Jazz Piano for Complete Beginners

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[Music] what's up guys Johnny May here and welcome to this week's quick tip where I'm gonna teach you how to improvise jazz piano if you've never tried improvising before or if you are brand new to the piano now most students think that to improvise jazz you have to learn all of your scales and all of your arpeggios up and down the piano but the truth is that you can start improvising jazz piano today even if you're a complete beginner so let's go ahead and dive in alright the first step to playing jazz piano is to know what key you are in so we're gonna quickly quickly review our C major scale and then I'm going to teach you the chords and how to improvise over the scale okay what is the C major scale well if you start on a middle C here it's the note just below these two black notes okay this is C and if you walk a C major scale up the piano it's basically all white notes okay that's the C major scale c d e f G a B and C okay it's very very simple scale to learn now when you're playing chords in jazz you basically take the notes of your scale and you skip every other note so try this with me let's put a C on our left hand we'll skip the D we'll play the e now we're gonna skip the F we're gonna play the G and then we skip the a and we play the beat okay and this is called a seventh chord it's called a major seventh chord okay now don't worry too much about the naming and the theory here but this is the way we build chords in jazz as we take the note from the scale and then we skip every other note from the scale and we end up with these intervals intervals are simply the distance between two notes and we call this a third interval this is a second interval this is a interval all right so we're building third intervals up the piano to build our chord this is called a C major seven chord now you can actually do this for every note of the scale so you can actually take the seventh chord and shift it up to a D and now we have a seventh chord built on the second note of the C major scale this is called the D minor seventh chord now don't worry too much about the naming here I just want you to understand the concept and you can do this on every note from the scale this is called the 3 D chord it's built on the 3rd note of a C major scale this is a 4 chord this is a 5 chord this is a 6 chord and this is a 7 chord ok the technical name for these chords are called diatonic chords and you can do a deep dive on this over at piano with Johnny but this is the basic idea jazz it simply uses 7th chords that come from major scale and in jazz you kind of hop around to these chords now the most common progression in jazz music is called the two five one chord progression you might have heard about it and the two five one simply means that you put a seventh chord chord on the two or the second note of the scale so this is the first note of the scale the D is the second note of the scale we build a seventh chord on the two then we build a seventh chord on the five well what's the five of a C major scale one two three four five it's a G so we come up to G we build our seventh chord and now we're gonna go to our one chord our one chord in the key of C major is AC major seven c e g and b does this make sense so this is the most common progression in jazz music and I would just practice this practice jumping D minor 7 this is called a g7 chord again don't worry too much about the names here you will learn these as you get better at jazz and this is our one chord and this is used on tons of different tunes like fly me to the moon to five or autumn leaves to five Hey or the way you look tonight to five right does that make sense so it's used on lots and lots of different Tunes and so if you learn this progression you'll actually be able to improvise on a lot of jazz standards by the way if you're enjoying this lesson please give it a thumbs up and if you're new to the channel hit that subscribe button for more videos just like this now when you're playing chords in jazz you don't want to jump around to your chords it's a lot better to find chords that are closer to the one that you started on and when we played this g7 chord you can actually rearrange the notes of this chord where you basically put the D and the F on the bottom of the chord we're going to take that D in the F off of this and we're gonna put them down here D and F and now I'm playing a g7 chord it's the same chord I played earlier but I'm simply rearranging the notes I'm taking those top two notes off the top and I'm putting them down here and so if you do this in your left hand D F G and B guess what after we play that D minor seven chord it's super close by all we have to do is drop the a to the G and the C to the B and we have our G chord this is our five chord on the two five one and so this makes it a lot easier to jump to chords now on my two chord I'm here D minor seven on my five chord I'm here on the G seven and now I'm here on the one chord for my C major seven I call these more efficient chords you can learn more about chord inversions over at piano with Johnny the final step before we start to improvise is to play a chord substitute and when you land on this one chord a C major seven which is the name of this chord you can actually substitute that top note that B down a step to the a alright this is a chord substitute and you can substitute this chord for this chord this is called a major seven chord this is called a major six chord but again don't worry too much about the names here and so when we play this chord progression we're gonna go - then we're gonna go five this is our five chord one and then one like this okay let's go ahead and play this with the backing track there is a backing track that comes along with this lesson here we go five one and now the substitute all right you're sounding great you can practice this with the backing track I'll put a link to it below you can actually download this you can also download the lesson sheet music up here on the top left of the screen you can print it and you can change the key with a click of one button you can practice this in any key with our smart sheet music so I'll put a link to all of that below alright it is time to improvise are you ready to improvise some jazz what you want to first do is you want to learn the most important scale in jazz music it's called the gospel scale all right it is a such a cool sounding scale for this skill is also called the major blue scale so what are the notes of the scale well here they are go ahead and play these with me C D E G and a we're going to use all of our fingers and we're gonna add one note to this scale we're gonna add an E flat to this scale and that is the gospel scale or the major blues scale you can think of this as a C major scale with the 1 the 2 the 3 we're gonna skip the 4 the 5 the 6 and then we're gonna add this e here this is called the flat 3 alright 1 2 3 5 6 with the flat 3 now we're gonna drop that top note that a and we're gonna put it on the bottom here to learn our two grips here so go ahead and play it like this and then you can also add the E flat just like that so we're gonna play it thinking of it more in this position but again the scale is a major blues scale or the gospel scale alright here's the two grips you need to improvise jazz piano the first one is like this e flat a and G now the fingering uses our index finger our middle finger and our pinky okay we call the finger numbers one two three four and five okay one two three four five so we put the two on the E flat the three on the E and the five on the G the second grip that you need to learn is called grip number two okay grip number two we're gonna put the ring finger on the E flat the third finger on the D the index finger on the C and the thumb on the a alright so that's gonna be grip number two so go ahead and just practice both of these grips we'll go to a the top grip here grip one and then grip to grip one grip cube just kind of practice jumping in between both of these positions alright now that you know these grips let's talk about how to improvise with each of these grips so we're gonna play that two five one chord progression D minor seven g seven C major 7 and C 6 this is that two five one and we're going to improvise a little line using both bar grips check out this little line okay so what am i doing basically I'm starting on my D minor seven chord I'm gonna be in grip number one I'm doing this little eighth note line one and two and three and I'm basically coming up these three notes okay one and two and three and four and now I'm gonna go to grip number two which is here and I'm gonna come down this scale one and two and three and four and and then we'll end our line one and two and three right twice on the C down to eight okay you see what we did there and then at the end of the phrase we're gonna go basically this is a c6 I'm coming up my grip to a CD C E flat D C alright that's the full line will do at medium tempo rip to four one two three four and repeats and that a cool idea and you can actually practice this as an exercise let's go ahead and do with the backing track and then I'll show you how to create your own lines using this idea here we go here we go [Music] all right great job you're sounding awesome now if you want to improvise with this idea it's actually really simple to do because basically I can hit any of these notes and I can switch between my grips so that's grip 1 and now I might come down to grip to I can repeat the chord progression maybe this time I'll start with my grip too and start and then go up to grip number one you and there's all kinds of cool ways that you can create lines using this idea the key is to leave little gaps in between your lines so that you do not play run-on sentences all right let's talk about triplets I love the triplet sound okay the triplet exercise goes like this [Music] alright here's basically what we're doing we're doing our two five one and see we'll start with that grip number one and we're gonna play these two three notes using the triplet pattern and then we'll end on the E and then we'll go to trim the triplets on grip number two which will be here triple the triple the triple it going a flat D C I'm just repeating this [Music] and then we'll do new pattern basically this is a CD CDC a CD CDC aids a triplets one and A two and A three and a four and okay so we're dividing each beat into three notes and that's how you get that triplet sound all right let's play this with a backing track and I'll teach you how to improvise with us here we go [Music] okay nice work with triplets and if you want to improvise your own lines with triplets then you simply play any triplets that you'll want just make sure you leave little gaps so here's some examples of triplet lines I'll start with my lower grip here this is grip two and then I'll go to grip number one that makes sense and you can mix these together man that sound really cool alright the final technique I want to teach you here are slides this is the sound of slides all right so the slide exercise basically we're gonna take our third finger here we're gonna slide the e twice like that okay same finger and then we'll go down slide to D that makes sense C a and then we'll do the same thing twice on the e down slide on the D I'm using the same finger down to a and now we're gonna do a new pattern here on the C major seven chord we're gonna slide the e up to G slide the e up to G slide the D to down slide see slide the D down slide and then switch to our C six chord up slide the D G G and down slide the D that makes sense all right let's go ahead and do this at a medium tempo here's how it should sound and if you were plate with the backing track it sounds like this [Music] okay so that's the exercise you can play this with the backing track and if you want to improvise with slides the key here is to slide the e up or the D down and you can do either one in any order so here's some ideas for how you can improvise with this [Music] you all right this concludes this week's quick tip and if you enjoyed this lesson I want to encourage you to check out piano with Johnny comm we have over 800 step-by-step lessons in jazz blues swing music cocktail jazz Latin jazz theory technique improvisation it is the full learning platform for all playing levels also be sure to check out the piano with Johnny membership this gives you unlimited access to all of our courses plus you get to be part of our live monthly events including our live Q&A s where you can ask me or practice questions we do live workshop lessons we have student assessments where you can send me a video and I'll give you personalized feedback we do weekly challenges for our members we do student collaborations and we have a ton of fun so go check out piano with Johnny and I'll see you in the next lesson [Music]
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Channel: Piano With Jonny
Views: 447,040
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Keywords: jazz, piano, beginner, lesson, jonny may, piano with jonny, jazz piano, beginner jazz, jazz piano lesson, beginner jazz lesson, beginner jazz piano, beginner jazz piano lesson, how to play jazz, how to play jazz piano, beginner piano, improv, jazz improv, how to improvise, how to improvise jazz, how to improvise jazz piano, jazz improv lesson, jazz chords, jazz piano chords, chord progression, jazz chord progressions, easy jazz, piano scale, jazz scale, jazz piano scale
Id: Df2Np4lTnQs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)
Published: Fri May 15 2020
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