Hello and welcome back to Inside Piano Video Tutorials
As usual on this video we are going to answer some of questions posted by you guys
in our comments section.
I’ve got requests for a video on how to improvise jazz piano.
Fravier Sckeiser wants to know about piano broken chords.
and Eliezer Perez wants to know about piano improvisation
in minor chords.
First of all is very important that we understand that improvisation is different in every music style
rock, jazz, country, blues,
they are all different languages they might have their similarities,
but even within 1 style there are different improvisation dialects.
On this video we are going to talk about how to improvise jazz piano
using the bebop scale and the jazz melodic minor scale
and we’ll also include how to use broken chords in jazz improvisation.
Jazz improvisation is the big elephant and it would obviously take
way more than one video to go deep in the subject.
but let’s take the most common chord progression in jazz
which is the II-V-I and use it to illustrate the concept.
Let’s take it from the F Major key.
The II-V-I on the F major scale consists of a IIm7 chord
In this case Gm7 followed by dominant C7
and resolving to the IMaj7
in this case FMaj7
To improvise fluently we need to simplify,
we need to find commonalities and take advantage of them.
The first thing we’ll notice when playing the scales of this chord progression
is that the scales of these chords share the same notes.
The G minor dorian scale
Share the same notes of the C7 Mixolydian scale
Which shares the same notes of the F Major scale
Because all these scales share the same notes at their fundamental level
they are interchangeable with each other.
But here is the problem I found on a lot of piano video tutorials on youtube
attempting to answer this question.
And the problem is that they use the mixolydian scale
as the basis of jazz improvisation.
And they mumble their way up and down this scale.
But somehow this scale doesn’t sound right it just doesn’t sound very jazzy
There is an innate Flaw to this scale
The flaw of this scale is that this scale is rhythmically uneven
because the notes of the chords do not fall on the down beat
and that’s why it doesn’t sound right.
Let me show you
1, 2, 3, 4
The downbeat notes are the notes of D minor
And that’s why if you improvise jazz using this scale you just keep loosing your footing
Specially when trying to play 16th notes
it becomes a nightmare.
This is where the bebop scale comes into play, the bebop scale was design to solved this inconsistency
by adding an extra half step passing tone On the bebop scale the passing tone is B
and the notes of the chord fall on the downbeat.
1, 2, 3, 4,
1, 2, 3, 4, 1
This is why this scale works so well
Now we have a rhythmically correct basic scale
that we can use all over the chord progression ascending and descending
and we can play those 16th notes beautifully
Our fingers just fall into place by themselves.
And then there is the minor scale. Unless you happen to be playing on the dorian mode
this scale will not be very helpful
because it also has rhythmic incosistencies
Same problem That is why the Jazz dialect
uses the melodic minor scale instead to bring more color to the progression
The melodic minor scale has both the major 7 and the minor 7
and this is what brings about that jazzy flavor.
But there is a difference with the classical music melodic minor scale
and that is that the Jazz melodic minor scale also uses the major 3rd note
in this case B when descending
Again, the Jazz melodic minor scale
and since these scales are interchangeable we can play the bebop scale over the C7
Or over Gm7
Or we can play the melodic minor scale over Gm7
or over C7
Or we can use both scales on both chords
Let’s play the melodic minor scale ascending and the Bebop scale descending
On the minor chord
and on the dominant chord
So that’s that
We went from playing this
To this
But now we need to leave the monotony of playing only scales
so let’s use now broken chords to add to our piano improvisation
Broken chords are basically the notes of the chords arpeggiated.
But what chords should we use? Well, all the chords from the scale of chords
We need to know our scale of chords.
We are on F Major So what is the Major scale of chords?
IMaj7 - IIm7 - IIIm7 - IVMaj7 - V7 - VIm7 - VIIm7(b5)
And this is another commonality because the 3 chords
the IIm7 - V7 - IMaj7 all share the same scale of chords.
so we can play them from F and it would be...
from Gm they would be...
and for C7...
Let me show you an example on how to use these broken chords on the piano
to create different motifs
Let’s start with the C7 broken chord
Dm
Dm7
Em7(b5)
FMaj7
Gm7
Am7 and BbMaj7
we can continue forever or play our scales
and use them to go down
So what happened here? at the end of this last sentence
I used extra half steps on each of the scales
the bebop and the minor scale which is another concept we haven’t covered yet
The half step rules of the scales
The Bebop language is all about half steps
there are half step rules for all the scales which allow us even more rhythmic variety and freedom
For example the Bebop C7 dominant scale already has the B half step passing tone.
But we can also use Db and Eb as half step passing tones
We just have to be careful not to loose our footing.
Let me show you what I mean by that If we start from C
Everything is fine and dandy
But look what happens when we play it from D
You see? We loose our footing immediately As a rule if we start from D
we should not play the B half step
also when playing from D we can use the Db half step passing tone
Also when playing from E we can play the B half step
Or we can play the Eb half step passing tone as well as all the others.
But let’s say for the sake or argument that we start from D
and use the B passing tone anyway and loose our footing
This happens because the notes of the chord
are flipped to the weak part of the beat
1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2…
But even so we can get our footing back in the octave below.
and of course the minor scale has its own set of half step rules
And since the scales are interchangeable, We can use both scales
with their half steps on either chord
Let’s play it on C7
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and I’ll see you on the next video