Practice session: melodic minor and friends

Scale studies

All Melodic minor scales with proper descent over natural minor
New scale dissection over moving shells in groups of 3: CMm, FMm — sheet music soon 🤖
- Arpeggiated
- Plain
- With rhythmic deviations

Left hand

Practice session: scale dissection and revisited ii — V — I’s

Scale studies

All Hm1 scales
Scale dissection: C, F, Bb Dorian over 1-5-2-7 inversions in groups of 3

Jazz voicings + left hand

iim9 — V13 — I∆9 — IV∆ | iiø — V7b9 — m9 in all keys, combining left hand patterns:
- Ascending broken 10ths
- 10ths with extensions
- 10ths with diatonic runs
- Reversed stride bass
- Combined pattern (sheet music coming soon)

Observations

Scale dissection is getting much better, but still sucks in Bb- and other keys with a lot of accidentals, where the “white are 1 & 2, black are 3 & 7” pattern is not there anymore. This is why visual pattern are shit! To take a slightly better thought-through analogy, they are like sugar — addictive and unhealthy! 😄

Session timing: 1h 40m

Piano day (1h 45m)

Scale studies

All Lydian scales
All Ionian scales
Ascending Ionian / descending Lydian in all keys
Ionian scale dissection over all inversions in C, F, Bb

Left hand + jazz voicings

iim9 — V13 — I∆9 | iiø — V7b9 — im9 (format 2) — skill 45 from Jazz Piano Voicings by Dan Haerle (C thru F#). Left hand:
- 1-5 shells
- 1-5-6 runs
- Broken 10ths (ascending on major part, descending on parallel minor)
- 1-5-10 + blocks octave above
10ths w/o clashes going up and down, focusing on with 2-octave leaps at range switches (e. g. Gb — B 8vb)

More descending motion practice + making it hurt for the right hand

“I only start counting when it starts to hurt” — inspired by this Mohammed Ali quote, I decided to make it hurt (well, for my brain) during today’s practice session. I am currently focusing on descending motion in the left hand as it’s my weakness (due to the years of ignoring reverse arpeggios), but, as you know, I don’t like doing just one thing as it quickly gets boring and frustrating. So I took two of my older exercises and added some mindfuck to them to also work on right hand.

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This is the continuation on the original one. I simply play 9ths over moving inversions, and because there is this panicky moment when hands are about to overlap, this version makes me think more, i. e. makes it hurt in a more effective way. Right?

Secondly, I came up with an improvement for this exercise. Now the right hand is involved, too, and it has to play the pattern that gets more and more complicated with each measure. The biggest fun for me happens in the last measure where I have to think about different scale degrees that I have to play with my left and my right hands. Yes, brain, it feels natural both physically and sonically to play C and then D with both hands, but in this case, it has to be D and then doubled Eb! (See sheet music for the explanation of this inner dialogue.)

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Descending motion is important, too!

Just realised that since I have discovered broken 10th patterns, I’ve been focusing heavily on ascending motion, almost completely ignoring the descending part. Here’s a workout that I’ve recently come up with to make up for that.

Left hand plays descending 10-5-1 pattern and then also continues with descending pattern of diatonic intervals alternating with the root. Doing it around the cycle of 4ths, as always!

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Then, of course, there’s the Fear Of Overlapping™ that has to be addressed — also in the context of descending motion. So here’s another exercise that does the job for me:

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Here I’m doing the same trick with alternating voicings (3-7-9 to 7-3-5) and forcing the left hand to play the same key as the right within one measure. I wrote about this here a little bit more in-depth.