So today I want to discuss two short topics. as usual, the first topic will be accountability, especially in terms of when we learn jazz guitar. Or it can be when we learn any instrument or even another type of hobby. but jazz guitar is, of course, the topic that I prefer. So we'll talk about this. And after we will discuss the B-flat blues in its simplest form.
In its simplest form, the thing I realized, I thoroughly enjoy doing song analysis, as you may have seen heard in other podcasts like Stellar by Starlight and Solo. And I just realized today that I never did a real analysis of the baseline blues progression. So we'll start from scratch and build it from there. Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way.
My name is Marc and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe. So the first topic, in terms of accountability, it's something that I realize is important more and more through my, my coaching, my personal teaching to, you know, try to show other people's stuff, especially in terms of jazz guitar.
accountability means that you have something that you owe somebody in a certain way. And my personal realization, well, this is very personal. I don't really like to talk about mini me in terms of teaching, but this is the case. I realize that it's easy to deceive ourselves, to deceive ourselves more than anybody else. So I would like to encourage you today in this podcast to find ways where you can be accountable, especially if you can get accountable to other people towards other people with your progress.
by this I mean, you know, if you have a training program and you want to go to the gym, for instance, you want to get healthy, you want to lose weight or build muscle or, you know, get better at the sports that you practice. you will get a private coach, most likely. And then it becomes so easy to go to the gym.
Or if you have your gym pal, you know, Bob, you go with the with Bob every Tuesday at at seven, you go to the gym together, do some treadmill. It becomes so easy. But when you do it on your own, relying solely on self-discipline and this whole momentum thing, after a while you quit and you. I don't know who listen to this podcast, but I'm convinced that some of you, and that includes me, have had monthly gym memberships that would just collect dust.
Right? You have the membership, you pay, but you don't go. So that's what I'm, I'm trying to get at in terms of jazz guitar. You have to find ways where you you go to the guitar, gym, pick it up, practice, learn and get better because that's what you want to do, right. So here's a few things, to keep in mind if you want to be more accountable.
First suggestion is to have an external motivation for playing your guitar. And that could be, for instance, being in a band, where you have to play new standards every now and then, say, every Thursday I have my band practice. It's with, you know, bass drums and guitars, and we don't have gigs, but at least we learn one new standard every week.
This is a very, very good motivation, because if you get to the rehearsal and you can't play the standard that you decided upon, then you, you know, you're in trouble. So that's one way to to do it. Another way is and this is a very common, typical way we you should be playing with a fellow guitarist. So somebody that's at about your level is you're lucky you can get somebody that's better than you to jam and, you know, play blues and standards and stuff like that.
Or, otherwise you can get another musician that is a beginner at a certain instrument. It doesn't mean that it's a beginner musician per se, but it can be a beginner, bass player or piano player. And this is great. by the way, if you get a bass player or a piano player you can accompany, but you can also be accompanied by the basses carving or the piano sculpting.
This is great for you to solo over. so I would, you know, be be careful if you jam with sax players, which you wind up doing is playing chords all the time. Although this might wind up being with you, you have to work on the most. I don't know, but you know, this is another thing. So start a band.
For instance. or have a solo, guitarist or another instrument, another player that's at about the same level as you are right now. And another thing you might want to do is take lessons, take private lessons. And, of course, I'm preaching, my own thing. Right. I've been teaching for 15 years now, and, I've been realizing this slowly.
the, the accountability accountability thing in terms of lessons, it's not always a good idea because I've had several students in the past come to me and say, you know, I used to take lessons with this local guy, every week for 45 minutes. And what happens that you play during the lesson and you practice the day of the lesson or the night before just to show your teacher that you've been practicing this stuff and then that's it, right?
You're not you're accountable, but you're only accountable to a certain extent because he's not going to give you, to give you, schmuck for not having practice this stuff. Right? So it's what I've been trying to do personally through the website right now. I'm trying to refine the coaching programs, what I want to get students that are more serious and more accountable, which led me to, through the years, got to polish the service for coaching, jazz guitar I've been offering recently.
It's really fun. So it's another way you might want to get more accountable to have more accountability to your playing. nevertheless, it the lessons might not be exactly what you're looking for. for instance, if you have really good discipline by yourself, like you're self-discipline and there's a local community of jazz players that are good, well, good, quote unquote, say better than you.
if there's a jam session, you can give yourself a challenge. And prior to even attend, read to write this down on a piece of paper, say, I'm going to attend the jam session three times, not even bring a guitar. And then the fourth time I will be playing one tune with those guys. B-flat blues. I don't know.
autumn leaves. whatever blue bass or whatever tune that you find that's easy for you. You will be scared to death, of course. But if you have good discipline to do this, you will see, you know, you're playing. You'll be making strides because you have some sort of external motivation and something that you have to be accountable for.
You don't want to look like a fool at a jam session, so you'll be shedding, hopefully like a maniac or depending on your time investment for, so that that's, you know, all the little things that you can think of starting a band jamming duo with another player, getting private coaching through the jazz guitar lessons of that website, or if you have good discipline, you know, jam sessions, go out.
Listen. Of course. this only goes so far. So it's my little, you know, my little thing about self-discipline and your motivation when we first get started, you know, those first 2 or 3 weeks when you go to the gym, it's really easy to go because we're still on the the first burst of energy. Think of, launching a shuttle into space.
You need a big, big burst of energy at first, right? But you don't always need this energy. If you established at some sort of a routine and that's what happens, which is a bit of a problem. I get people that practice a lot during 2 or 3 weeks, and then they stop. They don't start practicing, but it becomes more erratic, and it's because you did not use your personal self-discipline and motivation to establish a routine or a plan, a training program that you can come back to.
And it stems from, you know, setting goals and having a step by step plan to achieve your goals, right. So just be careful. Your your first burst of energy is not going to last forever either. So take that into consideration. You want to think for the long term how to establish a routine. And lastly, and this is probably the best idea ever to be accountable.
try to get out there, whatever your level and book yourself an event where you have to perform in public and you will both hate me and love me at the same time for saying this can be a barbecue with friends. Say, you know, 4th of July that just passed by the web. it can be a party.
it can be just a family reunion or can be a cocktail. if you have a cocktail hour to play and you say, oh, my God, now we're jazz trio, and here we go. You know, we have to play ten standards during this time. if you book yourself in advance and you have, say, 2 or 3 months notice, it's going to be the best time of your life.
It's going to be the most improvement you've made because you need to line up tunes, to learn chord progressions, to learn scales to rehearse them, etc.. So, so that that would be the last and probably the best thing that you could do. It's not always easy, but, you could be surprised just, you know, walk down to your local coffee shop, you know, they have paintings on the wall and, and different artists and just say, you know, I have a jazz trio.
Let's do it. And, there's just going to kick your butt. You get your. But really, it's going to be a really good experience for you. Nice. So that's it for accountability. Wrap up. Try to find ways where you feel like you owe something to somebody else in a good way. In terms of your jazz guitar improvement in the way you you want to perform in public.
Hey guys, just a quick note if you're enjoying this content and you're eager to boost your own jazz guitar playing, then connect with us. We've transformed the jazz skills of thousands of guitarists. You can find the link in the description or head directly over to Jazz Guitar Lessons dot net to begin your journey. All right, let's dive back into the episode.
Now let's talk about B-flat and blues and do a quick run through the different progressions. So there's several questions on the website, on YouTube or by email. And the thing is what what's the difference between them? What's the difference between my, my Chuck Berry blues if I know this stuff or that that the blues that we hear B.B. King play and Eric Clapton play, and now we're playing jazz blues and it should be the same thing.
Well, kind of has the same roots, but, let me just see here. Okay. So if you want to go to a jazz jam session, you're not likely to be playing like. You know, this type of blues, this is not what's going to happen. So I want to run through in the podcast today what you can find on jazz guitar lessons, dot net slash jazz dash guitar, dash blues, dot HTML.
It's a web page and it explains five of the most common blues progressions in jazz, in order of, complexity. So there are three, red big, big red letters. And the one we're going to do today is B-flat. So you can download the B-flat blues PDF and follow along. if you're listening to this in your car, it's not recommended at all.
But whenever you can you can take a look. So I want to go through the first three progressions, which brings you far enough so you can attend pretty much any jam session in America and say, I want to play these blues and you'll be fine, right? So it's how we jazz it up. So we get to a point where it sounds like a jazzy blues instead of a typical one 4 or 5 blues.
All right, so progression number one in the PDF it says the most basic 12 bar blues, three chords one, four and five. And why we say one, four and five because one is the B-flat note. And if we play the scale like a major scale. One, two, three, four, four is E-flat. So the note E-flat represents the four.
We build the seventh chord on the fourth degree, and we do the same thing on the fifth degree 2345, five. so the basic idea is that those chords are dominant seventh chords. So B-flat seven, E-flat seven, and F seven, and that's all we need in order to be playing on the basic one 4 or 5 C you know, I said, B.B. King or this type of stuff.
So what I'll be doing now is using a metronome and playing just shell voicings. So voicings that sound basically like this root seventh and third or root third and seventh. I'm not going to give the fingerings now because I can't display them on the screen for you, but at least you get an idea of how it sounds. So let's let me just play once through it.
I want to add one, two, three, four. Just order notes.
Last four bars.
And that's it. We're done.
Back to the top. So what's happening here is you notice there's four full bars of just a one, which is a B-flat chord, and there's two bars A for the four chord for Roman numeral E-flat, and, two bars of four and two bars of one. And then there's the last section, which we can call the turnaround if you want, where it goes through five, four and one.
So I believe it's better to look at the blues and think of it as three sections of four bars. So the first section is obviously just one, as in the one the tonic, the one for the B-flat chord. Then the second kind of section of four bars goes to foreign back to one, and the last section is where everything turns around, where we get this cadence, where you feel that it's it's wrapping up.
That's it. It's over. So there's not much to be understood in that blues in terms of theory. And it just so happens that you've been hearing this stuff on the radio for the past, what, 80 years, I don't know. So it's not necessary that we spend so much time on it. But we can look at progression number two and three and get much more, much more out of it.
So progression number two in the PDF, which I called a simplified jazz blues that will just outline the theory and the difference between the first one and this one. Well, first of all, instead of sticking to the one chord during four bars like one, two, three, four, another one. And that's four bars. It's very long. We go straight up and alternate with the four chords immediately.
So one, two, three, four, C, we go to the E-flat chord immediately. That's the first thing that's happening. The other main difference that there's A25 cadence. And this you can also read, on the jazz guitar lessons on their website. You get a page which is called what's the Name of the page? the no nonsense Guide to Jazz Harmony, I think it's called.
And you'll see what a 201 is, what A25 is and etc.. So in in the last four bars, the turn around, instead of sounding like this, which is your typical, you know, rock blues sort of sounding like this, it sounds like two five to back to one, two, five, one. So let me play just once through so you get an idea A12, A12, three, four.
Bar five. Back to B-flat. The turn around the 2525151. That's it. So you see, at the end we have, we still have this little F7, this five chord to go back to the top because five really wants to resolve to one. So what's the deal with this two five. Now you see instead of having all dominant chords, we get one that is a minor seventh.
And this is a typical two five cadence, the two being the C-Note in the key of B-flat. So one two and the F being the five notes one, two, three, four, five. And in terms of diatonic harmony, in terms of how chords work together, the two is a minor chord. So that's why we need the minor seven C minor seven, the F7 to go back to our B-flat, which is our one.
So if you can play this already, even with the simplest chords, the chord groups that you know, you're already halfway to playing a full fledged jazz blues. And you see, it's not that complicated. We just exchanged the last four bars and the first four bars to being more more hit if you want. So let's jump right away to the third progression, which in the PDF I called the most common jazz blues.
And I said I wrote the subtitle The Secondary Dominants, and there's one six, two, five at the end. So this one, there's a video on jazz guitar lessons. Dot net, which is called, I think, Jazzing Up Your Blues with the six chords. And now we see there's a G7 chord appearing and even a roll down G7 flat nine.
But for today, everything that deals with nines and 1113, we don't worry about that for now. so ignore the flat nine, ignore the B-flat seven, flat nine, G7 flat nine. Just think of the seven. So B-flat seven, G7, and G is the six, right? If you learned your B-flat major scale one two, three, four, five six G7 is your sixth chord.
And the reason behind this, which is explained in the video, is that the G7 is the five chord of the C minor, but it's the sixth part of the plan. So in any case, it sounds like, if you look at B-flat, G, x, B-flat, G, C, f, this is some sort of a turnaround. I'm playing the last two bars over and over to G7, C minor, F7, B-flat, G7, C one.
So as A, etc. so we impose this within the form. So as you look at bars, seven, eight, nine and ten, they're exactly the same as bar 11 and 12, but in a telescoping nature. So this you really have to look at the PDF or, you know, write it down to see it. So the only difference between the previous progression, number two and this one is really that G7 chord that brings everything into a new context.
And if you listen to guys like Joe Bass with Montgomery and Pat Metheny, those guys, that's really where they play really interesting lines because there's some sort of resolution needed. So let me just play it once together or if you want to play along and I'll let you go after progression number three A to 21234.
Which are to the G7 G7 C minor seven F.
And we're done. Yeah. So as you can see, we started from a one 4 or 5 blues which only had three chords three dominant chords. And now we added A25 at the end. We added that six for that G7. And this little turnaround 1625. And we pretty much got from what's very, very traditional, very straightforward to a more hyper kind of hip, jazzy sound.
And that's really the beginning of trying to to play more chords and play more interesting lines within your, your jazz blues is by having to run through different changes, right. So I hope this helps. In any case, this was very ten minutes, you know, let's do an analysis of course on the blues. But you can find a whole bunch of information.
There's a master blues page on jazz guitar lessons on that. There's several videos where you can dig into the harmony and how to build lines over those. And I will let you go. I'll see you in the next podcast. My name is Marc from Jazz Guitar Lessons dot net. Improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher. Thank you.
