11 Modern Jazz Compositions That’ll Transform Your Playing
Beyond standards and bebop melodies lie what what we might call modern jazz tunes – the compositions of musical innovators who pushed the music in a new direction. And navigating these tunes can be pretty challenging… As a musician, you know you want to expand your creative horizons and the musical options for your solos…to ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
How to Memorize Even the Most Difficult Tunes Right Now
Some tunes seem to make absolutely no sense, like the chords changes are some random crazy collection of complex sounds…But with a little know-how, using the same tactics we showed you in our recent lesson on learning tunes quickly, even the most difficult tunes can be deciphered in just a few minutes. Today’s lesson comes ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
The Secret to Unlocking the Lydian Sound: From Boring Modes to Killing Solos
Open up any music theory book and you’ll find the term “lydian.” A funny sounding word that refers to the fourth mode of the major scale. You’ve, no doubt, played this scale. You’ve probably even practiced it in every key and studied it’s relationship to the tonic… But what if I told you that you don’t ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
How Thinking Like a Writer Will Make You a Better Jazz Improviser
Sometimes a change in perspective is all you need. Jazz improvisation is a demanding pursuit, one that combines intellect, feeling and expression. It’s easy to grasp the music theory side of things, but it’s much more difficult to grok the more dubious concepts…things like strong phrasing, connecting ideas, having a unique musical perspective, or the ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
6 Reasons You Should Start Composing Today
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones – John Cage. At some point as an improviser, whether you welcome it with open arms or avoid it like the plague, you’re going to be faced with the chance to compose. That’s right – you, alone in a ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
Playing Colors, Imitating Movies, & Watching TV: Bizarre Jazz Improvisation Techniques
What if you could approach something in a completely new way than you’ve ever done before? What would happen? Perhaps an entire world of possibility exists from this new angle, but how do you get there? Trying completely outlandish, almost silly techniques can spawn immense creativity and improvement in one’s ability. In all art-forms, it’s ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
Dealing With Non-standard Progressions
Recently we received a question about non-standard progressions, specifically the type of progressions you see in Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson tunes… These types of tunes are notoriously difficult, as they don’t seem to use the same predictable chord progressions that other jazz tunes do. A reader asks: When we’re learning, we go through a ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
Finding a Fresh Approach to Playing the Same Old Tunes
Repetition. It’s one part of learning to improvise that’s par for the course. We practice scales over and over again until the technique is securely in our fingers, we spend hours repeatedly working out ii-V7 lines that we’ve transcribed, and we memorize the melodies and chord changes to numerous tunes until we can play them ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM
Learning to Let Go: Achieving your optimum performance mindset
When I think about what it means to “let go,” detailed scenes from Hollywood hits come to mind. Scenes like Neo in The Matrix learning that “there is no spoon,” and Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai being taught to think “No mind.” There’s a good reason these type of scenes take place in so ...
FREE PRO PRO & PREMIUM