Jazz Improvisation for Beginners

so first of all how should you practice improvisation well my advice is that you keep things really simple that you start in one key and we're going to take the 2 5 1 in c major that's going to be a d minor 7 chord going to a g dominant 7 chord ending on a c major seven chord so that's the major two five one in the key of c major and most jazz songs are made up of this major two five one just played in different keys sometimes you get the full three chords other times you'll just get a 2-5 other times you'll just get a 5-1 but most jazz songs their structure is based around the 2-5-1 so for that reason it makes most sense to practice our improvisation over the two five one unless you have any better ideas i recommend you just start by practicing over the two five one and we're going to hold things still within the key of c major holding things still in one key is a very good idea when it comes to anything composition related because it helps you to keep track of which ideas you've already experimented with and which ideas you haven't explored yet so we're going to take the 2 5 1 in c major and one variation is sometimes i make it a 2 5 one six because this chord progression actually loops around on itself so you go two five one and then you go to an a dominant seven chord and that's the sixth chord which resolves back down a fifth to the two chord so the two five one sixth chord progression is nice for practice because it loops back around on itself so you might want to do two five one six two five one you can keep repeating that so two five one six and then you can go two five one then you'd end on the one chord and also when you practice improvisation have sheet music handy which you can write down your best ideas with you don't have to remember all of this stuff you want to explore but you want to write down your best ideas because you might want to come back and really ingrain some of those best ideas later okay so my next recommendation is to focus on chord tone soloing so chord tones are the root third fifth and seventh of the chord so if you have c major seven chord then the chord tones are going to be c e g and b or if you had a c minor seven chord the chord tones would be different it would be c e flat g b flat or if you had a c dominant seven chord chord tones would be that's right c e the major third g the fifth and b flat the minor seventh and i would say about eighty percent of jazz piano improvisation is focused around the chord tones so each time the chord changes our chord tones will change as well so our notes in our solo will naturally change so let's take a two five one in c major for the d minor seven which four notes will we use that's right d f a and c the root third fifth and seventh of d minor seven for g dominant seven we'll use g b d and f and for c major 7 we'll use c e g and b and so on now i'm actually going to add one more note which is the ninth even though the ninth isn't really considered a chord tone it's more of the extended harmony it is still an excellent note to add in to this technique so then you're actually using the root third fifth seventh and ninth of every single chord and in pretty much every case it's going to be a natural ninth so for c major seven you would play c e g b and add a major ninth just count up a whole step from the root to find the ninth it was a minor seven chord same ninth and for a dominant seven chord same ninth if you're feeling more advanced then you can do a flat nine that's also nice but in most cases i'm using a natural ninth so let's apply this to our two five one five notes over d minor seven are going to be d f a c and e then we'll go to g dominant seven our five notes are going to be g b d f and a [Music] and then over c major seven our five notes are going to be c e g b and d so that's really nice we get five notes over each chord and then just to be thorough if we do a two five one six and we have this a dominant seven chord we're going to have a we're going to have c sharp we're going to have e and g and this is actually a chord where i would like to play a flat 9 b flat it just sounds better in this context the 2 5 1 6 i would use a flat nine in this context you can do the natural nine as well but i tend to enjoy this flat nine in this case [Music] so this is the sound of core tone soloing and the nice thing about it is it uses the same brain work which you've already done to find your left hand chords so if you're playing a d minor seven well you've already figured out the notes in your left hand so it doesn't really require any more to play those same notes in your right hand the same brain work so once you've figured out the notes for your left hand you're using those same notes in your right hand [Music] okay so next we're going to look at approach patterns now approach patterns go perfectly with chord tone soloing and what an approach pattern is is it's a melodic shape which precedes usually a chord tone so say we have this d minor seven chord we can proceed the root third fifth and seventh with a whole series of approach patterns now the most simple and probably most effective approach pattern i can show you is called the half step below approach so we're going to proceed any of these chord tones with a half step below so c sharp can proceed d f can be preceded by e a can be preceded by g sharp and c can be preceded by b natural then we go to g dominant seven we can do the same again take any of the chord tones and you can proceed these with a half step below [Music] and again for c major seven just take the chord tones c e g b and you can precede any of these notes with a half step below so c can be preceded by b e natural can be preceded by e flat g can be preceded by f sharp and b natural can be preceded by b flat now you've probably noticed that some of these approach patterns take you out of key they take you chromatically out with the c sharp this g sharp this e flat this b flat but in this context that is absolutely fine these half step below approaches actually sound really sophisticated especially when they take you out of scale [Music] so the half step below approach pattern is the place i would start that's my probably favorite approach pattern it's just so simple it's not tricky to do again you're just finding the core tones and then you're preceding any of those chord tones with a half step below but there are all sorts of other approach patterns you can do what's called a chord scale above approach where you take any of these chord tones and you approach them from the note above however in this case you actually have to be aware of which scale you're in so if we're playing a 2 5 1 in c major then over all three chords you can play c major scale because all three chords are taken from c major scale so if you want to do chord scale above you would approach any of these notes with the note from the scale that's above so it's going to be all of the white notes in this case [Music] and then there are other approach patterns where they really get more sophisticated in working backwards from a chord tone and playing the surrounding notes you get sort of patterns like this so say we're targeting d here above a d minor seven there's all sorts of patterns that you hear and really the sky is the limit [Music] so these are actually called enclosures when you get these neighboring notes which form a pattern around your target notes which is usually going to be chord tone and these are just patterns which you precede the chord tone with it's like working backwards it adds on some notes and then once you've played that you usually resort to chord tone soloing [Music] now to go with this lesson i've actually put together some sheet music where i've notated some of my favorite licks over the 251 and the 2516 i've annotated all of the techniques so you can really understand what i'm doing plus i'll include some techniques which we probably won't have time for in this lesson so to download that sheet music for free just click on the link below so my favorite approach pattern which i recommend you start with is the half step below approach go away practice the chord tone soloing and practice preceding some of these notes with a half step below and a little detail on that it's good to place the chord tones on the down beats the strong beats so the beats one two three four and usually you're trying to put the approach notes on the offbeat so the one and the two and the three and so that way you're playing the sort of dissonant notes on the weaker beats the offbeats the one and two and three and four and [Music] okay so next let's talk about rhythm now most of the time in improvisation you're mostly playing eighth notes one and two and three and four and so that's going to be most of the solo now to keep things interesting you need to add some variety to your rhythms one of the easiest ways you can do this is to add a triplet to each line a triplet is where instead of playing two eighth notes per beat you're going to play three triplet eighth notes in the same space so instead of playing one two you're going to play one two three so if i play the chord on one and then i start on the second beat i'm going to play one two three it's going to be a triplet so one two on the beat two i'm playing triplets so [Music] so i'm trying to add a triplet to each line the trip that goes well at the beginning of the line or it sounds good in the middle of lines [Music] so there i placed a triplet in the middle of the line started with just eighth notes but there i played the triplets one two three and then you go back to eighth notes [Music] so my next improvisation tip is to try and mimic speech that's what improvisation is it's like small talk and it's designed to sound a lot like us talking so when we have conversations we talk for a while then we take breaks why do we take breaks so that we can take a breath you need to have breaths in your improvisation you don't want to just keep playing eighth notes forever and what happens after we take a breath usually when we start the next sentence we change register so if we've ended down here when we start the next phrase we might start in a different register like this then we take a breath we might start our next phrase by coming down an octave we'll take a breath then i'll start my next phrase up an octave so this is a simple trick you can do it sounds very authentic sounds natural because it mimics speech but when you finish a line take a breath and then change octave go up an octave and start your next line up here then you take a breath and change octave either by going up or going down so when i'm improvising that's one of the things i'm thinking about when i end a line down here it's almost natural for me to jump up the octave and start my next line up now another good principle to use in your improvisation is to end on resolved notes in particular to end your lines on the root third or fifth of the chord so if you have a d minor seven chord and you're about to end your line try to end it on d f or a it's not a rule but it's a good guideline it sounds more confident most of the time if you end a line on one of these notes whichever way you want to do it and that sounds more confident usually than ending a line on the fourth or the sixth or the ninth or even the seventh so that's not a rule it's just a guideline but again it mimics speech because usually when we talk we end our sentences sounding resolved so c major seven ending on the root or i could go [Music] any of these three notes is a good note to end your improvised lines on [Music] now to help you even more with improvisation i've notated a whole series of jazz piano licks and lines which i've written over the 251 and the 2516. so if you like these sorts of techniques which i'm using well i've notated a whole series of them you can download the sheet music for free just by clicking on the link below

Channel: Jazz Tutorial | with Julian Bradley

Views: 605,943

Keywords: jazz improvisation, jazz piano improvisation, improvisation lesson, how to improvise, jazz piano lesson, jazz tutorial, jazz solo lesson, Julian Bradley, improv lesson, jazz education, jazz improvisation exercises, jazz improvisation made simple, learning jazz improvisation, jazz lesson, how to play jazz, jazz improvisation exercise, jazz improvisation examples, jazz piano tutorial, jazz, jazz piano, how to play jazz piano, how to improvise jazz, jazz improvisation lesson

Id: lhNZEIFv3uk

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021