There are some really beautiful variations and reharmonizations of a basic II V I progression that you can check out and start adding to your own repertoire. You don’t always want to play the chords exactly as written, especially if you are trying to make a chord melody arrangement or an intro sound better.
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This is a video that discusses how to think about the notes that we play. Why I think in note names as well as intervals and why you need different things to play jazz solos.
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Understanding what a secondary dominant is and being able to recognize or find them for chords is a powerful tool you can use in your playing and compositions. This video will show you how to use them, understand them and improvise over them
And actually, it is pretty simple if you know your basic scales.
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One of the most fun parts of playing a Jazz Standard is that you can make your own reharmonization and give it a personal fresh sound. And it is also great to not always sound the same as everybody else who has been playing the song for the last 60 years.
In this video, I am going to go over 5 examples of reharmonizations with a lot of different sounds and level by level becoming more and more exotic.
You can check these out and have a lot of ideas for your own arrangements and never sound predictable again.
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Music theory can help you learn faster and have more options. Here’s how you work on making that a part of your practice and playing!
I think Jazz is almost considered music theory turned into music by a lot of people, and mostly by people who don’t actually play Jazz. That’s, of course, not really true but at the same time it is really useful to learn some Music theory if you want to learn Jazz and it can really help you learn a lot faster and get much more out of the things that you practice and transcribe. But it is also important that you go about it in the right way so that it does not become a weird set of rules that stops you from using your ears.
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When you solo in Jazz you use chromatic passing notes and enclosures all the time, it is really a part of the sound, and actually this is true for Jazz chords as well. There are many ways to use chromaticism in your comping or chord melody and it is a great way to add more movement and color to what you play.
In this video, I am first going to show you one way of adding chromatic passing chords that is pretty visual and easy to use and then later I am going to start creating chromatic melodies in the chords and this is a great way to get to know your chords a lot better and also gives you a lot of great-sounding options to add to your playing.
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09:40 Passing Chords And How To Sound Amazing With Them
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Functional Harmony is almost a secret weapon when it comes to reharmonizing or creating great sounding chord progressions. In Jazz, we sometimes forget that just understanding basic harmony is a very strong tool for creating new sounds, and in this video, I will show you how you can mess around with a simple II V I and get some fantastic results.
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Music Theory and Harmonic Analysis can be great tools when you want to learn jazz and figure out how to improvise over a chord progression. These videos help you get started understanding how to do that, understanding functional harmony, tonal centers, and the rich harmonic language found in Jazz standards.
The videos will give you examples of how to analyze songs and also how to choose scales from that analysis. You will learn a lot from analyzing the songs that you play.
Remember that it is more important to hear the changes and recognize the sound of the theory as it is to know the name, so working on the songs you already know well will really help you. A fancy name probably won’t.
Analyzing Jazz Standards – Understand what you play!
How To Analyze Chords and Progressions – This video uses the song There Will Never Be Another You as an example and discusses the progressions found in there.
All The Things You Are – Harmonic Analysis– All The Things You Are is a great Jazz standard that we all need to have in our repertoire. In this video I am going to go over a thorough All The Things You Are Harmonic Analysis.
Jazz Scales! The 3 You Need to practice and How You apply them to Jazz Chords– Jazz Scales can seem like a million options that you all need to learn in all positions and all chords, but there is a way to approach this that is a little easier than trying to learn all jazz scales in all modes. After all the Dorian mode is not as important as the Major or Minor key.
This video has a PDF download of the overview of the analysis – Click Here
Music Theory Is The Effective Way For You To Learn Faster – If you know you basic Music Theory well then you can easily start to add another level to how you analyze melodies and chord progressions which will help you work more focused and learn faster when you practice.
If you are trying to learn to play Jazz Guitar and especially comping songs then you have probably already found out that it is not only about knowing the right chords, there is a lot more to it.
In this video, I am going to show you how I comp a slow medium jazz blues. I have transcribed a chorus and I will go over the chords but I will also show you how I play the chords and make the comp more interesting by using melodies, arpeggios and other tricks to color the chords. In fact, it may surprise you how rarely I “just” play a chord.
The Blues Transcription
Let’s first check out my comping with the transcription, then I will break down 5 of the techniques I use to make it sound more like a piece of music and more interesting.
The next thing to do is to have an overview of the voicings. If I play through the blues with just the chords because that is the backdrop for what I am doing.
Just the chords
After that, I am going to talk about how I am using melodies and fills, inner-voices and arpeggiation to make it come alive and I am going to give you some easier examples to work with.
As you can see most of the voicings are really simple and for the most part chords you probably know already.
If there is a chord that you don’t recognize then try to play or imagine playing the root under it.
bar 1 Bb789,13) magic chord
bar 6 Edim
bar 8 Dø G7 – It is a II V, and the movement is done by moving the 7th(C) of Dø down to the 3rd(B) on G7(b9)
Melody is more important than voice-leading
The first two bars are more about the melody I am playing than connecting the chords. I am using the chords to fill in around the melody.
The first chord is just a color, after that, you get this melody and on the long note in bar 2 I add the rest of the chord but I arpeggiate the chord to create a little extra movement.
The same type of thing is happening on the Eb7 moving to Edim. First the chord, then a melody that takes me to a G, and under that, I add the rest of the chord.
Playing Jazz Chords One Note at The Time
In the previous example, you could see how I arpeggiate the chords and in that way get more movement out of a single chord.
This is something that I use quite a lot. Two examples in this blues are bar3:
and bar 7
Both are using the same basic Bb7 voicing and the notes are spread out across the bar.
In bar 6 I do this as well, but here I am adding an extra note while arpeggiating and in that way starting to have two melodic layers, something that I use to create almost a counterpoint in another place.
Notice how I actually use voice leading to go from the Edim to the Bb7 even though it is hidden by the way I play Bb7
Electric Counterpoint (in a Jazz Blues)
In bar 8 we have this fragment:
Here I play a sustained F as the melody on Dø, and then add the rest of the notes and that turns into a second melody under the F that yields the G7(b9) voicing. This is an example of adding the chord tones in arpeggiating and that gradually takes on its own meaning as a melody and I treat it like that as well, not just as an arpeggio.
Grab what is easy to get by
Being efficient is important when you comp, also because you need to be ready to react to what is happening around you.
One of the ways I use block chords in comping is to just change the melody and keep the same chord which is what I am doing in bar 9 on the Cm7.
Improvising with the harmony
Since you are improvising when you comp then you can also change the chords a bit. The final turnaround has two examples of this. The 2nd chord is written out as a Db7, though you would expect a G7 there I play (and think) Db7
Whenever you have a dominant chord that resolves then you can choose to use the tritone substitute. That is what I am doing here. And added bonus is that the Db is the #9 of Bb which makes it sound like a harmonized blue note. That is also why I have that note at the top of the chord. In Music context is everything.
In the last bar, I am also changing the harmony, but I am doing so by delaying the F7. II V cadences are very flexible and you can often get away with leaving out one of the chords or as I do in this case, leave the F7 until beat 4 and then use it almost as a chromatic leading chord for the Bb7 in the next chorus. The quarter note triplet rhythm also adds extra energy by being a sort of tension against the groove.
Learn some amazing drop2 voicings
The majority of chords that I use in this video are drop-2 voicings, and a lot of the other ones can easily be seen as derived from drop2 by being drop2 without a root note for example. So studying drop2 voicings and being flexible with them is very useful if you want to be good at comping and free to choose what to play.
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Playing Jazz Chords is a huge chunk of what you do when we play Jazz on the guitar. It is what we need for comping, chord melody arrangements and, chord solos.
Learning new chord voicings and especially learning to use new chord voicings can be very difficult and often a lot of time is wasted just playing inversions and exercises when that is not how you would playing the chords if you are playing a piece of music.
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