7 Way To Practice Bebop To See Quick Improvement

[Music] welcome to the jazz penal school podcast where we have one mission that is to help as many interested people around the world learn and improve a jazz piano by providing structured and organized jazz piano education I'm better than Lowe I'm your host as always and thank you so much for joining me this is episode number 120 this is gonna be 7 ways to practice bebop and you know if you're new to jazz piano school you can visit our JSP on school.com /jp s podcast to hear the full audio version this is a Youtube version and if you're new simply check us out at jazz piano school comm we have a free blog free podcast for your transcriptions free look at the day we got a lot of free information we also have a membership options as well if you want to take your learning one step further so with that being said let's dive right into this episode so the first way and the first thing you want to learn before practicing bebop is is honestly how be Bob works and this is going to kind of come along with a bebop scale well what a bebop scale is is basically it's gonna be a scale but what happens in bebop if I play just check my levels here in bebop we want our chord tones to fall on down beats this solidifies the harmony when we are playing jazz right or bebop in in all types of improvisation not just bebop it solidifies the harmonies so if I'm playing a C minor 7 and I'm soloing over this if I play the chord tones on down beats right 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 right it's gonna solidify the harmony and the sound of the harmony just reinforces the harmony whereas if I was playing the C minor 7 but I'm playing all the extensions or you know non chord tones on down beats gonna sound like this [Music] it's gonna sound very strange right so that's one general rule of thumb you should know immediately okay and what a bebop skill does is that if I were to take a major scale and I were to continue this up once I get past one octave all of my chord tones are gonna be on down beats so one here in the first octave there on down beats one and two and three and four and one and two and three so as I continue up my non chord tones are on downbeat sound we don't want that right so if we take a mixolydian scale if I'm soloing over at C dominant seven chord all right here's my mixolydian scale what we want to do is add in a passing tone which is essentially how the be-bop scale came to be it's called a mixolydian bebop scale or c7 bebop scale the passing tone allows us to continue up the scale with our chord tones on down beats [Music] right you see that so as I continue up all my chord tones are following on down beats right so in that way as we're as we're playing you know however we're playing if I continue up or down either way my bebop scale is going to align and sound great right otherwise after the first octave it's not gonna sound that great so there's two bebop skills you want to start practicing you want to practice these bebop scales from the roots the thirds the fifths in the seventh of the scale and what do i mean by that well you practice your skill going up from the root alright you can practice one octave two octaves up you know all up all down up and down however you want however however many different configurations in jazz piano school when you remember we give you a lot of different configurations just to make sure you're mastering the concept right you practice from the third going up right maybe to the third maybe back down maybe from the fifth right maybe from and then from the seventh so you want to do all of these and again you can go up so I might just go up from the from all the chord tones [Music] and then I might come down with all the chord tones and then I'll start from the 7 you get the idea right and then up and down up and down so you do one octave two octaves three octaves it's completely up to you up to your technical abilities right so that's the first thing is your dominant bebop scale is going to include this passing tone in between the 7 in the 1 so practice all your dominant bebop scales I'm gonna give you two bebop scales the other bebop scale you're gonna learn is the major six bebop scale now back in bebop they didn't really use major seven chords much major seventh chords more of a modern sound actually they use the 6th chord right so this 6 chord the bebop scale I'm going to show you for that is going to be this we're gonna have a passing tone between the 5 and the 6 and this is going to ensure that all of our chord tones going up and down are going to land on down beats right so if I continue up so I'm back at C on down B and I can continue up ok so again you want to do the same thing for your major six bebop scale practice all the different the starting the scale from the different chord tones and then a lot of people right now they're like well right now I don't want to just practice scales right let me turn this volume down here just a little bit I don't want to just practice scales like how does this implement well this is the first step right you need to understand the flow in the lines ok so many different fast lines are simply scales like if you look at a lot of fast lines that people play there just simply scales so going down like if I played bebop scale going down right maybe in 2/5 [Music] that's just bebop skill right I'm not adding any approach notes or anything yet I did do that see well just my brain just kind of freaked out there it's also not easy right but again that's just be up scale so if you want to learn these in me a lot of the fast lines you're not gonna be playing all these different approach outs you know you know that's very difficult as well but your first step to get there is just to learn the movement the up-and-down flow of the lines that way you can just move up and down the piano and that actually is music so when people are like I don't want to learn how to play scales scales are still music I mean it's just our thought and our limiting beliefs that we have attached to the the process of playing scales you know so many of my improvisational lines are scales they're just scales like and if you don't know how to play them then that's a huge part of a musical improv area that you're missing okay so trust me when I tell you that I just move up and down these scales lots okay we're you're gonna move up and down the scales lots for your improv as you start to get brighter okay so that's point number one point number two is going to be approached notes there's lots of different types approaches here I'm gonna teach you for them okay the first one is going to be chord skill above so when we approach the chord tone first oh I'm sorry I skipped one let me backtrack sorry number two okay we want to practice landing on chord tones for improvisation so if I go and I'm about to solo right when we solo we should be landing on court tones just like I talked about in our improvisation and it doesn't matter if we're moving up or down like we could be moving around we want to put those chord tones on downbeat so I might say this [Music] right all of my downbeats were on core tones I forget what I played here right all core tones on downbeats this is a very beginner step but it needs to happen in order to solidify that you're actually moving through the harmonies when you're hitting these chord tones you're gonna be able to connect the changes in any tune okay so if my C major moves to an a-flat major seven moving to a G flat dominant seven moving to an E major seven when I can hit chord tones on the downbeats of those chord changes it doesn't matter what I play I mean I could be sewing over giant steps as long as I'm doing that whatever you're playing is gonna sound good right so if I go [Music] you know that's a very kind of beginner ish example because I'm moving super slow but that's the main goal and you want to practice this over your to five ones five two ones just simple major to major chord progressions like just move just pick two chords and move from chord to chord and practice that transition so I'd start out say so I landed on the third there now maybe I pick another note to land on landed on the fifth there right so I'm starting and then pick a different chord tone to start on right maybe start on the third this time I landed on the fifth maybe I go up and then down pick a different direction I mean there's there's so many different option knobs for practice like we have them all in jazz piano school but for you just kind of mess around with the different different things I prefer more of a systematic approach where we're starting on all the chord tones we're moving up moving down getting in all the different variations so that way it's all secured after your gut and going through the practice exercises but just when you go ahead and start just fool around with this stuff maybe you go to a b-flat major seventh chord instead [Music] right so I landed on the fifth there maybe I'd go up now instead of down right maybe I come back down you know I would have to land there right you can add skips - it doesn't have to all be scaler right you can add rest it doesn't matter either I could just do this that's a very simple way to just practice landing on chord tones and if you do this and master it trust me you're gonna be a hundred times better than you previously were I can guarantee you it's it's it's instant progress in your improvisational efforts okay number three is gonna be back to approach notes so approach notes I'm gonna teach you four they're going to approach chord tones right so when we go to approach a chord tone we're gonna use chord scale above this one right so if I were to go down to C I play right if I were to go down to e alright you see that so the common chord scale is the term coming from the scale so like over a major seven chord if I if this is how modes relate to bebop and how modes relate to improvisation they're very very important some people again well I don't need to learn modes I just want to learn how to solo well you're not gonna really know how to do a lot of this stuff if you don't learn your modes right because your chord scale is actually gonna come from mode so if I'm using my Dorian mode I'm gonna be playing the notes from the Dorian scale to lead down into my core tones right now my Dorian mode takes on a major six sound here right if I were to use a different mode like Phrygian right I'd be using an a-flat right not an a natural that's a big difference in your solo sound if I were to use like you know if I were sewing over this minor seventh chord with a Locrian sound right I'll be playing this flat to here instead of natural to okay so it's a very big thing here you don't need to worry about that too much just take your chord scale from a very you know neutral scale that you may know you're just you're Dorian like a C natural you can you C natural minor if you want whatever whatever scale works best for you you can also do it over your major chords right just use your just use your C major scale okay the other chord scale we're gonna learn is half-step below so you want to practice all those chords scales excuse me those approach notes in every key okay overall your chords essentially and I would swing it one two one two three four and just go up and forth okay so I'm doing one two three four and one the other the other way you can do this is it with an anticipation - it sounds really good - so you start on four and so you're going one two three four [Music] okay to rhythmic variations you can do this the other approach is going to be half step below okay so excuse me that's pretty self-explanatory so we're using a half step approach below to approach our notes right and the purpose behind this guy's is that we're gonna use these in our line so if I go to start a line I can use my half step approach below to approach my third right I ended with the chord scale above approach this is gonna actually these are like Legos guys they're gonna teach you how to put bebop lines together so many people ask me Brendan I want to practice lick so I can implement licks I want to learn more licks I want to learn more lines well would it be nice to actually learn the building blocks of the lines that way you can actually just build whatever you want like I'd much rather save my own self-expression through the way I want to rather than just kind of regurgitated licks right and that's what we teach that's what I strive to teach a jazz piano school is freedom that our tagline is alerting freedom so I don't want to just teach you this I want to show you what this line is built of what are the Legos that build that line a first Lego is a half step below the second Lego is just basically outlining the major 7th a chord going up to the nine right and then I used a chord scale buff to half-step below which I'm gonna talk about one sec resolution to the one and then just jump down to the five right super super simple now because I taught you that you can use this you know in so many different ways right so you could take the last portion of this you could do that you know you can vary it however you want because it's now yours you understand the construction the engineering of the line it is now yours to do whatever you want with rat rather if I just showed you this leg you know you practice it in all keys but that's all you would know how to do you just know that one line you can't separate the Lego blocks and then make them your own so you can speak freely and learn freedom within the music that's my goal that's what we teach here so that's the approach notes now the the third fourth approach now is where you combine to approach notes so you take your chord scale above link it to your half step below and then jump down to one [Music] and then you simply flip-flop it [Music] so if I started a line off right [Music] however whatever it is you can use these things in so many so many different ways okay now let me see that was number three that was number three here is number four number four is going to be approaches in the line so we've learned our approaches and like I was kind of describing before we're gonna take our approaches and put them in a line so we can start our approaches at the beginning of the line right if I were to play or if I played right doesn't matter what core were doing you know we can put them in the middle of the line so I could do like that I could do [Music] I could do let me see I could do that I could do that and again they can go at the end of the line where you're gonna use them at the end of line to resolve our line as well so if I'm changing from a see matter to a dominant position chords here if I'm changing from my C minor seven to a 7 dominant right so I used a chord scale above to half-step below to my core tone to resolve right we can use them at the end of line we can use them however we want and I mean as you start to look and analyze bebop lines you're gonna see them commonly used throughout all parts of the line and that's that's the point that you want to get to right right so that line there that has like three in there right we have this so basically this is this is even more than what I've gone on to educate you on today but we have this little slide here going into our half-step blow that's more of like a double approach right right so I'm jumping down to the five here approaching the root as well here's a quart scale above the chord scale below half-step below to the core tone right so that is using approaches in line so what you want to do with this information that I'm giving you is you want to practice a practice your approaches then practice putting them into your lines right practice using your approaches in your lines so make it a goal just to start your line with an approach right so maybe you you have no experience with this at all just start you just use the half step approach to start a line that's that's gonna immediately change your play if I just start a line excuse me with a half step approach even if I just add that one half step it's gonna sound more like jazz and just than just doing this right you hear that you can already hear it coming to life I mean it's fantastic and if I play the f7 like if I play an f7 chord right I could do that I could go back down you know whatever it is so take your approaches and use them you know to practice your line so so take your approach practice it in the beginning practicing in the middle practice at the end practice the beginning and the end and you want to do this for all different types of combinations for your approaches right all different types of combinations so take your half step approach take your chorus go above approach take your half step below the chord scale above and use that in the beginning use it in the end then combine it with a half step alright there's just so many different types of combinations and again this is all you want to hopefully I mean I don't have time on this podcast but you want to work through these systematically right jazz piano school myself and my education is all about learning with structure and freedom if you check out the podcast beforehand that equals freedom freedom equal structure and in in theory rather structuring organization so you know work through those now number let me see you limber that's gonna be number four approaches work your approaches in the line number five it's going to be slow practice connection so when I was growing up right I used to work through my lines incessantly like just I would sit down for hours just working through lines and approaches and resolutions so I take it to out you can take you can do this with any you know progression right so but I'm gonna just demonstrate two fives over you have to 5:1 here you know whatever whatever voicings you're using if using inference and no problem to start a line [Music] I would just do this for hours at the slowest temple possible right so four beats per quarter you could do two beats record whatever type of progression you're working on and then just drop the tempo down to like 50 and always make sure you're hitting that core tone when the chord changes especially okay doesn't need to be done every single beat right but but focus on hitting the core tone especially when the change is happening right [Music] right and I just worked through the lines now if I played something I didn't like I would stop go back and change it right [Music] and just go through it as slowly as possible like literally just sit there and go through it so so slowly right so for in a new key you know take your new key right and I was thinking there cuz I wanted to go but that would've been landing on the court tone right that's why I had that slight hesitation there and again I'm moving I'm still moving through that kind of fast but this is your slow practice connection now if we have random chords right let's say we're praying drying steps right this is exactly how you do you do the same thing to solo with giant steps right so you have this B major seven voicing or however you want to voice it I'll just play root position here [Applause] right so that first progression okay we have B major 787 G major B flat seven everyone's like Oh John step so hard but it's really not that hard I mean if you're working on it like says me right I mean it definitely is hard but it's because we're not used to working through the progressions if we simply practice the connection in the way that I'm explaining to you right right that's going to help your lines move through the harmonies right and then you just do it in different ways [Music] [Applause] in with all your approaches with your court skill notes you have so many different ways to land on chord tones however you want I mean it's there's so many you can always get yourself out of sticky situation what do I mean by that it's like if you're on a random note like let's I'm here and I need to find a chord tone right for my d7 I can go I can use my half step approach I can go back up I can use my courts go above approach and then land on the a right you know let me see that's that from that note if I'm you doing a scale or a connection without a jump those are my options there right but again there's always a way to use your approach notes to get yourself into the next chord or chord tone right [Music] right however however you want to connect it and again for me this is still an exercise on doing this [Music] I had to make a little jump there right cuz I screwed up a little bit so I jumped up a third I was on I was on a quartile already on and upbeat so I couldn't resolve to a downbeat so I had to make it a little jump there so again it's still practiced for me right so I went up there let me see if I remember what it did I forget what I played let me start new [Music] right so however you want to do it again I'm kind of overthinking these now [Music] [Applause] for me for me it comes out more naturally now because I'm used to it as a more of a flow when I'm doing it slowly and breaking it down that's actually when it becomes difficult which is a good thing because you know you want that uncomfortability as you're practicing so again I don't need to keep demonstrating this but as you're working you want to take any sort of progression work that slow practice connection through all types of progressions through tunes through strange progressions you're not comfortable with maybe your minor seven flat five right your minor major chords landing on a minor major chord tour right you're so [Music] you know how about whatever type of progression it is okay so that was let me see that was number 5 number 6 is going to be lick integration so we've talked about a lot of different things before I want to add this in now lick integration I did talk about this a little bit in again when people say ok I think I'm at a point where I need to learn more vocabulary I need to learn more licks like well have you mastered the steps that I've talked about beforehand because if not you're probably still not in a place where you're read like adding licks on to your repertoire isn't necessarily gonna give you freedom and again I guess this is all in the mind or it's all in what you want to accomplish right if you want a Rieger to take licks right if you want to play the lick sorry was it right that's uh let me see I don't even know it because I don't use it yeah this you know people play this all the time like I don't even it's not even in my repertoire but again they have these videos on the lick right and so you don't want to be just going along right let's say you're playing you know it might sound like crap and then you get to your C minor you know and then it just comes out right and it's just like what that doesn't fit anywhere right so I would highly recommend you don't take a stance of trying to integrate just licks into your playing right and what I'd recommend this is gonna be number six is you definitely want to learn more vocabulary parkour so if you study transcriptions I highly recommend that but I recommend it later in learning process it's definitely more in the later areas of our main curriculum right is taking vocab and we do it very cleverly I like to say that we we kind of release them slowly based on the theory sequence that you're working on right so we will release a little bit of a lick or a little one-liner that that relates to the theory sequence that you're working on so it's not just oh here's a lick you're learning all 12 keys right and that's not necessarily where I come from my stance so you know if you do have a lick let's say like let's say that's your lick although I don't consider that a lick because I don't you know let's say they're not just licks I mean everybody plays something like that I mean I guess there's a language but to me I have a relationship with each component here so the first component is a Lego right a Lego for our first Lego building block is the half step below approach right then we have a triplet moving up the arpeggiation of my C minor chord now we can take those lego building blocks just this right we can turn shoot we have two legos there we have the half step approach Lego then we have the Lego that is the arpeggiation of our cord up to the nine excuse me we can take that in not play the first building block I could just go I could just play the first building block right and I can use those two things in so many different ways right if I want to go to my F major seven right I could do it like that I could switch the building blocks right so my goal here is to help you guys understand that just learning licks isn't necessarily gonna take you to the spot where you are in spontaneously improvising and self expressing yourself right that's not gonna get you there and how do I know that I mean well for one thing I went through this same process and that's what jazz piano school is about and another thing is that just think about it functionally like if you have building blocks that you know how to use and put together you can do whatever you want right just like learning a language so again when you learn a lick let's say you learn a Charlie Parker lick that's it that's a very common lick right all right what's another one right what is actually happening there strive to learn the Lego components of the lick okay so what was the first one I played back so the first the very first pershin of this lick right now is our bebop scale is our it's just our bebop scale so because you've practiced your bebop scales you'll know you don't necessarily have to go back up to the 9 you don't have to do that you can continue down your block scale if you want to do right you could just keep going down so you have a building block at your disposal already because you've practiced your bebop skills but this does go back up to the 9 then we have a chord scale approach to the 5 right bebop scale 9 chord scale approach to the 5 now the lick continues right now [Music] that's what I played so the lick continues right we have an approach back to the 5 again now what's happening there you guys have learned this in this podcast we have a half step below approach courts go above approach back to the 5 so essentially there's another approach in the middle of the line which I've talked to you guys about practicing and step number three for excuse me practice your approaches within the line within the middle line practice at the beginning in the end ok so that's all that's happened there is there's another approach in the middle of the line right it's like a double approach almost we approach it one time and then we approach it again now okay we need some sort of resolution right so we continue down here so now we have court skill buff core skill below I didn't teach you this approach on to the podcast today half step below and then resolution okay so that lick again I want you to really think about this let's count the building blocks in here we have one building block that we learned the bebop scale today we have another building block which is the approach note ok quart scale approach we have another building block okay which was the second approach so we have three building blocks then we have a resolution building block which is another fourth building block so we have four Legos that I've taught you guys that you can use okay you don't have to use the four Legos in that same format you can switch them around right you can do whatever you want you can build whatever you want you're a master builder I use this Lego analogy a lot right you can use you can go you could do that right you could do [Music] you could use this approach you could do that right so we're switching the Legos we're putting them in different spots because you have the freedom to do that because you have the Legos you know all for lego building blocks that gives you freedom it's not freedom when you just play this lick right and then you go to your next key and you do the same thing right [Music] that doesn't give you Fred at freedom so you're waiting your entire time in your solo you know you're going along you sign you not sounded very good and then and then boom and then it's like yeah okay cool but that's not really your goal your goal isn't to like just just put in stuff that you've practiced in a ready for you want that true self-expression that's gonna provide you the happiness you know in jazz okay so definitely work that's how are you I want you to integrate lick so that when you learn your licks learn and study the building blocks the Legos in lick remove them from the lick analyze them use them in different situations switch those Legos around so you get practice with taking the Legos out of a lick you know maybe you learn a Charlie Parker lick look at all the building blocks start using them in different fashions and then you're gonna develop a relationship with each of those Legos and you can start to implement that in your playing ok that's how I'd like you to implement bebop lick integration okay now our last one seven is working with extensions you want to practice working with extensions and you utilizing them in your playing excuse me so if we have an F seven chord our extension might be a flat nine now our extensions will resolve you'll finally resolve to certain things so I can resolve my flatten down to the one or I can resolve to the ninth right so I might I might have a line like that goes like that no shoot I forget when I played already there's there's a nice line [Music] okay so in this case my extensions you want to take one extension I'm working with my flat nine see how you can integrate the flat nine into your plane right find out the ways that's gonna resolve so my flat nine again I could I could I could jump up I could use it as more of a skipping note [Music] you know I could use it like that right you've resolving to b-flat major right I could do that right so what did i do there I started with my Haskell approach [Music] I got to my flat nine I jumped back down to the flat seven okay chord tone right [Music] a step below and then resolution to the third of my B flat major I like that a lot I've actually never probably don't play that that much honestly we kid again I could do something like that but however it is let's say we take the sharp 11 okay for our f7 chord here's our sharp 11 there's a nice way to use it I could come down I could do that I could do that so all we're doing is we're taking our extensions and we're trying to integrate them into our our lines right slowly so we start to develop a relationship with the sound with the way we're gonna use it how it works like in this case sharp 11 resolved very nicely to the 5 right that's why you hear this line again so all those sharp 11 very very very much want to resolve to the fifth of the core right they don't want to resolve to the four by any means not necessarily the three either now you can leave them alone if you want [Music] you know that would be more of a Lydian sound just using the sharp eleven alone but again the more you play around with the extensions the more you're gonna start to understand how they work and here the resolution that wants to kind of happen that naturally wants to happen in music right this kind of resolution resolution here right I was gonna play [Music] there's some some some example I was playing recently I'm trying to think it was [Music] I forget what it is shoot anyway anyway that's that don't worry about what I was just trying I was trying to think of a certain demonstration there but don't worry about that so we want to integrate our extensions ok so that's number seven so I'll go back through them again number one practice your bebop scales dominant your dominant bebop scale your major six bebop scale okay that's gonna be a very strong foundation to what's to come and again just for movement up and down the piano to solidify the core tones on down beats it's very very crucial you know how to do that number two is gonna be just your slow chord tone process of landing on core tones right [Music] sorry I played a a sus in my left hand but working through the tracking a process of chord tones and making sure you're hitting chord tones on down beats number three was the approaches we went over right chord scale above past that below combination combination other way around you want to go through all your chord tones [Music] right through all your cords all your chord tones learn the approaches these are gonna allow you to weave up bob and weave okay throughout your lines okay this is the bebop sound this is what Clifford does but powell all the great bebop players are using this language and again I guarantee you no one starts like just playing with McCoy McCoy didn't start by playing you know like just you know playing like that style okay almost every there's don'tyou can't take a great player and then have them play and not have them play bebop like they could bust out bebop lines like it like the back of their hand there's no great player that cannot play bebop and I see so many people try and jump to this sound but bebop in modern sound comes out of bebop right it kind of stems from the use of harmony like bebop is the study of harmony in movement through harmony right and from that comes other great things so you need to have this foundation before you kind of get to other things so again we're working these approaches through all your chord tones that's number four number five is gonna be your slow practice connection okay working your lines out super super slow and tediously with your approaches I you know whatever it is right just super super slow work your lines out start to speed up the tempo get them under your fingers that you can really kind of start to move and get a feeling for how your lines are gonna work as you're moving through the harmonies and and let me see worried number six is gonna be your bebop lick integration okay anytime you have a lick study the Lego blocks take them out of the lick use the Lego box move them around integrate them in different ways put them all back together again for that lick so that you really have a clearer understanding of how the lick is actually functioning and working that way you have true freedom over the lick instead of just copying that one lick okay every lick can give you access to like ten other licks that you should learn how to play and that's gonna lead to freedom in your playing and then the last thing number seven working with extensions integrating extensions right into your playing you know whatever it is right if you want to integrate all those extensions go for it and then you can resolve whatever you know whatever it is there's your major sharp sharp five major right you can take each individual extension work it into your playing and then start to use that sound that atmosphere that it creates in your bebop lines alright hope you guys had a great time on this podcast there's this is a fun one for me and I'll talk to you guys in the future and until then happy practicing

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Length: 41min 38sec (2498 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018