Pathway 3
"I need more structure to my learning"
"My progress has flat-lined"
Aimed at those who have some experience of playing jazz, maybe having attended a few workshops or summer schools, but feel like their playing has flat-lined a bit. Maybe you are not sure what to work on next or how best to prioritise your practice time. Maybe you have learned a few things from some YouTube videos and one-off classes but are struggling to connect the dots. Maybe you have a reasonable understanding of how to improvise in theory but struggle with fluency in the heat of the moment. This pathway will give you some solid practice routines to work on essential musicianship skills so that your practical abilities can more closely match your theoretical knowledge
Ear Training
Ours is an aural tradition, mostly learned by listening to recordings and trying to copy the masters. Some people naturally have a good ear, some don't. But either way, as jazz musicians, we all need to improve our ear. Spend 7 minutes a day working through my ear training course in all 12 keys and after a couple of weeks you will really notice a difference. If your ear is good then everything else you do will become easier!
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Check Out Your Key Centres
When working in key centres we need to be able to identify every pitch and every alteration in that key, not just the major scale, and we need to be able to do it quickly. There is no time to think, we need complete fluency. In all 12 keys. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks most jazz learners face. If you are trying to improvise on a D7#11 chord but it takes you more than 1/10th of a second to think of what the #11 is (G#) then you are going to struggle. This is a really important skill because when playing traditional jazz standard repertoire (aka The Great American Song Book) the music will jump quickly in and out of different key centres, rather like modulating to another key for one bar, then back again, or going somewhere else. Therefore we have to get used to thinking quickly in different key centres and switching between them. I have developed some practical exercises that you can do on your instrument to help you speed up this thought process. Spend 7 minutes a day working through my "Check Out Your Key Centres" course in all 12 keys and after a couple of weeks you will really notice a difference.
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Exploring ii-V-I sequences
Check out my workshops on major and minor ii-V-I sequences, which are the backbone of nearly all jazz standard repertoire. In these two workshops, I give you a thorough breakdown of the harmony, plus lots of different ideas and methods (from simple to complex) that you can use to improvise over major and minor ii-V-I sequences. These essential techniques can transform your approach to learning jazz standards and help you to break through with your soloing.
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Now you are ready to learn from the masters!
Having worked on your essential musicianship skills and have a thorough understanding of ii-V-I sequences you are prepared to learn from the masters and by this I mean studying the recordings. Every single jazz repertoire class I teach is based on a particular recording of a particular tune, not a generic Real book lead sheet. I'm a passionate believer in this method because there is so much detail and so many more musical ingredients in the recordings that are missing from the Real books. If you have only learned jazz tunes from Real book lead sheets and practised with generic midi backing tracks, then it is easy to feel like you are flat-lining.
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Studying a recording puts us in a time and place, which means we have a particular style or sound to aim at. Transcribing the detail of the music and understanding the ingredients helps us not only learn what the masters played, but also why it sounds so good! And this will really help you to move forward.
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There is a huge library of jazz workshops in my "vault" covering a variety of jazz styles from classic recordings. Each workshop includes a 1hr video lesson, full band parts, all of the class downloads, custom-made play-along tracks and links to the original recordings. Here's a nice selection to get you started...
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