David's Tip of the Day: Value of Repitition, Part 2 (Each Chorus has a Theme)

I'm not speaking of the type of repetition where the player runs out of ideas and repeats licks from early in a song or set... this is called "gettin' old" and no player wants that.

The type of repetition I'm speaking of is the melodic, purposeful type... where you present an idea and then explore for the listener what you can do with that idea.

The first lick you play in every chorus is by default the theme of that chorus (the "A" in my Chorus Form concept). This can come by the way of simple repetition or fairly advanced transformations.

Since most of you have Little Walter recordings, let's use LW as our reference for a while. Listen to the first chorus of "Rocker" and see if you can figure out what LW is doing with his phrasing there. I'll speak more about it tomorrow.