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
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.
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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
The triad is one of the strongest melodies that we have. It is a part of so many famous songs that it makes sense to work on using triads when playing a jazz guitar solo.
In this lesson I will go over the triads you can use for all the chords in a 12 bar Jazz Blues in the key of F. I also will talk about how I use some of these triads in a solo that I played and transcribed. At the end of the lesson I will also go over some exercises that are useful if you want to be more flexible when using triad based improvisation.
Getting started with Triads
The first thing we need to do is to find some triads for each of the chords in the 12 bar blues.
The chord progression is shown here below:
In this next part of the lesson I will quickly go over the different triads that we have available.
Finding triads for the I and the IV chord
In the blues the I and the IV chord, in this case F7 and Bb7, are more or less identical. They are both mixolydian sounding dominant chords.
The triads that we have available are found on the root, 3rd, 5th and 6th of the scale:
F7: F major, A dim, C minor and D minor
Bb7: B major, D dim, F minor and G minor
Using Harmonic minor to pull to the IV
On the F7 in bar 4 I have an F7(b9) which is there to pull even stronger to Bb7 in bar 5. The scale I am using on this chord is F mixolydian b9,b13, also known as Bb harmonic minor.
The triads we get from this scale are:
F7: F major, A dim, Cdim and Edim
Triads for the #IV dim chord
On the #IV dim in bar 6 I use the C harmonic minor scale. This scale is both close to the F7 chord and contain the B diminished chord.
Bdim: B dim, D dim, F dim, Ab dim
A secondary dominant resolving to minor
The D7 in bar 8 is an auxiliary dom7th chord used to take us to the Gm7 in the final cadence of the blues.
Since it is a dom7th chord resolving to a minor chord the scale that fits on this chord is a harmonic minor scale. In this case the G harmonic minor scale.
D7: D major, F# dim, Adim and Cdim
The II Chord in a major cadence
On the II chord I have three triads. Just the basic triads found on the root, 3rd and 5th:
Gm7: Gm, Bb, Dm
The Altered Dominant
The C7 in bar 10 is an altered dominant. The C7 altered scale is the same as Db melodic minor and the triads we can find here are a little different than those on the other chords:
C7alt: Dbm, Eaug, Gb, Bbdim
Guitar Solo with only triads
The solo is written out here below. In most of the bars I am only using one triad so it should be fairly easy to follow.
The first bar is using the basic F major triad in 1st inversion. On a blues you can easily use the triad on the root, and in fact this is a very good triad to get the blues sound across.
On the Bb7 in bar 2 the triad used is again 1st inversion. Here I use the triad found on the 3rd of Bb7: D dim.
Returning to the F7 the triad used is Dm. The Dm in bar 3 is “voice-lead” into an Eb dim triad in bar 4. The Eb dim triad is a great to get the F7b9 sound across.
In the Bb7, Bdim F7 section in bars 5-7 I have an alternative progression that makes sense in another way that the chords move under it. The triads use are F minor, F dim, and F major.
On the D7b9 the triad used is an F# dim.
In the final cadence in bars 9 and 10 I start to use more triads per bar. On the Gm7 it is a combination of a Bb major and a G minor triad. The C7 alt combines Gb major and E augmented triads.
The two triads on the C7 altered chord actually form a triad pair because they don’t have common notes. You can look up more of my lessons on triad pairs here: Triad Pairs
Getting more rhythms down
A bonus feature with using the triads like this is that you only have three notes. The fact that you only have three notes will force you to be more creative with the rhythms and I actually think that this is a good enough reason on it’s own to start working on this!
I will probably make a video on this approach at some time, let me know if you are interested.
Getting more flexible and opening up your abilities with the triads
As you can probably see I don’t only play the triads in root position from the root to the 5th, and there are a lot more ways to make melodies with them.
To get more options when using the triads I have included a few exercises that you can work on.
This first exercise is to just simply play the diatonic triads through the scale. This is important to be able to find the different triads for the chord and of course also to be able to play them in the context of the scale where the underlying chord is found.
To build a bigger overview I would recommend that you also check out the other inversions as well. Here are the 1st inversions of the diatonic triads
and the 2nd inversion:
Besides having the overview of the diatonic triads in a position it can also be very practical to know the triad in this position as shown here below.
Another useful exercise would be to play the position version of the triad in inversions.
Exploring more melodies
A final idea is to mix up the order of the notes. If you think of a triad as 1,3 and 5, then you can also make a lot of other melodies by changing the order of the notes. The example here below is showing the diatonic triads played in a 3 1 5 pattern through the scale.
Adding the triads to your vocabulary!
Of course the example solo in this lesson is a bit radical in the sense that while it can be useful as an experiment to work like this and see what you can come up with. In the end you want to work on the process of finding the triads and you also want to try get used to make “alternative” chord progressions that you can use for solos.
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The minor II V I can be a difficult chord progression to play on and have a varied vocabulary on. In this video I am going to go over how you can approach it in several different ways with Phrygian Chords, Melodic minor and Tritone Substitutions.
In the video I will demonstrate the different Minor II V I approaches and talk about how to use them both in terms of comping, voicing choices et and also soloing and arpeggios.
I also talk a bit about what will fit with the melody of a piece.
Analyzing Chord progressions is something we all do as Jazz Guitar players. We need to understand Jazz Harmony in order to play good solos and to improve our Jazz Comping.
Here’s what most people seem to get wrong: Understanding the chords in the context of the song and not just looking at what type of chord it is.
The way we apply Music Theory to our harmonic analysis of a song decides how well we understand the chord progression and helps us play better solos.
In this video I will go over 5 types of progressions that if you can use to better understand the functional harmony that you find in a jazz standard.
Reharmonizing and interpreting chord progressions like a 12 bar jazz blues is a very important part of improvising in jazz. In this video I will take a Bb Jazz Blues and go over a few fairly simple ways to get other sounds on the first 4 bars. It should open some new ideas and widen your knowledge of jazz harmony and jazz theory.
I discuss how I come up with the ideas and how I both improvise and comp with the “new” sound. Often making the chord progression more modal gives you a lot of interesting choices in terms of reharmonization and scale choices.
List of contents
0:32 Overview of what is covered in the video 0:44 Comping and Soloing with alternative changes and sounds
1:10 Standard Blues Changes solo for Reference 1:48 Making the Blues modal
2:12 Lydian b7 as a “different sound” 2:45 Lydian b7 Guitar Solo example 3:36 Structures used for Lydian b7 3:50 Triad Pairs: Bb + C 4:03 Ab Augmented and Bb 5:02 Gm and Ab Augmented 5:08 Bb7(b5) Arpeggio 5:21 FmMaj7 Arpeggio
5:41 Bb Phrygian Guitar Solo 6:32 Bb Phrygian as a Sound on a Bb Blues 6:43 Bmaj7(b5) chord as a Bb7sus4(b9) chord 7:09 Fm7b5 voicing 7:14 Db7 voicings 7:49 Coloring Blues Phrases with Phrygian chords 8:28 Using the Bmaj7(b5) arpeggio
8:43 Whole step dom7th Guitar Solo 9:31 The thinking behind the reharmonization 9:58 Playing Coltrane Changes on a Bb Blues 10:15 Explaining how the chords work 11:05 Comping Description 11:46 Soloing Description, target notes 12:20 Reharmonization in solos and interaction
12:54 Modal Altered Scale Guitar Solo 13:43 The Altered dom7th and extending it to 4 bars 14:26 Voicings (E7/Bb7alt) 14:53 Soloing: Important clear target notes 15:28 The Mysterious Triad 15:56 Dmaj7(#5) arpeggio
16:47 Taking these examples further. 17:12 Using the chord voicings to learn to solo 17:30 Thoughts on soloing with superimposed changes 17:48 Other Reharmonizations and modal sounds 18:10 How to come up with reharmonizations
A great way to write better chord progressions is to check out reharmonization techniques and chord substitution. You can build your jazz theory or jazz harmony vocabulary like your solo vocabulary.
In this video I am going to take a I VI II V and go over 30 different ways of playing this progression. Some of the very common ones and also a lot that are more advanced or modern. Hopefully you can use the chord progressions to get some new ideas and techniques for reharmonization or for your own compositions!
0:00 Writing better chord progressions 1:24 The basic turnaround and some variations 4:22 The I I7 IV V 5:34 The Radiohead turnaround 6:09#IVdim in the standard turnaround 7:12 The Ladybird Turnaround 8:43 Getting less functional and more substitutions 9:55 Reinterpreting other chords in the progression 11:04 The “Inner Urge” idea 11:49 Major 3rd tonalities 12:23#IV instead of the V 14:42 Same interval in the root movement 16:31 More Poppy sound without dom7th chords 16:45 Same melody note 17:42 IVm type chords instead of V 19:09 Upper-structure resolving passing chords 19:54 How to use the vamps and the exercises
Reharmonization is a great tool to add some interesting sounds or surprises to you Jazz Standards or Covers. This video will take the jazz standard Body and Soul, analyze the harmony of the A part and go over some of the more subtle but effective things you can do with reharmonizing the chords.
The video covers different reharmonization techniques and offers some options for an arrangement of this jazz ballad.
If you are writing a chord progression or making reharmonization then you want to check out what options you have available in jazz harmony. This video is going through 60 chords and talk about how they are related to C major key and show jazz chord progressions that contain them.
I am also referencing chord progressions of jazz standards very often.
The chords that we find in a chord progression in almost any genre will more often than not contain chords that are not diatonic to the scale of the key. So the amount of chords in a key is bigger than the diatonic chords found in the scale, but how big?
