Jazz Piano Improv Tricks 1

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my first class on jazz piano improv tricks. I created this course, so that as a beginner to intermediate jazz soloists, you'll have a bag of tricks that you'll be able to work with. Whether these tricks are harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic or a combination of, I've got you covered. Sometimes in the world of improvisation, we're told to just use our ears. But as a beginner improviser, we might not necessarily know what that means, and we should have some concepts and technical devices that we can work with to get ourselves started in the world of improvisation. That's why I've created this course. We're going to be covering some fantastic topics like color tones, chordal harmony, B bob scales, and so much more. There's also going to be a project for this course, where you're going to take your two favorite tricks from within these classes and apply them exclusively within a solo. You're going to video record yourself and submit it to the project resource section of this course, and then I'll give you some feedback. The next class is going to outline more details for this project, so make sure that you check it out. So while this first course on jazz piano improv trick is designed for beginner to intermediate level students so that you have enough concepts to get yourself started with improvising. There is a second course as well, outlining completely different tricks, and it's more for advanced players. So if you do find that you got a lot out of this course and you want to continue in the same direction of learning, I have that second course available, so do be sure to check it out. Thank you for taking this course. I hope you have a lot of fun, and I'll see you in the next class. 2. Course Project: The project for this course is relatively straightforward. You're going to do is go through each of the classes provided and rate each trick out of ten, ten, being you like it the most, and zero is you never want to explore that particular trick. The two tricks that rate the highest, you're going to apply exclusively within a solo. So what do I mean by exclusively? I mean, you're only allowed to use those two tricks the entire time. You can go through either one song form or two song forms, in other words, through all the chord progressions within the head of the jazz song, one to two times, which is pretty standard for soloing, and you can do this on an original composition or a jazz standard. Transitioning between the two tricks is perhaps one of the harder elements within this project. If you're totally new to jazz improvisation, I would recommend apply one of the tricks for two to 4 bars and then switch to the next trick for another two to 4 bars. That way, when you're approaching one of these new tricks and transitioning into it, you're always going to be transitioning on a beat one and likely with some new cord change as well. Now, there's nothing wrong with adding rests. If you one, two, four beats of rest, that's okay. Just try to make sure that you're not adding in any extra beats or that you're late on your cord changes, your left hand cord changes should still be relatively in time. Keep it simple, for the most part. You left hand can just hold cords, whether it be for two beats, four beats, or even eight beats. That way you can really focus on the improvising of your right hand. This project is meant to show you not only what your two favorite tricks are, but also how to apply them within a real world scenario. I believe it's important to have a couple of improvisational tricks that you know really, really well and then expand your improvisational repertoire from there. So not only will you be performing a solo in what feels like a bit more of a real world scenario, but at the same time, you're going to learn how to transition between using different tricks. As jazz improvisers, we're usually thinking of multiple things at once and selecting from a pool of ideas as to what we are feeling most in that moment. Now, if you feel like you're not much of an improviser, and that's why you're taking this course, keep in mind that you improvise every single day. When you speak with someone, you don't script it out ahead of time. You're making a meal and decide to add a little bit of extra spice, that wasn't predetermined when you woke up. So everybody can improvise. It's just about getting comfortable, improvising on your instrument, and having a collection of ideas that you can work with. After all, that's what this course is all about. So you're going to record yourself performing this solo. Whatever phone or device you have is likely good enough. We just need to have some basic video, and basic audio, that's clear enough that I can see you, hear the solo, to be able to give you some feedback. After you've recorded your solo, going to upload it to either Video or YouTube and then supply a public link within the course resource section for this course. From there, I'll review your video, let you know what you did really well and potentially give you some areas of improvement. Now, keep in mind you're not required to play a melody as part of this. You don't have to do the classic head solo head, where the head is the melody with the harmony together. The solo is improvising over the chord changes, and then back to that final melody with C chords. You don't have to go through that full song form. You're welcome to. But for the most part, all I'd really like you to do is focus on improvising over the Cord changes. So I think I've cleared up all the details. If you have any questions, do feel free to reach out. I hope you have fun with your project. Do make sure that you're recording it on a day where you really feel in the zone, and don't jump into it right away. Go through the full course, practice the material, and once you feel like you really have something ready to show and to be evaluated, then record yourself and submit it. Let's start jumping into these tricks. I'll see you in the next class. 3. Basics: Okay, so it's important that we start to go over some of the basics. So as you're going through these lessons, if I start to get a bit theoretical, I don't have to keep going over these basics as we go. So this is a pretty important lesson to watch. If you feel like you're at late stages of intermediate player or advanced, you might be able to skip this, but it couldn't hurt to watch it anyway, just to make sure that all the gaps of knowledge, so to speak, are filled in before you start this course. So let's get through it. First, I just want to talk about what we are mainly going to be discussing, which is a 251 chord progression in a major key, and we are going to address minor keys as well, too, but it's a little bit easier to start with major, and we have lots of concepts that can apply to both. So what do I mean by all this? Let's start with a major scale. CD E FG ABC is our C major scale. And we have scale degrees 123 4567 available, D mi fa sola T, in other words. If I was to build a chord off of each of those notes by skipping notes two times and staying true to the scale, not playing any sharps or flats that don't exist in the scale. So in the case of C major, I have to stay on white notes. We have what's called a one chord, a two chord, a three chord, four chord, five chord, six chord, and seven chord. In every major scale, that amounts to a major minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major. From there, we can add an extra skip, we get major seventh. Now a major chord with a semi tone away from the octave is going to be a major seventh chord. 02 chord is minor seventh, which is a minor chord with a minor seventh, which is a tone away from the octave. We have another minor seventh, another major seventh, a dominant seventh, which is a major chord with a minor seventh on top, a tone away from our octave. A minor seventh, and then a half diminished chord often referred to as minor seven flat five. It's called this because it's very similar to a minor seventh chord, but the fifth is flattened. In terms of it being called a half diminished seventh chord, think of it this way. A fully diminished seventh chord is built of minor thirds only. The semitones at a time. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And this interval, B to A flat is called a diminished seventh. Y? Well, B to A sharp is a major seventh. B to A is a minor seventh. So if I'm not calling this not a G sharp, if I'm calling it an A flat, B to A is automatically going to be some type of seventh, BC DEG A. But what type of seventh, what type of seventh are we going to call it? Well, if it's one semi tone lower than a minor seventh is called a diminished seventh. So if this is a fully diminished seventh chord, what we have is a diminished chord with a minor seventh, So it's called half diminished seventh. A lot of us prefer minor seven flat five, just because it really spells out what's happening a little bit more clearly. It's a minor seven chord, but the fifth has been flattened. Our focus for most of this course is going to be on a regular old 25, one chord progression. You get minor seven, dominant seven, and then major seven. Now, often, I'll use inversions. The two might be root position. The five chord is going to have all the same notes, but the D and F are probably going to be moved down to the bottom quite frequently, and then we have a one chord. I'm not saying that these voicings are the best voicings to use for a 251 chord progression, but for the sake of keeping things simple within the lesson, I think it's going to be relatively straightforward. So that covers our 251 chord progression. Now, I want to quickly talk about something that I'm not actually going to be explaining in depth within the course, but it's worth knowing. And that is the modes, in other words, the scales that we play over top of each of these chords. So I'll go through it and explain what's happening, and feel free to do extra research on these three modes as well, but the tricks that I'm going to be showing you are going to give you so much mileage that everyone else that's playing this stuff, this regular role Dorian mode, mix lidian mode, they're great, they're great modes, they're great scales, but you're going to have a lot more tools to work with. So let's talk about it. D minor seven, we're going to use D dorian, which is a natural minor scale. In this case, D natural minor would have a B flat, but we're going to play it with a major sixth. So from our major scale, we would have B in D major. So we're going to take that B and change the B flat to a B. So what we get on the bottom part of the scale is very minor sounding, but at the top, it's a little bit more major and bright sounding. So the Dorian mode offers a lot of emotional shades, which is why I really like it. Next, we have over our five chord, the mixdan mode. In this case, it is a major scale, but with a minor seven or flat seven, which accommodates our chord because remember a dominant chord is a major chord with a flat seven. So it's a lot like a G major scale, but instead of an F sharp, we're going to play an F natural. You're going to need to know your major scales, and I would recommend practice all your major scales, natural, harmonic and melodic minor scales. Before you really dig into a lot of this stuff, if you're a classical player beforehand, that can help, if not, just start off by focusing on major and natural minor and then progress from there. So you can do this over any art. So here's a major seven, one, three, five and seven of our A major scale. If I flatten the seventh, I get a dominant seventh, and I'll take that major scale and flatten the G sharp down to a G. Okay. So that's your dominant chord, major scale with a flat seven. And then when we come to our one chord, you just use a regular old major scale. It's kind of boring, so I'm going to give you a lot of other options as well, too. But I should say that if you play the major scale the right way, it shouldn't sound boring. It's just a little bit harder to enagle, where when you're a beginner player, it doesn't sound cheesy and kind of overly hay. But what I would recommend is if you are going to use that major scale, try to resolve your lines on something a little bit adventurous, maybe like the D, which is the ninth or the A, which is the 13 or six in this case. So what am I talking about nine, 13? We should probably decode some of that stuff as well, too. So our scale back to it, one, two, three, four, 567 has seven notes, and then once we get to eight, we're repeating our first note again. It's the octave. But if I keep going, I could call this note, a nine, which is the same as two. 11 is the same as four, and 13 is the same as six. Over a dominant chord, you'll often hear these nine, elevens, and thirteens. Over a major chord, you'll often hear nine and six. The 11 you'll normally hear is a sharp 11. It's rare to see a major chord with a regular 11. The reason being that F in this case, is clashing with E in my left hand. It's like I'm playing this, but just separating a bit. It's still quite nasty sounding. So normally, We'll end up playing something called the Lydian mode. I want to back pedal just for a second. It's not uncommon over your one chord, if it's major to play the lidian mode. Some say it's even brighter sounding than the major scale, and it just gives us a little bit more color. So if we have a C major scale, CDE FG ABC, we need to raise our fourth scale degree. So we end up getting an F sharp, and getting some really cool sounds out of that. Now, we could go through all the different church modes. I don't think that that's necessarily what we need to do, but again, I just want to make sure that all the cracks are filled out. So let's go through it relatively fast, and of course, this is recorded, so you can go back and continually check it out. But you have the main ones, Dorian over a two, Mx a lidian over your five and Ionian or major over your one. And of course, the Lydian, with that sharp four, also works as well, too. I think it's important that we go through all the different church modes that relate to each of those chords. So let's tackle those quickly. We have a major scale built off of number one called Ionian. We have a natural minor scale with a raised sixth over our two chord, which is called Dorian. We have a natural minor scale with a flat two. Here's E minor, here's E Phygian. Natural minor with a flat two. Lydian is a major scale with a sharp four. Mix lidian is a major scale with a flat seven. Alien is natural minor, and then we have Locrian, which is a natural minor with a flat two and flat five. What you're going to want to know the most is the Dorian mixoldian, lean, Lydian, and Ionian, I suppose, the major scale, it's a great place to start, but we're going to want to explore the colors of those other modes, probably a little bit more than our basic old major scale. So as I mentioned before, we take the first third, fifth, and seventh note of a major scale to get a major seventh chord. If I then add anything past the eight, we're up to scale degree nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 91113 is the same as two, four and six. In some instances, we'll call them two, four and six, in other cases, we'll call them 911 and 13. Over a major chord, what you'll hear is nine and six. And the 11 is normally going to be a sharp 11. It's normally going to be leaning towards that lidian sound because when you have a major seventh chord with a regular 11, the major third and that 11 are going to end up clashing. Over a minor seventh chord, we're going to have nine, 11 and 13 or six. Different people have different preferences. But what I can tell you for sure is also over a dominant chord, you're going to hear those upper extensions used. 911 and 13 as opposed to 24 and six. So if you want to know more about when to name accord based on the lower numbers, 246 or the higher numbers, 91113, I would recommend check out the jazz piano book by Mark Levine. But it's a doozy. There's a lot to sift through, and my hope is that this course gives you a lot of really great stuff to start with almost sort of like jazz paint by numbers. A lot of tricks that to you will eventually seem easy, but to your listener, it's going to get them to twist their ear a bit and go, Whoa, what's he or she doing in that moment? So, Yeah, I would recommend learn your major scale, learn your natural minor scale. And then those other modes that we talked about are super important. L lidian Dorian, mixdan, and again, Ionian is major, and Alian is natural minor. Now, There's a lot of crazy words there. I bet you're getting fed up with it. Maybe not, but maybe. So repeat after me. I don't friggin like music any longer. Ionian, Dorian Phrygian, Lydian, mixdian, Allan Locrian. I learned that in high school. So hopefully that helps you guys. It's like, just a little easy cheat to remember. So I is Ionian. Don't is Dorian. Frigan is Phrygian. Like is Lydian. Music is mixdian. A is Allan, and Locrian would be longer. I don't friggin like music any longer. H. So, there it is. We talked about our 251 chord progression. We talked about the Dorian mode over two, mix lidian over five and the major scale over one or the lidian scale over one. In terms of the minor 251, on the one chord, you'll have a few different options. The two and the five can be a bit more complex. So check out the lesson titled Locrian Sharp two and altered scales, because that's the one that's going to show you what to play in that more complex atmosphere of a minor 251 chord progression. But I think we've covered the basics to help you just hit the ground running with a lot of these lessons, and You don't have to go through them in order, either. I mean, quite often, I'm doing a little throwbacks like in the last lesson, we talked about this, but really, you can go through them in whatever order interests you the most. So if there's a certain topic that you've heard of before, and you see that one of the lessons is on that topic, start there. I want to snare your interest. I want you to have enough ambition and passion behind this that you actually practice it, you really internalize it and you can use it properly. So that's it for our basic introductory lesson. Hopefully, I covered everything that we need to. There's so many basic elements in music that it's like, where do we start? We could talk about a semitone being two notes beside each other or a tone, having one note in between. But it would be a very extensive lesson for us to have right now if I was to cover all of music theory. So I think I've given you all the information that you're going to need to know to get through the rest of this course so that any little gaps in your knowledge might be able to be filled out by this lesson here. Josh, stop talking about the basics. Let's get into the fun stuff. Okay. Let's go. 4. Pentatonic Scales: All right, so let's get talking about your first jazz piano improv trick. We're going to start off by talking about major pentatonic scales and how we can use them to jazz up our playing a bit. So first, to break down what a pentatonic scale is, is it is five notes out of our major scale, one, two, three, five and six in terms of scale degrees, or D Ray M so and a. And it's called a pentatonic scale because it has five notes. So over our one, we're going to do something kind of sneaky. We're going to move up our major pentatonic scale by one tone. That's really the first trick within these pentatonic scales is that if you have a major seventh chord, play your major pentatonic scale up a tone. First, let's hear how it sounds. Super jazzy, right? So here's what's happening. We have the second note or our ninth as the root of this pentatonic scale. We have our major third. That's important for us to outline the harmony in the left hand, our sharp four or sharp 11, giving more of a Lydian sort of sound. So two major three, sharp four, then we get our six and our seven. So we have a nine. We have an 11. We have a 13. Right? Where's it? There. And then we have our third and our seventh. So the third and the seventh really ground the tonality of the left hand. And then we also have some beautiful color tones as well, too. So Just a really cool sound. So try that over your major seventh chords. Play a major pentatonic scale up one tone. Next, let's talk about what we can play over a minor seventh chord. So in this case, let's go about it like we would a 251. So instead of playing C minor seven, I'll play D minor seven for our minor seven example. Eventually G dominant seven for our dominant seven example, and as I showed you, C Major seven for our Major seven example. So over to D, the trick here is to play a pentatonic scale up a perfect fourth. So from D, we go up a perfect fourth, we have G. And again, very jazzy, very beautiful sounding. It all works. Let's take a look at what's happening under the hood. So the root of this pentatonic scale is our 11 or four over our chord, which is a very constant sort of source of resolution over a minor chord. I've done enough transcriptions to see that a lot of jazz pianists are finishing on that four at the end of some sort of little solo trans. It's colorful, but in the case of us thinking of this G pentatonic scale, it feels like we're finishing on the root, but really we're finishing in relation to D on a color tone. So we have that 45, Major six giving us sort of a Dorian sound, minor scale or natural minor scale with a major six, right? Then we have our root a little bit less common in some of these pentatonic scales because in jazz, the root is the safest note, and oftentimes we're looking for a more colorful sound, but in this case, it works well. And then our ninth. We do have an 11, 13, a nine, and then we have our five and our root a little more safe this time, but giving us some variety compared to our one chord. When you're improvising over a minor seventh chord, try a pentatonic up a perfect fourth. To recap, over the major seventh, we're thinking up a tone. For our minor seventh, we're thinking up a fourth. Now, for the dominant chord, we're actually going to play the same pentatonic that we played over the two. But this is wildly unadventurous, but I want to quickly talk about why we're going to use that and then some other options that you might have. So over a G dominant chord, you would play G, major pentatonic. Now, that would give us the one, two, three, five, and six on our chord. What is nice is that we have a third, helping us outline the tonality. We have a ninth and a 13th or a two and a six, helping give us some color, but we're very grounded with this root and fifth. If you've ever studied dominant harmony and sort of the options that we have to improvise over top of that, you'll realize really quickly that the dominant is where we get away with a lot more. We can be very adventurous With the scale choices that we use, that was, for example, an altered scale or whole tone. So I would say that the tricks that I use the most out of these three are the trick for the major seventh chord and the minor seventh chord. For the dominant, if you're stuck, you can use that same pentatonic. And what's really nice is in a 251, you're thinking, two play a pentatonic built off of the five or up a fourth from the two. Same over the five chord. And then for the one, then you change it up. So it keeps saying simple for the two and the five, but perhaps too simple. As your ears expand, try some other things. And the other thing too is this G dominant seventh chord, what are the odds it's going to be just a regular G dominant chord? Very often in jazz, we might end up getting something like sharp 11 or flat 13, or something else, maybe like a flat nine that we're adding as color over top of the dominant chord. And that would influence what you're going to play over that chord in terms of your pentatonic scale choice. So I would say, over the two chord, we have something very colorful and kind of paint by numbers jazz sounds really cool. Over the five chord, we have something very safe, but I recommend over time, be less safe. Try some chromatic approaches, and some of the other tricks that I'm going to show you will combine with this more sort of safe vanilla kind of scale that we've selected here. And then again, over the major seventh, maybe my favorite. Improvise with the two in mind, so the two is providing the root for our major pentatonic. And why I like this one so much is I found for years, I found it very difficult to improvise over a major seventh chord without it sounding kind of corny. We could use some sort of blues run or maybe the Lydian scale. But this eliminates the root and the fifth gives us plenty of color and still outlines our tonality. So there's a lot of really great tricks built in there. I would recommend trying out a 251 chord progression in all 12 keys over your two, player pentatonic up a fourth, over your five, player pentatonic off of the five's root. And on your one chord, play a pentatonic that is up a tone or starts on the second scale degree. So hopefully that's helpful. That's all out of the Jazz piano book by Mark Levine, as well as just some exploring on my own. If you want to learn more about that, do go into the chapter on pentatonic scales within that book. I'm sure it's probably also in the Jazz Theory book by the same author. But for sure, the jazz piano book has that. It can be a very dense book in terms of theory. So hopefully, I've helped you sort of decode and extract out some of the best nuggets of information regarding these pentatonic scales and how we can use them to jazz up our playing. The last thing I want to say is For years playing in a rock band and playing funk and pop music, I would constantly use pentatonic scales more associated with the key. If I'm in C major, playing a C pentatonic scale, and it's so refreshing to have practiced those scales for many years. And as much as they weren't applied as well as I would have liked them to, finding out some of these tricks allowed me to use the exact same scales, but just shifted a little bit. And wow, does it ever just sort of open up your jazz playing? Helps bring out the color tones. And you're landing on notes that would normally feel resolved, but all of a sudden, you're landing on a color tone, and it kind of tricks your brain into coming up with some really cool new licks, rifts, and chops. And hopefully, you guys all get to use that to your advantage. So with that all being said, let's get over to the next trick. 5. Colour Tones: All right. The next jazz improv trick that I want to leave you with is the idea of color tones. Again, we're going to use a major 251 chord progression to discuss what color tones you're going to use. For most of this course, we're going to be covering Major 25 ones. Minor 25 ones tend to get a little more complex, but I am going to touch upon them in some ways, but our meat and potatoes for this course is the minor seventh chord, the dominant seventh chord, and the Major seventh chord. We will work a little bit on types of twos and fives that do exist in minor keys, but let's stay focus on the meeting potatoes for now. The first chord we're going to work with is again, C Major seven. And I remember in my jazz workshop at York University, a great guitarist and our workshop leader Loren Lowsky. He told me to stop playing such bluesy material, and he was totally right. That was my background. I was really focused on blues. And so he told me to just try using color tones. And for me, this was a bit of an aha moment. So let's talk about these. What are color tones? But we have our basic chord, C major. And as we add a seventh, we're already starting to add some more color over top of the chord. Maybe we also add a ninth. Maybe we also add an 11 and a 13. But over a major chord, this 11, It's kind of a void note doesn't sound so great because it's clashing with our E by a semitone. So we're going to actually raise that up to an F sharp. Now, yes, the F sharp is clashing with G by a semitone, but G is not a crucial note in this chord. We could just play a more shell based voicing, C E B. F sharp really opens up that sort of lidian sound. So I'll still keep the g in the left hand to keep the voicing very simple. I just wanted to kind of explain why I feel the F sharp works, even though it's clashing with G by a sort of disguised semitone, whereas the F is a little bit more of an a void note. This fourth, for example, or 11th, we will use quite a bit on a minor chord, but over dominant and over major, you tend to want to try to avoid it. What do we end up getting? We get a minor seventh chord down one semitone from the root. Over a C major seven, I'm playing B minor seven. Some things that you can try with this B minor seven would be to zigzag through the chord. Get a really cool sound. You could also try diads. So root and fifth of the ord, third and seventh, fifth and root, seventh and third, alternating. That can sound really awesome as well. Of course, you could just lineate it. So just moving up through the different notes on the way up, and then maybe resolving somewhere a little bit fun outside of that. You might notice if you're really keen that the trick that I gave you for the pentatonic tricks over a major chord is not that different from what I'm showing you right now. So if we take D major pentatonic, it only has one note that's different from our B minor seven chord that we just had. It's the E, which happens to be the third of the chord that we're playing. So we're playing B minor seven with an additional E, and in this case, the B isn't on the bottom. It's at the top. There's our D major pentatonic. You get rid of the E, and you just have an inversion of B minor seven. The two ideas are very related. If you're used to using traditional scales, then you have a lot more opportunity for sort of smaller intervals within your improv. Pentatonic is going to open up some more skips here and there. So when we're going, and again, I'm talking in the key of D at this point, but one, two, three, skip to the five, six, skip to the one, so we skip some notes along the way. And then when you're using color tones, it's like primarily skips, sometimes large leaps as well too. Depending on how leapy and colorful you want your improv to be, if you want it very leapy, use the color tones. If you want it pretty leapy, use the pentatonic scales. And if you want to keep it tight knit, more semi tones and tones, then focus on more traditional modes, like Lydian, mixdan, Alian those sort of modes. So that covers the color tones for the major seventh. Next, let's move over to the minor seventh chord. If I was to play through D minor and add color tones, we would end up getting a flat seven, a nine, an 11 or four, and a 13, or six. So what we end up getting is a major seventh chord down one tone from the root. So if I'm playing D minor seven in my left hand, I'm going to be improvising over the notes from C major seven in the right hand. Again, try the same tricks. You can try alternating a zigzag pattern, Which can sound pretty cool. You can try every other note of the chord in an ascending fashion. So C to G, E to B, g to C, B to E, or root fifth, third, seventh, fifth root, seventh, third. So you can try this block. You can also try can ascending, descending. And again, you can try lineating this and then sort of finding your way out of the pattern by an accompanying note that might work well. So over a D minor seventh chord, maybe I want to resolve to an A. In this case, it's not available within this C major seven chord, but will make it available. So I'm coming down through the notes of that chord, and at some point when I'm close to A, I'm resolving to the A. So that's what I would play over a minor seventh chord. You're thinking, down one tone, playing a major seventh over the minor seventh in the left hand. And then lastly, again, the hardest one to cover is the dominant chord. So what makes the dominant chord tricky to improvise over in terms of color tones is that very often you're going to get a dominant chord that has some sort of alteration. Maybe it's a flat nine or a sharp nine or a sharp 11 or a flat 13. The idea here is the safest options for us would be the flat seven as a color, probably the nine, but you might want to consider that you might need one of the neighboring nines, the flat nine or the sharp nine, but Basically, we'll go with the nine. The 11 is a little risky. I would focus probably more towards the sharp 11, and then the 13, as well, too, which may be a flat 13. So these color tones are going to be absolutely extracted out of whatever chord you're playing over. A good basis place to kind of start is down a tone from the root, playing a major seventh chord, but watch out for that 11. It's generally an a void note over a chord like that, so you might want to consider sharpening the 11 or focusing on the major third, which gives you a rootless voicing for anyone than those rootless voicings. Yeah, for the major chord, I feel very confident saying that down a semi tone, a minor seventh chord is going to give you some really great results for a minor seventh chord going down a tone and playing a major seventh is also going to give you great results. But for the dominant chord, you're really going to have to take it case by case, see what are the alterations, if any, over that dominant chord, and then do a little bit of research to see okay, what color tones make the most sense. I want a seven, a nine, an 11, and a 13, which of those exist in the most complimentary fashion to my chord. So, that's it for color tones. We're starting on the seventh. We're trying to find a type of 791113, alter them as needed. And what you're going to get is just all of the color of that chord or the color of jazz over top. So, you may want to take this approach and pair it with some of the other tricks in this video just to kind of spice things up. So if I'm playing a 251 in C major, for the two, Maybe I'm just thinking, Dorian, for the five. Maybe I'm whole tone. And then over the C, then I'll try some of those color tones. So kind of use them in a mixed up fashion just to kind of spice up your improv abit. And that's what I have to say about color tones. Let's move to the next trick. 6. Quartal Harmony: All right, so our next jazz improv trick is all based on quartal harmony. If you haven't heard about quartal harmony before, you might be thinking, Josh, what does that mean? Quartal harmony? We're building our chords off of ours, or out of fourths. So we have C F B flat. C up a perfect fourth takes us to F and F up a perfect takes us to B flat. So how can we use this sort of sound? To help us improvise. Well, there are certain scale degrees where we can use certain quartal chords depending on the chord that we're using in our left hand. Here's an example. Again, we're going to do a 251 in the key of C major. D minor seven G dominant seven, C major seven. Let's start with the C, and I'll show you why in a second. We're going to ask ourselves off of every note in the C major scale, what quartal chords make sense and stay true to the scale, which ones are, in other words, diatonic. Right off the bat CF B flat, it's breaking a rule, because in this case, we have a B flat, which is not from our C major scale. So over a major seventh chord, we wouldn't really play off of that first scale degree. But the second scale degree has DG C. That's fine. Those are all from C major. The third scale degree is also fine. The fourth is definitely not. We have an E flat, which is from our minor scale. And a B flat. Over our fifth scale degree, G, it works, over six, it works and over seven. So we get two, three, five, six, seven. Write that down. Memorize it. Over a major chord, you can play chordal cords on two, three, five, six and seven. What's really cool is if you know, for example, in the key of C, I have D E, G, A and B available for these quartal cords, it's those same quartal cords that are available over the two and the five, and then in this case, of course, also the one. So over D, I can play D E G A B over the G, I can play D E G A B and over the C chord, D E G A B. But let's dig a little bit deeper and talk about how these relates to each chord, because we're not always playing 25 ones. Yes, they are abundant in jazz, but we might have a minor chord going to another minor chord going to another minor chord. Who knows? So over our major seventh chord, as I mentioned, the scale degrees you want to memorize are two, three, five, six, and seven. Over top of your minor seventh chord, you're thinking one, two, four, five, and major six, in this case, the B over our D minor seven chord. Again, that's outlining that Dorian sound that we love so much over a minor chord in jazz. Again, memorizing over a minor seventh chord, one, two, four, five, and Major six. Over the dominant chord, it's actually the most simple. And check out how this relates back to pentatonics. Remember, over the dominant chord for the pentatonic section, I mentioned that you could just use the pentatonic off of that dominant. In other words, to try to summarize this a little bit more, G seven, you would play G major pentatonic over G seven. Well, the notes for G major pentatonic would be G A B D E, and those are also the scale degrees that we get. With our chordal harmony. So there's something so simplistic about the way that we deal with these dominant chords in the early stages, but once things start to get altered, then it gets a little bit stickier, a little bit more tricky. So that one's a little bit easy to remember. So over the dominant chord, we're thinking one, two, 356, just like the pentatonic scale has scale degrees 12356. So to recap. Over our major seventh chord, we have two, three, five, six, seven, Over minor seventh, we have one, two, four, five major six, and over our dominant chord, we end up getting five, six, one, two, three, or to reorder one, two, 356. But you can see, regardless, over a 251, you're playing the same quartal chords because you're staying true to the key of your one chord. In other words, C major seven is only going to allow certain quartal chords to be played over top of its key center. In C major seven, we have two, three, five, six, seven, and we have to use those over the two and the five. But the relationship to the root of those chords to the two chord in to the five chord does change. That's why I was going over the idea of thinking, one, two, four, five, major six, one, two, three, five, six, or 56123, and then over the major seventh 23567. I'll even do one more slow recap for you just to make sure it makes sense. All you need to focus on is writing down the chord quality, and then the scale degrees that you can play these chordal chords over. So you're going to write, for example, Major seventh, two, 3567, Minor seventh, one, two, 456, and dominant seventh, one, two, 356. Another thing worth mentioning is that all three of these chords had a two, a five, and a six available. To use these chordal chords. So over C, we had two, five and six of C available. Over D, we had two, five and six available over that chord. And then over our G chord, we had two, five and six available. So if you panic, and you're like, h, what are the scale degrees that I can play over top of this type of chord? Well, over major seventh, minor seventh, and dominant seventh, as a backup plan, you can choose two, five and six. So let's try applying some of this. Over, for example, a minor seventh chord, we're thinking, two, three, four, five and six. There's a few different patterns that we can use in our right hand to lineate to org sort of break up the chordal harmony. We can try ascending, descending. Right? We can try straight blocked with a fun rhythm, maybe. Sounds really cool. What I call outside inside? Right? So we're thinking outside, inside, outside, inside. So so on and so forth. So you can try ascending, descending, outside inside, you can try blocked. You can also try it chromatic. So even something like The keyboardist from the Cat Empire actually comes to mind. He was a big inspiration for me when I was playing in my rock band. And over a lot of his solos, he uses this trick pretty frequently, just to really build up this tension. And he just keeps building it up and then some sort of, like, a fancy blues thing or whatever he's going to do. So yeah, those are some ways to get you started. You can also try the oral chords hands together if you're working with a bassist, and you can get some really big, colorful sounds that way. So If you really like this sound, I would recommend check out McCoy Tyer. He I want to say popularized this sound. I don't think he was necessarily the first, but he uses it a lot in a lot of different ways. And as we know as jazz musicians, one of the best ways to learn is through transcriptions. Listen to some McCoy Tyer. Try to find some instances of where you're hearing that sound and then transcribe and see exactly how he's using it. That being said, I think I've given you plenty of ways to get started with this. And yeah, have some fun. Quartal harmony sounds very different from any traditional sort of harmony built off of thirds. So to any non jazz player, they're going to probably twist their ear a little bit and say, what is he playing? Or What is she playing? What is that? So Quartal harmony. You get a lot out of it. You can't over use it just like a lot of these tricks, but it pairs really nicely with a lot of the other tricks I'm going to be showing you in this course, speaking of which. Let's get to the next trick. 7. Fill Tones: The next trick I want to teach you guys is the idea of filling in cord tones. So let's take a chord like C major seven. If I'm improvising starting on the third, which is E, I might want to fill in some cord tones with some chromaticism or semitones in between. In other words, E could fill up to G using semitones or down to C. But you could even hear the way I played it, there's more notes coming down to fill out that major third than there are going up to fill out this minor third. The third down to the root is bigger than the third up to the fifth in this major chord example. You may also want to experiment with some rhythms. Maybe from the third up to the fifth, you have similar to Blue Monk. On the B flat seven, and then on the E flat seven. But let's go back to our C major seven example. What if I'm starting on E and want to get down to C, it might be worth 'cause if I go, I still have one more note to go, right? So this da da da da rhythm works going up, but dum da. Okay, and one note short. So sounds pretty bad. So you can try adding in a triplet. Dump d going up? Or d d d da da coming down, da da da da So triple da da or da da triple. So throwing in a triplet on the larger leaps between cor tones can help out as well, too. Soles just do a basic two, five, one, and C major again, and give you some examples. So fifth, down to the third. Now, that's a fun one. That's the flat seven of g dominant up to the root. And there's only one node in between. So we had a big fill fifth down to the third, flat seven to the root, and then the fifth down to the third. That was just using that one concept, and then we have Sounds pretty nice. And I'm not even experimenting with adding any special rhythms or any of the other tricks that we talked about. That's just one basic example. I'll give you one more. Let's go and again, this is at random. Let's go from the root to the third. And then we'll reverse it. We'll go from the flat seven to the fifth is the same notes. B. And then the third down to the root. So we have root of d up to the minor third, seventh of G seven down to the fifth, and then the third down to the root. Now, there's one really cool sort of approach tone or chromatic fill that we could put in there as well. Notice, we had d to the root to, flat seven to the fifth, and then I was leaping a little, not leaping, but stepping over to this E. But what if I put in the E flat on the way up? That one note is taken from the idea of an approach tone, but now we get this. A It's very chromatic sounding, it's very tight, but I've given you a lot of examples from the color tones to the pentatonic tricks that can open up a lot more sort of leapy or angular improvisation. And now I've given you something quite a bit smaller, the idea of these fill tones or approach notes from before. And so now you have potentially leapy and angular aspects to your improvisation and also really refined small movements available as well, too. So to give an example, let's go through two, two, five ones. I'm going to start off with some color tones for leaps and then start to fill in some chromaticism. And you'll see it's really complimentary and quite contrasting at the same time, too. So we get something like Okay. So you can hear there was big, leaps, third, fourth, and fifths in the first half, and then the second half, it was basically all chromaticism, all semitones. So I had to include this just because it's so contrasting. You want to know how to improvise using small intervals, regular scales, which is kind of a mixed bag, pentatonics, which gets a little bit more stretched, and then color tones, which gets quite stretched. And quartal harmony is potentially even more stretched than that too because you're moving around by f. So you can kind of take each of the for examples that I just gave you, and really approach them that way, understanding, okay, how angular or leapy do I want my soloing to be? And how do I want to evolve in and out? Do I want to start with small semitones and work my way up to the chordal harmony or perhaps the other way around? Or maybe you're finding that you really like one of these sounds or two of these sounds much more than the others, and you're going to choose to specialize in that sort of sound, like McCoy Tiner with the fourths and Horse silver with the whole tone scale, so on and so forth. That when you're playing and when you're soloing, people really go, Oh, man, I'm recognizing all those fourths from this player that must be whatever your name is soloing because they recognize your style. So I think it's really important to know how to go back and forth between the smaller interval improvisations and the larger interval improvisations and potentially specialize in one or two of those, so that way your style is really sort of focused towards a more specific sound. But that being said, I think you should approach all of the tricks in this course, and then from there see which resonates with you the most, so that way you can help develop your style. So again, fill tones, and if you want to start with a jazz standard that uses these check outt Blue Monk by Felonius Monk, it uses quite a bit of this and do a little bit of a song analysis. Ask yourself, So, okay, he's going from the third to the fifth, okay? So that's a neat trick, third to the fifth, then there's the lick. Technically, and then you get this third to the fifth, and then you get the fifth up to the flat seven. So he's using a few variations of that trick and ask yourself what you like the most. Then go from there. I'm sure this trick will get used at some point in your improvisation. So even if you're drawing a blank, start on a chord tone. It's always a safe place to start and then just fill in some semi tones to a neighboring chord tone, and that might give you a little bit of extra time to think about what your next idea is. Whether this idea buys you time or you choose to specialize in it and really saturate in that sound, I'm sure you'll get some great use out of it. Let's move over to the next trick. 8. Grace Notes and Approach Tones: All right. So up next is the idea of grace notes or sometimes called slip notes or applications of the blue note within the blue scale, where we're sliding a semi tone to another note. Approach tones is another name that you'll hear. It has lots of different names. But these grace notes or approach tones, let's talk about those. Again, we'll go over a two, five, one in C major, but I recommend trying it in different keys. I'm keeping things in C for this course because I can't assume anyone's skill level, and I want to make sure that some of the more difficult or complex concepts can be used by the pros, but generally everything can be used by a beginner or intermediate player as well. So if 251 and C major isn't adventurous enough for you, try these tricks and other keys. I think I'm giving you a broad enough approach where you can try that on your own, and yeah, have fun exploring it. Okay, so let's talk about these grace notes or approach tones. So the idea is, if we have a chord like D minor seven, I could be playing up through those notes in a lineated way. Very easy on piano a little bit harder on a horn. You really have to practice all the notes and all the chords and just kind of have them known. If you know your chords on the piano, then you can just kind of go to play the shape, but then lineate it. So let's start with D minor seven. On a D minor seven chord, we may want to try something like some sort of little run up at the beginning of our improv line or our phrase. But it's really fun sometimes to try that with a semitone leading into the first note. So right. We have this starting on C sharp then leading into D and then moving up through the cord. And often you'll hear a triplet triplet that sort of idea. And you can feel free to have some fun and come up with whatever lick riff or chop you want to at the top. But starting with this semitone leading into the cord, it just gives this rub, this dissonance that quickly gets resolved, and then you can fly into some fun colorful tricks. So I would also recommend trying this not only with root position cords, but with all of the inversions of that cord. So over D minor seven first inversion we get So we had this E leading into our F, and then going up through. I believe I went to the nine there, but the same concept applies. We're going a semitone into that minor third and then sort of flying up through some notes and then having some fun up towards the top. Second inversion, same idea. Here's our chord. Now we're kind of getting into like a blues scale sort of sound. So already, some of these tricks are going to be overlapping. Blue scales will be coming later in the course, so stay tuned for that. So that's the flat five leading into the five and then going up through an inversion of the chord. And let's not forget because it's a four chord, there is a third inversion. Starting on the C this time. So we end up getting this sort of sound with the major six leading us up into the flat seven and then up through our chords. We end up getting something kind of like so we're bringing out some of the brightness of that major sixth. They all have a very different sound depending on which inversion you're using, and you're going to get to access notes that aren't otherwise available in the scale. If here's our D dorian scale, we had or mode. We had a C sharp, actually keep this within an octavta, C sharp, leading us into root position. We had an E leading us into the first version, a note that's already available, and then A flat that's going to take us into the second inversion, and then B, which is, again, already available, takes us into the third inversion. These notes I just outlined are the semitone approach notes or the grace notes that take us into the Cort. So now we have this Dorian mode plus this note, plus this note, and then we start to go, Okay, well, in certain circumstances, maybe if it's a B bop scale, I'll add an F sharp, and then all of a sudden, all the notes become available to you, but not in a jumbled up way in a way where you connect it with different concepts. Okay? The Blues scale allows this note temporarily to be used in this way. The Dorian Bop scale allows me to use this major third over a minor sounding and eventually, it all becomes chromatic, but with practice. So by using these approach tones, you can kind of have the illusion that you have all of that chromaticism figured out, and over time, it will actually help you make sense of all of that. So try using these approach tones in that sort of linear running up accord fashion, but there's other ways we can use them too. What if we want to try, let's say our G dominant this time, something like let's say we're improvising and we have So there I'm going up a semitone into each note. Maybe that was a little corny and a little too clean cut, but I wanted to really illustrate the basic concept of semitone into the flat seven, semitone into the fifth, semitone into the third, semitone into the root, and you can play them like that where they slip quite quickly, or a little bit more sort of like an eighth note line. D. Okay. And then again, over the major seventh chord, you've probably figured it out. It's all the same sort of idea. We're taking a semitone into the root position into one of the inversions, into the second inversion or into Third inversion, which is really fun when we get to open up a flat seven leading us into a major seven. So there's lots of different combinations. If I'm saying anything at all, there's lots of different combinations, depending on the type of cord that you're using. But these semitone approach notes tend to work really well, especially if you're using them as a pickup, like on an end of a beat and letting the cord tones fall on the main beat. You can try reversing it, but you're not going to get quite the same effect. So we have one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. That sounds nice. What if I start on beat three on a weird note, one and 23 Still sounds nice. But I recommend trying to prioritize yourself, which sound do you like more? Do you like it more when the approach tones or the grace notes are on the offbeat, upbeat, of the beat, whatever you want to call it? Or do you prefer when it's on a downbeat or a number like Beat one or beat two or three or four? So explore, experiment. Ask yourself stylistically what you prefer because when you're improvising, you want to prioritize not only your favorite tricks out of this course, but your favorite approach for each trick. That way, you have your own style that you're developing, and then from there, you're probably going to find some other tricks that you can use to complement these to really help solidify your style when you're improvising. So that's it. I know it's a simple concept, but you compare it with other ideas. So let's try applying this over, for example, the chordal harmony that we just explored in the last video. Over a D minor seventh chord, my chordal chords would be built off of one, two, four, five, and major six in relation to this D. Let's say I just wanted to take one of those like this E quartal cord built off of the second scale degree of d, and I'm going to lead into that with a semitone and then maybe move up through my color tones. Let's up the anti a bit. Semitone into cordal harmony, semitone down into our color tones, filling in or like a fill tone in between our note and our destination a tone away. So we end up getting Sounds really jazzy, but it's basically me thinking E quartal C major seven or color tones, which just two little semitones to connect it all. There you go. We're already starting to connect things together. So I wanted to show you that these approach tones or even fill notes, which we kind of briefly touched upon there. The idea is, if you're at a note and you're trying to get a tone away from that note, you can oftentimes just fill in a semi tone in between. But it feels a lot like an approach tone or a grace note. You could think of it like D filling down to the C or D, and then I'm going to use an approach tone to the C. It's the same concept, just a different way of thinking about it. The idea is there's an infinite amount of possibilities as to how you can connect all of these different ideas. Start to explore, start to experiment. Use your grace tone, slip note, whatever you want to call them in conjunction with chordal harmony, pentatonic scales, color tones, and anything else that we go over in this video. It's a connective device and something that we can use a little bit over top of anything else. I think of it like the salt in cooking. You can use a little bit of salt in most dishes too much, and it's overdone, but generally, it's a very universal spice, right? So, that's it. That's the grace note or approach tone or slip note or whatever you want to call, it's got a lot of different names, but the idea of taking a semitone away from where you're starting and starting on that semitone, and then pulling into your starting destination. So, again, the example, the simple example was a C sharp pulling into a D minor seven run up. Okay. So something else I wanted to mention about grace notes is why they're called grace notes or why they're called slip notes or why they're called approach tones or approach notes. To me, it makes a lot of sense, but I want to break it down. A grace note, you're gracing the main note with the presence of another note. So maybe it's We're gracing this g with the presence of an F sharp, or a slip note. Why slip we're slipping off of one key to another key. You'll hear slip note a lot in country, L say slip not, it's slip note. Maybe Slip None uses slip notes. I don't know. But the idea is you're slipping from one note to another, easy when you're going from a black to a white, a little less easy when you're going from a white to a black, but you just use two fingers and it works pretty similarly. And then approach note, while we're approaching one note from another destination. So I mean, come on. That makes sense, right? We're approaching the C from a B. So yeah it has lots of different names, but they all kind of make sense in context. The other thing I should mention too is you can use these specifically over the color tones and get some really colorful results. So over C major seven, as we talked about in the color tone section, We end up getting a B minor seven chord. So pick a note at random, let's say it's the D zone. Or let's say it's the F shirt. So I'm going up through these notes, but just on the way, taking the F up to the F sharp. And you could start again, with an inversion of something like this. So let's say, here's our main chord. I've inverted it a couple of times. Here's our chord now. So we get So now I've taken just a simple inversion of our color tones and led into the first note of that inversion with a semi tone leading into it with an approach note with a grease note with a slip note, whatever you want to call it. So between trying this on all the inversions of your chord that you're playing and all the inversions of the cord that represents the color tones, There are so many possibilities, and you can really keep people guessing as to how you're coming up with a lot of this colorful playing. I call it jazz paint by numbers sometimes just because if you follow these simple tricks, it should get you sounding like a jazz player really quick, or if you're already a jazz player, it might even give you some new approach where you wouldn't have normally approached it that way. So you end up sort of twisting your own ear and opening your own ear in new and creative ways. So, yeah, have some fun with that, and let's get on to the next trick. 9. Blues Scales: A All right, so this lesson I'm particularly excited to talk about, because we're going to dig into Blues scales. There are major blues scales and minor blues scales. So let's start with the major, and then on the second half, we'll try out the minor. So a blues scale derives from a pentatonic scale. Ah, there it is again, pentatonic scales. So again, just to recap, a pentatonic scale in the case of a major pentatonic scale is very similar to a major scale, but no fourth scale degree, no fa, and no seventh scale degree, no T. So we end up getting one, two, three, five, six, and then one. That's our pentatonic scale or major pentatonic scale, but it's not a blues scale, not yet. We have to add the blue note. And the blue note, in this case, is the minor third E flat. Why is that the blue note? From my understanding, we're adding the blue note to add a little bit of that minor feel. The blues. You don't say you have the blues when you're in a good mood, right? Generally, if you're not feeling the greatest, you say, I have the blues. We're going to add a little bit of that minor sound, that minor third. What we end up getting is this. Notice a little hiccup up at the top. That sort of idea. That's intentional because a normal major scale has seven notes, and a blue scale has six. Right? We eliminated two notes, but we only added one. So in order to make our major blues scale last the same amount of time, the same beats as a major scale, we do this little sort of hiccup up at the top. Allow me to demonstrate, I'm going to play a C major scale in my left hand and the C major blues scale in the right hand with that little. Again, I keep calling it a hiccup, but it's a repetition or a sort of pull back to the top note before we come back down. Let's try that out. Here we go. Doesn't sound great, but they finish at the same time. So generally, that's how we play our blue scale when we're practicing, and you'd want to practice it with swing. And if you want to know how to swing properly, just really quickly to recap, straight rhythms, you're thinking of dividing each beat in half and accenting the numbers. Two, three, and four. Swung rhythms, you're thinking of a triplet, where the first two notes are tied and the third one is not, but it is accented. The end is accented. In other words, we're dividing the beat into two thirds and one third, and it's the back half of the beat, the d that gets accented. 02, and three and four, and one, two, three, and four. So let's try that out over a Major 251. D minor seven, G seven, C Major seven, the People's key. So it doesn't sound entirely jazzy, but that one scale can get you through a full 251, as you just saw. Let's also explore the idea of the minor blue scale. So the same way C major relates to a natural minor. The C major blues scale relates to the A minor blue scale. This time, we have a minor scale or natural minor scale with no two and no minor six, and we've added the tritone. The tritone, in my opinion, we already have that minor sound. Let's add something that's kind of sinister and a little bit more serious like that tritone. But I want to take this quick moment to talk about this blue note that we've added to both scales, the E flat. It's not a note that we want to reside on. We don't want to play too much of that note. Think of it like a spice. You don't want to over salt your dish, but salt generally works well in a lot of different dishes. So the way you would have seen me use this E flat is sort of as a scoop or a grace note, as we've talked about in one of the other lessons here, to a neighboring note. And I love to pair that also with A. So the sixth in the case of a major 251 or the root, in the case of a minor 251. Okay. So let's go through that minor blue scale. Or really. We're still going to do that little hicup up at the top. And in our left hand, we're going to have 25, one, a very simple voicing in A minor. So we have B half diminished seven or B minor seven flat five, E dominant seven. I'm using second inversion, and then A minor seven. Let's try that out. Now, what if I was to land on that E flat and really focus on it? Let's listen to what that would sound like. It kind of works, but you have to really know kind of where that threshold is in terms of overdoing that. And again, using too much of that spice. Let's talk about a couple of simple tricks that you can use within your blue scale. Starting off with just the pentatonic scale, getting rid of that blue note for a minute, you can try ascending or descending in groups of threes. Or And again, often, you want to find some little way to pull out of any sort of sequence or repeated trick that's used to the brink of being used too much, right? We want to find some way to just kind of pull out of that and naturally resolve that sound. So another thing we can try is zig zagging through the notes of the pentatonic scale, occasionally using that blue note to scoop to one of the neighboring notes. So with just the pentatonic scale, we end up getting So, again, it's a fancy rhythm, but I'm going zig zagging up and down through those notes. We could, like I said, use the occasional grace note here, too, so we end up getting So those are a couple of tricks that you can try out. I also really love using in the minor blue scale, the flat seven, G, in this case, and the flat three, C, and using those to sort of surround the root. So you get this. And if you love that sound, I would recommend check out John Madeski from Medesky Martin and Wood. They helped popularize Jazz funk, and that's what really got me into jazz. Also, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, any Hard bop player. And a lot of the soloists, whether they're playing sack or trumpet. Any of the soloists from Art Blakey and the Jazz Mssengers, is a great place to start for Hard Bop. But if you like the idea of blending blues and jazz, check out Hard Bop as a genre. If you like the idea of blending Funk and jazz, start with Medesky Martin Wood, and John Schofield is great, too, so expand from there. So those are my notes about the major and minor blue scale. As a quick recap, the major blue scale is a major scale minus four and seven, giving us pentatonic, and adding a minor third as the blue note. Remember to use it sparingly to scoop to the neighbors. And the minor blue scale comes from a natural minor scale, minus two, minus flat six, and we're adding in the tritone. And again, use it like a spice. And also, as I mentioned, try pairing this scoop up with an A above or the scoop down with an A below. Having that sort of diad sound with two notes happening, to me, kind of helps emulate the idea of an open string on guitar during a solo, which is not uncommon for a blues guitarist to play. That's it. That's the scale that I think I saturated in a little bit too long when I first started playing jazz. I'd recommend once you get comfortable with it, try out some more advanced tricks. Don't get too locked into this sound, but it's so interchangeable from rock to pop to hip hop to funk to jazz. The blue scale, and in my opinion, especially the minor blue scale is a golden nugget when it comes to improvising. Don't overdo it. And yeah, have some fun with it. So I'll see you in the next video. 10. Rootless Voicings: Next up is using rootless voicings in a more lineated fashion so we can get more out of them within our improv. Now you might not know what a rootless voicing is. First, I'll take you through it. There's two main types of rootless voicings that we have. Say that broadly, we'll get into some specifics. So you can voice a rootless chord generally from the third or the seventh. You can voice it from anything really, but in this case, those are going to be our two main areas of focus. Let's start off with C major first. Here's our C major chord. To make it rootless in the right hand, we drop the root, but that's not enough. We want some color. We're going to surround that root with the two notes that are closest to it within its related scale. In this case, the C major scale relates to the C major chord. This is the sound we end up getting. We have a major seventh, a ninth, a major third, and a perfect fifth. So that's voiced from the seven. In other words, the seven is on the bottom of the chord. And you might think, but Josh, you have a root in the left hand. Well, sometimes that's going to be a bassist playing that note for you, and if you're playing solo piano, then in some cases, you'll have that root in your left hand yourself. But the chord in the right hand is still rootless, and that's the point. We can also voice it from the third. This looks like an E minor seven chord, but what we really have is in C major, the major third, the perfect fifth, the major seventh, and the ninth. So voice from the seven, voice from the three. I'll take you through some tricks in C, and then we'll reapply it over a minor seventh chord and a dominant seventh chord to see what sort of mileage we can get out of this. So voice from the seventh, we get again, this shape, and there's some really fun patterns we can play now that we have four notes in our chord. I like to zigzag, alternating up or alternating down, or having fourths that are built within this shape alternating. Or or backwards. So you can get some really cool sounds out of that. And then once you get used to voicing it from the third, applying the same techniques, zig zagging up, zig zagging down or alternating the fifths that are available. So what if we go from these tricks voiced on the seventh and then voice on the third and see what we can get out of that. Let's do a Zigzag going up first. Let's slow that down a little bit. First shape. Second shape. Back to the first shape and octave higher and second shape and octave higher. Or you can also try it descending. So, that's when we lineate it and break it up through that zigzag pattern. Let's do the more half blocked version where we have. So what was happening there? I was taking the first shape, alternating the fourths, second shape, alternating the fifths, same thing again, and then just reversing it all the way down. So oftentimes in our left hand, if we're playing in a small combo, as a pianist, we're going to end up having these rootless voicings. They're not uncommon. And if we panic and we're not sure what to play in our right hand, those are four perfectly acceptable notes and work on different ways of permutating them and changing up their order. Maybe you want to do too low, too, too low, too. Of course, we could just do ascending or descending. Come up with different ways to play those, but the idea is to use your rootless voicings available in the left hand to give you some quick notes in the right hand. Trumpet players, saxophonist. They're not going to have this as readily available. Now, of course, if they're doing their due diligence and practicing through different types of chord shapes, rootless, rooted, all that sort of stuff, then they should have this stuff relatively ready to go. But as a pianist, just looking at our left hand just decodes things. It shows us the notes that are available, and then you can come up with a pattern using those notes. But again, try your voicings from the seventh and the third. Let's talk about the minor seventh chord. Works the same way. So in this case, we have D minor seven. Okay. So here's our minor chord. We're going to surround the root with the ninth and the minor seventh. Again, they're both from the natural minor scale in this case, but they're coming from the D minor scale. So same tricks apply. So there's our alternating fourth voice from the seventh. Or in the case of the voicing from the third, we end up getting minor third, fifth, minor seventh, and ninth in D. It looks like a major seventh chord. U one third or a minor third in this case. So we can try the same tricks. So what was going on there? Taking voice from the seventh, alternating those fourths, voice from the third, alternating the fifths, voice from the seventh, alternating the fourths, voice from the third, alternating the fifths, and then reversed for the way down. So we could have zigzags, or all ascending. Of course, it works for descending. So you can get some really interesting improv tricks out of this, taking the basic shape from your left hand, the rootless shape, and in your right hand, lineating it, ascending, descending, zigzagged, partially blocked. The possibilities are huge here. So experiment, have some fun, but that's enough to get you started. I do still want to talk about the dominant seventh chord, but it's a little bit trickier. Let's talk about it. So in the case of a 251 in C, we end up getting G dominant seventh as our dominant seventh chord. Now, if I was to voice this rootless from the seven based on what we've been doing, you would have a major chord and you would surround that root by the ninth and in this case, the flat seven because it's a dominant seventh chord. We have flat seven, nine, major third, and the fifth on the top. But oftentimes with these dominant rootless voicings, what you'll end up getting is a 13 instead of the five. All the same tricks apply ascending from the seven, Ascending from the third. Let's break those down, 793-133-1379, even more specifically, be flat 79, Major third, 13, or six, Major third, 13, flat seven, and then up to the ninth. So you end up getting or so that would just be ascending or descending. But again, So zig zags lineated, or alternating blocked. In this case, you get a tritone and a perfect fifth, but you don't really need to think about the intervals. The idea is once your hand is in position, your alternating finger options. So I'm playing the bottom note in the third bottom note. And then the second bottom note and the top note. So whatever way you want to think about it, you're basically taking the blocked shape and then alternating every other note. Voice from the seventh, voice from the third, voice from the seventh, voice from the third, so on and so forth. So just make sure that you're practicing your rootless chords in all the different available options of chords. Dominant seventh with alterations, minor seven flat five chords, minor seventh, dominant seventh, major seventh, minor major seventh, whatever it is you want to work on. Work on these four note rootless voicings. Try some of these patterns. You'll get some really cool tricks out of it, and it's going to sound like you're doing a lot more than you are. You're thinking of two shapes, applying a fingering pattern, Bingo Bango, it sounds great. But really, it just sounds like this barrage of notes, colors, and tricks. So try it out, have some fun with it. Onto the next improv trick. 11. Whole Tone Scales: All right. So up next, let's talk about the whole tone scale. What is the whole tone scale? It's a scale made up of whole tones. Check it out. A good example would be C, up atone to D, up atone to E, up atone to F sharp, up to G sharp, up to A sharp or B flat, and then back up to C. But how do we use that whole tone scale? It can very often be used in classical and contemporary music as sort of a mysterious passage or something to kind of add a bit of magic to a phrase or to a melody. But in jazz, there's a few patterns that we can use that work out really well. So let me first let you know when to use it and then give you a couple of ideas as to how to use it, but, of course, feel free to experiment. This scale would work really well over a dominant chord and variations of a dominant chord. Now, if we're playing, for example, C seven, the problem with this voicing right now is that we're going to get a clash between this F sharp and G sharp in the left hands, G, this major seventh and minor ninth. You can try voicing without the fifth at all. Then you get a really nice complement to that dominant chord. But where you will see the whole tone scale used more often is on a dominant chord with either a sharp 11 or a flat 13. In this case, when we have our shell voicing of E and B flat for our third and seventh, supplying our root on the bottom, this is a really simple icing, just trying the sharp 11 or flat as a substitute for that G in this case. So we're just going to work with this simple voicing for now. This isn't a whole course on voicings, but maybe one day I will put that out, and hopefully that will be helpful at that point. But for now we're going to keep things really simple in the left hand. Let's talk about a few patterns that you can try with that whole tone scale. One would just be alternating. Back and forth. So if you know your scale, you're going to start from the top going down or it works the other way. Skip one, come back one. Skip down, U one. Skip down, up one, skip down, up one, skip down, up one. Right? But even then this sounds kind of boring. So improvise a rhythm over top. I can sound pretty cool. You can also work with augmented chords. Because an augmented chord is built off of major thirds, and these major thirds compliment the idea of filling in two tones. So two tones is a major third. Then if you move up an augmented chord by tones, you're only going to end up playing notes that are from that whole tone scale. So you can try just ascending, for example, or ascending, descending. Again, it works the other way around, you could try going down or now I'm descending as the whole line comes down, but the cords themselves are going down, up, down, right, you continue in that fashion. So I would recommend going through first all the different cords blocked just so you see what all your options are. And if you're not familiar with augmented cords, this is a great way to practice them with some application. So you're going up, you're going down, you're just practicing them slow, making sure you got all the basic shapes. And then from there, you can start to lineate, so on and so forth. So between the sort of alternating version of the scale. And using your augmented chords, you can get some really cool sounds using that whole tone scale over top of a dominant chord without a fifth or some sort of altered fifth, whether it be a sharp five, which is also a flat 13, or a flat five, which is also a sharp 11. I just want to quickly explain that because to some people, that might be a little confusing, so let's go through that. Here's the shell voicing for my C dominant seventh, and here's my fifth. If I sharpen my five, it's the same as a flat six or flat 13. Remember those two numbers are interchangeable. Also, if I flatten my five down to the sharp, that's the same as a sharp four or sharp 11 because four and 11 are interchangeable. So when I say a dominant chord with a sharp 11 or flat 13, that's what I'm referring to. But again, some sort of altered five, whether it's raised to the flat 13 or lowered to the sharp 11. So, and of course, I should also mention that if you do have an augmented chord, they don't come up a lot in jazz, but if it's just C augmented, of course, you can use this whole tone scale. But where you'll see it used most often is over a dominant chord, and especially with those alterations that I had mentioned. So that's a sweet use for the whole tone scale. And again, we can proceed some of these notes by semitones. I wouldn't do it for all of them because then you're just filling in a chromatic scale. So CD E F sharp are the first four. So if I did C D by a semitone, going into E by a semitone, going into F sharp, by a semitone. Now I just have a chromatic scale. So pick one or two spots. Let's pick them at random. Let's say it's the E and the A flat. So now you get just a really cool little sort of variation of the scale. It'll work better in some cases than others. And learning about the B bop scales, which we will be talking about later might give you some insight as to why some of these chromatic notes work at times and why they don't based on the part of the beat that they fall on. Hmm. I'm going to cover that later. So if you're wondering about that, go to the bebop scale section now. But just do understand that overall, the whole tone scale, you can have some fun. You can use the odd semitone, but start off by trying to master just the basic whole tone scale by itself, a couple of the patterns that I've given you and go from there. Hopefully that helps you out a bit and gives you some inspiration. The person that I heard use this the most that got me interested in it is Horace Silver. I'd recommend just check out a bunch of his music and see if you can spot that sort of And he does that quite a bit, the alternating sort of version of that scale with some sort of kind of funky, almost Latin driven rhythm. But instead of giving you, like, a specific song at a specific time, be like, check it out here. I want you to try to hear this stuff. Try it out on your own enough that when another player plays it, you're like, Oh my gosh, that kind of sounds like my practicing on the whole tone scale. Well, that's 'cause they're using the whole tone scale. So start with Horace Silver, check him out. Tens of artists, tons of musicians are using this over those altered dominant chords, altered, I mean, specifically just the five, so flat 13 or sharp 11. So yeah, see if you can spot this scale being used within an improvisation or maybe even within a head of some sort and get experimenting. There's really only a couple of patterns to remember on the piano. So a bit of practice goes a long way with this scale. I'll see you in the next video. 12. Bebop Scales: All right. Next up, let's talk about B bop scales. The three B bop scales that we're going to cover today are the Dorian B bop, the Mixedan B bop, and the major B bop. You might remember from the preliminary material lesson from the beginning of this course, the Dorian mode, mixdian, and Ionian mode, were all covered. And of course, when I say Ionian mode, I'm really just talking about the major scale. So to quickly recap, in the case of our 251 and C major, we would be playing D Dorian, all whites, a natural minor scale with a major sixth, then G Mx lidian a major scale with a flat seven or minor seventh, again, all whites, staying true to the key of C major, and then C ionian or C major a C major scale. So we'll start off with the two chord. The Dorian B bop scale is going to add a major third. I know. It's crazy. We're going to add a major third to a minor scale. But the reason why it works is the way that the BBop scale is approached. One beautiful thing about adding one extra note to a major or minor scale or one of these modes is that you now have eight notes. You can do something cool with those eight notes, and let's talk about that. The way most of us approach bebop scales is by really considering what note am I playing? Is it on a downbeat, one, two, three, or four, in the case of 44, or an upbeat, one of the Ns in between our beats. Let's just first hear the scale and then talk about how to apply it. That means your third kind of gets disguised. It sounds jazzy. It sounds cool. Why does it work? Well, what we have is on Beat one, we have D. O Beat two, we have F. On Beat three, we have G, on Beat four, we have a B. One and two, and three and four. These are all pretty safe notes with our chord. We get a root very safe. Minor third brings out the minor sound, the fourth, which sounds great over a minor chord, and outlining that Dorian sound, we have the 13. All the notes in 1-2 and three, and four, and we end up getting E, F sharp A and C. Now, some of these notes out of the E F sharp A and C would still sound great admittedly on one of our downbeats. The ninth, I love that sound, the flat seven, I love that sound. The fifth is pretty unadventurous, and the major third we have to use tastefully because it's a major sound mixed with this minor sound, so we have to have a solid approach. Here's what's really cool about the way these bebop scales work. I'll take you through with this scale, but keep in mind it applies to all three of the types of BBop scales that we're going to cover. So if I start on any one of those notes that we talked about, the root, the flat seven, the fourth or 11th, and the sixth or the 13th. If I start on one of those notes on a downbeat, I can just keep moving by step up and down, I can pivot whenever I want, and I'm only ever going to be hitting those notes on downbeats. Check it out. D, D F, G B. You'll see. D F, G, B, G, B, D, F, D, F, G, B, G F, D. So on and so forth. Because we have eight notes, we're able to do these pivots at any point and only ever hit on the downbeat, those four notes we just discussed. Now, if you're starting some sort of phrase from an upbeat, one of the ns, then you would want to start on one of the other notes we talked about, E F sharp, A or C. So one, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. But it ends up doing the same thing. By starting on F sharp on an n, I'm going to either pull up to G on beat whatever one or two or down to F on beat, again, one or two, whatever it happens to be. So I'm still landing on these four notes on downbeats, and these four notes on upbeats. As long as I'm starting These four on a downbeat, or these four on an upbeat. This is getting pretty theoretical. It's quite a bit to wrap your head around. Maybe it's coming easily to you. Maybe you already know about this. But I would recommend listen to this video a few times over and apply it in a couple of simple keys first, then apply it within your songs, and then try it within all 12 keys. Maybe just become a master of the Dorian Bebop first, and for Mix lidian use a different trick. For Ionian or major, use a different trick. Once you get really comfortable with Dorian Bebop, then work towards Mx lidian or Ionian or major. Also, it goes without saying, but these scales work really well within B Bop. I am not a bebop expert. I prefer hard pop, cool jazz, medium swing, a few other different types of styles. B Bop is still great though. If you want to specialize in B Bop, focus on the chromaticism that we've talked about, semitone approach notes, fill tones, that type of stuff, as well as these BBop skies, you're going to get a lot of that language learned really quickly as a result of that. That's the Dorian B bop over to Mixolydian B bop. What's cool about the relationship between the Dorian B bop and the mixdian B bop is that they share the same notes. In Mixtian, we end up having one, two, three, four, five, six, flat seven, major seven, and then back to our root. But notice it's still the F sharp to our home key, we have that tritone with our Dorian and our mixa lidian. That's what we've added to those two. The same rules apply, but let's go through and see which notes land on downbeats and which notes land on upbeats. We end up getting literally the dominant cord notes as the notes that land on downbeats, and we end up getting the minor six cord that lands between the cracks. It's all the same notes, by the way, in case you haven't noticed, they're just inverted. Before we had these four notes for our Dorian mode, take the DNF up, these are now the notes that land on downbeats. Downbeat notes for Dorian B bop, and then downbeat notes for Mxaldian B bop. Same deal applies with these four. We get E F sharp AC for the Dorian Bop upbeat notes and AC E F sharp for the mixdan Bop up beat notes. Oh. This is a bit of a mouthful. So again, go through this, go slowly. Listen to these little phrases, these little things that I'm saying over and over. Hopefully, I'm not going through it too fast, but I think whether I'm speaking very slowly, medium fast, whatever it might be, you're going to need to digest this a few times over. So going back to our Mx lidian bebop. Scale, the same rules apply? You need to start on one of these four notes on downbeats. Again, G, B, D F. You get B, B, G, B, D, F G F D. It just keeps landing you on those really safe notes on downbeats. But we get these really cool colors in between, and of course, adding that F sharp. Again, what makes this a dominant chord? It's the major core with the flat seven. Why are we adding the Major seven? Because we can based on the way that we're using it, using it on an upbeat, so it resolves to the root or down to the flat seven on a downbeat. That's B Bop scales in a nutshell. That whole idea of focusing on what am I playing on downbeats? What am I playing on upbeats? If you can master that, you'll get a lot of mileage out of this. But here's where it gets a bit tricky. The notes that we've had for the Dorin BBop and Mxdan BBop are essentially the same just starting from different points within the scales. They're all whites with an F sharp. The major bebop scale does not do that. It's C major. With a flat six or minor sixth on the way. And I believe why they have that is because it really accents on the upbeats a fully diminished seventh chord related to the key of C major. So in C major, our diminished chord is B diminished. If we want to make it fully diminished, we get G sharp, and that also lends its sort of sound to the harmonic minor. So when we're in a major scale, there's quite a bit of attachment to that minor sixth and how it relates to the interweaving diminished harmony between our main notes. What are our main notes? We get C E, G A, one, major three, five major six. So that's beautiful C Major six chord. And what exists in between. Again, it's all of that diminished stuff, the ninth or the two, the four, the flat six, and the major seventh. So the same rule applies. If I started on C E G or A on a downbeat, I'll always be playing those four notes on downbeats. A G, A, C, E, C A, G E. You can pivot at any point, and it'll still work out. But here's the tricky part. How do I transition from the first two scales that have the F sharp to this third scale that has the G sharp? In other words, how do I transition from the Dorian B bop notes and mix lidian bebop notes, which are the same to the major BBop notes, which again, has a different extra note added? Well, I have a couple of approaches for you to consider. Again, if we go through the notes that are available, on down beats in the Dorian B bob scale, these are our four notes, and you'll notice one of them overlaps with the C major BBob scale. That's this note, the G, the fifth of our home key, or in relation to the Dorian BB or fourth note. If I'm going through from here from D, and I'm starting, for example, on the D And going through the same way we just talked about. You can just keep zig zagging whenever you want. I'm on E, and then I can pull to D or F at this point. Ah, but then I'm not on one of these four notes on my downbeat. So we have to consider trying to get to this extra note that's been added at the end of our 25, leading us into the one. I'll explain. The point here is I'm going to try to get to this F sharp at the end. So of the 25. So we end up getting D F, D, B, G, G, B, G, There it is. I'm on the F sharp at the end of the line. And now I could pull up to the G. Right? I'm not going to pull down to F because it's not one of the notes that's available on a downbeat, but I could pull up from that added note to the G, and then I could from there, use the major B Bob scale, so. So that's the idea, trying to get to that added note, that extra note within the Doran B bop and mix litan B bop at the end of your 25 line so that when you get to your one chord, you can pull to the fifth of your home key, in this case, G, and then start to work through the B bop scale in C. Now, it's not always going to be so convenient where at the end of the 25 line, we're able to get to that extra note that's been added. So if you end up finding yourself on any of the other notes, there's two tricks that I'm going to recommend. The first one is a triplet. I'll show you why. So we end up getting So I'm on this C, and I'm about to play my C chord, my one chord, and my options are to pull up or down by step to notes that shouldn't be on the downbeat. But if I had done a triplet towards the end, it might have worked out a little bit better. I'm not sure I can play the exact same line again, but based on the same approach, it would be something like this. Did you hear that little that took me to see? Let's try the same thing one more time. I'll do a couple of examples so you can get the idea, and I'll go a bit slower. Starting on F, one of our stable downbeat notes, we have F, F B G, B. So putting a triplet right at the end of the 25 line allowed me to find my way onto a C E, G or A without having to finish the line on our added note that we added to the Dorian and mix Lian B bop scales. It's getting a little bit sticky. And in the moment when you're improvising the stuff is really difficult to figure out on the fly. So you have to practice it preemptively and just own one key first. Maybe it's C. I might recommend B flat, so you're able to play with some horn players pretty quickly. But whatever key it is, you want to own that two. You want to own the Dorian Bop. You want to own the five, the Mixing Bop, and find a way to properly transition to the one. Again, finish on the added note from the Dorian and Mx dan B bop at the end of the 25. Or if you're not in that situation, you're not on that note, try a triplet right at the end, so you gracefully fall onto one of the stable notes from your major bebop scale. And the other trick that you can try is just putting in a skip. Very often, we're going to find ourselves at the end of our 25 line on one of these upbeat notes because you're going to be on the end of beat four before you fall onto your beat one and using your C major seven chord in this case. So you can see that This note here is already part of our chord that we're trying to get to. So if I'm finishing on the end of beat four on this E, and then transitioning to my one chord, and then I have to go somewhere preferably by step in this case, my options are D or F. So why not? Since I'm already there, just skip down or skip up. Just literally, you could even leap to any one of those down beat notes. So we end up getting something like this. D, F, G, B, G, B, D, B, and then there's that skip C to E. And then we can rock our major B bob scale from there. I'll give you one more demonstration. This time, let's start from G. G, F, D, B, D, F, D, B, A. I've jumped from the C down to the A. Okay. So practice the super slow. I hope that last part made sense because that was the hardest part for me to wrap my head around. The two and the five share the same notes, but the one or does not. And based on the way that these scales work, where we need to be very conscious of what's happening on downbeats and what's happening on upbeats, you need to have a game plan to transition to that new set of notes for the major bebop scale. And unless you're landing on that added note that we've added to the Dorian and Mx lidian Bop, you're going to have to use a triplet or a skip or a leap to find your way onto beat one as one of those stable notes within your major bebop scale. So if you want to focus on playing Bebop, focus on these scales. Check out other YouTube videos. Check out as many resources as you can, because I think there's a lot of different ways to think about these scales. But from my understanding, that's a really good starting place, and it's so methodical. It's almost like jazz paint by numbers in a way where if you do start the right note on the right part of a beat, you should get something that sounds pretty stable, colorful, jazzy, and cool. So That's B Bop scales in a nutshell. I think it's probably the most dense lesson from this course. So revisit this one a few times and best of luck, slow it down. Just start with one scale. Go through really slow and ask yourself, okay, why do these notes work on downbeats, and why did the other notes work on upbeats? And you'll start to really see as well too why a lot of B Bop players finish their two chord, for example, on the major six or on the four, because they're probably thinking to some extent about these bebop scales. And if they're not, let's be honest. These are really cool places to finish our lines, right? They're very colorful, so or on the 13, right? So there's a lot to take out of these scales. It's dense theory. It is totally fun once you get used to it and quite difficult. So take your time with it, and hopefully that helps improve your improvising while you're playing Bebop. Let's get over to the next trick. 13. Altered and Locrian #2: Okay, Let's get talking about the Locrian sharp two and altered scales to be used over top of a minor 251 chord progression. This one lesson is a little bit less about tricks and more just about filling out the course a little bit because we've done so much work on major 25 ones where we're resolving to a major one chord, that I want to give you a little bit more context for a minor 251 resolving on a minor one chord. We can quickly talk about what to do over the minor one in terms of what scales to play, but this lesson is mostly about what to play over the two and what to play over the five. So let's get into it. Over your one chord, you could play Dorian mode, which is a natural minor scale with a major six. You could play the minor blues scale, or you could play a natural minor scale. But in jazz, you're more likely to play the Dorian as it's just a little less devastating and minor sounding, and that major sixth over the natural minor scale, in other words, the Dorian mode just has a bit more color. Okay. So with that out of the way, let's talk about what you're going to play over your two chord. There are lots of options. You could play just regular Locrian. What I'm going to show you is Locrian sharp two. And the way I think of Locrian Sharp two because I don't play the Locrian mode a lot, but I play the natural minor scale a lot or Alean, if you would. So I think of this mode more as a natural minor with a flat five. So A to A, all white notes, but with an E flat, for example. Now, in our example, we're going to play a two, five, one in C minor. So our two chord is D minor seven flat five or D half diminished seven, and the scale that's going to go over it is D E F, G A flat, B flat, C D. It's very similar to the natural minor scale, but again, it has a flattened fifth note. So A is flat in this case. Now, here's how I want you to think about this, and I'm going to relate it to the altered mode in a minute because it's a lot to memorize as a young or beginning jazz pianist or jazz player. So what I would say is think of it this way. It starts like a whole half diminished scale. What's a whole half diminished scale? It's a whole tone, half tone, whole tone, half tone over and over until you reach the octave. The opposite of that would be half hole. So half step, whole step, half step, whole step, till you reach your octaive. Again, half step hole step is the same as semi tone and tone. So starting on D, we get whole step, half step, whole step, half step, and then it's tone tone tone right up to the top. So the top half has that magical whole tone sort of sound, and the bottom half has that more complex, diminished sort of sound. So that's how you're going to create that scale. Hole, half, whole, half whole hole hole. And there you have it. So really jazzy sound once we get working with it. So I'm not going to give you any specific tricks within the scale. This one lesson is just about knowing the scales and experimenting on your own. You can try zig zagging through thirds. You can try different types of leaps working with the fourth or fifth that might be available. But the whole point of course isn't to be like, here's a Dorian mode, and here's a bunch of tricks in it. It's a little bit more broad than that with the chordal harmony and the color tones and the pentatonic scales super imposed over a chord. But I really feel that I'd be doing you a diservice to not include this lesson, because if you're playing a minor 251, you need a starting point. I've already given you some, but this is a really solid foundation. So, we have the Locrian sharp two. You can also play Locrian, which is the same scale, but with a flat two. I find myself using that one a lot less. So with this whole whole step, half step pole step half step, pole step pole step hole step, you can see we have that whole step sound on the top and diminished on the bottom, the altered scale is going to work the same way. But I guess just quickly before we get there, I just want to show you this is the chord that we're playing. So it makes sense that our scale would have the notes from our half diminished chord or minor seven flat five. We've actually added another little diminished chord in there, the remaining notes, E, G and B flat in this case. Remember, whenever you're trying to figure out a scale to go with your chord, start off by playing the notes that are in your chord and then fill in the blanks from there. So let's get talking about the altered scale and how we're going to use that. The altered scale generally gets used over an altered chord, but it doesn't have to be used over an altered chord. We're going to go deep here, so feel free to wine back or anything that you might need to, but let's get into it. So here's our G dominant seven chord. We have our root, which makes it G, we have our major third and flat seven, which makes it a dominant seven, and our five is filler. So if we get rid of that five, we can actually play this altered scale over top of this chord. But the altered scale is really meant to be played over a altered dominant seventh chord. And what does that mean? Well, if you have a dominant seventh chord with some type of altered ninth, in other words, a flat nine or a sharp nine, let's put on a flat nine, A flat in the case of this chord, and some of altered five, either a sharp five, or a flat five. But most of the time we're not calling it that. We're calling it a flat 13, same as a sharp five, or a sharp 11, which is the same as a flat five. So let's go with our altered chord having a flat 13 and flat nine. Because it has a type of altered five and altered nine, I know that the altered scale is what I want to use. But again, to be clear, if you really like the sound of the scale, you can use it over a regular dominant chord, but I would recommend just don't play the fifth. Leave it as more of a shell voicing. So here's the scale. We actually have the opposite from last time, kind of. It starts half whole, but it still finishes whole tone. So we get half tone, whole tone, half tone, whole tone, whole tone, whole tone, whole tone, or semi tone tone, semi tone tone tone, tone tone. So we end up getting our shell voicing, both types of altered nines, both types of altered fives, and that's the scale. So you have a sound like this. And really, really cool, colorful sound over top of that. So what I want to really show you is that over this minor 251, the two chord, the minor seven flat five has this whole step, half step, whole step, half step, who, whole hole all the way up to the top, and the altered scale is very similar. Half step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step hole sep till you reach the top again. So as long as you're aware that both of these have that whole step sound at the top, that very majestic kind of augmented kind of sound towards the top and something diminished based on the bottom, then that's a really good starting point. When I'm thinking, Okay, what's the locren mode and then, okay, sharp two, to me, that takes a lot longer than just trying to see how the whole tone and the diminished scales kind of get put together. And it's really great to see in the case of the altered scale the shell voicing, the root, major third, flat seven, and then just seeing the altered nines and the altered fives. Play around with those two scales have some fun. As I addressed before at the beginning of this lesson. For the one chord, you have lots of options. But for the two and the five over a minor 251 chord progression, there's so much happening in the harmony that the scales have to be quite specific to complement that harmony. So work with these, the Locrian sharp two, or as I think of it natural minor with the flat and fifth, and then the altered mode, which is the shell voicing for a dominant chord, both altered nines, both altered fives. Remember, those altered fives are most often referred to as sharp 11, is Sharp four or flat 13, which is flat six. So have fun with those, and let's get on to the next lesson. 14. Dotted Quarter Notes: The next trick I want to give you is something rhythmic based. A lot of what I've given you so far has been based around elaborating on some harmony or using some scales, but we haven't talked a whole lot about rhythms. So let me give you one simple rhythm to work with. It's simple to understand, but it's not necessarily easy to play, and it's going to take some practice. And that is the dotted quarter note. We're going to play this dotted quarter note over and over and over. And you'll see that it gives this really cool syncopated and juxtaposed rhythm. So let's break down what a dotted quarter note is first, and then go from there. When you have a more basic time signature like two, four, three, four, or 44, a quarter note is worth one beat, as many of you probably know, a dot beside a note or a rest is worth 50% of whatever it's beside. So if a quartere is one beat, then the dot would be half of a beat, and you put them together, you get 1.5 beats. Now how do you count 1.5 beats? Well, if we are counting in between our beats with ns like one and two, and three and four, and, then 1.5 beats would be any combination of two ns and a number or two numbers and an n. For example, one and two, that's a beat and a half. And three and that would also be. So one and two and three, four and one, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one. And after 3 bars, you line back up with beat number one. So one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, one, two, and three and four, and one. Try it out that way first, with counting 3 bars, one and two, and three and four and one and two, and three and four and, one and two, and three and four. While playing that rhythm that I just showed you, one and two, and three and four and one, two, and three. So on and so forth. From there, try playing a left hand chord where you're accenting, only on beat one, one and two, and three and four in. One and two, and three and four in, one and two, and three and four. Then put it together. One and two, three, and four, one, two. Three and four, and one, two, and three and four, and one. When the hands line back up on beat one, after 3 bars, that's when the cycle has completed. From there, you can try changing the notes in the right hand. So I'm going to use The minor blue scale, in this case, is going to be what we use. One and two, three, four and one, two, and three and four. One and two, and three, and four, and one. There it is. Now, maybe I want to change my chords on every beat one. Let's go with one, flat three, two, five, as our chord progression. One and two, and three, and four and one, and two, and three and four, one, and two and three, four, and one, two, and three and four, and one. Again, it lines up every 3 bars. If you have a four chord chord progression, you have to either go through that progression three times before it all lines up perfectly back on beat one or have some sort of way out of this pattern, for example, one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three and four. One, two, and three and four, and one. Poor little blues lick out of it or something like that. But you kind of have to be aware of how the math squares up and lines up before you have an approach to not only use this, but also find your way out of it. So from there we can continue on. What if I had a baseline? Let's go back to our basic 251. Throw a little six at the end there. So there's our baseline. I'm going to slow it down a little bit. Let's also try with the right hand added. Two, four, and one and two, three, one, two, one, two, two, one, two, and 34. Again, finding our way out of it in the end. But I basically still have my one, two, three, four, one and two, and three, and four. One and two. Again, you could even just try this with one note like one and two, and three and four, and one. Three and four, one and two, three, one and two, three. It's not going to sound the best. But it gets you started. And then let's start on the D. And it sounds really cool at fast tempos too in the middle of an improv 'cause it kind of just blends its way in organically as a unique rhythm that you find your way into and find your way out of. For an example, Did you hear it there towards the end? All of a sudden things started to kind of feel like they were being stretched a little bit. What's really cool about this, too, is that because everything is exactly 1.5 beats, if I get rid of my left hand, here's what you hear. Almost just sounds like one, two, three, one, like, a really simple four. But with the left hand or with the rest of the band, that's when you really hear the impact of this. Again, let's drop out the left hand. It's a very squared out rhythm, for the most part, in that there isn't any long notes and short notes happening. Everything's kind of exactly a medium length. But when you have that left hand, when you have the band, you can hear that syncopation. Again, I recommend trying to find a way into that rhythm and back out of it. You can also develop an idea that you're working with, like, for example, quartal harmony. Let's go back to our example from before two, five, one in C major. Maybe you have Some sort of fourth thing that you've started, and you're trying to get colorful, and then maybe you'll have something like. All right. So again, one and two and three, and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three, and four, Okay. So I was using D, E, and A, chordal chords, sometimes ascending, sometimes maybe going low, high, middle, and just alternating through the notes. But again, I'm using that same dotted quarter note rhythm as the rhythmic foundation, and I've applied it with one of our sort of more colorful tricks from before. This works with the color tones. This works with the pentatonic tricks. So as you can see, there are tons of ways for us to apply these various tricks together. This rhythmic trick compare up very well with some of the more colorful or note based tricks that I gave you before. I've also attached to this lesson a worksheet to help you visualize what's happening a little bit more. Because sometimes that quarter note pulse is going over a bar line, and you need to know, when am I holding a note when I'm adding a cord or when do the two line up together? When is the cord happening exactly with the note. So I'll give you some basic concepts within the worksheet to help you visualize what's happening. Also, if you're still having trouble putting this into a solo, try writing out a solo, and part of that solo we'll have this dotted quarter note pulse. Start with it that way so you can start to feel it out, and you can also visualize what's happening in relation to the right hand sloing and the left hand chords. Then from there, try to put it back into your actual improvisation. When we're writing it out, it's not truly improvised, but that's okay. If it's a tool to help us improve our improvisation, then that's okay, too. So try taking this trick, try going to one of the other categories and Okay, how can I apply this dotted quarter note trick with pentatonic scales or with color tones, or as the example was recently, with quartle chords. There's so many ways to combine it. Have some fun experiment, and find out what works for you stylistically. And that's what's going to help you stand out as a jazz improviser? I'll see you in the next video. 15. Comping Patterns: This next trick is so common and it's very simple, but I want to take you through it because I think it's really important to talk about. That is ways of dealing with our left hand accompaniment pattern or comping pattern. Let's take a basic 251 back and see again. And come up with two ways that you can try improvising in a way where you're making sense of your relationship between your left hand and your right hand. Let's get into it. The first we're going to talk about is call in response. The idea of taking a couple chord shots, maybe to start or maybe as the second instance after you've played something, but we're going to start with the chord, and then we're going to respond with our right hand. So a call, a response. A call. And then another call, a response. I don't know. So the idea is you're calling with the left and then responding with the right. So, space is our friend. A lot of people don't think about this, but music is probably about half noise and half silence. I'm not saying half the time you listen to music it's dead silence, but when a drummer isn't playing that high hat, when they aren't playing the snare drum, there's silence happening between those snare drum hits or a tail that's sort of dying out. So all the instruments themselves are going back and forth between sound and silence. So we're sort of complimenting this idea as a solo instrumentalist or someone within a band by taking advantage of the use of silence. And I think of any good public speaker, using silence to really captivate an audience. If someone goes Hello, And welcome. All of a sudden, you're like, Whoa, what does this person have to say? Their words are so spaced out. They're very commanding. In some instances, that's because of the delay in the auditorium making it difficult to speak. But I think of a lot of great public speakers and as soon as they put that space between their words, I'm captivated and I'm listening. But if someone comes up and says, Hey, right, so today, I'm going to be talking to the 2018 graduating class of Harvard University, and they just start going off, you've already lost their attention. We're taking that same approach, the idea of space. And going back and forth between the two hands. So call and response. So complimentary to that, we could try playing the same rhythm in the left hand and right hand. You'll see that if we get very complex in the right hand, our left hand is going to sort of be throttled as to how complex its rhythm can get. But allow me to show you what I'm talking about. So, let's come up with a short phrase. For example, Okay. So we could have with a call and a response. We could also have where we're complementing the rhythm of the left hand and right hand together. So we have But you could see during the triplet, it got a little fast when we played at full speed. So maybe you want where I'm holding the left hand during faster rhythms. Again. And once you practice this enough, you won't really have to think about, do I do the full speed left hand or do I hold? It's like your brain is going to be able to anticipate. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to go super fast. And if I could, it wouldn't even sound all that great. So it's okay to hold the left hand through some of the faster sections. And so outside of the context of our basic 251d progression, here's how something like this might sound over A one flat 645 quard progression in C minor. Maybe something like So it just ends up sounding really cool by complimenting those two rhythms together. And by contrast, if that's not your thing, try call and response, or what a lot of people will do is start with something more of a call and response to kind of be more sparse off the start and then build up into this big, bah bah, slammy sort of approach, where everything's happening rhythmically at the same time. And it's really cool if you kind of know already what rhythms you want to use, work it out with your drum or drummer and basis, and everyone could be playing those same rhythms, and you get some really cool, big rhythmic impact because of that. Also, this same approach could work with quartal harmony, right? So over C minor, for example, we could go one, two, four, five, six. I'm just going to keep C minor seven in my left hand. And it ends up sounding really cool. You could even try it chromatically. Again, grounding the harmony in the left. I got a bit adventurous there towards the end, but you get the idea. It has a lot of application. Try it out with a lot of the other tricks that I've given you so far, and you should have plenty of possibilities to work. 16. Enclosures: Next up, let's talk about enclosures. Enclosures is a very big part of the B bop language, and it can be used on any instrument. It's really quite simple, for the most part, but performing this on the fly can take quite a bit of practice. Let's start off by talking about the term enclosure. The idea is we have a destination note. Let's say we're on Cord number one, doesn't matter what it is, and upcoming is Cord number two, doesn't matter what it is just for the sake of this example. Going to anticipate Cord number two and one of the notes within Cord number two, or maybe another note that resides within a related scale, but we'll keep it simple for now and say that one of the notes within that second chord is our destination. We are going to enclose that note. We're going to create like a little cocoon around it with other notes. So for example, if I'm on, let's say we have a 251 chord progression in C major, So C D minor seven, G seven, C major seven. The first chord being D minor, we'll play a little bit in D minor, maybe just a D dorian scale. And we know that our next chord, G dominant seven consists of G B, D and F. Let's choose the D. So we're going to go from our first chord D minor seven and play a few notes from our scale. Now, as I'm ready to get to this G chord, there's a few different enclosure patterns that we can use, and I'll start with two of the more common ones. We're going to play one note, a semitone above D, which is our destination note, a semitone below the D, and then we're going to reach the D as we play that next chord. So it's Oh, getting pretty B Boppy. One and two and three, and four. That fourth beat, both halfs of it, four and are going to be those two notes that are enclosing our destination note. So one more time. There it is. Now, if we start a little bit earlier on the end of beat three, one in two and three. Four and one. That's another very common enclosure pattern, starting a semitone above the destination, moving a tone below, then a semitone below and then reaching the destination note. So we have 12 and three and four and one as our first example, one and two and three, four and as our second example. And you can reverse these. I just find they don't sound quite as sweet. So instead of above the note below the note, get to the note, we're going to go below above and then get to the note, something like this. Two, and three and four. Still sounds okay. Pretty jazzy. And then we're going to try the other one, where we're starting on the end of beat three. This time, semitone below, tone above, semitone above, and then hit the note. So we're a semitone below D, and we're a tone above D, semitone above D, and then we're going to hit the D one and two, and three, and four, and one. Without me talking, here it is. Mm. Sounds pretty good. So four and one or four and one. We're enclosing just with semitones or four and one and four and one. We can have this semitone above or below, and then we become a tone above or below and slowly work our way back to that destination note. So going slowly, I'm going to try a couple of these. We're going to do a two, five, one, six dominant, two, five, one ward progression. Again, I'm going to play slow, and I'll try to do a few enclosures along the way. Here we go. Okay. So most of those enclosures, I was following the rules pretty verbatim, as I just taught you. But you'll notice one of them was not on the same beat. It wasn't four and one. I don't know in the moment exactly what it was. It might have been and two and three somewhere in the middle of our four beats. But over time, you can start to experiment. So case in point, the way I've taught it to you is a good starting point. But ultimately, listen to a lot of jazz, experiment with this on your own, and see if you can do something a little bit different with enclosures so that your style stands out. That being said, enclosures are a large part of the B bop language for a reason. They are really great with this idea of anticipating chords, which within jazz improvisation, that's a very big part of what we're doing is always looking a little bit ahead, and that's part of what makes for the magic of a lot of jazz improvisations. I will see you in the next class. 17. Outro: Congratulations for finishing this first course on jazz piano improv tricks. At this point, you have a lot of ideas that you can work with, and I want you to start to think about what concepts resonated with you the most. Make sure to use those tricks a bunch, really saturate in the way they sound, the variations of them that might be available, and make it so that you feel like those tricks are really a part of your sound. And then from there, expand into other tricks. For me personally, I kind of get obsessed with a certain sound for a bit until I feel like I really understand it almost to the point where I get a little bit bored with it, and then I move on to a different trick. It's also the case that some concepts I've heard of I'm really not interested in, but then a year later, I get super passionate about them. So make sure that you're coming back to this course to review the material because you never know when there's a concept that you blew over the first time might be something that really inspires you in the future. Now, keep in mind, there is a jazz piano improv Trix two course. So if you feel like this is going in a direction that you're really enjoying, do make sure to check it out. It's all new concepts, and some of them are a bit more advanced. So if you feel like you're progressing as a player and ready for that next level, do make sure to check out that course as well. Also, don't forget there is a project for this course that I want you to complete. It's not mandatory, but it's highly recommended. So if you want more details on that project, please make sure to go back through the classes, find the class that's specifically on project details. All of the details should be outlined in that class. But of course, if you have any other questions about it, please feel free to reach out. So feel free to fuse some of these ideas. If you want to mix enclosures with Bop scales, go for it. If you want to mix a certain rhythmic trick with color tones, go for it. The whole idea here is that you have enough tricks that you can combine them almost infinitely. Ask yourself which tricks you're most passionate about and really focus on those. If you'd like to learn a bit more about my musical journey, you can head over to Cook Hyphen Music dot C. At that site, you're going to be able to hear some of the musical works that I've done for film and video games, as well as passion projects and solo piano projects. You can also visit the Cook music store where I have solo piano sheet music available You can begin to understand a little bit more where I come from as a composer. Now, of course, it's recommended that you take the concepts from this course and bring them into a private lesson setting. Have your teacher give you their perspective on these tricks. Perhaps they might approach it from a different angle that resonates well with you. But that being said, if you don't already have a teacher, I do run a music school called Cook Music School, and you can learn more about it at cook Music school. I've hired on teachers that teach everything from music history to theory, as well as classical instruments like violin, Cello, Woodwinds, and brass, to modern instruments like guitar, bass, and drums. Vocal teachers as well as music technology. So if you want to learn about music production, mixing, mastering, or synthesis, and sound design, I got you covered. All of our teachers are available to teach online. So all you have to do is enroll, and we can set you up with a teacher that's well suited for you. You can also find some of my video content on YouTube at youtube.com slash at Cook Hyphen Music. On my YouTube channel, you'll be able to find some of my solo piano recordings, some extra teaching materials, some passion projects I've worked on, and so much more. Also, if you want to connect on social media, you can find me on Instagram or Tik Tok at Lets Cook Music. So I do want to congratulate you for finishing this course, and I also want to thank you for taking The more students that engage with the course content that I put out, the more encouraged I am to create more courses. It becomes this fun feedback loop. But if you can, please do leave a good review or follow me or whatever you can do to help support so that I can create more course content to support you as a budding musician. Again, if you want more jazz improv tricks, do make sure to check out the second within this course series. Thanks again. I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you in the next course.