Why Should I Bother Learning Scales? 

You guys are the Angels of spreading out Jazz & music harmony to the world and feed the planet with it to achieve peace & paradise on Earth!

Two Kings:Adam and Jonny🌹🌹🌹🌹

You two are the best teachers online. Jonny's course is amazing

From the man himself! The best jazz piano teachers I could have ever asked for. Thanks guys, keep doing what you do!

Couldn't agree more. Thanks Adam!

Good one. 😊

Great acronym

that's not a bad one :).... I got mine form Venus Theory, which is " I Do Pot Leave Me Alone, Locrian" :D and now I always know the names of the modes, I just need to learn how to use them :D

Hi I’m borrowing your acronym but altering one word I DO particularly like…… Thank you!

I have some of the same confusion. You say "...if you leave out the 'left hand,' no bass note or chord...", which makes me think two things: * 99% of the time, obviously, the listener has "the left hand" (the song's key center) bouncing around their heads--it's often very hard for the listener to lose that context, so the notes of a Phrygian scale that sound so distinctly "Spanish" in a Phrygian modal-jazz piece just sound like "tension notes" in a major-key ballad. * If you are listening to, say, a solo sax player on the sidewalk blowing over chord changes, the player is choosing which notes land on strong beats, and which don't. That can shape the listener's perception of both the chord being played during that short passage, and possible even give the impression of a new key center / tonic (say a change from Bb Ionian to D Phrygian, where the scale notes don't change, but the tonic does). If the sax player plays a lick over a minor chord that mostly emphasizes non-chord tones, it might be heard as mere "tension" if preceded and followed by licks that clearly establish the minor chord using chord tones on strong-beats. If they ignore the chord tones long enough (never emphasizing them), the changes get fuzzy very quickly, and the casual listener loses the thread (though this could be just another way to create tension and release, when the song comes back into focus). One thing I've read over and over is that most seasoned players rarely think about chord scales once they've internalized a composition, if they use this framing at all. Older generations focused more on learning vocabulary and letting their ear guide them. And some people really dislike the chord-scale framing altogether, and recommend other routes. As Ethan Iverson has written on this subject, hard-core beboppers loved their chromatic, snaky licks that depart constantly from chord scales, and likewise blues licks that give solos so much flavor often depart from chord scales.

Further to this - if the various modes are basically the C major scale, but starting on different keys, isn't this lesson just "If the song is in C major, just improvise using the C major scale, and you'll automatically be playing in the various modes as the chords change"? Or is it as Jazz Time commented above, the way you might emphasise certain notes depending on which chord the left hand is playing? I'm going to watch this again and try to understand it a little more when I'm in front of the keys :)

Being conscious of the mode informs, among other things, Your choice of leading tones and notes used for enclosures.

Good question, same here.

Thank you so much for that explanation.!!! Now this otherwise totally opaque tutorial is stating to make some sense. So glad I read the comments, otherwise I'd have wasted my time.

It seems overwhelming. How do I go about leaning and being fluent with these scales?