A Beautiful Warm-Up For Jazz Chords
Playing Jazz chords is one of the most fun parts of Jazz, but the exercises are often boring and uninspiring. The most effective way to practice chords is to use them. Let me show you how to turn a few basic jazz chords into an excellent warm-up exercise that will give you a fun way to level up your skills with Jazz Chords.
It is very similar to how Joe Pass thinks about chords and chord melody. His priority is to always have something moving when he plays solo guitar.
I will cover 5 levels of this, start simple and end up very demanding! I will use a turnaround to keep it short, but it works just as well with a complete song, and you probably want to try that. Later in the video, I will also talk about the 3 things that any good warm-up should connect to really work and not be a waste of time.
Level #1 – The Basic Shell
You probably know the basic chord voicings already. Start with shell voicings, a very efficient and flexible way to play 7th chords.
For a turnaround in C major, you could use these voicings.
Notice that I am using a secondary dominant, A7, to get to the Dm7 chord. As Joe says, we want it to keep things moving!
This Cmaj7, and then the A7 taking us to the II V: Dm7 G7 and back to Cmaj7.
In the beginning, play the chords a few times, then add some simple rhythms to breathe life into your comping.
Playing the groove with just a round of quarter notes is an excellent place to start.
You want to feel or hear that in the back of your mind once you play more open rhythms.
Starting with playing the chords as long notes might seem too simple for a turnaround, but remember that you can use longer or less familiar progressions as well. Then, it makes a lot of sense to use long notes to get the sound of the chords into your system.
Level #2 – The Split
Having played level #1, you have the harmony and the tempo in your ears. We often underestimate these two things when it comes to playing chords, but you need to internalize tempo and harmony to play well and become freer.
Now, you can add our simplest way to have a melody in the groove: Low and high, like we think of a drumkit with bassdrum and snare or a bossa nova bassline. Luckily, that is very simple for shell voicings since they have a natural split between bass and chord:
And you can already sound pretty amazing working with this, plus you can hear how open it is for you to react to a soloist or leave room for something else. You will see in the following levels:
This level is still easy to do, but you can also hear that it is a great way to keep expanding your repertoire of rhythms. If you want rhythm inspiration, I think the best place to listen is piano players and drummers. Try to check out Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly with Miles Davis; they have very strong and clear rhythmical ideas you can take into your playing.
Level #3 – A Bit Of Bass
I’ll get to the 3 essential ingredients of a warm-up, but first, let’s add a bit of bass. You already have the shell voicings split into two layers. All that needs to happen is opening up which low note you use under the chord. Later, You will see me open this up more than what I show you in this example, but here is a good place to start; remember that this shouldn’t be a walking bass, but I’ll explain that after the example.
This is surprisingly simple; I am adding extra notes that are easy to play and make sense with the chord, so for the Cmaj7, I am adding a G to get up to the A7.
The E is great on A7 to move to Dm7,
and later, you’ll see me extend this into a chromatic approach as well. An F is moving from Dm7 to G7, and finally,
a D to get from G7 to Cmaj7.
It’s all just about chord tones.
As I mentioned then, this is not there to get you into playing chords and walking bass, even if you could now turn it into that quite easily like this:
You want to keep it more open and give yourself more room to play different rhythms. The walking bass will lock you in and stop you from interacting and developing your comping. But you can work on that separately; You can check out this video for that:
Instead, you want to play more like this next example. As you will hear, it is more open, and you have a lot of freedom with the rhythm of the bass notes:
Now, we only need one more thing to complete this, but that will get a bit complicated, luckily Joe Pass has a solution.
The 3 Ingredients of a Solid Warm-Up Exercise
Usually, when you think of warming up, you think of moving your fingers and maybe getting your left and right hands synchronized, but for playing music, there are other things you need to get to work together as well.
Of course, the physical aspect is a part of it, but you also want to get your brain started thinking about music. In this case, that means thinking about rhythms, other bass notes, and what you will see me add at the next level; I am sure you can guess what it is.
There is an old low-quality video of Pat Metheny warming up. I think it is from a masterclass in Italy.
This video always blew my mind. It is very inspiring and a great example of how you want to work on technique but also about hearing, and making music, really getting your ears to work together with your hands. That is why it is important to warm up with real music and not only exercises. This Metheny video demonstrates all of this perfectly, with Metheny clearly making the exercises into music while also warming up.
Let’s move on to the next level and add the last missing element to this warm-up before I’ll show you how to make it difficult!
Level #4 – What To Do With Those Top Strings
The bass is on the low strings, and the chord is on the middle string set,
so now you want to add the top string set with room for melody. The point of this is to warm up and be able to play it, and you want to accept the limitations and keep it simple. So, you should be fine with only having one or two options for melody notes. The point is that even if you add only one note to the chord, you have two notes to make a melody, and you get creative with that and the rhythm.
First, ease into it and try something like this without moving too much and keeping bass movement and rhythm simple:
And then you can start adding back the other things, but check out how something is still missing:
As you might have noticed then, I did not add the high e string yet, and doing that is often easier like this:
In this example, you have everything happening, and as you can see then, I am also adding a rootless version of the Dm7 chord.
That is an option as well; you need to get used to splitting things up. The way I think about this is similar to how Joe Pass describes playing solo guitar:
When playing like this, you are working on THAT. An important thing to point out here is that the easiest way to get to this type of playing is to think about chords in the same way he does, something that I go over in this video. I’ll link to that in the video description if you want to check it out. But maybe check out the last level first; it is pretty useful.
Level #5 – You Didn’t See This Coming!
For these two, synchronize the audio but level the camera mic in there so I can use that for the metronome.
A few things can really hinder the development of this type of playing, but I’ll return to that in a bit.
The way you get started working on this is by taking an easy tempo and a progression you know you can play. So Start easy, and play through the chords as I described in level #1. If it is a short vamp like this, then you can repeat it a few times using the shell voicings and gradually open it up. And, of course, you want to use a metronome because how useful is it if you can’t play it in time?
Once you feel comfortable working with this progression, you can level it up by moving to another key. That might sound like it is making it difficult for no reason, but when you do that, you have the sound of the chord progression in your ears, and you can lean on that while solving the technical problems and getting the flow in there with the new key. Moving it to another key is also one of the best ways to understand how progressions work and get the building blocks that make it easy to learn songs.
This is especially useful with these short progressions, which are found in songs in different keys, and like this, you are now working on getting them ready for other songs and just making your skills more flexible with chords in general.
The Wrong Way To Think About Chords
But you won’t develop these skills if you can’t connect the different chords you play and spend energy on thinking in separated groups like Drop2, triads, and all that. Instead, you need to start thinking about the chords in a way that helps you make music, and that is also the approach you see Joe Pass using, something I explain in this video.
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