Welcome back! today I wanna give you one of the best jazz lessons guitar players or any other
instruments, I’ve had. It’s the simplest one, yet the coolest one I’ve ever been taught.
So you know how playing jazz seems all difficult and complicated. You see all those unusual
chord progression and somehow the scales you know don’t go very well, or somehow it keeps
changing scale and it’s just too much. I mean, you not only have to learn the scales all across
the fretboard, but you also have to come up with a melodic idea because, it’s art and we are not
just repeating patterns we read in a book, we are creating something unique.
Well, I’m gonna show a very easy way to play over jazz progressions; it’s so easy that you will
barely think about the scales. First of all, let’s check out the chord progression:
So this progression is a bit unique and complicated. Every chord uses a different scale; if you try
playing using the same scale all the way through it’ll sound bad.
But anyway, how do we jam to this? Well something very interesting that I learned is that you
don’t really have to play all the notes of a scale; in fact, you can play a few. So why not use a
very simple scale to outline a few notes? And that’s what we’re going to do. We are going use
the minor pentatonic scale for every chord.
One thing you should take into account is that the pentatonic scale won’t always start on the same root as the chord. For example, the 1st chord is a Dmaj7, if you play the B minor pentatonic you would outlining a: B, D, E, F#, A. These are all part of the D major scale that one would usually go for:
For the next chord, an Fmaj7, that would usually ask for an F Lydian, we can use the E minor
Pentatonic, which would outline an: E, G, A, B, D:
These, once again, are all part of the F Lydian scale, but somehow for us guitar players the
pentatonic scale is just so easy to remember. We guitar players love the pentatonic scale.
You could do the same thing for every chord: Bbmaj7 A minor pentatonic
Ebmaj7 D minor pentatonic
But the A7#5 that usually takes a Mixolydian b13 or an Altered scale, would use a C minor
the pentatonic scale which would outline the: C, Eb, F, G, Bb.
This is all for today! I hope you enjoyed this lesson and please remember to check out more videos at: