- The II, IV, I is the most common chord
progression in jazz. In this video, I'm going to show you some of the basic things
that you should practice if you want to improvise over it and I'm also going to show
you how you take that material and turn it into some great lines so that when you're
improvising over a II, IV, I it actually sounds like jazz and not like you're just
noodling in a scale. My name is Jens Larsen,
learn jazz, make music. If you look at the C major scale. (guitar plays) Then for each note in that scale we have a chord that's what's
called the diatonic chords and for C major, that gives us (guitar plays)
C major seven (guitar plays)
D minus seven, (guitar plays)
E minus seven, (guitar plays)
F major seven, (guitar plays)
G seven, (guitar plays)
A minus seven, (guitar plays)
B half diminished, (guitar plays)
and C major seven. The II, IV, I progression is a progression that sort of takes us to the root of the key so the C major. Starts on the two, so that's a D minus seven.
(guitar plays) Then it moves to a G seven.
(guitar plays) And then resolves to the C major seven. And if we put those chords together and play them a little bit
closer to each other then we get. (guitar plays) Now that you know where the
II, IV, I progression is then we can start
looking at some exercises that are going to give you
something that you can use when you're solo on this progression. When you play a solo in jazz, you're improvising melodies and lines that are closely
related to the chords so that means that it makes sense to practice the melodic
version of those chords, which is the arpeggios. A great way to practice
them would be to play them directly on the chord progression. That would be something like this. (jazz music) Notice that I'm playing these arpeggios as one octave arpeggios and they're all in the same position. And that's just because
I want to have it so that they're kind of easy to play, but also so that when I start to solo I can later connect them because I don't wanna skip around the neck to get to the different
arpeggios that I need to use. If you practice soloing
just using the arpeggios, then you're very clearly
connecting to the chords and you can still create
really solid lines. Something like this.
(jazz music) To really make the chord changes clear then I'm looking for notes that are not in the chord that I'm playing on now, but are only in the next chord and then I try to play towards those notes and play those notes on
beat one of the next bar because then you can really hear now we get a different note,
we get a different chord sound, and that makes the chord
change really clear. So that's what I'm doing
in the example as well where you can see that I'm playing the B on beat one of the G seven and the E of beat one
of the C major seven. The way that I'm playing the arpeggios as these one octave melodies is something that you can also work on taking through a scale
in a scale position, and if you do that then you have access to all the arpeggios that
are found in the scale in one place on the neck and that's a very powerful
thing to actually have access to because that means that you
can do the previous exercise for any progression that
you can come across. That exercise sounds like this. (guitar plays) I have another video where I'm
talking about this exercise and I think it's a super
useful exercise for connecting the harmony with the scale
exercises and their arpeggios. So in that way it really
brings a lot of things together that are just very
important for playing jazz and something you
definitely wanna work on. There's a link to that
video in the description. Later in this video, I'm gonna show you how this exercise can become a gigantic shortcut and give you a lot more
material that you can use on any chord in this scale. As you could see in the
beginning of this video then the chord progression
is in the key of C major and everything is actually
found within that scale. So it makes sense that
before we start working with all the bebop tricks and chromatic notes, we just wanna take the arpeggios and then also add the scale notes because that's sort of
the immediate context that's found around those chords. Those are the notes that
we want to use as well. So if we look in this position then the C major scale sounds like this. (guitar plays) Again, it really makes
sense to take exercises and scales like this and then try to really put
them onto the progression so you can hear how they work. And in this case, we
can do that quite easily because we can add the scale
notes around the arpeggios and then you get an exercise like this. (jazz music) Like this, you can hear how
the scale works for each chord and you can still hear the chord because I'm sort of playing the arpeggios. So all the chord tones are on the beat and the scale notes are
then in between the beat. This way of practicing
the scales on the chord is something that I
learned from Barry Harris, even though he tends to
mostly ignore the two chord and then just play the five
chord for an entire two five. The next thing we can do is to start making some licks with this, and that sounds like this.
(jazz music) So here we have a lot more
options when it comes to what melodies we now can create, but I'm still using the chord tones. They are still sort of the notes that are tying us to the chord that are making the harmony clear and I'm playing those
mainly on the heavy beat, so on beat one and beat three. You can also still hear how the changes are still pretty
clear if you play this lick without any backing. Besides playing lines
that are really connecting with the chord changes then another part of
the jazz or bebop sound is that you use chromatic leading notes and you can, of course, turn this into all sorts
of complicated rule sets. But I think if you're just
getting started with this then really what you want to do is that you just wanna experiment with adding some chromatic leading notes to the arpeggios that you
use when you improvise, so the chord tones. Because then you have this strong pull of the chromatic leading note
that resolves into the chord. That's just the strongest
resolution when you're improvising and that means that you
can make lines like this. (jazz music) Here, the chromatic notes are
placed before a chord tone and they sort of really
help spell out the changes and they also sometimes help just really making the chord change clear because I'm using them moving
from one chord to the next. So I have the C sharp before the D. (guitar plays) And I'm also using the
chromatic leading notes to really change chord in a very clear way 'cause here I'm using the A sharp to lead to the B on the G seven. So in that way it's really
sort of emphasizing that B, make it really clear that
the chord is changing. The same happens when I'm
going from D sharp up to E on the C major seven. And once you start getting a little bit familiar with using these chromatic approach
notes to the chord tones then you can of course expand on it and try to target notes
that are not in the chord or maybe use them as suspension so that you'll create a
little bit more tension and make your line a
little bit more surprising. (jazz music) Here you have some
chromatic notes that resolve to scale notes not to chord tones. So in the first bar you
have a D sharp on B3 that's resolving up to the E so the ninth and I'm also using sort of a suspension. So usually you wanna put the B, the third of the G seven really
on the one to make it clear but here I'm delaying it and that's just another way
of creating some tension and resolving that. So on B one we really get the A sharp, that's not really a
note that fits in there. And then I resolve that on the one end. I'm using the A, A flat, G, to go to the C major seven and I also have a leading
note on the C major seven that's just to a chord tone so just approaching the third from below. (guitar plays) As I said earlier in the video, if you practice your arpeggios
in the scale like this, then you get access to a lot more material for each of the chords. In fact, you just get
twice as many arpeggios that you can use for each chord. Let me show you how that works. So if we take a look at
a C major seven arpeggio or a C major seven chord, then we have these notes, C, E, G and B. When you're playing a solo and you're using the
C major seven arpeggio over a C major seven chord, then that sounds good and that works because
you're just playing the notes that the one playing the
chords are also playing so of course that works together. Since the arpeggio, so C,
E, G and B sounds good, then another arpeggio that
has pretty much the same notes will probably also work and that could be the arpeggio
from the third of the chord. So that means that we can of course have, (guitar plays)
the basic arpeggio and then we can start from the third, that's the E.
(guitar plays) Then we have those notes as well. (guitar plays) This you can take to all
the chords in the II, IV, I so that means that over
a D minus seven chord you can also use an F major
seven arpeggio over the G seven. You can also use a B
half diminished arpeggio, and of course on the C major seven, as you just saw, you can use
an E minus seven arpeggio. (jazz music) And this material you can use and of course also
combine with chromaticism and then create a line like this. (jazz music) If you want to explore this in more detail starting with the exercise
of the diatonic arpeggios and then going through
all the great things that you can do with this, some really neat bebop tricks and also just some great sounding licks, then check out this video called "The Most Important
Scale Exercise In Jazz."
Thank you for this.
https://jenslarsen.nl/ii-v-i-you-need-to-practice-this-for-solos/
It’s extremely useful & well put together!
Content:
00:00 Intro
00:20 What is a II V I?
01:09 How To Solo Over A II V I - Basic Arpeggios
02:36 The Most Important Scale Exercise
03:35 Use The Scale As Well
05:13 Chromatic Notes (Bebop Made Simple)
07:28 More Amazing Arpeggio Ideas.
08:57 Learn this exercise!
09:02 Like the video? Check out my Patreon page!