“ Steve hits it out of the park here ”
I remember taking his first baroque class — like with everything that he does it’s completely comprehensive with tons of material. My rule of thumb with regard to these master classes, as Vic Juris said many years ago, was that if you can get one or two really important fundamental things that you can genuinely incorporate into your playing, it would’ve been well worth it. I absolutely got something very important from that first class, which I still use to this day when I improvise: how to use tritones and displaced tritones to get you to play tenths and thirteenths. The secondary effects of that class was that kind of information really helps with fingerboard knowledge as well. This class In a way builds on this fundamental information from the first class. I took copious notes of all the exercises and condensed them to eight pages of really essential stuff that I know if I worked tirelessly on, will immensely improve my playing. Steve is right when he declared in this class that mastery of fundamental counterpoint and cadential mechanisms, maybe used in the way that George v EPS used it, Will enable one to improvise more readily. And that’s exactly what this class is, even building on some of the fundamental principles of the first class. When I analyze the material, it really came down to really knowing your 10ths, 13ths, and spread triads and being able to work with these. Now that I have eight notes of really important stuff synthesized, the next step is to hit the woodshed and as my original teacher said, “ work the shit out of it!“
“Going For Baroque III”
Another great class by Steve that I will be able to incorporate into my playing thanks to his clear explanations!!