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This tutorial is part of a full playlist by violinist Christian Howes- How to play Samba or Bossa on the violin or cello. Using a loop pedal and Yamaha Electric Violin, I demonstrate a wide range of concepts you can use to play bass lines, inner voices, and internalize rhythms and melodies related to Samba or Bossa grooves.
I show you how to play a bossa or a Samba looping the different parts on an electric or acoustic violin, cello, or viola, using a part of this Samba called Tristeza. And you look at the KZfaq video that I did-- just look up Tristeza, T-R-I-S-T-E-Z-A. I've got a full performance of that song on my KZfaq channel, as well. I'm just going to talk to you about how we can put together those different parts on the violin. Put your instrument down and, with your hands, we can get going this the 16th pattern. Don't hurt your hands. I'm accenting on four. I kind of go down with my right first because I'm right handed. It might work better for you left. And then, the bass, what we're going to do is one, three, one, three. So on three, we accent. And three is also long. Now, the clave, which is this repeated rhythm. The next thing you want to do is immerse yourself in the whole groove. Try to get different combinations going. So a combination of the bass and the sixteenths, or a combination of the bass and the clave, or the sixteenths and the clave. So let's see if we can get the sixteenths and the clave now. And then you can throw the bass in if you want. And now, if you want to put it together with a loop pedal, the rule is, whenever you creating a loop, always play something that is your subdivisions first. So the bass line. I'm using my octave pedal to get a bass line. You can either play the root of the chord twice, or you can play root down to the fifth of the chord. So G, down to fourth to the fifth, and then C, down fourth, G, C. Just a disclaimer, I'm not an expert on Brazilian music. But this is just sort of some of the basics that I've learned. So I would not do the bass line first, because it doesn't have as many subdivisions. I feel like this has more subdivisions, my clave pattern. So for your clave, I'm just using the third and the seventh of every chord. So whatever the song is, you just play the third and the seventh. Usually, that will work, especially if you're talking about seventh chords, in other words chords with four notes or more in them. We'll just use the third and the seventh. Now, if it's just triads, it's just three note chords, you can use any combination of root, third, and fifth. But for this song, if I just have my third and the seventh-- That's what I'll lay down first. And when you put it all together, you've got the whole groove. Really all you need is that clave repeated rhythm and then you've got the bass line going with it down an octave and it sounds pretty good. Now some other little things that you can do which is just kind of fun is you can get this kind of cuica sound. So I sort of keep my finger in the strings, slide that way up high on any string. Or if you want, you can kind of get those 16th notes going just by covering your strings lightly. You can do the same thing with the bow if you want. Anyway, those are some different ideas for just ways to adapt a bossa or a Samba to a bowed string instrument and create your own loops. I should make the point that essentially, if you want to, instead of playing a Samba, if you want to do it as a bossa, you slow it down. So I'll give you an example of a bossa using the same idea. So I'll start with the clave. And my progression is going to be simple. I'm just going to do A minor, and then B minor 7 flat 5, to E seven. Since it's slow, you can think of it more like a bossa nova. A lot of the melodic material be really laying on these off beats. Not always on off beats, but it helps. And one of the things you'll notice is that I'm always keeping my bow moving although they don't make a sound all the time. And that's something I'm going to go more in depth into another video.
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