So if you're practicing improvising over jazz standards but you continually feel like you're
not improving not getting any better it could be that you're just practicing them
wrong in the very first place so i'm going to share with you strategies for practicing jazz
standards and actually improvising over them coming right up so to demonstrate
these strategies that i'm talking about for actually practicing improvising let's
go look at the tune called four and this is by miles davis four sounds like this
so for our purposes today let's just look at the first eight bars of four and see what we
can find out about the chord changes themselves they're gonna cause us a little bit of struggle
so when i take a look at this particular tune the first problem i see is we have this e flat major
seventh chord it's the one chord we're in the key of concert e flat major and it lasts for two
bars right so my first question that i'm having is what do i play over top of this e flat
major seven and like how can i improvise well over top of that because a common mistake that a lot of
improvisers make is you're just gonna put on a backing track and play through this entire tune
and keep playing through all the chord changes therefore not really getting great at improvising
over a few chord changes so what my first strategy is going to be is to isolate just one chord and
practice improvising over that one chord so let's go ahead and do that over the e flat major 7.
so notice that i was actually slowing the tempo down quite a bit and this is really important as
well a lot of times i see improvisers making the mistake of trying to practice the jazz standard at
full speed but by first slowing things down a lot like i just did over top of this one
chord it's really going to help me get a little bit more of a chance to think of some musical
ideas now the beauty of just isolating this one chord is i'm gonna have a lot of opportunities
to experiment and play around and get really comfortable with those first two bars of four
now if we take a look at the chord changes we also have this isolated f minor seven
that lasts for two bars so i'm also realizing hey when i get to that point i'm gonna wanna have some
good ideas that i can play over top of f minor so of course we can go to recordings and transcribe
solos and all that good stuff for learning jazz language but again we're talking about practicing
improvisation here so let's go ahead and practice just improvising over the f minor seven
do
so
so now let's look at the second problem in this tune which i identify here as e flat
minor seven to a flat seven so e flat minor seven to a flat seven is what i would call a
common chord progression so we have a two and a five now this is a two five in the key of
d flat major now in the case of four it doesn't resolve there that's okay because really i want
to get really good at two five chord progressions because they're going to come up all the time in
jazz standards and if i don't have some good ideas over top of just those two chords it could be a
little bit difficult so now what i want to do is i want to isolate just these bars bars three and
bars four and see what kind of musical ideas i can come up with and again i'm gonna slow things down
quite a bit so that i have a good grasp on practicing and experimenting with these two chords
so now i'm going to isolate just this common chord progression at 2 5. let's give it a try
do
and by looping this over and over and over again i'm getting used to playing
this 2 5 the e flat minor 7 and the a flat 7 and getting more comfortable with it allowing myself
to truly explore this chord progression and of course i would do the exact same
thing with the a flat minor seven to the d flat seven practicing in that two five
relationship not only am i getting really good at playing a two five in that particular key
i'm gonna feel more comfortable when it gets to the point where i'm actually improvising over
a bigger structure now by the way you're gonna get used to a lot more common chord progressions
the more jazz standards you actually learn so i actually have a free guide called learn
jazz standards the smart way and it's really going to help you learn jazz standards by ear
it's a five-step process really fool-proof and it's really awesome so check it out learn jazz
standards the smartway.com okay so now we've isolated just single chords we've isolated
common chord progressions now what we have to do is start looking at bigger pictures because right
ultimately when we're improvising we need to work on actual transitions so the third
problem we need to face is how do we practice transitions so the first transition that happens
is in the first four bars we go from that isolated e flat major seven to that two five
so i'm gonna have to practice transitioning from that e flat major seven one chord to
the e flat minor seven to the a flat seven so let's go ahead and practice that right now
so
so that's one transition i might want to work on but also here's another transition the e flat
minor seven to the a flat seven to the f minor seven right because actually normally we'd be
transitioning to a d flat major 7 a 1 chord well this actually goes to the 2 chord in e flat major
which is f minor so let's practice the e flat minor 7 a flat 7 to the f minor 7 transition
so
now i would go and continue throughout the entire tune doing exactly this finding problem
areas really isolating them slowing the tempo down looping them over and over again until i
feel comfortable and slowly but surely practicing bigger and bigger and bigger sections until i'm
able to play the entire thing so now obviously this is great for practicing but you may wonder
hey how do i actually play jazz language like the really cool jazz lines that all of my
favorite jazz musicians are playing well a good idea would be to learn solos by them but how do
you actually do that well i have a video on the screen right now called how to learn a jazz solo
by ear it's gonna make it really simple for you so go ahead and click on that video right
now hope you found this video helpful make sure you like it if you did find it helpful
subscribe to the channel and we'll see you in the next video cheers