fills

In a standard 12 Bar Blues, with our most common vocal AAB rhyme scheme, fills are found on the last two bars of each four-bar line (of which there are three). These fills happen on the I (one) chord. This makes fills generally easy to play due to there being no chord considerations to be made.

In a non-12 Bar Blues progression this may not be the case, and this is true for "Key to the Highway."

Play fills to Little Walter's recording in the following manner... continue reading...

The most basic way of playing with a vocalist is to play when they're not singing, called playing "fills." This naming comes from the idea that you're "filling" the holes left by the vocals.

The first challenge is to know when to start playing (this tends to be fairly intuitive) and when to stop playing (which is a little less intuitive... it's easy to play too long and step on the next line of the vocals).

There's a simple answer... sing the vocals. continue reading...

When students work on their improvising skills, they find it challenging to come up with cool fills for their Af Af At and Af Af B Chorus Forms. The easiest place to find lots of fills is in songs where there's harmonica playing fills between vocals. The study song "I Want You With Me" in Accompaniment Study 4 is a good example.