This is the most overlooked jazz fundamental... (feat. Nathan Graybeal)

[00:00:00][music] [music] [music] [music] >> Hey everyone, Nathan Graybill here. If you've ever wanted to learn jazz, you've probably run into the same problem a lot of musicians face. It's hard to know where to start. There are so many concepts involved, scales, chords, language, phrasing, time feel, transcription, improvisation. And when you start digging into lessons online or different books, it can feel like you're getting pieces of the puzzle without a clear path that connects everything together. A lot of players end up jumping between random ideas, practicing a scale here, learning a solo there. But without a structured system, it's tough to turn those concepts into real jazz playing. Today, we're going to focus on fundamentals every jazz musician needs.

[00:01:06]Developing a strong time and feel, understanding how harmony actually works, building vocabulary so you can use it in real playing, and learning how to turn scales and chords into musical expressive lines. That's exactly why we've created something different. My new course with jazz lesson videos, 30-Day Jazz Foundations, is designed to give you a clear starting point to actually build better jazz improvisation skills. And we're going to cover a bunch of material from that course today. And if you want to get full access to this course, you can use code foundation25 for $25 off.

[00:01:39]Today, we're going to talk about the melodic minor scale. So, the melodic minor scale is almost a major scale, except now it just has a lowered third.

[00:01:48]So, we're going to take the third of our major scale and lower it down a half step. Now, the warm-up we're going to do here is to play the melodic minor diatonic seventh chords. The one chord is going to be a one minor major seven.

[00:02:01]The two chord is going to be a minor seven. Three chord, an augmented major seven.

[00:02:06]The four chord and the five chord are both dominant. And the six chord and the seven chord are both half diminished.

[00:02:13]So, let's play them all in succession for a warm-up in all 12 keys.

[00:02:18]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> So, now let's get into the minor two five as I promised earlier. For the two chord, now we're going to have a two half diminished chord. So, it sounds like this.

[00:02:54]>> [music] >> And over this chord, you're going to play the F Locrian scale.

[00:03:04]>> [music] >> This is the seventh mode of the major scale. So, really we're playing F sharp major or G flat major but starting on F.

[00:03:15]There are a few other possible options, but we'll get to those later. For the five chord, the most default option is known as the Phrygian dominant scale.

[00:03:23]Really, it's the fifth mode of harmonic minor. So, in our case, the B flat dominant seven, we're going to play the B flat Phrygian dominant scale, which is the fifth mode of E flat harmonic minor.

[00:03:36]So, if we play E flat harmonic minor, >> [music] >> that scale has a lowered third and a lowered sixth. Now, Now we play that scale but start on the fifth, you get the B flat Phrygian dominant.

[00:04:01]When that's our new root, now we have a flat nine, a flat 13, and a flat seven.

[00:04:07]And then for the one chord, there's a few options we have, but we can do the melodic minor scale for our one chord.

[00:04:16]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> All right, thanks so much for watching today's video. If you want to get full access to the course, you can use code foundation25 for $25 off. Hope you learned something today and I'll see you next time.