Tag Archives: chord progression jazz

Can You Do This On The Chord Progressions You Know?

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You practice improvising jazz solos over progressions and spend hours or days learning to solo over songs. One thing that we mostly leave almost random is when do we know it. How do you answer if you know a song or a chord progression? Having a way of judging how well you know a song is very important but also difficult to really describe.

In this video, I am going over 4 exercises that I use and that my students use to learn chord progressions. Two are technical and two are more about being musical and working on playing what you hear.

I find that learning Songs and Chord Progressions is extremely important for learning jazz or jazz guitar, so if you have any thoughts on when you know a progression or exercises that are useful then please leave a comment.

Content:

0:00 Intro – When Do You Know A Chord Progression?

0:37 4 Exercises – Two Technical, Two Musical – Know what there is and Play What You Hear

1:15 The Turnaround – Scales

1:52 #1 Only Using The Arpeggios

2:25 Basic Technical Exercise

2:45 Solo only using Basic Chord Tones and Arpeggios

3:27 #2 Never Ending Scale Exercise

4:24 The Scale version

4:51 Using Diatonic Arpeggios instead of the Scale

5:11 The Diatonic Triad version

5:52 #3 Rubato Solo from chord to chord

6:24 The Exercise and the Goal

7:01 Giving you time to listen to what you hear in your solo

7:36 #4 Motif Exercises

8:16 Learn from Wes Montgomery

8:42 It is a great measure of how free you are on a progression

9:04 Hearing motifs and then playing them.

9:27 What Exercises do you find very useful? Leave a comment!

9:46 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

Improvise using Target Notes

One of the core ideas that I used when I learned how to improvise over chord changes was using target notes. This method took me from working on Rhythm Changes to Giant Steps. It is such a strong concept that it will help you deal with any progression.

Rhythm Changes – Target Note Strategies

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Jazz Chord Progression – Knowing the blocks that make up the Jazz songs

A Jazz Chord Progression is made up of smaller blocks of progressions. This video will go over the three most important types of blocks or progressions that you need to know in order to understand the chord progression of a jazz standard. These will help you memorize and play jazz songs and make it possible for you to get better at sight-reading jazz lead-sheets.

Content:

0:00 Intro – Thinking in blocks of chords – for memorizing and transposing

0:28 The three building blocks that cover most jazz standards

1:06 Block 1 – The Key and the basic cadence

2:10 The Turnaround – creating a loop

2:52 The Substitute for the Tonic: III VI II V

3:14 Block 2 – Secondary Cadences and dominants

3:42 List of Cadences

5:12 List of Secondary dominants

6:00 Block 3 – Subdominant chords in major

6:25 The Country version of a IVm chord

7:15 Common variations of IV IVm progressions in Jazz

8:40 Why think in blocks or groups of chords?

9:15 Did I miss a progression or a chord? Leave a comment.

10:07 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page