From the course: Jazz Piano: 3 Basics of Improvisation

Adding your first extension to guide tones

From the course: Jazz Piano: 3 Basics of Improvisation

Adding your first extension to guide tones

- As these lessons progress, our harmony is going to get more and more sophisticated. And throughout the intermediate lessons, we are going to make it more sophisticated by continuing to add extensions to our chords. Right now, we've been, especially in our left hand, we've been working with the guide tones. And what we're going to do now is start extending those guide tones beyond seven. And the further you go beyond the seventh, (piano notes) the hipper it gets. (piano notes) You start to get into things like this. (piano notes) Those are upper structure triads, which are combinations of extensions. Right now we're going to add our first extension, though, it's an easy one, it's the ninth. (piano notes) All you do, you build your guide tones with a third on the bottom, then the seven and then you add degree two of the scale. (piano notes) So a ninth chord on F7 would be A, E flat and G. (piano notes) Again, we call it the nine because if we go up (piano notes) one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, it would kind of be the ninth degree of an extended scale. (piano notes) We're going to work with that on B flat 7, same idea, build your guide tones, third and seventh. We need the third on the bottom for this to work. (piano notes) You can also voice it like this, but that's a little, it's not really the open sound we're looking for (piano notes) so for now, put your guide tones third on the bottom, (piano notes) seventh, and then add the nine on top. (piano notes) If you were doing your ear training exercises, you might remember this note (piano notes), I think of it in terms that it wants to go down to the root, but the cool thing about jazz is that we try to leave some element of what we're doing somewhat suspended. (piano notes) There it is in B flat, here's the C9 chord. (piano notes) Note that if it's a C major 9, (piano notes) that uses the natural 7, if we use the flat 7 as we're doing here, (piano notes) it's just called a C9 or a C7, (piano notes) there's no, the one without the quality is always the dominant one. If it's a minor one, (piano notes) the chord symbol will say C minor 7, if it's the major one (piano notes) C major 7. If it just says C7, (piano notes) it's got the (piano notes) major third, the flat 7 and now we're adding the 9. (piano notes) In an ideal world, I wouldn't really use this up here (piano notes) all that often, I would use another voicing that we're going to learn in a few lessons. But for simplicity's sake, I want to get these under your fingers to where you can use them. (piano notes) The only real problem I have with this one is that I'm often blowing in here, and often when I am taking a solo, (jazz music) I do kind of cross over in there sometimes. For simplicity's sake though, let's play a little bit of F7 blues and work on integrating these things in there. The one for G minor 7 is the last of the four chords (piano notes) and it's the same idea. Build your guide tones with the third on the bottom (piano notes) then the 7, in this case it is a minor third B flat F and the 9 is simply the A. (piano notes) That's way high for this voicing, so I might kind of try to play it a little bit more down there. For now I want to get these things going in this position though (piano notes) or (piano notes). Let's play a little bit on our F7 blues, and just work on our left hand. (percussion background) One, two, three, four (jazz music) Let's blow a little bit on top of this. (jazz music) A little bit, mix in a little bit of our guide tones down low like we've been doing, to get out of that register, add a little bit of variety to what we're doing. (jazz music) There they are on the F7 blues, the four of them, the principle is exactly the same for our E7 blues, (piano notes) build your guide tones with the third on the bottom, (piano notes) then the 7, then the 9. (piano notes) That's a nice register for this voicing. (piano notes) Third on the bottom, 7 and then the 9 of course, is just the second degree of our scale. For B7 (piano notes) like this, and then the other one is the minor chord (piano notes), third, 7 and 9. Now there's an interesting little feature of this voicing that kind of gives you double your money on this. And what it is, is that this voicing is good for the F7, natural sounding F7, when we start discussing altered dominant chords, if you just move the root up a tri tone, (piano notes) this is the same exact voicing for a B altered 7. That's all for later. Right now we're working with kind of a natural, more or less major unaltered scale for our dominant sound, meaning that we're not adding any (piano notes) of those notes. We're keeping it pretty pure, so learn these voicings on the eight chords that we've been working with. Integrate it under your playing. I recommend maybe start with the very slow blues track, and just play your left hand for a while, see how creative you can get. As we talked about in a previous lesson, little chromatic alterations can go a very long way. I think you probably heard me going. (jazz music) You can make a lot of little melodies like that, sliding into things, and in those cases, it is a straight parallel thing. (piano notes) You're not using the diatonic, just take everything down a half step, or everything up a half step (piano notes) and have fun with that. I will see you for the next lesson.

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