How I use chord numbers (and why)

[Music] hi this is sean and in this lesson we're going to learn something i'm really passionate about why i use chord numbers as well as chord names that you're used to seeing what it really does for you where people miss the point and how it skyrockets your jazz fluency if you use them the right way please do hit like on this video it helps youtube to spread it to more people who may be interested and if it's your first time here please do hit the subscribe button and notification bell so you know when i upload new content and with that i'm ready to begin so first of all why chord numbers do we now just have to memorize even more stuff you know it's struggling enough to memorize chord names and tunes and now we've got to remember this as well and this is just an extra layer it's nothing like that this is what freed me up and actually got me to get through standards in a way that i knew what i was playing and i could do something with them okay so a little bit about my story with chord numbers well my first teacher leon used to write out tunes with nothing but chord numbers so if you wanted to play blue moon it wouldn't say c major seven a minor seven d minor seven g7 to see it would say one six two five one etc you know so we had to learn it that way and it was a very beneficial way to do it because suddenly the context and the common chord progressions would come to light that's one thing but also when i would accompany the barry harris singers workshops it was really tough in the early days it was hell i'll never forget the first time i was made to do it there was a jazz standard that i'd never heard of before there was a lead sheet with mistakes on it and he wanted it in eight keys that's when i realized i didn't know the functions in standards as well as i thought i did but that's not the point for you you might be thinking yeah but i'm never going to do that that just illustrated to me how much it could free me up and what was interesting was i would go to the piano class and i did okay i'd go to the improv class i did okay but in the singer's class where i expected to learn nothing is where i really honed my craft and started to get fluency and learn to play within the band to support learned what the real functions of the chord progressions in tunes were because i had to look at them in other keys as well okay so why i use them is that's one reason because of those workshops actually i would if i saw the lead sheet coming up for a tune we were about to play i would quickly go and write the chord numbers on there and that would help me in the early days and then i got to the stage where i didn't really need to do that anymore was able to think of both the chord numbers and the chords at the same time context as i said so in the key of c f major is just f major that doesn't tell me anything let's imagine we don't know we're even in the key of c somebody just says f major means nothing i mean it could we could be in the key of f we could be in the key of c it could just be a chord but in c it tells me that this is the one two three four fourth chord in the key of f and that tells me where we probably just came from there are several ways to get to four so some common ones one two three to four another one would be the two five that leads to four so we could have a g minor seven because that's 2 in f c7 to get to f major 7 even if we're in the key of c and those other chords come from the key of f because we'll borrow things from the key of f to lead to an f major 7 chord even when it's in the key of c so can you see how i don't expect if you're new for you to understand all these things right now but can you see where it leads linguistically so what i retain is the story of a tune the same way london as if you're going to walk from oxford street to covent garden there are several ways you can do it and you don't have to remember every turning you're going to walk on on every street but you know the direction and once you do the first bit you'll remember the second bit and then once you do the second bit you'll be reminded and your sense of direction will lead you in the same way in jazz your ears will begin to lead you and generally newer students this is really for sort of level one and two students for me level one just learning the chords and getting it together level two putting tunes together adding melodies and simple voicings basic improv level three full-blown movements advanced improv etc substitutions all the whole works but at that level it may feel like you're never going to have ears and people think you should do this either with your eyes or with your memory what i call re-re-skills read skills or remember skills it's just not how it's done you have to have language skills and they're not that hard to get together so every tune has a story and secrets is trying to show you about how it's how it's got stuff that's in common with other tunes and where it's coming from and where it's going to and if you ignore all of that and just try and memorize a sequence of events you can't play the music because you're not playing the language in the way that the composer did you're playing from the perspective of an audience member really just saying i'd love to play that you know a puncher off the street i'd love to play that let's buy the music and read some arrangement or transcription the amount of times people email me and say you are going to write down in a pdf every single note you play right no i'm going to show you how to arrive at your own things and i'll guide you a lot along the way but that's not how it's done so that's about the story that you get from it there are only a few functions there are things like i showed you two fives that land on chords in the key and a couple of others let's look at one more today let's look at one two three and see and then flat three and we put a diminished chord on this flat three so this is a diminished chord all the notes are equidistant equally distance one two three away one two three away one two three away minor thirds apart means the same thing and flat three normally leads to two okay two is d minor in the key of c so now if i'm in the key of f and i wanted to do that well here's chord one chord two because remember f has a b flat chord three chord four chord five chord six chord seven and back home so in f one two three flat three okay so i've gotta play a diminished chord on a flat now and that leads to two just doing that flat three diminished to two if i play in the key of f i can think of several tunes that do that so for example here's one my heart stood still [Music] and those are all common functions as well smile does it so if you take um here's a flat 3 diminished a flat diminished well that kind of thing um how about what's this one called [Music] smoke gets in your eyes so there's a one or one with a three in the bass flat three diminished remember i said they go to two and every one in this case two is g minor in the key of f every one of those tunes has gone to two there are some exceptions but we study those two so you see how we start to get a feel of the language once we know a couple of little functions all standards jazz standards start to make sense i initially did this for myself and created a little system so that i wouldn't get caught out in barry harris singers workshops right that's the truth of the matter but next thing you know i start to see functions on every tune and they're all the same if we're talking about jazz standards if we're talking about tunes after you know from the 60s and so forth when a lot of rules get broken things can change for sure but the functions within the jazz sound is the american songbook every single tune conforms to a few functions so if your thinking functions as the music goes past then it becomes much clearer where you're coming from where you're going to you can start to predict several chords ahead you can hear those functions because if you're aware of them and numbering them as you go you start to recognize the sound of them so everything starts to come together and it's exciting as you can see i'm quite passionate about this so one obvious benefit would be transposing if i had to play let's say that area of smile in the key of c i'd have a chord one [Music] a flat three diminished a two and then this one goes to a sixth dominant that's a that's a different story so now if i want to do it in f one in f flat three diminished two [Music] the melody is a different story maybe we'll talk about that another day but i'm mostly doing that with my ear and occasionally a little bit with eyes right so transposing is a pretty obvious um benefit of this however i know a lot of people immediately say yeah but i'm not going to need to do that i'm not going to be playing with singers or going to jam sessions where somebody calls a tune it doesn't matter by doing this i got to know the tune in the original key better by doing it in a couple of other keys i got to know and still get to know the progressions better by drilling one tune in a couple of keys that's the point of doing it you get to know the piano really well and then you get to realize what's in common between different tunes so in a minute we'll look at a tune and we'll see how that has a lot of stuff in common with another tune so you're really learning music not a tune by focusing on the ingredients the jazz that's why we call it jazz skills the jazz skills involved the language hope that's making sense so let's take a look at what a difference a day made normally the key of f now if we look at the last head i normally write these out in roman numerals to begin with these are tracks that my students use that they can play with [Music] and then they can play the chords [Music] etc they can play the chords along with those and then they can remove me because these come with 12 different recordings with comping with me or tracks only they can put them in different keys all sorts of stuff but let's see what we have if we look at the last head i normally write out the straight chord numbers always write out the straight chord numbers actually so we can figure out what's going on and and get practice of reading a real lead sheet as well and then they can also look these up if they're confused about any of the numbers so in f g minus seven is one two c seven is one two three four five you're supposed to know that before you start playing a tune in f right you're supposed to have drilled your chord numbers properly and this brings me to another point actually i've seen so many beginners try and find a better way i remember leon my first jazz piano teacher i studied with barry harris but i studied with leon before that i remember after a long break going to see leon and i remember him saying to me um you know sean jazz musicians are opposed to the direct statement took me a little while to to know what he meant and i feel that he meant i could just tell you play these notes play those notes this is an easy name for it this is a quick thing that's easier it's not better it's not more informative it does not inform you about what you're doing it just tells you where to put your fingers right and that's real yeah so what so a lot of newer players think yeah i've got a quicker easier way to do that why don't i write on this lead sheet in another way drives me crazy when my students do that fortunately very few do that because they're missing the real nutrition that's available okay so two and one two three four five typical two five one progression in the key of f right and then oh didn't we talk about this it goes one two three flat three diminished to two exactly as we spoke about earlier so this is all textbook stuff so far and by the way another tune i can think of that goes one two three flat three diminished to two is my romance if anybody's heard or played that but often in the key of c or b flat so if i put this in c my romance begins with that so it'll go c major one two d minor three e minor e flat diminished flat three diminished two and then a five one you see so you start to get which tunes have stuff in common even if they're in different keys so it no longer feels like oh i memorized all the chords for what a difference a day made now i got to memorize all the chords and all the notes for my romance in in the key of c no you don't you just got to recognize what a 2-5-1 feels like and sounds like you've got to recognize what a one two three flat three diminished to two feels like and sounds like and then you're playing the same stuff just in slightly different ways okay because if you're not doing that how will you improvise because improvisation is all about context it's all about these functions and having tricks to use over them so i'm not a neurologist but i think in my brain if i'm improvising over this tune [Music] whatever i suspect that in there somewhere it's going you know which tools do you have for a 251 which tools you have for a flat three diminished going to two and then that can be true it doesn't matter which key you're in as long as you've learned how that key works right so after that what happens we get that two five one and we've gone two five one and then we get we'll just do the first half of this together so you get a taste for it right then we get what i call a 2 5 that goes to 6. why i've got a whole lesson on this that i'll link below because in the key of f one two three four five six is d minor seventh and when you two five before a minor two fives are just progressions that go and landers on places right you normally go minus seven flat five on the two one two and then on the five one two three four five you'll play an a7 those of you who know your d harmonic minor scale doesn't matter if you don't that should really be a c sharp but i haven't told the computer which key to put in um the second chord of that is e minor seven flat five and then the fifth chord one two three four five [Music] just alternate notes to make these chords is a seven so that's why two five to d minor is e minor seven flat five to a seven and then finally we get a d minor seven to g seven you could there are several ways to look at this for today i'm just gonna say it's a 6 in the key of f going to a 2 dominant and then we finally get a 2 5 in the key of f and then we're on to the b section right so we could put all of this into roman numerals in our heads that's not why the word head is written up there it means the tune um or we can literally write it out i get my students to follow this as they learn tunes i'll tell you why i did that and i'll also tell you why that's the single most valuable thing we've done in lessons for decades because it fused this thing that was going on they would learn tunes and they could talk about progressions and functions but they could only talk about that before they played a tune and analyzed and had loads of time to think about it or after they played a tune in retrospect and had loads of time to think about it but i realized they were not processing the progressions as they were going past and this has got them to do that i now have students who wouldn't have dreamt of taking a tune and putting it in different keys so they could learn how different keys work that are doing that regularly with tons of tunes as a matter of course and improvising over them as well and this has been the biggest thing we've done to make that happen so this is how it would look two five one two three flat three diminished and it's fine if you're just playing the chords by the way i get them to do that first anyway two five one etc now that two five to six we were talking about e minus m flat five to a seven six d minor seven and then this progression that is another thing i call the long progression of the dominant we'll maybe look at that another day two dominant g7 so if you're playing a g chord in the key of f and it's not a g minor seven because f has a b flat and you need a g7 you say too dominant [Music] because it's a g7 a dominant chord two five and then you're back to the b section and then it'll be a couple of parts that are a little different that's how we learn a tune see so the whole point of this is to be playing the tunes you can play the tunes and learn nothing about the language or you can play the tunes in a way that the language starts to make sense and you're thinking of the language as it happens i guarantee you those people thinking oh this is just another layer it's another thing to do we do this all the time it does work but you have to do it for it to work you can't just think about it i get so many new jazz skills members who say things like i know the two fives i know the flat three diminished the four minor six all these functions i know about them i know about the substitutions i've read all the books i've watched all the videos still can't play don't have any freedom cannot improvise and it's because i've never met one of those people who can think and talk about maybe even recite the progressions whilst they're playing and that shows then that's not what's fueling them what's fueling them is a sequence of events they've memorized or stuff they have to read every time it doesn't mean you have to memorize these you know but it is helpful you have to think about the functions i think i've made that point thank you so much for sticking with me through this video i hope that you learned something in there that you can apply to your own playing if you enjoyed that and you want to work this way and really take your playing to the next level and skyrocket your fluency we have a whole developing fluency course on jazz skills where we do all of this stuff on several tunes as well as the whole members area with hundreds more lessons thanks a lot for watching see you on the next one bye for now

Channel: JazzSkills

Views: 30,408

Keywords: Shan Verma, jazz piano lessons, jazz chords, jazz standards, nashville number system, chord progression piano, learning jazz standards, learn jazz standards, what a difference a day made

Id: 8T5Bh1oCtV4

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022