The Ultimate Guide To Piano Improvisation

[Music] what is up guys Simon from piano digg.com and in this video I'm gonna give you a six part system to follow to help guide you into the world of improvisation when trying to learn how to improvise it can be so easy to get overwhelmed or just lost in a random maze of information so my goal is to simplify that all into a step-by-step system which you can keep coming back to and use as a kind of roadmap to help develop your improvisational skills this video is a kind of summary of one of my courses in the piano Peak Academy so if you find it useful and you want to see more stuff like this then definitely have a think about becoming a member and joining our awesome community and as always if you want the resource sheet and backing track to go along with this video you can download that for free via the link in the description below so let's do it [Music] so the first step of the six step system is to learn a chord progression which we are going to use as the vehicle to improvise over we're going to play these chords with our left hand freeing up our right hand to improvise with later on this is how the chord progression sounds [Music] so we're using rootless voicings for these chords which means that the root note is not actually in the chord the reason we do this is because one the bass in the backing track is already playing the root note see we don't really want to double that up as it would sound a bit muddy and two it gives us some spare fingers which we can use to play a small colorful chord tones which makes the chord sound so much richer so just remember the root note is not in the chord and if you want a bit more information on this I'll link a video up at the top which talks all about rootless voicings in more depth so for our first chord we have AG minor nine for which we are playing this we've got the flat seven nine minus three and five for our next chord we have AC minor nine for which we're playing this we've got the minus 3 5 flat 7 and 9 and then we play that G minor 9 again followed by this chord ad seven flat nine we've got these three five seven and flat nine up at the top so all together we've got this [Music] so step one is to master this chord progression you want to be able to play this with your left hand and hardly have to think about it which is done through repetition so get the backing track on or just a metronome and play those chords over and over the second step of this system is to start playing around with the G minor blues scale this chord progression is in G minor so the G blues scale is a great place to start it's good because there are no what we call avoid notes which means that any note from the scale will sound good over this progression this is what the G minor blue scale looks like so learn that master it make sure you know it like the back of your hand and once you've done that get the backing track on get those chords going in the left hand and start playing around with it so just keep it simple the short little phrases try and be creative and don't be scared to experiment and avoid just running up and down the scale so that's step two and you could spend months on step two if you wanted there's an infinite amount of licks and runs you could come up with so take your time on that one and if you see me playing a lick you like the sound of I encourage you to transcribe it and work it out yourself to have at your fingertips so moving on to step three guys who have been playing around with the blues scale for a while and don't know where to go next this step is going to be exactly what you need we're going to be looking at chord tones so core tones are essentially just the notes within the chord so for our G minor nine these would be the chord tones for our C minor nine [Music] and for our D seven flat nine so I'm going to quickly run through three different exercises for you to get familiar with these the first exercise is to play through the progression just playing the chord tones one three five and seven each note on the beat here's what I mean along to the backing track [Music] the second exercise is to play the chord tones three five seven and nine and here's what that should look like the third exercise is to improvise using nothing but chord tones and still only playing one note per beat and you might need to spend some time doing the first two exercises before doing this here's an example for you [Music] so again you could spend a long time on step three and I've actually got another video which talks about these exercises in much more depth I'll put a link up at the top now so when you've done that it's time for step four to do in step four is combine the minor blues scale with the chord tones we just looked at and this is going to give us a load more notes to play around with and get some more interesting sounds I'm just gonna rush through this this video is more just showing you how to teach yourself rather than teaching you each individual stage as I said at the beginning if you want access to a fully structured course which covers this all in way more depth then check out the piano peek Academy so I'm just going to give you an example playing around with the G minor blues scale along with the core tones of each chord as they come [Music] and if you want even more to play around with hang around for step 5 in this step we're going to look at some chord scales and modes for each chord we're going to learn a scale which goes with that chord so for our G minor nine we're going to use the G Dorian scale which looks like this for our C minor nine we're going to use the C Dorian scale which looks like this and for our deep dominant seven flat nine we're going to use the D dominant diminished scale which looks like this [Music] so get to know these scales practice them over and over until they become very familiar just practice them up and down along the chords in the left hand to help associate the scales to the chords once you've done that you're ready to move on to step 6 so well done are making it to the final step what we're gonna do here is put everything together so we're going to improvise using the scales for each chord mixed in with the chord tones and the G minor blues scale this is a lot to think about so it's really important that you've spent a considerable amount of time on each step getting familiar with what you're learning and not just rushing through things here is an example using everything we've talked about so far [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I know that was a very fast-paced lesson but the idea is not for you to follow along but rather use this as a guide and a pathway to help teach yourself how to develop your improvisational skills and get to that next level if you want access to the lesson resource sheet and backing track the link is in the description below and you can download that for free and if you want me to teach you all this stuff step-by-step at a much slower pace then head over to piano Pig comm and sign up today I hope you enjoyed this video and found it useful if you did make sure to smash that like button subscribe to the channel and I will see you next time

Channel: PianoPig

Views: 256,353

Keywords: piano improvisation, jazz piano, improvisation, how to improvise, piano improv, jazz improvisation, neo soul, gospel, pianopig, piano pig

Id: BqwKqeoiGbc

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019