a feeling level, they become a part of you, and will be available as you simply turn loose your musical feeling, just as all the words, expressions, grammar and knowledge you’ve picked up over the years is available to you when you sit around a table with a couple of good friends talking about everything under the sun. The purpose I see in playing scales on single strings is primarily to get clarity on where things really are in this puzzle that the fretboard sometimes seems. Keyboard players get this information for free if they just pay attention. For us it’s harder to see what’s going on, and it leads us often to play things mechanically— read tablature instead of music notation, for instance, or learn chords from those box charts and maybe never be fully aware of which note is which, and forget about voice leading! This idea also motivates videos 4-7, Scales in Parallel, a course of study I developed as a way of working toward the dream of getting my hands on EVERY POSSIBLE CHORD! As it turned out, it gave me something even more: not only much greater mobility, but also and especially an understanding of chords as part of a linear (melodic) conception of harmony. Videos 1-3 constitute what to me is a comprehensive experience of the major and minor scales: along the individual strings, in strict positions, and best of all, along the whole fretboard. Number 3, the long scale, opens up mobility, shows where the sweetest spot is for each note, and makes possible a much more song-like phrasing than you can get if you’re stuck in the position concept. The long scale is ever my touchstone. But if you master all three orientations, the note you’re hearing will always be right under your fingers. Running Time: 26min