This is the first in a bunch of tutorials
I’m making on jazz piano for beginners. I’ve talked about jazz a little in the past,
but I thought it would be good to make an easy series like this that you can use if
you’re just starting out. Every lesson is going to be based around a
jazz piano improvisation that you can play, starting very easy and simple, and getting
a little more challenging with each tutorial. To start with you only need the most basic
beginners’ knowledge of the piano. If you know about chords that’s cool and it’ll
help, but for now all you need to know is the names of the notes on the piano keyboard
- we’ll cover the jazz concepts and music theory you need as we go. OK, let’s look at this first improvisation.
We’ve got four beats in a bar at a moderate speed - 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4. Here’s middle C.
And first, we’re going to make the left a simple repeated pattern. In this octave
down here I'm going to play A - F - G - A. Let’s do that again against the beat A - F
- G - A - A - F - G - A. Each note has two beats, so the whole sequence is just two four-beat
bars long - that's two measures if you’re using the US terminology - 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
A - F - G - A. The first thing I want you to do is practise that over and over until
you don't even have to think about it. We want as much of your brain’s processing
power as possible working on the right hand. OK so what notes can we use to improvise on
in the right hand? The simple answer is, any of them. This is a really, really important
concept when you start piano improvisation. There aren’t any wrong notes as such, it's
just that some notes that will sound better, in some situations, than others. Now, that
left hand pattern, starting and finishing on A kind of suggests that we’re in the
key of A minor. T he great thing about A minor is that its natural scale - which would be
our kind of first port of call if we're looking for notes to improvise on - is all the white
notes. The natural scale of A minor. However, if I just said to you, hey, you know, go crazy,
improvise on any of the white notes on the keyboard, that would be kind of a little bit
mind-blowing if you were just starting out - far too much freedom if you like. So what we're going to do is restrict ourselves
and just start improvising on one note, yeah - this A below middle C. Now this is a technique
that I’ve covered before. One note is all you need to improvise with. So what we're
going to do is just start by using this single note A, and improvise on it using some swinging
jazz rhythms, against that original left hand. OK and so on and so forth and get really kind
of confident with that. Now that raises the question, how do we create
those jazzy rhythms and get the kind of hand independence to use them? This was actually
something I was talking about a couple of weeks ago in the first tutorial in my Train
Your Piano Brain series, so do go and check that out afterwards if you haven’t seen
it - I’ll include a link in the description below this tutorial. When you’re starting to swing, an important
thing to understand is that jazz almost always stresses what we call the offbeat in a four-beat
bar. Now most four-beat music stresses the on-beat, which is beats 1 and 3 - 1 2 3 4
1 2 3 4. But with jazz, as I say, it’s that offbeat, beats 2 and 4 - 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4.
So one good way to start creating those jazzy rhythms in your right is to tap the offbeat
with your left - maybe just on your leg or something - or at least kind of have that
stress pattern in your head as you play. OK try that for a while, and see then if you
can drop in the left hand. You might not find it easy at first - so if it’s tough going,
slow it down. When you’ve got that working, start to expand
outwards to using other notes. Try using two notes - maybe A and C, and then three, maybe
A, C and D, you know, and grow outwards and use more and more notes. As you get confident
maybe moving up and down the scale a little bit. OK, if you’ve had piano lessons this
is where your scales are going to come in really handy. Like I said, because we’re in A minor any
of those white notes are going to sound at least OK, OK, maybe with the odd exception
in certain places but you will notice some work better than others. So, for example,
the notes A, C and E will be particularly strong, because they make up the basic chord
of A minor, the tonic triad of the key of A minor as we call it. So if you’re beginning
to create little phrases, it’s a pretty safe bet to start and end on those notes. As you move on keep exploring - figure out
which notes and combinations of notes sound cool. Spend time playing around, yeah? I like
to emphasize that word PLAY. And play is what I want I kind of literally want you to do
- as if you’re kicking a ball around or, you know, seeing what shots you can do on
a pool table. Don’t worry about wrong notes. The important
thing is to try to get some sense of flow, yeah, however simple the improvisation you’re
playing. Try to get to a point where you’ve, you know you've got into the groove, where
you can a little lost in it, where it becomes addictive. You might notice that some notes don’t work
as well as others in some combinations, yeah - so playing an F over the A kind of loses
the minor sound. It can work as a passing note, OK, a note on the way to somewhere else,
a chord note for example, but if you focus on it your brain starts to give it weight
as a chord note, which implies the chord of F major. That’s not a bad thing in itself,
but it’s maybe not the direction we want to take this particular improvisation in.
You’ll might discover that the five notes that work best in an improvisation in the
right hand are A C D E and G, and if you go no further than those, that’s fine. Those
notes work well because they form the A minor pentatonic scale, which we’ll come back
to in the next tutorial in the series. Just a couple of final things. First, remember
that when you’re playing the piano you're supposed to be expressive and musical, yeah?
Getting the expression right is as important, in fact more important, than just getting
the bare notes right, yeah? So for example vary the louds and softs - the dynamics as
we call them - OK, try and create something that's musically rich and satisfying. OK, so there we go - I’ll pick up this thread
and run with it in the next tutorial in the series. In the meantime, practise practise
practise - above all, PLAY with this stuff. That’s how you learn jazz piano as a beginner. Finally, if you read music might like my book,
How To Really Play The Piano, which explains a ton of stuff about music theory and jazz
and blues and has loads of tips on getting started with this stuff. You do need to be
able to read left hand and right hand music, OK, but not at a very high level. Click on
the link right below this tutorial to find out more.
