Learning jazz piano can be a daunting task, but with the right guidance and resources, it can be an incredibly rewarding experience. While traditional jazz piano lessons with a private instructor can be helpful, they can also be expensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, there are now many excellent online jazz piano lesson programs available that offer... Continue Reading →
Introduction The harmonic minor is one of the three main source scales in music. This is a seven note minor scale with a b3, a b6 and a natural 7th. The related modes group from this scale offer quite a few interesting textures, sometimes overlooked by many jazz beginners. Here's a taste of what this group... Continue Reading →
Introduction The Circle of Fifths is one of the most powerful tools we half to represent our 12-tone system. By stacking perfect fifths you get all the notes in western music. Using the circle of fifths to show scales allows us to find very interesting properties of that scale, from determining key signatures, to finding... Continue Reading →
Wouldn't it be nice to just sit at the piano and play for hours on end improvising beautiful music in different styles and moods? Here's a list of 20 piano tricks that will change the way you play piano for ever. These piano tricks are much more than just a recipe of what to play.... Continue Reading →
The Universal Encyclopedia of Scales is a fully interactive PDF containing all 2048 scales in music, organized over the circle of fifths, with 2600+ pages of information. The encyclopedia includes chapters on scale theory, several master indexes by mode count and note count, source scales, symmetrical scales, and hexatonic bi-triadic scales. Each scale has its... Continue Reading →
Here's a song by Billy Strayhorn that I've always loved and never fully analyzed until writing The Jazz Standards Progressions Book. I've been fascinated by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn compositions since the first time I heard an Ellington album, about thirty years ago. Since then I greatly enjoyed their rich harmonies, rhythmic vocabulary and... Continue Reading →
Here's a musical concept nobody taught me at school. While analyzing 1000+ jazz tunes for The Jazz Standards Progressions Book, I noticed a great number of songs in major keys tonicize the IV degree at the beginning of the bridge. It's usually preceded by the V/IV, landing on the IV at the beginning of the... Continue Reading →
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