Piano day (2h)

• Jazz voicings
  • Dominant to major (2 versions)
  • Dominant to minor (2 versions)
  • II — V — I — IV’s in all major and parallel minor keys
• Comping
  • All By Myself (Irving Berlin)
    • Voice leading / minimum movement
    • Some improv in passing chord scales (when I was able to find it quick enough)
• Improvisation
  • Cool stuff: nine tone scales in C & F (WOW that was huge)
  • Minor blues scale in C through Ab (comping with minor and dominant shell voicings in LH)
  • Combining nine tone and C + F minor blues over I — IV progression. Crazy

Observations

Synthetic scales are absolutely awesome. They may sound harsh at first (especially if you play them over a wrong chord type, e. g. nine tone over minor, whereas it apparently works better over augmented), but they are such a great material that helps you enrich your vocabulary and break out of the stuff you’ve been using for ages! Just like Todd Johnson says in his masterclasses, scales and patterns are the “templates of digesting the new harmonies”. Exactly that.  The more ways to alter your scales you’re comfortable with, the less time you spend lost in the dark when improvising.