[Music] Jazz backing tracks or play longs can be great tools to improve your Jazz improvisation
but it could be possible the way you're actually using them isn't helping you very much let's
talk about strategies for using Jazz play alongs so it's important for you to understand
that jazz backing tracks are not natural environments for jazz improvisation that's because Jazz
is more of a social kind of music you're meant to be improvising and reacting to what other
actual musicians are doing backing tracks are just pre-recorded sterile musical environments
that aren't reacting to anything that you're doing so they're not really a replacement
for playing with other musicians at all but that doesn't mean that playing along with
backing tracks isn't beneficial in fact they can be very beneficial when thought of as
musical playgrounds to experiment and try out different musical ideas essentially getting
better at the fundamentals of how to improvise but the most common mistake that I see musicians
making with backing tracks is they just put it on and they keep practicing for the entire
track and keep repeating it over and over again hoping to get better results each time
but the reality is they don't actually feel like they're getting better because they're
not actually stopping to figure out what parts of the song they need to work on and fix so
here on the screen I have a program called called song Master up and the chord changes
that are in here are the tune Autumn Leaves [Music] a really classic Jazz standard that
has lots of great 251 chord progressions in it and a good one to practice so what I did
is I took one of our Jazz backing tracks that learn jazz standards has made I'll be sure
to put a link in the description down below and put it into this program called song Master
also I'll leave a link to that in the description down below now once uploaded into song Master
it actually kind of puts the chords there for us so we have C Minor 7 F7 B flat major
7 E flat major 7 a minor seven flat five D7 and G minor seven which are in fact the first
eight bars of autumn leaves so let me play the melody along with the backing track before
we do anything with it at all [Music]
[Music] so tip number one for practicing with backing tracks is to Loop sections so taking
a look here at Autumn Leaves the first three bars are a two five one and B flat major okay
a two five one is the most common chord progression in jazz so let's just say for example that
I'm struggling with playing good ideas over two five one well instead of just playing
through the entire song form of Autumn Leaves why don't we just Loop this section so what
I'm going to do is press this Loop button right here where I can actually select which
section I want to Loop so I'm actually going to select this section right here which includes
the IV chord and let's just practice for a second this two five one four and see what
we can come up with foreign
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okay so now I can actually get around to practicing what this sounds like right instead of moving
on to the next section like we can really start working on this 251 chord progression
now another section I might want to Loop is actually right here it's the a minor 7 flat
five to the G minor seven which actually is a minor 251 chord progression which is the
second most important chord progression in all of jazz and I want to figure out some
ideas that can play over especially this half diminished chord to start with because it's
kind of tricky so let's give it a shot and see what it sounds like foreign [Music]
[Music]
this a little bit I actually feel like it's a little bit too quick of a tempo for me which
leads me to tip number two and tip number two is to slow down the tempo So currently
as you can see with this metronome right here it's actually at 140 BPM and I kind of want
to make it a little bit slower than that so over here at the speed on song master I'm
gonna go ahead and slow it down to 80 percent of the tempo which is a hundred and twelve
BPM so this is quite a bit slower but when you want to get better at playing something
then slowing something down is a great idea so of course we can do this for the entire
backing track but in this case let's keep this loop on the miner 251 and see what we
come up with and the great thing of course like song master and other slowdowner softwares
out there is that when we're slowing down the speed here it's not actually changing
the pitch so we're going to be playing in the accurate key [Music]
[Music] thank you now of course we can go the other way around too let's say I actually
want to practice playing a lot faster let's go ahead and speed that up dramatically to
1.4 percent so now we're at 196 BPM [Music]
[Music]
now already I hope you can see this is a lot better practice than just simply listening
to the entire backing track and practicing with the whole thing looping sections and
then slowing or speeding them down is allowing us to practice in a much deeper better way
now as we go through this process of looping and slowing things down we might start feeling
comfortable with these chord progressions and decide actually let's expand this even
further so that we're doing the first eight bars in totality and put that on a loop for
a little bit before actually getting to an entire chorus so let's move on to tip number
three and tip number three is to transpose so let's go ahead and zoom back in here to
our 251 chord progression at the very beginning and loop this section so this is a 251 in
the key of B flat but let's just say that we want to practice this in another key because
we know that playing a 2-5-1 in every single key is ultimately going to be an important
skill for us to have so the first option we have here on song Master is we can do a pitch
transposition we can move it up in semitones so for example one semitone would be B major
and two semitones would be C major so now we can actually practice this chord progression
in C major
foreign [Music]
now we can get really good at playing this in C major as well but of course like I mentioned
actually being able to play an important chord progression like this in all 12 Keys is a
super great idea so one thing that we can do here in song Master is go over to this
key trainer over here I'm going to press the on button and then click set up which is basically
going to allow us to select the sequence of how we're going to practice these keys so
we can select the circle of fists the circle of force chromatic Ascend chromatic descent
whole step ascent and whole step decent personally I love practicing in the circle of fourths
so now that we've applied that to this chord progression let's start seeing how we can
practice this in all 12 keys foreign [Music]
[Music]
and so on and so forth through the circle of keys and of course we can slow it down
we can speed it up and we can also change it to the circle of fifths or chromatic ascending
just other ways to practice working this through the different keys so this to me is a much
better way to practice with jazz backing tracks or Jazz play alongs I'll leave a link to song
master in the description down below as well as a library of 226 MP3 backing tracks of
the most important Jazz standards that we provide down description down below as well
now if you're like Brent we need to take a step back for a second because I have no idea
how to improvise over two five ones or anything else in the first place then check out this
video on the screen right now called The Jazz improv explained I really start from the very
beginning the most simplest terms how to start improvising over Jazz standards so click on
that video right now make sure you like this video if you found it helpful make sure you
subscribe to the channel if you've never done that before and we'll see you in the next
video cheers