Let's face it improvising over jazz standards will not be the easiest thing you've ever done
in your life and especially if you're a beginner someone trying to get started with jazz it can
be kind of overwhelming and maybe you've heard me say stuff like learn jazz solos by ear take
licks and all 12 keys and all these other things that you're just overwhelmed and you're thinking
I just want to get started right now what are the basics of what I need to do well in this
video that's exactly I'm going to tell you three things that you need to do to get started your
jazz improvisation let's do it what's up Brent here from learned jazz standards calm which is
a blog a podcast and videos all geared towards helping you become a better jazz musician make
sure you subscribe at the button below and hit that Bell notification to make sure you
are locked into everything we've got going on here listen I want you to start I don't want
you to feel afraid to start improvising over jazz standards and feel overwhelmed by the process so
I'm gonna be boiling it down just to three things that I want you to do today I'm gonna make things
simple so let's jump right to it so step number one is simply to outline the chord tones now I
call this mapping and this is really important I'll talk about it more in a second but we're
gonna use my pet tune to use as examples autumn leaves because it's really simple to understand
and we are gonna apply this concept so take a look at this I've got the chord tones written
out over the entire form of autumn leaves and I'm using a technique called voice leading to
connect them together so you'll notice I go up one arpeggio or the set of chord tones and down
the next from one chord to the other and they don't necessarily start or end on the root I'm
connecting them to the nearest chord tone from where we left off last which is called voice
leading now the reason we do this outside of just spelling out each chord tone is because
we want to learn how to connect them together this is the bass line the most basic thing you
can start doing it's not that hard and it's really gonna help you start actually playing the changes
now let me address the elephant in the room really quick the first thing I said was not
start playing these scales overtop of these courts now why didn't I say scales because scales are
not going to help you outline the court changes scales are just too many options too many notes
and by boiling things down just to the core tones it makes it way way easier and just try this for a
second like don't forget about scales for a little bit I'm not saying they're bad I'm not demonizing
them you can use them that can be helpful but just try improvising only using Core zones or
the form of autumn leaves just just just try it seriously just try it I guarantee you it's gonna
sound like you're playing the chord changes and it possibly could be more musical than playing scales
okay step number two is to outline the guide tones so this is further into the mapping process we're
simply taking the chord tones and trying to give ourselves even fewer options now less is more so
the guide tones are the thirds and the sevenths of each chord so we're discarding the route we're
discarding the fifth and just focusing on those thirds and sevenths and we're going to do the
exact same process as we just did we're going to voice lead the guide tones and the reason we want
to focus on the guy tones is because these are the notes that really define each chord if you really
look at the difference between a minor and a major 7th chord and a dominant 7 and half diminish and a
fully diminished it's really the thirds and sevens for the most part that are changing and that are
making the difference and especially if we start targeting notes like the third in our jazz lines
that's when you really start hearing your chord changes come out that's really like the most
secret hack I can give you for jazz improvisation so it's gonna sound something like this [Music]
by identifying these you've really honed into these important notes and you already know how
to voice lead chord tones so now we're really able to get more specific about what notes are
important to start targeting alright I only have one more thing left to do and this is
really actually applying some jazz language so it's really simple all you really need to
do is just listen to recording or find a book of licks or just create one for yourself even
and just take one chord progression out of that song and just play a musical idea over
it okay so you can learn it you can compose it on your own so in this case autumn leaves is
really big 4 to 5 1 chord progressions those are the most important chord progressions in
jazz so would it be a good idea to learn some jazz language over a 2 5 1 well the only thing
you need to do is learn one idea you don't have to learn a million ideas because you can
take that one idea and morph it and change it and just change you can make it like ten ideas
just out of one idea as inspiration so for example this is one two five one lick I play
all the time as an example because it's such a great one for outlining the chord changes
like seriously just learn that one lick and mess around with it as many times as possible
and you've already just really hacked autumn leaves now the only other big corporation is a
minor two-five one chord progression so if you want to take another step after that learn a
lick over a minor two five one progression and just do the same process now you've basically
really started to open up a whole library of musical ideas over top of this so step number
one outline those chord tones step number two identify those guide tones step number three
learn some jazz language just one piece of jazz language over a common chord progression in the
tune all right here's the part where I want to hear from you I want you to leave your answer
in the comments below what three things would you tell a beginner jazz improviser to work on to get
started over a jazz standard leave that in the comments below would love to fill that up with
just as many different ideas as you can possibly do I love hearing other people's opinions now of
course if you really want to start taking your jazz skills to the next level and get a little
bit more down-to-earth and in-depth then I would suggest my free mini course accelerate your jazz
skills go to accelerate your jazz skills dot-com and get signed up for that and get started I hope
to see you in that one alright now before I go I want to tell you something really sad and that is
whenever someone decides not to like this video a bad musical idea is played somewhere in the
world and you know we really don't want more bad musical ideas in the world so please like this
video at the button below give it a heart give it a like and we want to just fill the world
with more musical ideas that are pleasant to the years and that's all for today's video thanks for
listening thanks for hanging out and please subscribe and I'll see you in the next video