The Dorian Improvisation System

By Graham Tippett

One scale that reaches from blues into fusion

Dorian isn't the most sophisticated scale you could study, and it isn't the hardest. It's the most useful. It sits at a crossroads - one foot in rock and blues, the other in funk and jazz fusion - which means a player who really owns it can move between those worlds without switching systems. That's why it's the one I keep coming back to after twenty years.

You already know most of it

If you can play the minor pentatonic, you're closer than you think. This book builds outward from there in small logical steps: adding notes, opening up harmonic options, introducing improvisational devices you can use the same day. No reset, no starting again, nothing filed away for later.

The endpoint isn't reciting a scale. It's that Dorian stops being something you think about and becomes how you hear the neck.

Not a modes book

There's no explanation of where Dorian sits in the major scale sequence, and no seven modes to memorise before anything becomes useful. It's an improvisation system that happens to be built around Dorian - the theory serves the playing rather than the other way around.

Over a hundred fretboard diagrams, progressive rather than encyclopaedic, and applied to chords and progressions throughout rather than left as scales in isolation.

Who it's for

Guitarists who know the minor pentatonic and want a structured route past it. Players who've tried learning modes and found them abstract and disconnected from anything they'd actually play. Anyone who wants to sound more inventive over minor chords, jazz-blues progressions and funk grooves without going back to the beginning to get there.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B085RT3L5B
• ISBN13: 9798627453521
• Release Date: March 2020
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 40 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 8.0" x 10.0"