learn to play jazz piano Now it's YOUR turn to be the life and soul of the party!. Click Here 👈 in just two years I went fr...
learn to play jazz piano
Now it's YOUR turn to be the life and soul of the party!. Click Here 👈
in just two years I went from having zero jazz skills to playing jazz piano professionally in both solo and ensemble settings The only way this was even possible isn't because I'm some prodigy who was just ripping at age seven Cuz believe me I'm a late learner It's because through my own constant failure and frustration and relentless curiosity and figuring out this whole jazz thing I eventually knew I had to come up with some sort of framework to make it all click And when I did it changed everything And now I'm making this video to show you exactly how it works And if you've been following me for a while then you know that I do not when it comes to learning I don't sell hacks and secrets that promise overnight results Instead I'm going to show you real systems that actually work And not just for me but also for all the students I've worked with all over the world When I started this journey jazz seemed impossibly complex to learn It was like you either knew it or you didn't through all the YouTubing and buying courses and books and ebooks you know I thought I had to just memorize a bunch of scales chords modes and drill exercises and all 12 keys every day and transcribe a bunch of solos that made no sense to me But that just left me way overwhelmed And the worst part is I had nothing to show for it I still couldn't just play through a jazz standard or improvise a decent sounding solo Eventually though I realized I had it all wrong You see I was viewing jazz as some sort of complex math problem But in reality it's just a language And with any language you learn it from its smallest simplest elements You know you start with the letters and then you learn to form words and then sentences And then one day you're just speaking You're just playing jazz And this is exactly what my framework is built on And I call it the jazz morphology matrix So what exactly is morphology Morphology is the study of language but specifically the study of the words within a language and how they're formed and how they're structured off of what we call morphes And morphes are just the smallest units of meaning that make up these words And so morphologists will study how these morphes interact with each other and how uh meanings can be different depending on what comes after another morpheme what comes before a morphe that kind of thing And when it comes to jazz it's no different So what we need to do is we need to understand jazz down to its smallest units of meaning and how those units interact with each other And I call this the stock vocabulary So one of the misconceptions in learning jazz is that you sit there and you figure out your own vocabulary But no you learn the vocabulary that's already part of the language So here's how I view all this I'm going to break this down to two parts So first check out this chart Okay looks a little crazy Don't worry it's not that bad We're going to go over the stock vocabulary and then we're going to go over ways to apply the vocabulary so that you can get playing Okay so let's look here I have the vocabulary broken down into four general categories Melody rhythm voicing bass We don't have time to go through everything in deep deep detail obviously okay But we can look at some general ideas that will really be helpful for you So in terms of melody you just need to learn some cliches And when I say cliche I mean as simple as major scales and minor scales and major triads and minor triads You got to know all those And then we get to more jazz specific cliches I'll show you what I mean later Rhythm What you really need to know are just some comping patterns Okay and comping patterns are really just going to be based off of having a strong swing rhythm Okay that's really it for a while You don't need to go look up complex jazz rhythms Just really understand swing And we'll talk about specific comping patterns And so these are kind of like my more themes right The further you go out from this graph the smaller the units become or more specific I should say Now let's look at bass here So bass you can really just um break this down into half note bass and quarter note bass or walking bass Okay And then after that it's going to be voicing This is the big one because this is what separates jazz chords from other chords and other genres is the way the notes are ordered And that's the definition of voicing right How the notes are ordered And so you have your one-handed voicings and your two-handed voicings And you have these different types And then as we expand away from the center here we get smaller and smaller So all these voicings they're based off of knowing your shells All right And shells are the essential tones which are the third and the seventh of each chord So before you even go learning all these things you really need to know the smallest units of voicing which are the essential tones third and seventh Okay And in a nutshell that's about it Okay this these are the things I focused on that got me from playing zero jazz to going pro in two years Now let's expand into some more details so you could get a a clear image of all this Okay so I got a bigger graph here It's actually the same chart It's the same exact chart but with details Okay don't let it scare you We'll break it down real quick here So let's start with melody Man when it comes to cliches like I said earlier it's as simple as just learning your scales and your arpeggios and then learning about chromaticism This could be quite a big topic in itself So we're not going to get too deep here but you'd be surprised A lot of people come to me and they're struggling with improvising but they don't know their major scales that well Okay Playing them up and down does not mean you know them You got to know like what's the fourth of D You know what's the flat six of G What's the seventh of A flat You got to know those things These are like general music cliches They're not even cliches in the definition of cliche right They're just so foundational but I still think of them as like these foundational cliches as part of western music right And then you get jazz specific So for example some jazz specific melodic cliches would be like this over C major We hear this all the time It's been done forever you know And if you want to get specific to like Bbop this is a piece of Bbop language or this or this So these are just like some enclosures right But again these are stock pieces of vocabulary that you learn and you memorize and then you start learning how to string them together Okay And this will also help you when you listen and when you analyze So it's not just melody in the terms of you playing melody and making melodies but it's also when you listen to melodies and analyze melodies And then when it comes to rhythm these three comping patterns will take you a long way Okay the reverse Charleston the Charleston and the Red Garland rhythm Are there more Of course but they're all kind of based off of these three And when it comes to bass no you have these very stock ways of doing your half note bass and your walking bass So for a half note bass you would use like roots fifths and chromatic approaches So for example if I'm doing Fly Me to the Moon you [Music] know so I'm just doing the root notes in the fifth So for a minor the root and the fifth then D minor the root and the fifth And then you can add chromatic approaches Instead of using the fifth I could approach D minor like [Music] this Chromatic step below the D or above All right either way And then walking bass Since we have more notes per chord now we can play more things So we could do like triads or just straight scaler motions So from A minor to D minor I could do something like this And that's stock I didn't make up that line [Music] right I just did it again for D minor to G You could also do like these triads So I did a triad a minor triad followed by a chromatic step to the D [Music] right I did it again there D minor triad chromatic steped G And these are all very stock okay Stock vocabulary I'm not making these things up as I go They're kind of downloaded into me and I learned them from the history of jazz and all the players who did all these things And finally the big one voicing So real quick here rooted voicings Those are voicings that have the roots in them okay You know those And then bass shells So bass shells is when you play a shell So like the essential tones of C major right Third and seventh And then you add a bass note There you go It's a three note bass shell I didn't make up this voicing It already exists in the jazz vocabulary Same with this one If you can reach it great And then you have two note bass shells So I could play C major 7th like this I don't need the third Or I could even do it like this Just root and third So two note bass shells are just the bass note and one of the essential tones And these are also known as bud Powell voicings You might have heard that before Rootless voicings Oh this is a big one So many students have come to me with a big question mark over their heads when it comes to rootless voicings They're sitting there trying to figure these things out Oh my goodness rootless voicings are so finite There's only a few of them that you learn and you memorize them You don't sit there trying to figure out rootless voicings Like D minor 7th boom Just do that every single time and you'll be fine And then you have So this is the type A because the third's on the bottom Type B is the inversion with the seventh in the bottom It's the same four notes but this is all you would ever really need Then after that you have maybe spicier options but that doesn't matter Okay this is what's important Learn it memorize it and get moving Play a bunch of jazz standards Open voicings This is a little bit more advanced You have your four note five note six note So for example like you could play D minor like this And this is if you're comping and you're playing in a band and someone's already playing bass You know this is a stock four note open voicing for D minor Five note you could add the root note here And a six note you would add an 11 up here And this is stock This is not my voicing All right Block chords Also a little bit more advanced All right But this is like the George Shearing and Barry Harris type stuff That's where you can have um something like this like C6 right You see the octave on the outside And then you could also learn the drop twos where you drop the second note from the top down an octave So C6 C major 7th You do this again Stock stock vocabulary It's like looking in a dictionary and just learning some words These are words that exist in the jazz dictionary Okay And then spread voicings Finally my favorite The reason why spread voicings is highlighted is because it's such a crucial element of playing solo jazz piano You absolutely need it And spread voicings are a type of open voicing but they're melody driven meaning they depend on the melody note So if I'm playing Fly Me to the Moon let's just keep using that [Music] example I'm voicing these chords based off of what the melody note is okay And I'm using what I call the functional level voicings right now So the melody note will really tell us how to arrange the rest of the notes in the voicing so that they sound good and also idiomatic to jazz I have these three levels here and this is unique to my personal system in approaching spread voicings and how I learned it and how I went pro in just two years landing three-hour long solo piano gigs Okay And I cover these in detail in Novu Jazz Academy which is my online jazz academy which features several courses especially courses in spread voicings The functional level would just be you know just the bare minimum the notes that you would need to play the chord which are really just the four notes of the seventh chord right so a minor 7th this is like functional level with the third and the melody and then authentic will be you know you're going to find these more specific to jazz so for example if I take B flat 7 and the melody note is let's say the root note a functional level voicing might be something like this this is not specific to jazz You could do this really in any genre okay And it only has the four notes of the seventh chord right The roots the third the fifth the flat 7 But you're not really going to see this in jazz But I think you need to learn it this way So you could just plug it into a bunch of jazz standards Then a more authentic way to play a B flat 7 with a root note in the melody might be this All right So we have B flat 13 Or you could do [Music] this All right Or you can even use the fifth here instead of the 13 It's not as interesting The fifth is thought of to be the most boring notes Okay And dominant chords This here And then at the pro level that's where you start considering altered extensions like Okay Listen to how rich that is But here's the thing This is a stock voicing I didn't make this voicing All the greats have played this Anyone who's playing jazz at a professional level they know this voicing and it's ready to go in their fingers whenever they want to use it And there's many of these prolevel authentic voicings You could also do this one here This is like B flat altered You could do it this way You can move the third to the left hand You could even just do like this augmented So just a flat 13 This is a little cleaner right A little simpler But again all these are stock voicings All right And so when you learn them in order you don't get overwhelmed The idea is that you play a bunch of standards You learn like 10 20 30 40 and you're just moving along and you upgrade gradually Now this is the first part okay I wanted to show you what the stock vocabulary looks like But now I want to show you something else that's equally as important or maybe even more important It's what I call the stock styles How do you apply all those stock all the stock vocabulary Well you need to learn your standards in these four stock styles Okay And this is going to take you so far For example let's start on the left For every standard you play you need to know how to play just the melody and just the bass Let's do Fly Me to the Moon [Music] And you do this at whatever level's appropriate for you okay And that's something you kind of have to figure out by yourself or with the help of someone else And so if you're especially advanced you might do more of a walking [Music] bass If you're just starting you might just do whole note bass [Music] I think you get the idea And then you need to be able to do melody while the left hand is just comping So that might sound something like Okay And then right hand comping and left hand bass And you do this at whatever level you're at And then finally spread voicings [Music] And if you're more advanced you might you know incorporate some more extensions in your chords you know and some reharms [Music] So depending on your level but these four styles I think were the biggest in uh biggest factor in getting me to where I am is just taking them applying them to all the standards and doing it in time Don't forget to get that metronome going or iro pro or some sort of backing track Okay Do all this in time And then there's these advanced dials and you know it's gonna be a while until you touch these you spend so much time on just these four um more accessible styles So two-handed comping you know you're playing a lot of six note five note four note voicings Let's just do like a 251 you know 251 the key of C This is your D minor And then your D or your G7 might be something like this you know right And then your C major you might do And then your block chord melody So if I'm doing Fly Me to the Moon and then three part Basa I'm not sure if that's the best name for this but it it kind of describes it you [Music] know That's where I'm playing three parts the melody the bass and then the inside [Music] chords Something like that over Fly Me to the Moon But that's really it in a nutshell And so approaching jazz from this kind of perspective completely transformed my playing So get out there and start practicing with this mindset of accumulating stock vocabulary the vocab that's already there in the jazz language for us We don't need to figure it out We just got to learn it memorize it apply it to a bunch of standards and you will reach your goals and you will be able to play the way that you've always wanted to And if you really like this video then make sure to follow my page here on my Instagram my Tik Tok and you'll be seeing more content like ...
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