Phrasing
How to turn loose notes into phrases with a beginning, a breath and an ending, the way you do when you speak.
Applied
Content under musical review. It may contain inaccuracies.
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How to turn loose notes into phrases with a beginning, a breath and an ending, the way you do when you speak.
Applied
Phrasing is how you group notes into phrases. A good phrase works like a sentence: it starts, says something, breathes and ends. With the same five notes you can sound clumsy or eloquent. The difference lies in rhythm, length and silence.
First, notes from the A minor pentatonic with no break, all the same length:
Now almost the same notes, grouped into two short phrases with a clear ending:
The second version "talks". It has direction and leaves room for the listener to take in what they just heard.
Work inside a small area of the neck. Fewer available notes force you to think about rhythm and the shape of the phrase:
String 6, Fret 5: A2 · 1 · Root
Set the metronome slow and play two-bar phrases followed by two bars of silence. Silence is part of the phrase too:
Metronome at 70 BPMTry these rules, one at a time:
The ingredients of phrasing are few, and they combine endlessly:
A very useful device is call and response: one phrase stays open, ending on an unstable note, and the next one closes it on the tonic.
Ear & improvisationCall and responseHear a short phrase and repeat it by ear on the guitar.Sing a short phrase, then play it. Your voice needs to breathe, so your sung phrases will have natural pauses. If an idea can't be sung, it's probably too mechanical.
Record a four-chord backing and alternate: four bars playing, four bars listening. Then listen back and mark the places where phrases run on without direction.
Hal Crook suggests practising phrases that start at different points in the bar: on beat 1, on the offbeat of 2, on beat 4. The same idea sounds new once you displace it.
Also try odd-length phrases, such as three bars, over a four-bar form. The phrase crosses the bar line and creates tension that resolves when you line up with the form again.