Pentatonic Jazz Solos Explained in 12 Minutes

[Music] how's it going guys Julien Bradley here today I'm going to talk about pentatonic scales and how they can do wonders for your jazz piano improvisation and any composition you're using so a pentatonic scale first of all is this scale this is C pentatonic scale it's five note scale so here's a stack of fifths c g d a e and if we compact those into one octave that's what you get so I'm I'm not actually sure if it's called the pentatonic scale cuz it's five notes or cuz it's a stack of perfect fist doesn't really matter but it's interesting to know that pattern it's just a fifth a group of fifths so it's a very very pleasant sound some people associate it with or Oriental [Music] music but it sounds great in jazz piano playing and because it's only five notes it's quite a simple thing for your brain to have in your mind and uh yeah you can come up with licks in the pentatonic [Music] scale so let's start with a C major 7 chord when you see a C major 7 chord you could very simply play a C [Music] pentatonic it sounds consonant sounds fine doesn't sound particularly interesting though because it's not adding much it's really repeating mostly what's already been played in the left hand so it's got the 1 three and the five it's just adding the nine and the 13th so generally I should say now the colorful notes in your improvisations are going to be the extended Harmony so you have you have the cordal tones 1357 and then you have the 9 the 11th and the 13th whether they're flat 9es sharp 11s flat 13s whatever it's always going to be these extended Harmony notes that going to sound really colorful whatever chord you're playing and in my improvisation I tend to aim for these three notes a fair bit so so playing a C pentatonic over C major 7 isn't going to give me many of those notes although actually is going to give me two but there's better ways to do this so the next scale degree we could build it off is the fifth play a G pentatonic and this would be slightly more colorful it would repeat these cordal tones the G and the E the seventh is the more colorful cordal cordal tone but it would also give me the sixth and the ninth so these are all quite colorful notes these are fairly Bland but I'll get straight to the point the for me the best and for many people the best most colorful pentatonic scale for the major 7 chord is if you build it off the second scale degree so in C major 7 that would be the D we'll play a d pentatonic gives you this lovely sharp 11 and outlines the lydian mode which is the major scale of the sharp four that's a lick I use a lot it's actually in one of my uh e books it's in uh foodoo dancer it's in F minor what do I [Music] do so basically the relative major of C minor is E flat major and for that reason playing the E flat major the E flat pentatonic scale sounds consonant that works fine but it doesn't add much color because it's mainly repeating the cordal tones chordal tones are 1 35 7 it's repeating all these cordal tones and it's only adding the 11th which is an F natural remember these are the the colorful notes that I tend to aim for in my solos or when I'm composing a melody so the E flat pentatonic doesn't add much you could also do a B flat pentatonic that would add a bit [Music] more so that's quite a good one but in my opinion and many people's opinion an F pentatonic does a nice job CU it's outlining the dorin mode it's got the 11th the 13th and the 9th so it's got all those extended Harmony notes all the colorful notes sounds great over C minor so whenever I see a minor chord Minor 7 chord and I want to play a pentatonic I will tend to just play the fourth scale degree pentatonic so take another example if we're in F minor if I see an F minor 7 chord I'll play a B flat pentatonic scale because that's the fourth above the root if it was a key of A minor if I saw an A Minor 7 chord I play the fourth of a is a d sounds great now on to the last kind of chord um is a dominant 7 chord here's a c dominant 7 c e g B flat what pentatonics could we play well could play a C pentatonic doesn't add that much color we could play a B flat pentatonic sounds all right but here's the here's what I would play I'd probably play an FSH pentatonic scale and what does that outline well that outlines a kind of altered Harmony altered scale you can play over dominant seven Chords it's quite a it's probably as exotic a scale as you can get on a dominant 7 chord and really the Exotic notes in the altered scale you have the root the third and the seventh which are the Bland cordal tones but once you've got those in the Exotic notes are all these black notes when I'm playing over C dominant 7 and those black notes happen to be a pentatonic scale so for me when I want to play a pentatonic scale over a dominant seven chord I'll just build a pentatonic scale off the sharp four of the scale so so C dominant 7 means F Shar pentatonic another example if we had e dominant 7 I'll build it off the sharp four which is a Shar or B flat resolves down a [Music] fifth that's how the altered scale always wants to resolve so so let's start off with a simple pentatonic approach to 251s let's practice 251s cuz that's 90% of jazz is 251 so makes sense to practice those most of the time got a 251 and C Major D Minor 7 G dominant 7 C major 7 I'll just tell you the answer you can play a G pentatonic and that will sound consonant over all three [Music] chords [Music] so that's a simple approach to 251s is just build a pentatonic scale off the Fifth Scale degree the first chord is a minor chord Minor 7 chord and I told you a consonant scale consonant pentatonic scale is build off the fourth of a minor 7even chord so for the for the first chord we'll play a G pentatonic then we have G dominant 7 the five chord we could do the the sharp four pentatonic so C Shar or d flat and then end with the major 7 chord I'll play the D [Music] pentatonic so that's a quite a sophisticated sound

Channel: Jazz Tutorial | with Julian Bradley

Views: 861,774

Keywords: pentatonic, scale, jazz, piano, lesson, jazz piano lesson, Jazz Scale, Pentatonic Scale, Guitar, Blues, theory, learn, improvisation, solo, improv, jazz piano lessons, licks, jazz improvisation, jazz improvisation lesson, jazz piano scales, jazz scales, pentatonic jazz lesson, jazz tutorial, julian bradley, jazz scales lesson, pentatonic jazz scales, jazz piano pentatonics

Id: ZaBn07sdv84

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2013