Mike Outram

The Jewel Box Vol.1 is a downloadable collection of 29 guitar lessons, complete with audio, notation, tab and an explanation and analysis of the ideas presented, along with suggestions for developing the ideas in your own way.

Click the ‘download’ link on the music player. All the notation/tab etc., is included in the download.

The lessons range from simple to complex, so for an example of what’s included, here are two of the 29 PDFs included in the download: a simple one [listen] featuring some laid-back, funky comping, and a more complex one [listen] featuring a syncopated, chromatic fusiony solo. And, if you want, all the audio can be previewed in the player below.

You can also hit the ‘Share’ button on the player to embed it on Facebook, MySpace or just about anywhere, or email it to a friend. It really helps to spread the word!

Mike Outram

Table of Contents:

1. 4 Ways To Target Chord IV
2. 4 Ways To Approach The Turnaround
3. How To Solo Using Triplet Groupings
4. Jazz Fusion Solo & Miscellaneous Bending Techniques
5. Jimi’s Chords, Wes’s Octaves, Metheny’s Phrasing And The Tri-Tone Substitution
6. 4 Burning Lydian Dominant Licks
7. Unlocking The Super Locrian
8. Mixing Major And Minor Pentatonics Ala BB King And Rhythmic Scale Exercises
9. Making The Changes: Using Triads 1
10. Making The Changes: Using Triads 2
11. Making The Changes: Using Triads 3
12. Making The Changes: Using Triads 4
13. Making The Changes: Using Triads 5
14. Making The Changes: Using Triads 6
15. How To Use Octaves And Chords In The Style Of Wes Montgomery
16. Double-Time Soloing In The Style Of Wes Montgomery
17. Simple Funky Comping Using 3rds & 7ths
18. Funky Soloing In The Style Of Grant Green
19. Four-To-The-Bar Comping Using Inversions And Passing Chords
20. Spacious And Simple Comping On A Laid-Back Funky Minor Blues
21. Phrasing Expansion: Inflections And Articulation
22. A Documentary About Cuddly Pets And Their Owners
23. Suspended Harmony – Focusing On The 4th
24. 4ths, Consecutive 4ths, Damnation And Pain
25. Contrasting Simple And Extended Minor Harmony
26. A Rhythm Gtr Part Using Sextuplets In 12/8 Phrased In Groups Of Five
27. Anticipation, Chromaticism, MelodicUppyDownyism, Syncopation And Sleepless Nights
28. Fingerstyle Constant Bass With Improvised Upper Part [exercises]
29. Fingerstyle Constant Bass With Improvised Upper Part [solo example]

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Cool. Thanks, WordPress! Anyhow, If you’ve checked out this site over the past few months, you’ll be observing a man that is *ACTUALLY CURSED*. This is not white-man’s-blues. This is not mere whinnying about piffle. This is ACTUALLY SATAN HIMSELF WEAVING HIS DARK WAYS UPON MY LIFE.

Phone line?
“Oh, sorry, we destroyed your line and it’ll be a month before we reconnect you. And, by the way, you’ll have no internet.”
Thanks, BT. May you die of maggot infestation.

E-mail?
Oh, no, silly! That will be DEVOURED BY THE MINX OF FAFF. Oh, by the way, do you you have an iPhone?
“Yes”
“Well that will cease to work.”
“Why?”
“It is the way of the future”
“Thanks. Whatever. Mephhh”

Car?
“Hello, is that the garage?”
“Yes”
“So you realise you’ve had my car for TWO WHOLE WEEKS now and I’ve been shelling out for taxis while you, you, you, do NOTHING?”
Oh, yeah. Well, and, um, um, the, er, water leak, which wasn’t actually a water leak, is now fixed and we have a magic fairy wand that we wave it and do tricks and things and, yeah, anyway dude that’ll be £500.”
Thanks, crappy ealing garage.

Computer?
“So, you know that rocking sensation when you type?”
“Yes”
“That’s the battery about to explode”
“For the 3rd time, you mean?”
“Oh, er, yes. Explody battery is fun, no?”
“No”
Thanks, Apple.

Website?
Ah, time to upgrade to WordPress 3
“Cool, what do I do?”
“Press the ‘upgrade to WordPress 3 button’ you total thicko”
“Ok”
“Ah, this seems to have gone wrong”
“I can”t get back to the site now it’s disintegrated”
“Does this mean I have to figure out what has gone wrong all by me selfy?”
“Yes”
“Thanks. Eat lead you scum sucking mekons. May your days be filled with bile and putrescent festering smeg”

So, that, Dear Reader, has been a portion of my month. It does get worse but it ceases to be funny so I won’t labour you with that. So now here I am in Frankfurt having just done a gig with Tim Garland in a nice old church for lovely people. Do I bother to reconstruct this site as it was? Or do I just start again?

I think for the sake of time and faffing I’ll just start again.

So here we are. Born again. All new and shiny. And incomplete. A work in progress.

The past two weeks have involved heroic levels of faffing. My internet connection failed, my computer has failed, e-mail had an epic fail, phone fail, car fail, and so on. All without resolution. So, I say, you have a choice: ignore all of these things and get on with what you need to do; or, spend days starting at preferences, calling helplines, reading manuals, spending money. Hmmmnn?

At the moment, if I don’t have a rehearsal or a gig, I have about 3 hours a day to do something. So these 3 hours are becoming precious. How best to use them? How to make effective use of the time?

I guess it comes down to what’s important right now?

Have you got any killer tips on how you focus, how you make your time count?

I just installed this new theme on the site called Thesis. Reason being is it’s a little bit easier to customise so I save myself figuring out how to change the code to make the site look the way I want. That said, it doesn’t look the way I want yet but I’ll fiddle with it over the next month or so.

So ‘get better tools’ is the tip of the day for me.

Ah, blog, why can’t you write yourself?

So anyhow, the Japan tour was great. Fantastic music and fun tour, good people, places, stuff, y’know. Will post some more about it in the future in a sort of reflective-type manner. Ah, good! That’s that problem dealt with.

Now, onwards…

I am so totally, like, like, truly getting my misson together it’s untrue. Truly. Lately I’ve been wrestling, again, with the interminable faffing, procrastination and bibbling habit. But after re-reading Getting Things Done for the 14th time I think I’m starting to breathe easy. I’m getting better at doing. So that’s why I haven’t blogged anything lately :)

First, I’m going to start sending out monthly mailing-outs to my mailing list. This’ll cover upcoming gigs, stuff from the blog, what I’m making, and anything else that’s relevant to that month. So if you’d like to know any of that then please subscribe to the mailing list which you can do by entering your e-mail in the box at the top left of the page.

Spam will not be an issue as I think I’ve sent out 6 mail-outs in my life thus far. But you might want to ready yourself for the one-a-month deluge. Maybe subscribe to Seth Godin’s mailing list; he makes me seem like Marcel Marceau on a dark night.

I did start collating the addresses for the list but as I was doing it I fell asleep at the computer in a sleep-deprived-teething-infant-stupor and deleted all 800 addresses. And, you guessed it, there was no back-up. So I’ll probably just do the first mail-out to everyone I know and make it head-slappingly simple to unsubscribe. A good idea?

Second, well there isn’t really a second; I’m just making this up as I type. So all I can offer right now is this little place where I house most (I think) of the YouTube videos featuring me. Currently, there are 36 videos. [dons leg-warmers; starts singing theme from Fame (or this)]

Here’s the link to see it in a list format.

Bye for now.

The duo stuff that Steve Lawson and I have been working on is nearing completion, and in the meantime Steve has been getting all modern himself with this ‘tweet for a track’ thingy. He says:

We’ve been releasing a new preview track each time the play-count on the previous one reaches 500. The last two are on Soundcloud, and are both past that benchmark, so we’ve made another available.

BUT.

It’s not on Soundcloud. It’s available for free in exchange for a Tweet.

Head to http://stevelawson.net/tft/ to get it.

The tweet for track code is written and made available by the amazing people at CashMusic.org – they’re doing more to undo the damage inflicted by 50 years of the Record Industry on music-as-culture than anyone. One big of clever geekery at a time. Wonderful people.

So there it is, click on the link here to go and get it, for a tweet. (If you’re not on Twitter, there’s a clever workaround, but you REALLY should be on Twitter. Srsly. Not being there is basically like being a homeless on the internetz.)

Barring any volcanic interruption/godzilla/end of the world as we know it, I’m off to Japan tomorrow with the band TALC.

I’m utterly excited to be visiting Japan. It’s been very high on my list of things to do in life for a long time now.

We’re going to Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya. You can see them on this here map.

At this point I haven’t got a clue what exactly we’ll be doing apart from playing music and travelling around on the bullet train. But I’ll be taking a million pictures and trying to blog from my phone.

Day 1

I set off Monday at 10am and am writing this from our hotel in Tokyo having travelled pretty much without sleeping. So I reckon that’s around 22hrs and it’ll be another 4hrs on top of that before sleep in order to adjust to local time over here. We’re 8hrs ahead of GMT.

We’re staying at the excellently named ‘Hotel Excellent’.

I’ve brought three books with me for the journey. I read most of Ben and Roz Zander’s ‘The Art Of Possibility‘ on the journey here. It’s a fantastic book. I heard about Benjamin Zander from his great TED talk. Here. Also I’ve got Philippe Petit’s book To Reach The Clouds, and A.C. Grayling’s Liberty in the Age of Terror. Should make those bullet train journeys fly by. Oh, wait…

Apparently, the sports manufacturers Puma are involved in this tour so we’re being kitted out with trainers/sports gear. I’m *VERY sporty, so that should work. (*sarcasm)

Looking forward to playing tomorrow.

Missing my family intensely.

More soon…

Day 2

Err, what time is it? I’ve NO idea. Got up today at 4pm went for a run. The sight of an out of breath English man in shorts with *bright* red new trainers and pasty-white legs – jogging – yes, jogging round a district of Tokyo may have caused a few double takes; I don’t know, I was too busy trying not to collapse. Anyhow, after a short while I realised I had no idea where I was and spent the next hour trying to find my way back to Hotel Excellent. A good start to the day.

On to the soundcheck. We were playing at UNIT. Ridiculously amazing sound system and very well organised gig. We were looked after by Yoshi and Katsu. Here’s Yoshi.

The gig was a blast. A great start to the tour. I guess we’ve got a couple of days off now so will have a chance to explore Tokyo a bit.

If anyone has been and has any suggestions as to what to do/see then let me know!

And if anyone knows how to order vegetarian/vegan food in Japanese then *really* let me know. Vegetarian seems to mean ‘not much meat’ over here :)

Day 3 or 4

Here we are day 3, or is it 4? Anyhow, Jim and Nichol have ventured off into darkest Southern Japan to do some horn section/duo/I don’t know what and we’re left here to entertain ourselves until their return. Yesterday we went up a really tall building with panoramic views of Tokyo. It’s quite something. Somehow, in a scarily natural way, we got talking about darts. What else would you talk about really? So we found an electronic darts pit – it’s so modern here. We played, I won, it was a ripping victory.

Day I’ve No Idea & Parasite Museum

So yesterday I woke at 4am, got up and had a nice early morning stroll round Tokyo.

After that we went to the Parasite Museum; the world’s only, I’m led to believe. This pic below is all that’s left of an 8 foot tapeworm – now homeless. The splendid museum was full of many other extraordinary parasitic curiosities, and I’d recommend visiting if you’re ever in Tokyo and are at a loose end for something to do for free before lunch.

Next we went to the Electric Town. The most interesting bit was a market stall full of old valves. The rest of Electric Town was rather like tripping whilst being in Dixon’s.

Sampled some really excellent Japanese veggie food afterwards courtesy of our excellent host Yoshi. Thanks, Yoshi :)

Next Day

Today I woke at 2pm. It’s Golden Week holiday here and I’ve timed it exactly right to run completely out of money when all the banks are shut. I write this like it will help but when you put a card into any ATM here the sound of laughter appears to be coming from somewhere deep within the machine. So I’m giving up on that one as a lost cause. I imagine the tapeworm and suddenly I’m less hungry :)

So today consisted of wandering round and exploring more and I read Philippe Petit’s ‘To Reach The Clouds’ which was really, really good.