The RIGHT Way to Improvise with CHORD TONES for Better Solos

everybody jeff schneider here you know when you're improvising the solo and you play that note that makes everyone cringe how about when you listen back to recordings of yourself does it ever sound like a random sloppy mess of note noodles trust me i've been there and i want to tell you how i got better and how i've helped my students get better too the short answer is to practice improvising with chord tones only now if you've heard this before keep watching because i'm not only going to explain the reasons why improvising with chord tones is beneficial but i'm also going to show you how to do it well because unfortunately when many improvisers get this advice they end up sounding kind of basic so let's get into it i've gone through a lot of jazz programs at schools and camps and just about all of them placed a huge emphasis on learning scales and modes but for some reason the teachers completely bypassed the pedagogical method of improvising with chord tones only and just to be clear by chord tones i mean the root third fifth and seventh of the chords within any given progression now i'm not going to say that all scales are bad they do have their plays in learning to improvise but by focusing first on chord tones you're going to have a much easier time playing notes that align with the chord changes for example if we take a basic c major seven chord and play a c major scale over it you'll see in here that not all the scale degrees are equally stable there's a spectrum of consonants and dissonance the most consonant note is the root followed by the fifth third and seventh the second and sixth don't sound bad but they're not as fundamental to the sound of the chord as one three five and seven and then there's that annoying little fourth often referred to as an avoid note because it clashes with the third which is only a half step away my point is that some notes will better represent the chord at hand than others don't get me wrong those non-chord tones can still sound good the truth is any note can sound good played over any chord some are just less user-friendly than others it's kind of like taking a picture on your phone versus a fancy dslr camera if you don't know anything about shutter speed aperture and iso you're much more likely to get the picture you want by just using your camera app to analogize the analogy buying the fancy camera before learning the fundamentals of photography is like getting in a ferrari without knowing how to drive but again there's nothing wrong with scales it's just that when you're a beginning improviser or even a more experienced improviser learning a difficult tune worrying about scales can be counterproductive especially when you consider how many scale options there are out there that's a ridiculous amount of notes to call to mind when you're trying to improvise a solo i highly recommend not overloading your circuits and instead focus on the four nodes that actually capture the sound of the chord root third fifth and seventh another huge benefit of sticking to those chord tones is that by clearly outlining each chord you'll better internalize the sound of the changes it's one thing to understand the theory behind a series of chords on an intellectual level but actually having the sound of a progression ingrained in your ear is what will help you get from thinking your way through a solo to hearing your way through a solo it's the difference between having an effortless conversation with your best friend and a forced conversation with that uncle you see once every six years but as i said before even though learning to improvise on a tune by limiting yourself to chord tones makes a lot of sense most people don't sound that great when they try to do it why is that well there are a couple of reasons when you strip away all those extra notes it exposes many people's lack of phrasing time and rhythm anyone who's taken my courses knows my spiel about how you can play all the hippest combinations of notes you want if your phrasing time and rhythm aren't happening it all falls apart my favorite reason for limiting yourself to chord tones is that limitations breed creativity look i know it's a challenge to make something up with only four notes but i promise if you take on that challenge and succeed your playing will be so much better when you fold back in the non-chord tones you know who i think would agree with me ernest hemingway in the 1920s the author was rumored to have taken on a similar challenge the story goes that hemingway's colleagues bet him that he couldn't write a complete story in just six words to which he replied for sale baby's shoes never worn thankfully improvising with chord tones is much less depressing than hemingway's exercise in flash fiction but many improvisers still sound kind of sad when soloing with just chord tones one of the main reasons is that when most improvisers think in chord tones they end up playing this kind of thing it's a boring arpeggio up the root position voicing of the chord so what should you do instead here are some tips get comfortable not starting your lines on the root of the chord it's predictable and provides less color than chord tones like the third and seventh both of which are literally referred to as color tones you can also practice inversions of chords a triad is usually played like this one three five that's called root position but you can also play the same three notes like this three five one which is first inversion or like this five one three second inversion long story short don't start your phrases on the one the same rule applies to rhythm starting your phrases on beat one is also predictable get comfortable with the other beats in the measure you could start on beat two three or four how about the end of two the end of three or the end of four there are many more possibilities but those options i mentioned are a good place to start no pun intended now here's another tactic change direction and skip around in the examples i played earlier the lines go up linearly a series of consecutive ascending chord tones but when you start zigzagging and skipping over adjacent chord tones you open yourself up to so many more possibilities also you don't need to play all four chord tones on every chord it's a simple reminder but sometimes we forget that it's okay to use a subset of the already few options at hand finally the most important tip of all is to think and play compositionally how do you come up with a solo that is melodic and not one that ends up sounding like that sloppy mess of noodles my answer is always the same repetition and variation i go deep into this concept in my course making the changes but in this video i want to do a compositional breakdown if you will of a chord tone solo i wrote over the jazz standard there will never be another you let's look for instances of repetition and variation as well as examples of other strategies and techniques i've covered thus far by the way this piece is from a new collection of etudes i've just released called chord tone magic 12 chord tone etudes over popular chord progressions we'll help you internalize the sound of the progressions and give you a ton of ideas of how to craft chord tone lines that are actually melodic and interesting so here's the etude on there will never be another you let's start by listening to the first 16 bars that's the first half of the [Music] form bye all right so let's do a little bit of analysis we're going to take a look at some of the compositional devices that i've used here specifically relating to repetition and variation so we're gonna start on the seven and then go down to the three and then repeat that again a few times so seven down to three seven down to three and then it's a little bit different right in here if you take a look at the rhythmic variation between this this and this all three of these are a little bit different rhythmically but because the pitches are the same there's enough repetition to keep it in one grouping or one coherent idea so it sounds like this a one two three four [Music] one and then on the d minor seven flat five that d half diminished right in here we vary the phrase and go like this so we're going from this to this [Music] pitches start to vary at this point but the general shape of the line is intact we're still doing that fairly large leap down there all right going on we have the flat five of the d minor seven flat five that d half diminished and then we're just gonna hang on the g for a bit one one one one flat seven remember these are all chord tones and then look at this we are back to that original shape going down a fifth so from the d to the g that we had here that's a fifth and now we have the same interval g down to c that's also a fifth i'm really trying to use repetition here to make this feel like a coherent solo and not just a random mess of notes all right now the rhythm alters again we have this slight variation this eighth note right here followed by the quarter and then another eighth that's a pretty common rhythm it sounds like this one two three four all right now we're going to build off of that idea and do it again right in here adding this little pickup note that's that's the flat third of the chord again just chord tones but we're going to repeat that same rhythm and i feel like this one echoes what we just heard so let me change colors here so you can see what i'm talking about so duda so what's similar about those two lines well specifically it's the ends of the lines these lines rhyme i like to talk about lines that rhyme i'll make another video about that in the future about rhyming your lines just like lyrics rhyme but we have this descending whole step right here and then the same thing descending whole step going on we have this pickup right here sounds like this all right we're anticipating the three of a flat major seven but what i think is interesting about this pickup here is that it's the same rhythm that we had on this line and this line right here but instead of the line going down like it does here and here we're going up so we have a nice little bit of contrast there some balance to the direction of the phrases also another thing that i'm thinking about right here with this c that's held out for three beats this a flat major seven is somewhat of an arrival chord it's a resolved chord especially compared to the b flat minor seven and e flat seven those chords both have some tension in them because they are essentially leading up to this destination this a flat major seven so the fact that we hold the note with that c we hold that note out for a little bit longer that adds to that sense of arrival the next couple of notes are similar to what we started with that descending leap that interval going down it also balances out what we just heard the line goes up here and then it comes down here now on to the e flat major 7 we have this repeated g again which is going to set up this dramatic leap up the octave by the way these repeated g's are not too different from what we had here i don't think i was consciously thinking about relating those two measures but it is related nonetheless but yes we have this dramatic leap up the octave this thing right here [Music] landing on the flat 3 of c minor 7. and if i play all of this back or at least from say this point right here you're going to hear how each one of these phrases is kind of building up to to this point right here so i know i've written a bunch on the music here but i'm going to play starting at this point and let's try to hear the relationship between each one of these little melodic cells all right so starting from the pickup into the b-flat minor seven one two three [Music] each one of these lines is birthed out of what's come before and then we're going to continue this idea in just a moment but we're going to do some fancier stuff here because we've done a lot of slower melodic movements the rhythm has been a little bit less active in the previous four measures or so so when we go into this next line coming up here there's a lot of activity there and what that is going to do i hate to spill the beans here but what it's going to do is it's going to set up this resolution really really nicely so just like we had that dramatic change right here that dramatic arrival we're going to have an even more dramatic arrival when we resolve to the g on the e flat major 7 which is uh bar 17 halfway through the tune but let's check out this line in here it's all chord tones but i'm trying to change up inversions of chords i'm zigzagging like i was talking about before uh let's check it out it sounds like this i'll play it um from the pickup starting right here a one two three [Music] so that final resolution is so satisfying after all of that rhythmic tension that's built up over the previous four bars so we have some really interesting rhythmic activity right in here we have this phrase right here and then it starts on the end of four so here it starts on beat one then it starts on the end of four da da then it starts on the down beat of four ba ba do da de ba du da du da du de da all right so sounds crazy when i just sing it out like that but the fact that we are starting that little five note or four or five note cell right in here and then starting it again on different parts of the measure i was talking about this earlier about not always starting your lines on the one i'm starting on the one i'm starting on the end of four i'm starting on beat four if you vary those starting points you're really going to be able to introduce some creativity into your playing also in the middle of this line we have this classic bebop type vocabulary in there where you have that perfect voice leading of the flat seven of the f minor seven chord resolving down to the three of b flat seven and then when we complete this line we get to our climax we get to the highest note we've heard thus far the a flat and i think that's positioned well because when we get to bar 17 here you know this is this is where we come back to the repetition of the chord progression so the form of this tune is kind of a a and then there are some different chords at the very end but at least in the beginning of these two a sections you've got the same chord progression you've got that e flat major 7 d half diminished g7 when we get to bar 17 it really feels like the the point of arrival that we've been waiting for and we set that up with the high a flat and we get a nice climax there with the highest note as we land on the second half of the form again holding out the g just as we did earlier to accentuate that sense of arrival all right this video is getting a little long so i'm going to make the second half of my analysis available as a free video download along with the sheet music transposed for all instruments and a backing track for you to practice along with click the link on the screen or in the description below to get all of that for free and happy shedding thanks for watching and see you in the next one

Channel: Jeff Schneider

Views: 295,687

Keywords: improvising, improvisation, jazz, jazz improvisation, jazz piano, music theory, chords, chord progressions, there will never be another you, there will never be another you backing track, jazz improvisation piano, jazz tutorial, how to improvise

Id: Z-KzfB7vfFA

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020