Hello and welcome to inside piano video tutorials
Federico Dantoni here.
On our last video we talked about the bebop scale
And how to use it improvise over a 2, 5, 1 chord progression
We also played an unusual jazz melodic minor scale
different than the one on the books
Today’s video is about improvising in minor chords
so will go over those melodic minor scales in more detail.
Before we start, I want to thank all of you subscribers
for the nice comments and likes but mostly for remaining engaged
with the videos and asking those wonderful questions
Ok let’s talk about minor scales
We have the natural minor scale
We have the Dorian Scale
We have the Harmonic Minor scale
We have the minor pentatonic scale
We have the minor Blues scale
Then, we have the melodic minor scales
There are several melodic minor scales and that’s why it gets confusing
There is the Classical Melodic Minor Scale
The Jazz Melodic Minor Scale
The Bebop Melodic Minor Scale
and then, there are variations of the scales as well
The classical melodic minor scale ascends using the major seventh
and descends using the minor seventh
Then there’s jazz melodic minor which uses just the major seventh
ascending and descending
But if we want to improvise fluently we need to move beyond those book scales
and start finding our own solutions
Because when we talk about improvisation those scales form the books
won’t help us very much and I’ll tell you why
When we improvise we need scales that we can sustain
playing up and down the keyboard without loosing our balance
The problem with the regular jazz melodic minor scale
is just like with the Mixolydian scale they are rhythmically odd,
They work fine within the confines an octave but when we play pass that octave
But when we play pass that octave everything starts falling apart.
To solve this issue we have the yet another melodic minor scale
The Bebop Melodic Minor Scale
The Bebop melodic minor scale solves that Rhythmically unevenness
by adding the minor 7th as a passing tone
and it works great for any number of octaves
Let's play it again...
This is nice because we play with both the major and minor 7th
which adds that jazzy flavor
but it does not have the major 3rd passing tone
which is another important jazz color we need to use
This is why we need to get creative
I’m going to show you a variation of the bebop melodic minor scale
to take advantage of that major and minor 3rd
In this variation the scale ascends
as the bebop melodic minor does but it descends as the dominant bebop scale
in this case the C7 bebop scale
This scale is common on the bebop language
but we don’t usually find it on books
The great thing about this scale is that it allows us
to go up and down the keyboard with our loosing our balance
The other variation we used on our last video
is a variation of the melodic minor scale
In this variation the scale ascends as the melodic minor does
and descends as the bebop scale does passing through the minor 7th
and the major 3rd passing tones.
to achieve this we play the scale up to the 9
skipping the root and then descending
from the root down
melodic minor up...
dominant bebop down...
let's play it again...
This scale works wonderful on the way up
and we can also play it up and down the keyboard
without loosing our balance.
But playing scales is like reciting all the letters of the alphabet
what we need to do is to use those letters to say words
let me show you what I mean by that
let's grab a minor chord progression and improvise over it
let's say Gm and Dm
our first instinct is to analyze the material we have available
we say, OK
we have the Gm pantatonic scale
we have the Dm pentatonic scale
the we have the Gm "blues" scale
and the Dm Blues scale
also we have the G melodic minor scale
and the D melodic minor scale
but really, again... all these scales are like reciting the whole alphabet
G minor pentatonic up...
D minor pentatonic down...
G melodic minor up...
D melodic minor down...
every minor chord shares a relationship by extension
with a minor chord found a 5th above its root
in this case Gm the 5th is "D"
so the related chord is Dm
or even a Dm7 if we keep extending
and same thing for the Dm chord
from Dm the 5th is "A"
so the related chord is Am or Am7
now, look what happens when we play the Dm7 and Am7 arpeggio
over these two chords
Dm7
Am7
Dm7
Am7
Dm7
We are still playing the scale, but we are "wording it" differently
because we are playing chords instead of scales
To make words we need to break down
the scales into chords
Dm7 broken chord
F Major
Am7
the D minor blues scale
and we can use the scales to take us from word to word
Dm7
Am7
D minor blues scale take us to Am
Scale again... and it takes us to Bbmaj7
Dm7
scale again...
takes as to Am7
All of this can also be applied
to a minor blues Let’s play a Dm blues
and apply this elements using the same concept
I hope this video was helpful
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and I’ll see you on the next video.