Tips and tricks for practicing with Djangolizer

Create your own licks

Let's go to the ultimate discipline: The creation of your own licks. Here are a few suggestions, how Djangolizer can help you to get creative.

One simple thing is, to adapt a known lick and change it by your taste.
You have a lick, that works well over a minor chord? Why not make a dominant lick by changing the third, or make a major lick by changing the third and the seventh? Use the arpeggio view for that.

Here a method, to create a lick from scratch.
But first a little bit of theory:

You can reduce the essence of western music to two basic things:

- Create tension
    The combination of different chords towards the dominant chord (V)

- Release the tension
    The change from the dominant chord to the root chord (I maj or i min)

It's very important, to be familiar with the dominant seven chords. Let's take a simple example to practice that:

Les yeux noirs
    This song sounds well, played slowly as well as played fast.
    The two main chords are A7 and Dm.
    The harmonic minor scale fits over the whole song.
Try to play in octaves and try the A# diminished scale over the A7(b9) chord.

Even there are four chords used in this song, you can reduce it to only two of them: A7 and Dm.
Load the song "Les yeux noirs" from the Djangolizer library and set the loop over the first four measures. Choose an easy tempo. Maybe 110 bpm. Turn on the arpeggio view and choose the position 3.

Grab your guitar and start the The constructive jam session