This lesson is conjunction with my earlier post on The Almighty Lick Book. If you are unsure of what a lick book is, you should read that post first.
Your lick book is not just a place to record the most killing licks that you will have in your musical arsenal for the rest of your life. This certainly is the goal. However, sometimes the lick book is really more of a working notebook. You may have to do some work in it until you come up with something you really like. Sometimes you will put a whole lot of work into a lick and still not like what you came up with, and that is OK. The most important thing is that you are working on it, and you will be helping yourself improve - even when it doesn’t seem like it.
Now I am going to introduce you to an important tool for working with a lick book - Warping Licks. To warp a lick, basically means to alter it in some way in order to produce a new lick that is related to the raw material of the original lick. There are many ways to accomplish this, and I am only going to talk about one way today - rearranging the melody.
This first lick is a very simple ii-V-I-iii-VI lick that is designed to take you back to the ii again. This chord progression can be found in several tunes, but the specific tune I was thinking of was Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under my Skin.”
This lick is mostly based around scales and arpeggios and moves mostly in 2nds and 3rds. It’s not a bad lick, but is what I would consider a somewhat bland one - very by the book. So let’s try our best to spice it up a little bit.
This first trick to spice up a lick is to simply change around the melody notes over each chord so that the intervals are more interesting. It can be very difficult to make the lick sound perfect by doing this - but try your best and do not change any of the notes or the rhythm. Many times, putting constraints on yourself can push into creative places. This is because it forces you to think in ways that aren’t as natural to you, therefor stretching the possibilities available to your mind. Here is my attempt at rearranging the melody notes.
As you can see, this is by no means perfect. In fact I would venture to say it is pretty random and incoherent sounding. However, there are some interesting ideas that this lick gave me. The first bar accomplished something, completely by accident, that I often do in my composition - having two melodies going on simultaneously within the same melody. The wide leaps make it sound like there is one melody on all of the downbeats and one on all of the upbeats. I don’t necessarily love either of the melodies, but I do love the concept. You could stretch that concept further too, by not limiting yourself to just a downbeat melody and an upbeat melody, but having syncopated rhythms in each melody, or allowing the melodies to overlap and have two notes playing at once (if your instrument can accomplish this.) As you can see the possibilities are pretty endless, and this is only in the first bar. That is what makes warping licks such a neat concept - it can lead to so many more concepts exponentially. More than you can even handle. Trust me.
Now, sometimes I don’t like to leave a lick hanging like this. Although there are some good concepts in this lick, I don’t like it as a whole, and too me that is unsettling. Therefor, I will usually try to tweak the lick to make it a little more pleasant sounding, while trying to keep some of the key concepts. There aren’t really any rules for this, but you could feel free to impose some if you think I’m wimping out on a challenge. Here is my tweaked version of the lick.
As you can see, I kept the first bar pretty much the same, except that I cut out the first beat. I think it sounds a little better this way - less like an exercise and more like a melody. The second bar is also pretty much the same, except I cut out two notes and tweaked the rhythm. I think this helps to give you a little bit of breathing room after the ascension of the first bar.
The third bar is kind of a new concept that came to me from the first three notes of the third bar in the last lick. It is pretty much a pattern of fourths where the first is a descending fourth, and the second is an ascending fourth a step up. Then another descending fourth a step up , and so on. I like the way this sounds - fourths always sound pretty modern and hip. The fourth bar is similar to the fourth bar of the last lick, but I used the same concept in the previous bar to end the fifth bar, except this time with fifths. This is pretty cool because it gives you all of those alterations on the G7 - b5, #5, and b9.
Then the final bar, I added a little non-chord tone just because I heard it as I was working out the rest of the lick. This leads me into my final point. Always trust your ear first and foremost. Warping licks is a concept where it can be tempting to ignore your ears and focus on your brain. DO NOT EVER IGNORE YOUR EARS!! Your brain is a helpful tool for stretching your musicianship, but it will always be a loyal subject of the king - your ears. If your brain tells you something is cool, listen to that something and see if your ears agrees. That is the only true test.
Try warping some of the licks in your lick book by rearranging the melody. You may be surprised by how many new ideas it can lead to.
