Bro you've blown my mind. Nobody's ever explained the point of practicing left hand arpeggios to me until now. Now I see that if you base your solo off them, and then add the rest of the scale notes as passing notes, you get a way more harmonic solo than just randomly playing the scale. I'm at jazz school and they haven't even articulated this properly to me - let alone told me to practice arpeggios at all! Thank you!
I jumped back to this series after your comments on rhythm changes in a couple other videos, I'm glad I did. Really sound approaches here to what has become an overly thought out and hand wringing composition. MORE HOMEWORK...! Thank You!
Sir, you are amazing. Thanks for your all lessons and your effort. I really like your simple explanations in the begining and step by step progression in detail. Thanks a lot again.
What helped me with using scales way really to see the scale as an inversion much like the arpeggio and to outline the arpeggio using the scale, got that from a jason becker lick from the DC Music School lesson on him and that lick is free on youtube. now I use that kind of thing as the scale and arpeggio kind of approaches and/or embellishes the melody and kind of use fills as to what can I say with the melody and try to keep all of that connected. getting use to that is kind of bit to think about, especially if you want to modulate between changes and keep a theme/motif but the melody stands out the more I get use to it
+Jens Larsen if you would like I could make a video using my phone on it. basically I'm take say EM and I'm outlining EM using a sequence of phyrigian dominant. I would feature/accent the notes of EM (E-G#-B) by using phrigian dominant as the embellishment, passing tones, approach to the arpeggio.
Hi JENS you a really master!, thank you very much for the videos and shared your knowledge with us :), i would like to know if in the future you gonna make a video explanen how to transcribe solos or if you have some advise. Thank you again!
You're very welcome Colo! I talked about transcribing a few times in the Q&A. I wasn't really planing to make a lesson on it, but who knows, it might be a good idea!
I enjoy most all you do and many people, rightly so, analyze Rhythm Changes but no one seems to even mention Honeysuckle Rose. Would you consider analyzing it. Thank you.
Hi Jens - I'm curious about the choice of the Ab in the scale for EbMaj7. To stay diatonic to the key of Bb the choice would be the A or #4 for the Eb scale, no? Is it related to the Ab in the preceding B7? Thanks!
Yes, Eb is diatonic, but when you have the Bb7 before it you already introduced the Ab, and that often makes that sound more natural. In any case it is not super important since you have 4 8th notes to play and neither A or Ab will be very strong notes for an Eb chord :) Making the IV chord a temporary tonic is very common, if you remember I did the same in the Roadmap course, and you will also see that most often in solos.
+Jens Larsen No problem, I would love to see you do something similar for other tunes with a lot of changes like Giant Steps. Even explaining how/why it's possible to leave out certain chords and simplify the progression for the purpose of the solo.
+gamzer I might, the Turnaround series will end in Giant Steps. You should be aware that you can't always reduce the amount of chords (GIant steps is a bit like that..) In the rhythm changes we are reducing a tonal progression to a very similar but simpler progression.
+Jens Larsen Maybe you cannot reduce the amount of chords much, it helps that the number of tonal center changes of GS is much smaller than the number of chords.
Jos Groot True, though I am not sure that is a very huge advantage when playing on it, especially since the tonal center moves in the middle of the bar :)
How would you treat a progression like Bbmaj - Bdim7 - Cm7 - C#dim7 - Dm7 - G7 - Cm7 - F7? I noticed that that kind of substitution is played quite often. I understand that it's in fact just sub I - VI - II - V for most part but I can't really grasp the meaning of C#dim7 and how to approach it.
That would be great, the IIIbo7 chord is tricky from what I'd seen. And in rhythm change setting with high tempo and 2 chords per bar it gets quite confusing. Thanks Jens, great vids!
Actually it isn't a bIII dim chord. I do have a video on those here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RiK0xJsBUiY.html I'll get to it in one of the next Q&A's :)
Hey Jens at 2:09 in the video when you see the Bb maj 7. It may sound silly but for this can we play the 1st string on 6 too? I was wondering if you omitted it for a specific reason, I know some stuff gets rid of an octave because it can take away from the progression later but I was just curious. Also what about barring that chord and just muting the A string if the above question is yes
+Mike Santo Or maybe you were keeping the 4 note chords consistent, that makes more sense. Well even if that's the case is barring a good option for the Bb7
+Mike Santo I leave the high Bb out for two reasons. the Bb over the A doesn't sound that nice and the chords move better if you don't have 5 voices in the first one.
+Mike Santo If you are barring chords that means that you have to take more care with muting some strings so I tend to avoid that. I also avoid the bar chords because I often play basslines and not having the bar is more flexible for the bass lines.
+Jens Larsen Oleo is sometimes written out like this : Bmaj7 - F7 - Cm7 - F7 - Dm7 - G7 - Cm7 - F7 www.chipin-kaiya.com/c/c-transcription/c-transcription/TranOleo1_files/oleoleadsheet.gif My teacher plays it this way and I have been taugt this way. Would playing a Bmaj7 arpeggio over the Dm7 and G7 "work" so to speak? To my ear it sounds ok, but that might just be that it flies by so quick and the bmaj7 arpeggio obviously fits the B major scale. To outline the progression better, would you recommend I play a Dm7 arpeggio instead? Thank you, love the lessons.