4/17/06

Berklee Jazz Harmony 1-4


Is Berklee College of music out of your price range? Do you want to see what you're missing?

These are the work books from Jazz Harmony 1-4,
required of every Jazz performance major.
I have no idea how these got on the web ;-)

Berklee Jazz Harmony 1
Berklee Jazz Harmony 2
Berklee Jazz Harmony 3
Berklee Jazz Harmony 4

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Handy. Is the Berklee course syllabus detailed anywhere online? I'd be interested to get a full perspective on what you study on this course. Repertoire, composition, improv presumably? Details would be great. Yep, the Berklee course is out of my price range, time zone and land mass so it'd be useful to have a general idea of what to look at to cover the same material and "roll your own Berklee" so to speak.

Anonymous said...

Guess it's sketched out here (http://www.berklee.edu/majors/performance.html) but was hoping for more detail I suppose.

David Carlos Valdez said...

If you could get your hands on the performance proficencies then you'd have a graded practice regimine. They start with all the scales in increasingly hard intervals and arpegios. When I was there we used to always say that for a fraction of the price you could get the same education by moving to Boston and studying privately with the good teachers and getting tutored by the seniors. You could even hire great players to play sessions with you and still end up paying a tiny fraction of what tution is.

Anonymous said...

Cheers David, that's helpful. Not sure how I'd get the performance proficiencies but I'll keep on the lookout. Couldn't actually see how much the Berklee course is on the website but no doubt it's steep. Why Boston? Good jazz scene? Cheap place to live? I'm not not very familiar with the US - just interested. Guess I'll stick to lessons from my local tutor. Cheers.

David Carlos Valdez said...

Boston has awful weather, unbelievably high prices and few Jazz clubs. There are a ton of great teachers there though. NYC is probably a better bet if you just want to play and learn without going to school.

Anonymous said...

David,

I tried using the links to download teh berkley books and other great stuff you have links to, but it just seems to reroute me to the ads every time. Is content-type a free service or do you have to buy the membership to download anything?

David Carlos Valdez said...

This free hosting service is lame-o but it does work and it is totally free. Often the server will be busy and you'll need to wait in a cue to download. When it's your turn a new windom will open asking you to to spam your freinds, close this and go back to the original window. Where it first said what number download in the cue you were, it will now say 'download now'- click this and whalah!.

Anonymous said...

Hi The Ring Modulator,

My name's Az and I'm currently studying at Berklee doing Jazz Composition and Performance as my major. I would be glad to answer any queries you might have about the program. You can e-mail via my blog e-mail link.

Cheers!

elscorcho said...

Just to clear a couple things up... the books that are linked to are not part of any "Jazz Harmony" course or any performance-major related courses as implied by the author of this post. Rather these are the books to the core harmony classes that every Berklee student has to take regardless of major. Just figured that as a current Berklee student I could clear this up.

David Carlos Valdez said...

Thanks for the clarification.

It is the Berklee Jazz Harmony method, but the course is not named "Jazz Harmony", just plain Harmony 1-4. Every Berklee student must take these two years of core harmony, but you can also test out as soon as you get there. This is what I would recommend doing. Use these PDFs as your study guides to do this and save yourself time and $$$$$.

Anonymous said...

I have been lookng for these since I lost mine. As prior student many years ago, I thank you for posting these. A great publc service to prior Alumni. Wondering if you have the Ear Training 1-4?

David Carlos Valdez said...

Sorry, I don't have ear training. I would recommend any student about to go to Berklee find those books and try to pass out of at least one semester of Ear Training.

Mikey said...

Cheers for this. I had wondered what some of the berklee material was like.

Do you have access to any of the other modules?

David Carlos Valdez said...

Sorry, I wish I did. These just showed up on a file sharing network.

Anonymous said...

Berklee College of Music? ....What an unbelievable waste of money. Boston was fairly interesting but utterly destroyed my health.

Sometimes it just seems like I dreamt the whole thing. I hardly remember course material and such things. I just remember constantly playing with various ensembles and trying to teach myself essentially.

The ear-training instructor was completely USELESS and the school was all about $$$$$$.

David Carlos Valdez said...

My ear training instructor spent a good portion of class time bragging about what a big producer he was in order to better hit on the female singers in his class.

Berklee is now the same price as fucking Harvard! I can't wrap my head around this. When you graduate from Harvard at least you have a good chance of getting a well paying job, or at least you used to.

Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva said...

Anyone still there? Haha. Even though this post is 10 years old(wow), I'll take a shot at it. I've been thinking of going to Berklee for some time now, thought the most important things I would learn would be from the experience of being there and being surrounded by astounding musicians and what I thought to be(at least till I read these comments - if they're right) an active musical scene around Boston. If it wasn't enough that the cost of a year is roughly 60k dollars, I'm from Brazil, so in local currency I would pay much more, plus I would have all the costs of moving to another country. Anyway I thought it would be worth it for the experience and because moving to the US would mean getting into a more professional scene when it comes to business. Music business is not taken much seriously here. Would I be mistaken to spend that much cash? I would probably be able to skip some classes due to knowledge I got prior to entering and would only go if I got a good scholarship in the audition. Please hit me if I'm making a mistake. Thanks, cheers

David Carlos Valdez said...

Unless you get a Presidential scholarship or your parents are wealthy it's definitely not worth the money. For a good Jazz education at a fraction of the cost look into European conservatories. Much nice cities to live in also, like Berlin, Prauge, Leipzig, Colgne, Budapest. Berklee is outrageous now.