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Funky Fills with Attitude
by Christopher Sung

Earlier this evening I was playing around with some simple funk riffs and realized that I was inserting little fills here and there to embellish my rhythm playing. I also realized that I usually used the same kind of melodic idea for the fills and just kept doing little variations on it with each repetition of the pattern. So, here are some of the things I was playing....

Our funk groove is in D, so we'll be mostly doing licks and fills with the D blues scale. Our main rhythm thang is the F#-D-F#-C pattern that starts off each two bar phrase. Each time we we play this pattern, we throw in a little fill after it. The first is a simple bend from the F to F# in measure 2. The second is the the bend from G to A in measure 4. The third is a repeat of the bend from F to F#, and then in measure 7, we finish with a bluesy double stop that mimics the G to A bend in measure 4...

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