Jazz Piano Improv Tricks 2

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on Jazz piano improv trick number two. In this class, we're going to be developing even further some of the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic tricks available to you as a jazz improviser. We're going to be playing off the grid from the rhythms you play to the notes you select. That means we're going to be diving into poly rhythms, outside soloing and outside harmony, chromatic clusters, and so much more. It's recommended that you take jazz piano improvisation tricks one first, because some of the things that we covered in that course, we will be developing further. Once you've taken this second course on jazz piano improv tricks, you'll have enough material to keep you improvising new ideas for the rest of your life. After all, these tricks can be combined in a nearly infinite amount of possibilities. So whether you're taking a rhythmic trick and melodic trick and applying them at the same time, we're diving deeper into variations of any of the tricks provided, you're going to have a plethora of material available for you during your next solo. So whether you want to become a better improviser or simply enrich your language within harmony melody and rhythm, I got you covered. Make sure you set aside plenty of time to practice, and do go through as many of these examples as possible in all 12 keys. Now, remember, if there's a concept that you particularly like and you want to take it to the next level, make sure that you bring this material to your teacher. Hopefully, you have a private teacher, who should be able to help you develop the material further. That being said, I've gone into great detail in each class to make sure that you're going to be able to study this on your own. This course is also going to have a project where you're going to take your top two favorite tricks within the course and apply them within a solo over a jazz standard that you're working on. It's as quick as rating each trick out of ten, picking the top two that rate the highest and only using those two tricks for your solo. You're going to record yourself playing a solo using only those two tricks, and then you'll submit the video to the project resources section of this course. So now is the time to improve your improvisational skills. I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: Let's talk about some details for your class project for this course. What you're going to be doing is taking a jazz standard that you're working on, and you're going to be recording yourself soloing over top of that standard. You're going to select two of your favorite tricks from this course, and your solo must exclusively use only those two tricks. It's almost going to feel more like a technical exercise. At times, you're going to want to not apply those tricks and fall back to some of the old tricks that you used to use, but I highly encourage stay on track and only use the two tricks that you've selected. What this is going to do is get you to saturate in the environment. Of those tricks. And as you've recorded this material and watched it afterwards, you'll be able to see which of the two you're executing better and what sections of your solo you like the most. The video quality doesn't have to be fantastic. I would say just use whatever phone you have, and that should be good enough for both the video and the audio components of this project. While you don't have to submit your notes, I want you to make some notes about which parts of your solo were your favorite, and which parts you didn't think worked so well. Sometimes I'll solo over an entire song form using only one trick. Is it kind of boring? Yes. Does it force you to think outside the box? And it absolutely helps you break the routine of the tricks that you would usually use. If you feel like you've hit a wall in your soloing, and you're always playing the same stuff. This is one way to get past it. Now, on scale share, you cannot upload video files, but you can upload links. So I want you to submit your video as a public link to either YouTube or Video, and then submit that link within the project resource section of this course. Now, as an alternative, if you're not yet working on full songs, I would encourage you to try your top two favorite tricks over a simple chord progression. Be it A 251 in a key you're familiar with, or possibly just a minor one to a minor four progression, like C minor seven to F minor seven, moving back and forth to keep things simple. So whether you're improvising over a progression or a full song, the project remains the same. Top two favorite tricks. Use only those, record yourself doing the solo, take some notes based on your evaluation of the video, load it to YouTube or Video and supply us with that link, and I'll give you some feedback. Remember to take things at a tempo that makes sense for you. Let's not forget this project is supposed to be fun. If you feel like you don't want to do the recording on a certain day, wait until it feels natural for you. I hope you have fun doing this courses project, and I'll see you in the next class. 3. Side-Stepping Harmony: Let's get talking about sidestepping harmony. So what is sidestepping? It's the idea that we're going to be very close to our home key, but slightly shifted. If the song is in C major, there's going to be some element of C sharp major or B major. Since C is one semitone away from C sharp and one semitone away from B, you have stepped to the side to get to one of those notes, hence the term side stepping. Later we can talk about how sidestepping can also relate to outside playing, but we're going to save that for the next class. So we're going to be in C major, and our chord progression is going to be a simple two, 51. Of course, for all of the material in this course, I would highly recommend practicing everything in all 12 keys. But for now, let's find a starting point where we're comfortable. C major can help us build a lot of confidence and really see these tricks with transparency, then try out some of your other favorite keys, and then don't forget to practice the keys that are a nuisance that you would generally avoid. It's highly recommended that you practice in all 12 keys. So if we take that 251 in C major and sidestep the first two chords, so we have a 25 of B major, and then a 25 of C major before we resolve. It can sound really cool when we're improvising because there's this stretching effect into the home key. It's a bit of a disorienting feeling, and that's okay. That's kind of what we're going for. It's like calculated disorientation. So you will have to work out these harmonic tricks with your band because if your basis is playing a D and you're sidestepping to a C, We don't need all of that clashing together. So you have to work this out, but you can then apply it, especially when you're reharmonizing a song during your solo. You might say, Okay, actually, in this middle part of the solo, let's do a little sidestep down a semitone. We're going to double up the tempo of the chord, so they play twice as fast, and that allows you to get back on track. So instead of D, G. You'd have D flat, G flat, D, G, playing a little bit faster allows you to catch back up to the main chords within the song. So you've worked this out with your band. Let's hear how it sounds. I'm going to start by playing a regular 251 and C so you get grounded in hearing C as the main key. Then we'll try out the side step. It sounds like this. So as you can see, it really twists the sound of a conventional 251. Let's stick with this idea of B being our sidestep for now. So everything side stepping down one semitone. What if I was just to play the flat two and then the regular two? So we have D minor seven, D minor sen, and then five just resolving straight to the one. Let's hear how that would sound. So I'm going to start with the 251 and c and then pull into that. It kind of reminds me of so what by Miles Davis, where we're taking a minor seven add four and moving. To another minor seven add four, a semitone away. And as we're soloing, you can do these sort of fun chromatic sidesteps to go from one train track, the D Dorian mode, to another train track, the E flat Dorian mode. Despite these keys being very conflicted in terms of their notes and not really relating to each other too much, the harmony making that shift, especially with a full band, then makes it feel intentional, and the intention is going to be the convincer within this move. Next, we're going to try a similar progression, but the only chord we're going to play from our home key is the one. So we're going to play this flat two flat five, And then to the one. Let's give it a try. Again, I'll start with a regular 251 in C. That one feels a bit more shifted right at the end, but again, it's a really fun push and pull for that harmony. Now we're going to try out all the same moves, but instead of thinking of everything sidestep to B, we're going to sidestep to C sharp. That means the 25 that we're going to be borrowing is D sharp minor seven and G sharp dominant seven. Let's try that first trick again where we play 25 of the sidestep key, and then 25 of our home key before resolving to one. It would sound something like this. H. And what I'm doing there is taking a bit of a phrase and shifting it. So whatever you have on this first 25 litate. And then So just taking some sort of a sequence or a phrase can be a great way to connect these ideas. Again, because there's so few notes in common between these keys that are semi tone away from each other, you need to find a way for this to sound convincing. So using something like similar phrases between these two keys can really help. Next up, we're going to use the sharp two chord, then the regular two chord, and then to the one. Sounds like this. Again, using similar phrasing. It's a really fun way to shift between those two keys. Lastly, let's only use the one chord from our home key. We're going to use the sharp two, the sharp five, and then our regular one. Again, I'll give you a regular 251 to get started and C. Those are just some harmonic ideas that you could play around with. If you want to play a two a semitone down from your home key, a semitone up from your home key, and then back to the home key, that works as well, too. You can extend these progressions as much as you'd like. Just keep in mind, you don't want to overdo it as it can be a jarring harmonic movement. This works for major 25 ones, as well as minor 25 ones. I'd recommend exploring where you can put this into your own solos and your own reizations of the songs that you've come to love Remember to coordinate these moves with your band, especially the bassist or guitarist. If you're playing with one, I'll catch you in the next class, where we're going to take this concept to help us springboard into something called outside playing. I'll see you there. 4. Outside Soloing: Let's get talking about outside playing so you can apply it into your solos. The concept is simple, but the application could be quite tough. It's going to take a lot of saturating in this environment, a lot of practicing and really getting to know what you can get away with within this world of outside playing. So what is outside playing? In our last class, we used harmony to sidestep to a key right beside our home key before we would move back to our home keys main progression. So a two, five and B, a two, five and C, and then finally resolving. Now, what if all I played was 25 of C, like 251. But in my mind, temporarily, I was thinking about playing around for my solo within B or C sharp. Well, that's sort of the concept of outside playing. Instead of actually playing those extra chords that sort of act like training wheels, we're just going to go for it. We're going to play in a key that's quite different, right? Like C major and C sharp major, very different keys, but they're super close to one another. So despite the fact that these two keys have very different notes, because they're right beside each other, there's sort of this magnetic push and pull as we move inside and outside with our playing. Now, for a moment, let's ditch the whole 251 and just talk about soloing over top of a single chord. Generally over a major seven chord, I would play. Lydian. So in this case, over C major seven, I'm playing C Lydian, but we're going to move to C Sharp Lydian. Just listen. Yikes or B Lydian. Ooh, pretty outside. But the trick here, if you take anything from this class, the big trick is to play inside, outside, and then back inside again. So first, let's sidestep to C Sharp Lydian, and see how that would sound. I'm going to start off in C, move to C sharp, and then back to C. I'd sound like this. Did you hear that twist as I sort of pulled outside of C major? Now, the line I played was pretty simple. I was coming down, see Lydian, at some point, I stepped into C sharp, and then back to a note that works in C. Now, you're not always going to be able to get away with playing scales into scales. We're going to cover each version of side stepping using three different approaches. The first approach is going to be using chords, in this case, superimposed chords, not built off the root. We're then going to be using pentatonic scales followed by more full scales and phrases. So in the case of a C major seven chord, The superimposed cords that we would have, not C major seven, but moving to the third of the chord would be E minor seven, and then to the fifth of the chord would give us G major seven. So this is a really great way to pull out different colors over top of whatever chord you're playing. Because as we move higher and higher, we're moving more and more up into these upper extensions and colors of the chord. So for each example, I'm going to start you off in the home key, then we will sidestep, play outside, and then come back. Here's our first example. C major seven gives us E minor seven and G major seven as our first two chords that use upper extensions, and C sharp would give us F minor seven and a flat Major seven. A little outside sol using these chords would sound something like this. If we were to take the upper chord extensions from B Major seven, we would end up getting D sharp minor seven and F sharp Major seven. It would sound something like this. So as you can see in both cases, it's adventurous, but still safe enough to be able to execute with confidence. Now, don't forget, play inside in C, play outside, your sidestepped key, and then come back to C for the resolution. One other thing worth mentioning is when I was playing this C major seven chord, I mentioned that we had E minor seven and G Major seven. Where's this F sharp coming from? It's coming from C Lydian. Remember, for the most part, we're not using a C major scale to improvise over a C major chord. We're using Lydian. Keep in mind if you were curious about where that F sharp came from, that's where it came from. Next, we'll talk about pentatonic scales. We've talked before in the last course about how over a C major seven chord, you could play D major pentatonic. I mean, you could sidestep this concept, but now we're sidestepping pentatonic scales that are built up off of the root. Try that out eventually, but we're going to start more simple. Over a C major seven chord, we're just going to play C major pentatonic. And we're going to sidestep either to C sharp or to B. And again, we'll play inside, outside, inside. Here's how it sounds first sidestepping to C sharp. Now sidestepping down to B. Now, notice the end, we used an enclosure. Enclosures work really well with this concept of sidestepping because generally, you're pulling back a semitone to a resolved note from your home key. So if we're up in this B major pentatonic, once we're up on these two notes, we can surround our G, which is a great resolution back to our home key. So you might find that enclosures work really well for you using this sidestepped concept. The third concept that you can apply is full scales or phrases. So now we're kind of more into a free form version of soling. If I start in C and move to C sharp, it might sound something like this. Keep in mind we're using Lydian for both. Okay, so it gets pretty outside up on these notes. And again, an enclosure to bring us back. You don't have to use enclosures to transition back, but they will sound quite nice. Let's demonstrate connecting phrases by sidestepping down to be this time. It would sound something like this. Okay, so we have the fifth moving up to the seventh, and then fifth down to third through the sharp 11. Then I'm thinking B major fifth to the major seventh, fifth, down to the major third through the tritone again through that sharp 11, and then resolving preferably a side step back to your main key. Okay. So that little represents the phrase, you shift that, a semitone up or down, and then you find a way to resolve it. Now, what can also sound great when you're using the whole set of notes, in this case, C Lydian, is to play a longer scale run and then sidestep, play outside, and then come back. It would sound something like this. So as I'm coming down through C Lydian, at one point, I jumped to C Sharp Lydian, and again, find myself back to, in this case, a colorful note from C major. Now, it's a lot to demonstrate in all 12 keys over Major seventh, minor seventh, and dominant seventh, all three of these concepts. We're going to speed up the class a little bit from here. I'm going to go through minor sevens and dominant sevens, and we're just going to brush on each of these as we've gone through them in great detail over a major seventh chord, and the general concept applies for these next chords to come. Let's talk about the upper extensions of C minor seven. After C we get E flat G, B flat D, which is E flat major seven, and one skip on top of that gives us G minor seven. First, we're going to sidestep up a semitone. So in C sharp, that would give us E major seven and G sharp minor seven. Let's try it out. Now we're going to sidestep down to B minor seven, where our upper extensions would be D Major seven and F sharp minor seven. Let's try it out. Next to the sound of the pentatonic scale, C minor pentatonic. We're going to be moving to C sharp minor pentatonic, and then back. Let's give it a try, something like this. And then finally over to some phrases and more full scales. In this case, we're going to be using the Dorian mode as we are playing outside. First, side stepping up to C sharp Doran, it would sound like this. And again, with some phrasing. Now let's sidestep down to B Dorian. Let's give it a try. And again, with some phrasing. Or, again, a more full scale run. Now let's move over to dominant chords. Instead of demonstrating all three of these concepts, again, I want you to make sure that you understand the theory from major seventh and minor seventh so that you can apply it to these dominant seventh chords. Now, for the upper chord extensions, you would be choosing the minor seven flat five built off of the third and a minor major seven built off of the fifth. That's going to give you some wackier results generally. Now, the dominant chord is meant to represent tension in most genres and in most cases. You can still apply the same three concepts that have given you, but I'm going to give you a totally different concept to work with over top of the sound of a dominant chord. Going to be using something called the altered scale. An altered scale is to be played over dominant seventh chords, and it is essentially the shell voicing of a dominant chord, root, major third, and the flat seven. From there, we're going to take the second node of the scale and the fifth note of the scale, and we're going to split those notes down a semitone semitone, down a semitone pasemito. That gives us a flat nine and a sharp nine, a flat five and a sharp five, or flat five, you could also say is a sharp 11, and sharp five, you could also say is a flat 13. For now, just think of it as the shell of a dominant chord with the second and fifth note split up and down a semitone. It gives you this sound. Now, this scale is the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale. If you don't know your modes of the melodic minor scale, at some point, you will come across this scale. Again, it's called the altered scale. Because we have three notes that ground the sound, it does work well over these dominant chords, but there's also a lot of adventurous notes happening. Now, technically, we are playing outside, although we've grounded our thought towards all of this around this g dominant chord. It's like we're thinking on a dominant chord. Think melodic minor pasemtone. But to me, that's too many steps of thought. I'd rather just think of this altered mode and get to know the colors within it, so I know how I'm twisting and turning the sound of that dominant chord. I'm going to demonstrate a small solo over G dominant seven, where I start on all white notes, G mix lidian, then I'll move into the altered sound and then come back to mix lidian. It sounds something like this. So you can see it gives a very similar effect to outside playing, but you're not thinking of an adjacent scale. You're just thinking of a more potent version of the scale that offers some more color. Now, if you're going to use altered as your sound, I would recommend don't supply a fifth in your harmony of the left hand. Now, there's actually one other scale that works really well with this type of voicing, and it sounds quite magical. It is the whole tone scale. It's super easy to figure out these scales because you start on a note, you go up a whole tone, a whole tone, a whole tone, whole tone, until you eventually reach the octave. Again, it sounds very magical like Genie out of a bottle sort of sound. And then back into the bottle, right? But we're going to try out just a little piece of that so we can hear how it sounds. Now, you can create a lot of augmented chords using this scale. So I'm going to play around using three different augmented chords, G augmented, A augmented, and B augmented. As part of my solo, let's listen to it. It sounds like this. Now, this sound really reminds me of Horace Silver. If you haven't heard a lot of Horace Silver, he uses the whole tone scale quite a bit within his solos. As he is playing hard bop, he's taking the sound of the blues and fusing it with jazz, and what chord is so fundamental in the blues, the dominant seventh chord. So there's lots of opportunities for him to use these whole tone licks. I've given you plenty of different approaches towards applying outside playing within your solos. Make sure you approach it with caution and practice it a lot before you bring it into a band setting because it can really go off the rails and sound bad. But generally, if you approach this going inside, outside, inside, you will get better results. So go have some fun trying some outside soloing. I'll see you in the next class. 5. Rolling: Next up, we're going to talk about a technique called rolling that we're going to borrow from the Blues, but you can use this in your jazz improvisations. After all, there is a style of music that fuses jazz and blues together, known as Hard Bop. Admittedly, when I first heard about Hard Bop, I thought to myself, I BPOp is difficult, then surely Hard Bop must be even more difficult. But that's not necessarily the case. Hard pop is it hits hard. It's Blues. It's jazz. So Hardbop, great combination of blues and jazz. And if you want a great place to start in terms of listening to famous pianists that were in this hard pop genre, I would recommend checking out Bobby Timmins and Horace Silver, both players of the Art Blakey Jazz Messengers. Now, I'm going to show you four different stages of rolling. The first one is going to be very simple. It works on a major or dominant seventh chord. The second stage and the third stage can only be used on dominant seventh chords, and the final stage is going to be about variations, so it's at your discretion. But again, generally, it works best over a dominant seventh chord. So what is rolling? Let's consider a train rolling along. Chuck at your co choc concoct, co chuck, concoct you, good job. We're essentially creating that sort of chug, that rolling along on the keys. And it's relatively simple. Let me break down stage one of rolling, which is a simple roll. So we're going to take a C major chord, and we're going to replace the fingering with one, two and four. Now what we're going to do is play the top notes followed by the thumb, and we're just going to get used to that feeling. And then we're going to play fingers three and five on F and A, and then we come back. So this is our sound. Now, you can also use two and four in both of those positions up top, that's up to you. T and five works really well for the simple role because you get this sort of easy exchange with that hand position without constantly stretching out. But there's one little thing that we have to add. And that is we're going to scoop finger two from a semitone below into its regular position as the major third from our major chord. This works really well on C F and G because we're sliding from black notes to white notes. Now guitarists will tell you that they typically want to play a blues in E A or D, the first three open strings on a guitar. We have to keep that in mind. Later we'll talk about how you can roll in those other keys, but we're going to start off simple in C major. Now we have this sound. We're rolling into the first sound, we're sliding into it using a gray note and then playing our top notes. Now, you have to make sure for the most part that you play this with swing. It can sound okay without swing, but it's going to sound way better with swing. Here's without. Now, here's with. Now, it's really chugging along. And for the most part, in jazz, in Blues, and other applications for this sound, you will be playing with Swing. So I'd highly recommend practicing it with Swing. So that's step one. That's our basic role. We're just kind of moving along. If I was in a Blues context, I might have some sort of baseline happening at the same time. But in jazz, it might be that you have a dominant seventh chord you're improvising over. And you're just taking a little piece of that role and applying it into your improvisation. Now, for example, on F, everything works the same way. We're going to start off with an F major chord with fingers one, two, and four. We're going to slide into that middle note and then play our thumb. But now we have a B flat on this top shape. While I'm not going to go through every single shape available for rolling. I wanted to break down C and then F, and then you can apply this same context to other keys. In the case of C, we were essentially going from a C major chord to an F major chord. This chord here is F major, and we've taken the C and brought it down. This is an inversion of F major. In other words, an inversion of the fourth note from that major scale. In this case, the C major scale. Now F major, the fourth note of that scale is a B flat. We're going to be playing an inversion of B flat major, and that's why we choose the B flat and the D. Now, I'm going to give you one more quick example just to show you something out of context, something you won't use for the most part, but a more extreme example. Like a blues in A flat is something you won't see very often. But let's talk about how you would do the simple role on A flat. Now, it's worth mentioning, like I said before, we're not always going to get a finger two scooping from a black note to a white note. In the case of A flat major, we might have two whites beside each other. So this sound or in A major, a white to a black. Keep in mind, unless you're able to scoop from a black to a white, you won't always get to use that two sliding off a black to a white note, and you'll need to be ready to use a grace note from finger two to Finger three. Next, let's expand and go into a more full version of the role. In context, again, the simple role can work over a major seven or over a dominant seven chord. It's a little bit more situated to work well on a dominant seventh chord because you can start to work with its variations and generally, the sound of rolling is used on a dominant chord. But check this out in a 251. Do you know? Still works. It is possible to use on a major seventh chord, like in that example, but generally favor the sound towards dominant chords. Speaking of dominant chords, we're now going to go to step two into a full role. Now, in the case of the full roll, we're actually going to be thinking of this dominant seventh chord, and it's going to be as though we're going from a major chord passing through these notes on our way up to the top two notes from our dominant chord. Again, fingering is going to change on a case by case basis. It depends on your hand size, it depends on what chord you're rolling on, and then what your preferences. But for now, I'm just going to use two and four for this C dominant seven example. So it starts the same. We're sliding into the third of the chord. We're up to our f inversion notes or passing through on our way up to the dominant seventh notes. Now we're only sliding on this first shape. Again, we want to swing, but here's the sound. Now this wouldn't work over a major seventh chord. Because by the time you reach the top, you're playing a B flat and your chord has a B natural, and generally that's going to clash. So make sure that you're doing this over top of a dominant chord, or in the case of a 251 over your five chord. Try practicing this just at a slow speed. Go through, for example, C major, G major feels very similar. It's all white notes up on the top. F major, we've talked about, is B flat on the second shape, watch out for that. It's going to be a little bit more difficult on D E and A, but I highly recommend practicing in those keys so that you can jam along with some of the keys that guitarists like the most. So in the case of something like A major, a key that a guitarist would prefer. You'd have to make sure that you're using two to three as that grace note slide. Then we have a D major second version up to the top notes of A dominant seven. Okay, D major similar. This has more white notes up the top, and then E major, again, very similar to the shapes for A major. That's our full role. You would generally hear this on a repeated chord within the blues. As an example, regular rule on C for four beats, four on F, and then Here comes. Okay. So a regular role and then a full role when chords are repeated. But again, this isn't a course on the blues, it's on jazz. So you have to make sure that you consider how many beats do I have on this dominant chord? Is it a vamp and you're on a dominant chord for 24 bars? Then you can get away with it. No problem. But in the case of a 251, you'll have to consider, do I have four beats? Do I have eight beats? So you want to think of rolling broken up as eighth notes, one and two, and three, and four So in the case of a 251, let's say we are in F, so C domino is our five, we'd have g minus seven, C seven, and then F major seven, and that C seven is four beats. So we might get something like Okay. So one, two, and three, and four n, you get your four beats using the eighth note version of rolling, and then you're on to the next idea. So Step three is not starting from the comfort of a major chord. So right now we have the C major that we're starting with. What if I started from the top of the chord? Well, we're going to talk about a descending role. This sort of, that's the sound we're going for. Again, in the context of a solo, Okay. So when I was on that C dominant seventh chord, I just reversed things. Instead of starting from my C major shape and then working up to the top notes of the dominant chord and back. I just started from those top notes and worked back with a little slide again into the third of that chord. Now, I think step three doesn't require as much detail as step one and two, because it's essentially just a piece of it. Instead of working your way up to the top notes and back, you're just starting from those top notes. But it can be difficult, especially if you're new to dominant seventh chords, seeing this shape without the third and then working your way down. Now, step four is where you're really going to get the most mileage out of this. It is the idea of taking any one of those three versions and variating it. Allow me to give an example. We had descending rolling. What if I went Something like this is top notes, thumb, and then I'm bouncing off of these top two notes with no thumb in between. So we don't need our thumb in between all the time. It really depends on the sound that you're going for. So allow me to give you a few variations that work well for me, and of course, I encourage you to explore and find your own variations that work well for you. So the first variation is not always putting your thumb between these top notes. In the case of the descending role, it might sound like this if I always played my thumb in between. But I could play Okay. So I'm not always playing my thumb in between. Another thing you can do is at the top of the full roll, I want you to do a little trill between those top notes. So something like and then you can work your way back down. Now, you could stay there. And then resolve somewhere from there. But again, once you get to this top, you can work your way back down. It's like a little variation of the full roll, but with a little squiggle up at the top. One of my favorites, but it's the most complex is thinking of threes or triplets, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, and then it resets. It sounds in context of the blues like this. So essentially, you're breaking things into triplets, thinking of everything in groups of threes, one, two, three, so top notes, thumb, top notes, and then thumb, top notes, thumb. Those are the only two combinations you'll get, but it takes a while to recycle, so things line back up on beat one. If you're thinking, triplet triplet. Triple electo, triple electri triple electri triple electro. Maybe you're going up to a full role. That one's going to take some practice. I'd recommend working with your teacher on that, but if you've worked with groups of threes before, and we'll talk about that more within this course, I'd highly recommend that you try that with your rolling. So we talked about basic rolling. Just kind of staying close to home, staying close to that major chord, works over a major Major seven, major six or dominant seven chord. We talked about full role, which works on a dominant chord, where we're working up to the top notes of a dominant seventh chord. Taking a piece of that and starting from the top, we have the descending role, where we're coming down from the top notes of the dominant seventh chord. Step four is to work outside of the confines of the basic version of these roles and start to work on variations. Again, maybe we're not putting our thumb between everything. You can have that with descending role, or just the basic role. Another one is using a little trill up at the top. And the other one that I like to work with is these groups of threes. Okay. But again, I'm giving a baseline like we're talking about the blues. This works within the context of jazz. Now, again, if I was to have a 251 in the context of F major, it might sound like this. Okay. Also, I will be supplying a PDF that will outline the basic role, as well as the full role in all 12 keys. I won't be supplying the de sending role because essentially, it's just the second half of a full role, so it's already available to you once you learn the full role. While I would recommend practicing rolling in all 12 keys, keep in mind that C and G are the easiest to start, but E A and D, rolling on those notes is going to make any guitarists that you ja. So, traditionally, the Blues is taught through oral tradition. Someone would show you how to play something, and then you're to internalize it, memorize it, and practice it. If you are the type of player that prefers sheet music, I got you covered. Make sure you check out that PDF. There it is, we're stealing a little trick from the blues to apply it within our jazz improvisations. Listen to a bunch of jazz improvs and see if you can find some examples of rolling. I'd again recommend starting by looking into hard bop and the players that were most influential within that genre and seeing how they might be using rolling within their improvs. Whether you're using basic rolling, full rolling, descending roles or variations of, I'm sure you'll get a lot out of that trick. So start applying it, have some fun with it, and I'll see you in the next class. 6. No Butter Notes : Next up, we're going to dive into the world of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis and talk about what it means to do a solo without the butter notes. At a time in his life when Herbie Hancock was starting to reach his limits as a musician and felt like he wasn't really making much progress. He was about to play a tune in Miles Davis' band when Miles leaned over to him and said, Don't play the butter notes. Now, some people believe he might have said, Don't play the bottom notes, but whether or not that's true, Herbie heard Don't play the butter notes. Herbie thinking to himself, what does that mean? Butter. Fat. Trim the fat. Well, what is the fat that we're trimming from this scale? Now, when we think about jazz and outlining chords, there's something called shell voicings, where we just play the third and the seventh. So on a C minor seven chord, we would play just the E flat and B flat leaving the C to our bassist. Now many people believe that it was interpreted by Herbie to not play the third and seventh within scales. Let's see how that would sound over a major seventh chord, a minor seventh chord, and a dominant seventh chord. Let's jump in. Now, we're going to start with a major seventh chord. But the first thing I want to mention is that it's very popular for jazz musicians to use Lydian when playing over top of a major seventh chord. So a major scale, but with a sharpened fourth. And that's what we're going to be using as we eliminate these other notes. So if we get rid of the third E and the seventh, B, let's play around with that for a second. First on C major seven, then on D Major seven. It doesn't give us the predictable resolutions that we're used to hearing on these thirds and sevenths. Now, while the third and seventh do have quite a bit of color, the E giving us quite a bit of our tonality, the major sound, and B really helping to outline the canality of the chord, in this case, the major seventh, by getting rid of both of those, we're taking a little bit of the hokey pokey majores out of that scale, but leaving a lot of the color still. The scale degrees you get on a major seventh chord are one, two, sharp four, five, and six. Now, some people believe that the butter notes might have been the root in the fifth. Can also play around with that sound as well, too. I'm on the camp of, I believe he was referring to the third and seventh. But if he was talking about the root and fifth, so the notes you'd be left with, in that case, would just be the D major pentatonic scale. And if you took the last course, you might recall, we went through that in great detail. So up one tone from your root, you can play a major pentatonic scale, or again, try this sort of variation of eliminating the third and the seventh from that scale, giving you one, two, sharp, four, five, and six. It's a bit leapier. It's a bit more angular, but it sounds really fun. Next, over to minor seventh chords. Again, we're going to go from a variation of the minor scale. In this case, Dorian, one of the most used scales within a minor sound in jazz. So that would give us C D E flat FG A, B flat C. Now, if we eliminate the E flat and the B flat, we get C D FGA, and then we're back to C. Now, wait a second. Isn't that the same as a major pentatonic scale up a quarter? And again, in the last course, we covered that over a minor seventh chord, go up a fourth and play a major pentatonic scale. But now you have some more perspective as to why these notes are being selected, right? We're getting rid of the third and the seventh. So ditching some of the tonality, some of the minor assurance and replacing that with the idea of more ambiguous colors. Now, that was already given to you in the last course, but again, perspective is important. Let's now eliminate the root and fifth and see what we're left with. We would have D E flat F A B flat. It just feels lost, but in a way that still feels confident if that makes sense. It's very colorful, like I said, a bit of ambiguous color. Now, what's cool about that is you do get to play the third and the seventh. But at the same time, you're ditching the root and the fifth, two of the most stable sounds, but also the most vanilla sounds that you could play. You'll rarely hear jazz musicians finishing a solo line on the root of a chord. I mean, you'll hear it, but it's just not as adventurous as finishing with some color, and after all, color is a huge part of the language within jazz improvisation. Next, let's talk about the dominant seventh chord. We're going to choose C dominant seven in this case, and we're going to ditch the third and the seventh from our C mixdian mode. In other words, C major with a flat and seventh, B flat. No third and seventh. Gives us a very similar result to the minor seventh chord. Now we have up a fourth a major pentatonic scale. But there's a bit of an issue with this. The same reason that we switched the four for the sharp four on a major seventh chord. I'm also in the camp that I prefer to do that on dominant chords as well, too. Using a lidian dominant sound, which sounds like this, one of the modes of the melodic minor scale. The scale degrees that we get with this lidian dominant scale are one, two, three sharp, five, six, flat 71. Now we don't have F major pentatonic. We have something very close, but within F sharp. Ah, let's try that out over top of the C dominant seven chord. Oh. Very colorful. Sounds quite nice. Now, again, you are going to get a bit of a leapier sound because notes are being eliminated, sort of like the pentatonic scales, but pentatonics feel more grounded. This is going to feel angular and leapy while at the same time never really fully resolving, but staying colorful enough by choosing notes from your key, so that things still feel like they make sense, and they have some cohesion. Now, getting rid of the root and the fifth from that mode, let's try it out. So if we had Lydian dominant, but with no C and no G, you would get D, E, F sharp, A and B flat, almost the D major pentatonic scale. Let's try this out. That might be one of my favorites. It just sounds so out there. But again, there's something about having a lot of the notes still from that scale so that it can still make sense. To me, it's kind of like, maybe you've seen this, but As you're reading through words, if you eliminate most of the vowels and just read it as only consonants, our brain still picks it up and is for the most part able to read it fluently. That's what we're doing here. We're getting rid of the vowels of the scale. Some of the most fundamental notes within the scale. But because there's still the collection of notes around from that same key, these colorful notes, we're still able to make sense of it as a listener and as an improviser. Those are my two takes on Don't play the butter notes. I would say start with eliminating the third and the seventh, but eliminating the root and the fifth can also give some really cool sounds. One, you're eliminating a bit more of the tonality, what makes it sound major or minor. The other one, the root and fifth, you're eliminating a little bit of what makes the scale sound grounded, but also a little bit of the elementary sound of that scale. There it is, don't play the butter notes. I'll see you in the next class. 7. Tones and Semitones: D Our next trick is perhaps one of the most simple within this course, but it's super effective. Let's get talking about slowing while keeping in mind only tones or semitones. What I'm referring to by this is playing, for example, a C major seventh chord. We know our scale that we would likely want to improvise over is C Lydian, which is C major with a sharp four. We're going to go through the scale and find where all the semitones are. C to D is a tone. There's a note in between. D to E is a tone, there's a note in between, so on and so forth, till we hit F sharp to G, and then eventually B to C. Now, there's two ways that you can resolve these semitones, either into a resolution to the g or the C or into some tension, down to the B, down to the F sharp. Let's play around for a couple seconds with first resolving the tension and then creating the tension. Resolving would sound like this or falling into the tension would sound more like this. But because the sound of the Lydian mode works so well, over top of a C Major seven chord, whether we're falling into the sharp four or Major seven or resolving to the root or fifth, both options would sound great. Now, the root and the fifth are sort of vanilla notes. They're a little bit simple, so you might find that you get a jazzier or more colorful sound by sort of falling into this sharp four and the Major seven. Now let's just extract the tones. Now, C to D might be a great place to start, but we're going to see in a moment this has to be corrected, but we'll keep it for now. That's a tone because there's one note in between. D to E is a tone because there's one note in between that we hit F sharp, can't play G F sharp to G is a semi tone. A to B is a tone, but now look, B to C, Mmm. That's also going to be a semitone. I have to eliminate the C that I started with and look where we are yet again, a major pentatonic scale up one tone from the root. Again, more perspective as to why this sounds so great. Now, again, we covered this in the pentatonic scale section of the last course, but here it is again, and we've come about it through a different sort of lens. So whether we are eliminating the butter notes, we're thinking of it from the perspective of just selecting the tones from a scale, we end up getting in this case, a major pentatonic scale up one tone when we're improvising over a major seventh chord. That's the semi tones and tones isolated when improvising over a major seventh chord, let's next move over to a minor seventh chord, and we will be using C Dorian as our reference mode, CDE flat FG A B flat, C, or 12 flat three. Four, five, six, flat seven, and then back up to our root. Now, in this case, the semitones are going to pull us into those butter notes, D to E flat, A to B flat, or again, we can resolve each of these semitones into color. So we have this sound of the nine and the major six. I prefer that sound, but they both sound really good. Let's play around for a moment with resolving into the butter notes, the flat three and the flat seven, and then I'll show you resolving into more of the colorful sound. Sounds like this. Versus Now, landing on any of those sounds great. What you might want to do is start by resolving into the third and seventh and then at some point, resolve the last one into more of a colorful sort sound. Now, if we were to just take the tones out of C Dorian, let's see what we would get. We end up getting C to D. Can't do d to E flat, so e f is eliminated, F to g g to A, and then A to B flat is again eliminated. This might seem redundant, but what we're left with is a major pentatonic scale up a fourth. Again, this was covered in the pentatonics class within the last course, but we are arriving there from a different perspective. For some students, it might resonate best to think on a minor seventh chord. I'll just play a major pentatonic up a fourth. Whereas other students might want to see, Oh, I'm eliminating the semi tones, some of that dissonance or tension, and that's how I came about this. I want to make sure you have different perspectives because for different students, this information will sink in deeper, depending on the approach that I take when teaching it. We've heard this sound before, but let's check it out again, oversee minor seven. And now we're left with the dominant seventh chord. Again, this fourth note of the mix lidian mode, in this case, C major with a B flat, the fourth note is a nuisance because it's clashing with the third of the chord in my left hand. Let's raise up that note to F sharp, and what we get is lidian dominant. This is CDE, F sharp, G A, B flat, C, or more universally, one, two, three, sharp, four, five, six, flat seven, and then back up to our root. Now, what's interesting here is the semitones are really close to each other. We have F sharp to G and A to B flat. G and B flat, being the more resolved sound, and F sharp and A being the more colorful resolution. If I was to play around for a moment resolving to the G and B flat, we would end up getting this sort of sound. Very leapy because this set of notes is so far from this set of notes, keep in mind you'll be leaping around a bit more. Resolving to the A and the F sharp for a bit more color, we would get this. Again, very angular, very leapy, but none of it sounds particularly bad, just not really resolved and quite colorful. Similar to the leapy nature of these semitones, when we eliminate those semitones, we end up getting CDE F sharp, can play the G. A can't be played because it's beside this B flat, but B flat to C is only a tone, so that gives us CE F sharp B flat. There's a big leap there of a full major third. Let's try playing around with that sound using only the tones from the Lydian dominant sound. Now, some of you might have noticed this sounds a lot like the whole tone scale. CD E F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, or B flat, and back to C. But we've eliminated this flat six or A flat, G sharp, whatever you want to call it. And I think that gives you the sound of the whole tone scale, but it's almost a little bit more safe. Once I hit this note, a flat I'm clashing with my left hand g by a minor ninth. And minor ninth are generally not going to be that great of a sound. So it's like the whole tone scale, but we're not using that flat six. This is my preferred way of playing whole tone scale when I'm playing over top of a dominant seventh chord. Now, I'm not saying I don't play the flat six, but I'm keeping in mind the tension that that note can present, and I'm being sparse and careful with it. So that's it. That's how I would go about playing only semi tones or only tones over top of a major seventh, a minor seventh, and a dominant seventh chord. So that's it. Go become a master of your semitones and tones, and I'll catch you in the next class. 8. Fancy Blues Run: Let's dive into a particular way that you can play your blues scale. That's going to sound really great. Now, I am going to be covering the blues scale and the blues as separate courses in great detail. So I don't want to make this too much about the blues scale in particular, but rather just one really awesome trick that you can apply to your solos. So we are going to be applying this trick on a minor blue scale. And first, we need to know how to form that scale. So we're going to start with a minor pentatonic scale. So in the case of C, we're going to take C natural minor. You eliminate from any natural minor scale, the two and the flat six. You are left with the pentatonic. Again, choosing out of the semitone pairs available, the more choice notes, and we're going to be adding the blue note which is in between the fourth and the fifth. It is the sharp four or flat five. The function of this note generally is to sort of sidestep to a neighbor. Because again, we eliminated certain notes so that our minor pentatonic would sound very safe. But adding the F sharp gives you the possibility to land on a bruiser, something that does not sound so great. So instead, it's meant to sort of grace its presence to one of these side notes. That sort of idea. Now, let's descend through this minor blues scale. And every second note, we're going to play a note from our C minor chord. So we're going to just use index fingers to demonstrate this to keep it nice and simple. My left hand is going to come down the blues scale, and my right hand is going to come down the notes of a C minor chord. Now, there's not as many notes in our C minor chord as there is in our C minor blue scale. So my right hand moves every two notes. We're going to start with just the left on C. And as I come down one note in the blue scale, I have my E flat in the right, down two notes in the blue scale, down to C in the right, down two notes in the blue scale, down to G in the right. O more time, down to the E flat, down to the C, down to the G, and then back home to C. Now in the right hand by itself, it ends up sounding like this. In the context of a solo, it might sound something like this. So just a little pinch, a little taste of that sound and then into some other sort of little blues line. Now, whether you want to finish with something bluesy or something jazzy, that's up to you. Again, we're blurring the boundaries a bit within this course, taking some examples from Blues and how we can apply it within jazz to diversify our sound. Again, this is coming from someone who's a hard bop enthusiast. I do love Bobby Timmins, Horace Silver. That whole sound really speaks to me. I often do incorporate a lot of blues tricks within my jazz soloing. I wanted to make sure that's available to you as well. Also, if you haven't checked out Bobby Timmons, check him out. He's fantastic. Now, this run does work a lot better in some keys rather than others. You might find your tripping over your fingers. So make sure that you do try it out in some of your favorite keys to see where it works best so that you can apply it with ease in the key that you're most comfortable with. For the longest time, I couldn't understand why this worked until I just saw it as the minor blue scale and a C minor chord working with one another. Now, the same way the minor blues and the major blue scale are relative to one another, this trick can also work over major seventh chords. In this case, we're going to choose E flat major seven because it is the relative major to C minor. If I play everything the exact same way, I'm not going to adjust my starting position to start on E flat. I'm still going to start on C, and you'll see, it sounds great. Check it out. Okay. So you can do some little bunny hops, whatever it might be, but play around with it, play around with the rhythms that you select as you're applying this. I'm just giving you the notes. I'm just giving you the shell so that you can have some fun and play around with it from there. I hope you get some mileage out of this trick. We've taken this idea of diads and blue scales and sort of fuse them together, but in a very choice and select way. That's it for this fancy Blues run. I'll see you in the next class. 9. Open String Concept: So I want to dive a little bit back into the blues with you and talk about the open string concept that a lot of guitarists use when they're soloing in the blues. Let's use the E minor blue scale as this is one of the friendliest keys for guitarists, and it makes the most sense based on the way the strings are laid out on the instrument. So the topmost string, the one that sounds the lowest in pitch is an E. So if we put an E down here below on the piano, let's now run through the blues scale. But we're going to imagine that we're playing that open string as well as some notes on the second or third string. So it's this kind of E is open. That sort of idea. Again, you have to imagine there's a low pitch E always droning on every other pitch. Now, it also works really well if you put the note up above, and that is quite often how I end up using this trick. Let's bring it up one octave higher. Here's my top E. If I play down through the minor blue scale, It sounds a little hokey right now, but if I start to play some better blues lines, it can sound great. Check it out. It makes sense that the rhythm for that top pinky on E would be the same or very close to the rhythms of these bottom notes. In context with some chords, we end up getting Sounds pretty great. Now, again, it's not particularly jazz, it's more blues. But if you consider hard bop, that fusion between jazz and blues, as an available option to you, you're going to need to know tricks from both jazz vocabulary as well as Blues vocabulary. What I'd like to teach my students to start with this trick is to play the top note of the blue scale, as well as the blue note sliding to a neighbor. So the blue note in E minor blues is a B flat. So we're either sliding that up, or down. And quite often when we slide up, we'll move up one more note in this case to the flat seven D. And when we scoop down, quite often, I'll use my thumb in this case to move down to the minor third G. This sort of sound. But you can also use the E below. That's idea. Whether you're using this open string concept of one note droning, and in the case of the minor blues, it's the root. It doesn't matter if you have it up above or down below. While the lower pitch represents the sound a little bit more towards how a guitarist would sound, using it one optive higher as a top pitch still has that same sort vocabulary, and it still feels very similar, so it works just the same. Now, something worth mentioning is when you're doing the major blues scale, I want you to use the same note to drone. In this case, E. So if I want to utilize this trick in G major, I'll do it the same way. I'll have my E on the top or bottom droning. And it sounds fine. My best guess as to why we're not using G as our droning note for that minor blues sound is because the guitars layout wouldn't change based on what K you're in. So E is the note that they're always strumming through in E minor, but G major has the same set of notes as E minor. It would make sense that they would still that low E string because all the other notes that they're slowing on could be the same and it would sound great over a G major. The other thing worth mentioning is the layout of how this feels on the hand is a whole lot better than this super wide stretch of keeping a G on top and using that balloon. I can barely stretch that. But if we come down to the E, a very safe note within the G major blues, it sounds fantastic. So I would recommend start off by getting very comfortable in the minor blues environment, and then just try changing your left hand to the relative major chord. So if I'm in A minor, play around with that for a while, but then also try it over C major. Okay. So try both the minor blue scale over a minor seventh chord and the same minor blues scale tricks over the relative major chord. Now, the minor pentatonic and the major pentatonic, when they are relative to each other, have the same set of notes. E minor blues has this set of notes, and G major blues has the same set of notes just starting on G. So in both cases, we have E G, A, B flat, B and D. So at a fundamental level, sloing the exact same lines over the E minor seven chord or the G Major seven chord should in theory sound fantastic. But again, just make sure that you're droning E in both of those cases. So there it is droning a note with the same rhythm as our solo, or in other words, applying the open string concept. Guitarists have got plenty of mileage out of this, and now you can, too. I hope you enjoyed that trick, and I'll see you in the next class. 10. Phrasing 3's: Next, let's talk about phrasing threes. Now, in the last course, I talked about dotted quarter notes. This idea of playing one and two, and three and four and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two and three, so on and so forth. Now what we're going to do is we're going to take the same concept, but we're going to break it up. One and two, and three and four and one, and two and three, and four, one, and two and three, and four and one. Now, if I'm not counting, it might just sound like But there's a big difference between what I just played and what I played before. And that's the accents every three notes. It should sound more like Day, D bit, you do bad, D bid, you do, but it's not triplets. It's not one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. It's one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three. Sort of idea. Let's break it down so you can have a good starting point to get used to this concept. First, what I'm going to have you do is play any major seventh chord in your left hand. I'm going to recommend C major seven and take the major scale related to that chord. In this case, C major, you could also choose C Lydian, and you're going to group fingers one, two, three on each set of notes ascending one note at a time, like this. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, 31. That's step one, but that's not the hard part. It gets a bit trickier. Now the counting is going to get involved. It's going to sound like this. One and two, and three and four, and one, two, and three, and four, and one, and two and three and 41. I extended the pattern a little bit more because I wanted to make sure that I was finishing where the right hand was lining up with a new pattern of three on beat one. This will take three whole bars to complete. One and two, and three and four and, one and two, and three and four and, one and two, and three and four and one. And at that point, you'll line back up. I will include that exercise as a PDF, just in the key of C, but make sure that you're going through all 12 keys. Major keys, minor keys. You don't have to practice them all at the same time. Pick a few of your favorite keys and start there. Next, let's break out of this exercise environment and try it with a bit more of a true solo. Now, what we're going to do is, we're going to take our time. We're going to use a C minor seven chord this time. In our right hand, let's apply the trick of no butter notes. I'm not going to be playing any thirds or sevenths, which again is going to give us the sound of F major pentatonic. L et's try it out phrasing these groups of threes. One and two, and three, and four and one, two, and three, and four, one, two, and three, and 41. Now, in the context of soloing, you won't be doing the three full bars and then finishing on beat one. I mean, maybe you will be, but you're probably just going to use a snippet of this. Let me show you how that would sound. Okay, you can hear that that little climb up. It also works really well with the pentatonic scale. Just coming down in groups of threes. Again, it works really well if you're doing something different beforehand and different afterwards. Maybe you're playing color tones, then you're phrasing threes, and then you're doing some a blue scale line. Ultimately solos are always going to sound a bit better when they're mixed because then it won't sound so much like a technical exercise. But when you're practicing, try it both ways. Try saturating in the environment of whatever it is you're trying to execute. If it's phrasing threes, do this idea over different chords with different scales and do it for ten, 15 minutes straight. Really get used to how that feels, and then try applying it within a solo, only using that sound. And then try applying it into a solo sparsely using that sound, so you're being more subtle and delicate with the way that you apply it to your solo. Even with hands off the piano, you can practice this one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three, and four and one. Remember, it takes three full bars to complete. Then you can try it with snaps, one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one. Snapping every three beats or half beats, one and two, and three, and so on and so forth. Then you can try snapping on the main beats, one and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one. Once you can do both of those, it's probably going to apply itself a little bit more easily for when you get on those keys. So count, count and snap both ways, saturate with this exercise and then start subtly using it within your solos. This idea of oversaturating any of these tricks that I'm sharing with you works across the board. Really make sure that you're getting used to that rhythm or that you're getting used to the colors or the sound of a scale and saturating in that environment so that when you go to use it within a solo, you have that much more confidence. It's like if you were a chef, I would want you to know how every ingredient tastes that you're putting in a dish, so you have a good gauge of how much of that ingredient to use. Some of these tricks are a bit more potent. You might only want to pinch in the recipe, whereas others might be a bit more universal. The blues scale comes to mind. It's very friendly. People tend to enjoy its sound, so it's something that you can fall back on if you're not sure what else to do. I digress, but I wanted you to understand that it's really important to work deeply within all of these tricks so that you can best apply them within your solos. I hope you enjoyed this class. I'll see you in the next one. 11. Phrasing 5's: Next, let's take our concept of phrasing threes and upgrade it to phrasing fives. This is much more difficult. And while a lot of drummers are very comfortable phrasing five, sevens, nine, 11, so on and so forth, a lot of pianists miss this type of rhythmic vocabulary. Unless your teacher has gone through phrasing fives as a concept with you, it's probably something that you've brushed over. So let's make sure we lift up that rock, see what's underneath as difficult as it might be. But I promise you, if you practice this concept, it's well worth it. Even if you don't use it within your soloing, it just feels really good when you get it, and it's like solving a puzzle. That being said, I do hope you use it in your solos, and we're going to go through it in great detail. Let's talk about phrasing fives. Let's use a left hand Ostinato or a repeated phrase underneath the right hand phrasing of fives, which are going to be for now just on five selected notes. The first five notes, of C minor, and our left hand is going to play an octave, and then the seventh. So you can hear one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. We have a solid left hand part in 44, and our right hand part is going to be moving up through five notes steadily, just like this. It will take 5 bars to recycle so that everything lands back on one where my right hand thumb is on C, as well as my left hand pinky. Here's how it sounds. It's going to take some practice, but let's break it down. You could count one and two, and three, and so on and so forth. And let's see how that would sound. One and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one. Like I said, five whole bars before recycles. Now, it's important to mention what makes this a bit difficult is holding that left hand thumb for a value of two. If you find that difficult, you could try something like And then. That sort of idea. But once you've got that, come back to that left hand holding. It's just a nice funky left hand part. Now, we could also try this descending. Keeping in mind at this point, it's the top note of the pattern we started with. So when it recycles, we'll have that note with our left hand pinky. Also, in the right hand, let's go back to the ascending pattern. We can try this both with quarter notes or with eighth notes. So quarters, we get Okay. So it's going to be one note with your left hand pinky, two notes with your left hand thumb, and then another one note with the left hand index. But you can double that speed to eighth notes, so you get two notes with the left hand pinky, four notes with the left hand thumb, and then two notes with that left hand index. I'll do a full example with quarter notes and then a full example with eighth notes. Let's dive into it. Here's the eighth notes. Both examples do take 5 bars to recycle. Now we can mix up the pattern. Instead of ascending, let's zig zag through the first couple of notes and then ascend through those last few. C E flat D F G. It would sound like this. Or double time, Furthermore, you can take different shapes from your favorite scales and try moving through them. Let's take this finger one, Finger three, finger 245. Let's take that same fingering option and apply it to different patterns. We're going to use this set of notes, this set of notes, this set of notes, this set of notes, and then we're back to our first set of notes. We're essentially playing a C minor scale with sixth as our options for these shapes. Going up through these notes, it would sound like this. Or moving down, we can reverse each pattern five, four, 231. It would sound like this. And of course, both can be done in double time, and you can even fuse the two together, so when you reach the top, you start coming straight back down. The full exercise would sound like this. And as the super hard mode, every two left hand patterns, you can change from eighths to quarters or quarters to eighths. We can choose to start with either. Let's start with quarter notes. It would sound like this. Okay, so that's the extent of the full exercise, where if you can start to get comfortable on that level, switching phrasing fives from quarter notes to eighth notes, ascending, descending, zigzagging your way through patterns, and even going back and forth between these types of rhythms. At that point, you've basically internalized the general concept, and you can start to apply it within your solos. Let's go through a small solo example using some phrases of five within the solo. So we're going to play the solo over a simple 251 in C major to help illustrate how this sounds. Let's try it out. So when I'm on C Major seven, I'm working through the five notes of the pentatonic scale. Which works so well. Pentatonic has five notes, Penta five. So the fact that you can just take those five notes and work up through them, it's another great way to apply phrasing fives within your solos. So I will supply a PDF breaking down these different steps to help you out because at this point, if you're a visual learner, it's really going to help, and you're going to have to watch this video a few times. When I first learned this exercise, I had to set aside quite a bit of time to get into the zone to really not overthink it to the point where I could just play it. If you're thinking too much, it's not going to work. If you're not thinking enough, it's also not going to work. Have to find that sweet spot. But once you get comfortable phrasing fives, it's really going to be able to help you improve the rhythmic vocabulary within your soloing. I hope you enjoyed this class and I'll see you in the next one. 12. Polyrhythms: Let's get talking about polyhyhms. So what are polyrhythms? Basically, the concept is this. Let's say you're in 44, and you have your four quarter notes, evenly spaced out, but at the same time, you want to have three notes that are evenly spaced out playing at that same time, that would be three against four. Some people would argue four against three. And the same works for if you have two steady beats and you want to have three beats that take up that same amount of space with everything being equally spaced out, that would be two against three, or again, possibly three against two. I'm going to be referring to the first rhythm as three against four, and the second rhythm as two against three. Allow me to demonstrate with snaps. If we have two beats, one, two, one, two. Now, my right hand, I have one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, everything is equally spaced. Here's my left hand. So there's a steady pulse here. There's a steady three pulse here, and they're working with each other. Da da da da da ta. Nice cup of tea, nice cup of tea, nice cup of tea. That's how I was taught this using that little pneumonic device, nice cup of tea. I want you to accent the though. Nice cup of tea. Nice cup of tea, nice cup of tea. That kind of keeps the two in check. Think about it this way. I could have a song that has two main beats. So moving back and forth between these, and then improvising. Over top. But I could also have a three beat pulse and then play phrases of two over top. I'm going to take you through the snapping in such a way that you'll want to be able to progress through all of these little snapping exercises before you start playing at the piano. You could jump to the piano a little bit earlier, but you will find it more difficult. So we're going to do it like this. We're going to get things going where the left hand is our one, two, one, two, and the right hand is going to represent. Three. Now, I want you to be able to count either of these two hands like this. One, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three. Get comfortable being able to go back and forth, maybe two patterns of each just like I did. And once you really have that snapping down, let's apply the same trick to the piano. So let's play a couple C minor seven chords, thinking of it like one, two, one, two, now, my right hand snap is going to just play a single note for now. Instead of a snap, we're replacing it with Okay. So we're just going to be playing one note, and then you can start to venture ad. We're not too concerned with fingerings. I am staying within C Dorian or C natural minor, depending on the flavor I'm going for. We're just moving around, maybe diads. Okay. So with a 251 chord progression in C, you would end up getting something like this. So I broke out a bit at the end. It sounds nice. To me, it's getting a bit boring. I do want to variate it a little bit. But again, we're saturating in these technical environments, getting really comfortable with the concept, and then sprinkling them into our slowing as we see fit. So there it is. The basic left hand, two with the right hand, three over top. So the other example that we could have is where our left hand is representing the three, and the right hand is representing the two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two. Again, we're starting with chords in the left hand, single notes in the right hand, and then starting to move the right hand as you feel comfortable. So that would be a great example if you're playing in 34 or your left hand is playing triplets, and you're wanting to then superimpose another rhythm over those triplets. I will include a PDF with the basic versions of these exercises to help you get started, just in case you're the type of person that prefers to work with sheet music. Next up, we're going to talk about three against four. For this example, I'm just going to be showing you the left hand representing three beats and the right hand playing four over top. If your left hand is playing the four and your right hand is playing threes over top, It's a lot harder to stay on beat. The four kind of gets lost a little bit, so we're going to focus on that left hand representing three beats. First, let's talk about what we're going to do to kind of get things in place back with our snaps again. What I was taught for this one is pass the Gosh darn butter. Pass the Gosh darn butter. Both left, right, left, right left. In both of these cases when we're saying something to help us get through, it's always both fingers snapping at the same time or both hands playing at the same time, and then an alternation between them. So both left, right, left, right left, or both right left, right, left, right. We're focused on both and then leaving with the right. That keeps our left hand in three. To me, this feels more like three. One, two, three, one, two, three, 424 It feels very staggered when we try to count the four. So again, we're going to focus on three as our main beat. So our left hand again, is going to represent three beats. We'll choose three C minor seven chords and three F minor seven chords. Right hand instead of snapping. Is just going to be playing a single note. In this case C, it's common between both chords. Once you feel comfortable with this, I want you to start to move your right hand around a little bit. Now, it's very possible that already at this point, you're like, I can't get to that stage. This is tough. This is muscle memory stuff. This is rhythmic stuff that you're not going to get right away. If you did, congrats. Most of us is going to take a few tries. It's going to take a few good sleeps. It's going to take the snapping into the playing. It's going to take all the baby steps needed, so you can bust this out in a solo with confidence. I'm going to play a small solo for you in that same C minor F minor environment where I start not doing the three against four. I will move into three against four, and then I'll come back out just to show you how this could work into a solo, something like this. Here comes. I want to keep slowing, but I'll stop there. So that's it. We've covered two against three where your left hand can represent two beats or three beats, and then also a three against, for example, where your left hand or the band, in this case, is in three. So I will supply a PDF for this class that covers the basics, but make sure that you review this class as many times as you need so you can get from the snapping to the p. And again, once you're done with the snapping, just focus on one note in the right hand, one or in the left, get that feeling back at the keys. Instead of here, we're here Then create the movement either between chords or between solo notes, and at that point, it's just about being able to transition so you can use this within one of your solos. I hope you enjoyed that improv trick. I will see you in the next class. 13. Pentatonic Dyads: Let's dive a bit deeper into pentatonic scales. So a pentatonic scale can be major or minor, and we're actually eliminating semitones very similar to how we were in the last class, but we're being calculated about it in terms of choosing our preference out of those two notes. So over a C major seven chord, let's say we go back to just a C major scale. There's two semitones, E to F and B to C. Out of E and F, E is the favored note because it's in our chord and out of B to C. We're going to choose C because after all this is C major pentatonic. Now, it's unfortunate that we have to get rid of that B because it's such a huge part of the harmony happening in our left hand, but we do get a very great sound out of it, and it sounds like this. It's such a safe scale that I often refer to it as bumper bowling. Bumper bowling is when you're bowling and they either put the inflatable tubes within the gutter or they pull up those rails. No matter what, you're going to hit some pins, and that's sort of what it's like soloing using the pentatonic scale. No matter what you play, it's never going to sound too bad. In fact, anyone can play with the pentatonic scale, even nature. Think about wind chimes. Nothing sounds bad. It's all quite beautiful. Now, the same way that the notes from C major relate to the notes from A minor, hence their term relative major and relative minor, the same can be said about pentatonic scales. The major pentatonic has all the same notes as a minor pentatonic, just shifted down so that we're starting on the A. If you know your major and minor scales and how they relate, the same is true for the pentatonic scales. Now we start on the A, A CD E, G A. Now over a dominant seventh chord, we're actually going to get a very similar result to what we had with our major seventh chord. Here's our G mix lidian mode. G A, B, we're going to eliminate the C because it's right beside our third and the third is preferred. We have our fifth, D, our sixth E. Again, we're going to eliminate the seventh, unfortunate, yet again because it is within our chord. But this six really outlines, in this case, we're on G seven, it outlines the totality of our destination, C major. The E sort preps that it's a major sound to come within the resolution. No always, but quite often. Then, of course, we have our high G, so we're left yet again with a major pentatonic sound. So for the major seventh chords and dominant seventh chords, we're just going to cover one approach that will work for both, and we will also cover the minor seventh separately, but you'll see it's very, very similar. So let's dive into the meat and potatoes of this class and talk about two fun ways that you can play around with your pentatonic scale that we have not yet covered. Over to C Major seven. It's very common in classical music to play thirds that alternate sort of like this. But we can't really do that within our pentatonic scales because we've eliminated notes, we don't only get thirds. In fact, there's not many thirds at all. We start with a third, C to E, and straightaway, we get d to G. Again, the approach here is just to skip a note. So in our pentatonic scale, we have CD E G A. After the D, I'm skipping E. Remember there was no F, G would be my next note. Similar, E skips G to A, there's another fourth, G skips A up to C, there's another fourth. A skips C up to D, there's another fourth. So we're almost exclusively getting fourths, but with one third as the exception. It sounds like this. Definitely a different sound than what we've covered so far. And it's quite tough when you first start doing this because you have to remember the notes that you've eliminated and make sure that you're not touching those notes as you go through. So whether you're playing C major seven or C dominant seven, It works on both. So play around with those diads, playing two note chords in the right hand and moving through the pentatonic scale. Now, all of those same intervals will exist for an A minus seven chord, again, because it's relative to C, and our pentatonic scales share the same notes. You're going to get the same sort of combination of notes, but this time you start with a fourth and then pull into your third. There's the general sound. What that also teaches us is that any pentatonic melody that you have, you can harmonize with one of these notes below. Let's say the sound was Now we would have. You can really hear those parallel fourths moving around, and again, it's a very different sound than what we've covered so far. So make sure that you practice it to put it into your solos. Now, breaking up those diads can give you a really cool sound as well. Let's dive into that as the other trick for these pentatonic scales within this class. Again, let's go to C major seven and go through the different diads that are available. The So I'm going to break them up ascending. C to E broken D to G broken this idea. Now, what it ends up feeling like is one of two things. One that you're playing these diads and breaking them up, so you have this, then you have this, and then you have this, or just simply zigzagging through the pentatonic scale, which is how I tend to think about it. So again, you have to consider the notes that you're eliminating the F and the B, but it sounds like this. C, skip up, back one, skip up, and then back one, skip up, and then back one. Now, when I say skip up, I mean skip one note in the pentatonic scale. I'm not referring to a skip as a third as it is often referred to in classical music. So whether it's zig zagging up or zig zagging down, it sounds like this. Sounds pretty cool. Again, it works over top of the Dom and seventh chord. Okay. I've played around a little bit with some steps, but you want to start to break things up a little bit, so it doesn't sound too much like an exercise and more like a solo. Again, it works the same way over a minor seventh chord. We're zigzagging up through the notes of A minor pentatonic. The sound is used in pop music, hip hop, R&B, soul, jazz, all over the place. It's simple once you get to know the concept, but you have to know your pentatonic scales really well. Because again, there's certain notes that are eliminated, and there's a good chance you could accidentally play those. Let's put it into the context of a solo. I'm going to play an A minor seven to a D minor seven. Let's try it out. You hear it that sort of raindrop fall of the minor pentatonic coming down. So it's very applicable and just takes a bit of practice. There it is two new ways that you can play around with a pentatonic scale built off the root of your chord. We've been doing so much of this super imposition of saying, Okay, on a C major seven, I'm going to play a D major pentatonic. But what if I wanted to play a C major pentatonic? How can I make it not sound too corny and predictable? Well, these are two tricks that I think you'll get a lot of mileage out of. That's it for this class. I'll catch you in the next one. 14. Chromatic Clusters: Let's get talking about chromatic clusters. This is one of my favorite tricks to use when I'm improvising, and I only started using it in the last couple of years. So this technique is taking a very similar idea to grace notes and sort of sliding to a neighboring note. I generally use fingers one, two, 34 to just sort of roll through a cluster of a few notes into my destination. Let's say I'm playing a C minus seven, and I want to play a C in my solo. I might go from an A all the way up to the s or from an E down to the sea. It happens quite quickly, though, something like this. Here there. So the idea is you're going to work with four note clusters. Your grace notes is going to give you two notes, a grace note and a destination. So you can try three notes and four notes. But I say for these clusters, the effect works quite well when you have that extra fourth note. Now, you can do these clusters on every note on the piano, whether it be c123 or d12, but you're going to see once you start to cluster towards an E, you have to play very deep to get your thumb to this C sharp. So it might be beneficial to just use three notes or Instead of all chromatic, maybe we're C D, D sharp E. Maybe we're a little diatonic and a little chromatic. In that case, that might work really well if I'm playing like a blues. A notes from the blues scale. So you could deviate from the four chromatic notes or the four semitones when you feel it's necessary and beneficial. So the easiest clusters to play would be to a C to a D to a G in terms of white notes, and then to an E flat to an A flat and to a B flat up on the black notes. So you can see half of the notes on the piano work really well with these four note clusters. The other ones, you might have to either reduce down to three note clusters, or if you're comfortable playing in a way where your arm movement is a little bit more exaggerated, and you're starting with your thumb up on a black note, then you can keep everything as four note chromatic clusters. I just wanted to let you know that if some feel a bit more organic and natural than others, that's totally appropriate. Now, I should mention, you don't want to put in too many of these into a solo. This really is like salting ai. You need just that right amount and generally not too much. So if I was to play a 251 in C, again, I'm keeping this simple for beginners, maybe we'll throw a six at the end like A dominant. We would get something like this. I'm going to solo just for a minute, so you can hear how a couple of these clusters would work their way into a solo. Okay. That's sort of idea. Now I threw in a couple of lectures more than I usually would, but I wanted to make sure that I could illustrate the point and show you that they work really well, in this case, on all the chords that we played through. These clusters are not biased towards if you're playing a major seven, minor seven, whatever chord you're playing, the starting point would be to cluster into a note from that ord, something resolved. Then you can also do these clusters into some of your favorite colors. Maybe on a major chord, you're using these clusters to land on a nine, right? But if I was to use the same set of clusters to land on the fourth note of a C major scale, Ooh. That doesn't sound so great. As you explore soloing more and more, and you realize, where is their crunchy dissonant color? Where is their color that's appropriate? Where is there some stability, and where is there like vanilla boring stability? There's shades of how stable a note can feel against a cord or with a cord and how dissonant it can sound. Once you have a good gauge for that spectrum, then you'll know where you're going to want to use these clusters in terms of your destination note. But I would recommend start with going towards cord tones. They're always going to be safe and then explore landing on something more colorful. That's it for chromatic clusters. I'll see you in the next class. 15. Psych-Out Ending: Let's get talking about how you can psych your audience out as part of your outro, is a whole lot of fun. Let's talk about it. As a fun bonus trick, I'm going to show you a fun way that you can end a jazz song when the melody lands on the root. Allow me to give an example. I'm going to come up with a fake song right now, something super simple. Let's say the song finishes with a 251 in C major. So we'd have something like Okay, so just going down through the arpeggios, through those chord notes, nothing too fancy. Let's say that's the end of our song. Okay. So what you're going to do is you're landing on C, and your chord is C Major seven, super vanilla, super boring. What if I was to find some other chords that have a C? Now, just about any note on the piano can support that C, depending on how you play it, but I'm going to take you through some of the more obvious examples. So consider this. Right now, C is the root of C major. We could play C minor instead of C major, where it's still the root, but just of a different chord or C dominant, but that might not be the most resolved sound for an end of a song. We could also have it as a third. The major third of A flat Major seven or A flat dominant seven, the minor third of A minor seven or A minor seven flat five. We could have it as the fifth of F major seven, F dominant seven or F minor seven, and we can have it as the seventh of D flat Major seven, D dominant seven. Or D minor seven. So you can think of that final note C as either the root, third, fifth, or seventh of a different chord. And one of the most common tricks here is the sidestep to a C sharp Major seven in this case. So now we would have and then a sort of wash out on that chord and then then you can finish on your C major seven. But you can extend that tension. Let's play this C sharp Major seven, and then a few other chords before we finally resolve back to C. It would sound like this. So it's just a fun thing that the whole band can do. You can work this out ahead of time, and I realize that means it's not really an improv trick, but if you're playing by yourself and finishing a song, you can sort of randomize these chords in a way where it is like you're doing a little improvisation as your outro. So while this isn't the most standard improv trick, it is something you can apply to the end of a song to sort of have a bit of improvised for your out. I hope you enjoyed this class. I'll catch you in the next video. 16. Outro: Thank you for taking this course on jazz piano improv tricks, and congratulations for getting all the way through. In this course, we've covered tons of different material from rhythmic to harmonic, and of course, melodic tricks that you can apply directly in your next solo. Similar to the class project guidelines, take a couple of your favorite tricks from this course and saturate in that environment. Use them so much that you can hear other musicians doing it on recordings, and you're left with no questions about how to apply that technique. Speaking of the class project, Don't forget to make sure that you record a video of yourself playing through either a chord progression or an entire song form using only your top two favorite tricks. Now, again, you can't upload video files to skill share, so make sure that you upload a link instead, make sure the link is a public link preferably from YouTube or video. Now, if you do have questions about the project guidelines, make sure that you go back to the class that illustrates all the details that you need to know for this project. If you have any questions past that point, please feel free to reach out to me and I'll answer whatever questions you might have. Now, all of this material works best if you pair it with private music lessons. Make sure that you're bringing some of your favorite concepts to your teacher, asking what their perspective is as to how they use those tricks and find some ways that you might be able to add even more details to the material provided so far. Now, if you are looking for a private music instructor, I got you. I run a music school called Cook Music School. You can learn plenty about it at cook Music school. But basically, our teachers can teach traditional music. Band music and music technology and production. So no matter what type of musician you want to be, I got a teacher that can help you. If you'd like to learn more about myself and my musical journey, you can head over to Cook Hyphen Music dot C. There you can hear my music. You can see my music within film and video games that I've composed for. You can learn a little bit about my backstory and a whole lot more. Lastly, if you'd like to find me on social media, on Instagram and Tik Tok, you can find me at Lets Cook Music. And on YouTube, you can find me at youtube.com slash at Cook Hyphen Music, very similar to the.ca. Make sure you start applying some of the material that you're most excited about, get using it in different types of jazz and different types of genres in general. Jazz improvisation doesn't have to be confined for jazz musicians. You can use this in a hip hop setting, RMB so L atin and so much more. So after taking this course, your improvisation vocabulary should be much more dense, and you should feel ready to jump into your next solo. Thanks for taking this course, and I'll see you in the next one.