JazzGuitarLessons.net, improve your jazz guitar playing with a Real Teacher podcast on the key of the week principle. So today we're going to cover only one topic. Hopefully I'm going to ramble on and on as usual. And hopefully we can all learn something from it. 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 Mark, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe. So this thing of playing in a key every week, I think is extremely important. When a player is intermediate or trying to get to push the boundaries a little bit in the improv sense, in soloing and also in comping.
So let me discuss a little anecdote, a little personal story, and then you show, I think this little anecdote will tell you the relevance of playing in a key each week. So basically, let's just get to it. You take a key. We're week one today. Tomorrow's Monday. So you're going to be playing in C major or in C something for the whole week.
And whatever you work on, whether it be tunes or chords or special licks or arpeggios, you decide to focus on the key of C for this week. All right, that's it. And then the week after, when next Monday comes, you don't give yourself a chance to stick to things that you did not master in the key of C, yet you just move on to another key.
In my case, I would move on to D flat or C sharp, right? Just go up a half step and see how far I could go with it. So let me outline how I first got in touch with this, this principle, this idea of playing in a key each week. So you can find on the website, there's a page and there's five videos where I, you know, tell you I help you out in improvising on 16 different chord progressions.
Those chord progressions are not very complicated. You get, you know, two, five, one, six, two, five, get the Blues progression. You get typical back cyclings and minor progressions. Nothing fancy, right? So the pages, jazz guitar lessons, dot net slash jazz dash chord progressions, dot HTML. Of course you can do a search. And it's a series of five videos, two on YouTube where you, you'll see examples and we discuss what scales to use, what arpeggios and why and how, and etc. and plenty of examples.
Get a PDF even on this page, with the printed 16 chord progressions in a lot of keys. Not all the keys, not 12 keys, because I wanted to let you work out some of the keys for yourself. Of course, on the page there's also an audio introduction where I, I'll basically tell you a lot of the stuff that we're going to discuss in the podcast.
But in this podcast today, I want to go further and tell you, when I first started improvising on those 16 progressions that were all in the key of C, and to me, at that point in my development, those progressions were nothing new, right? They were, as I told you, one 6 to 5 blues, minor blues and like, yeah, yeah, it's not a problem.
What I wanted. What I was curious about though, is how far can I go on these progressions by switching the key every week for 12 weeks, because some progressions were very familiar in C, but if we switch the key to A-flat, then I'd be screwed and you probably would be also. So you look at it like, well, I'll just see how far I can go on the 16th progressions, and perhaps in the first week I could cover them all, or maybe 13 or 14 of the 16 progressions and really improvise and come up and be comfortable with them.
And during week two or week three, I could only cover 3 or 4 of them because of my lack of knowledge of the current key. We were in C. So when I first stumbled upon this idea, it was through those 16 progressions. But in general, in my life personally and in my teaching, this is something I've been promoting a lot because it is extremely important to understand what happens in other keys, because it's still the same music, and you should not be confused by the key of G flat or the key of F sharp, which is the same, you know, and harmonically the same.
You should not be confused as switching a tune that is in E-flat, switching into A-flat, or, you know, playing in A major for the standards. Like Autumn Leaves or All the Things You Are, right? So here's my advice basically is, really told you, whatever you're working on, whether it be those 16 chord progressions that you're attempting to play good solos on them or play good comping or that on them, or try to understand the theory, whatever it is that you're doing, you can still fix yourself in your mind and say, all right, whatever happens in seven days, I'm going to be in that other key.
And then the week after, whatever happens, however little material I covered, however I learned in that key, I'm going to change to the next key that I chose, etc., etc., etc. So guess what happens when you do so? This is from personal experience. 12 weeks later you did one round and you're back at the top. You're back where you started, right?
It doesn't mean that you'll still be working on the same material, but you're back in the same key. So it's a bit of fresh air because you're hitting familiar ground. So you're like, oh, right, this is you know, for me it was C, C major or whatever. And then I think I did 3 or 4 rounds only. So it's not a lot of rounds, in terms of covering all the keys, but just by being confronted with the puzzle of, wow, this thing is in D-flat minor, or what's the six in D-flat minor again?
What's the four chords? How does a minor blues sound in D-flat. How's this? How is that? Just by puzzling through, you discover a lot more music than if you had only stuck with one key or, you know, only taking the material to a certain extent so it cannot always be done. It's like there were some beginners out there.
You're probably listening to me go, right. Yeah, I'm just learning All the Things You Are in the original key and you want me to play it in B major tomorrow ain't going to happen. I know, I know, it ain't going to happen. I'm aware of that. But what he could be doing is perhaps take the first four bars of All the Things You Are and see how it all works in B major, just so you can develop this awareness of the relativity of all the keys, because nothing's set in stone.
It's just imagine you took your guitar and all of a sudden it would be tuned, three half steps up or three half steps down. You'd still be putting your fingers on the same place, and the links between the notes would still be the same, but in absolute terms, you would be in the key of, you know, F major or B major right there.
It doesn't matter. So, I think at this point I think I made my point. Right. You should try and see if there's anything, either your whole practice routine or history is anything within your practice routine you're already doing that could lend itself to the key of the week principle. Just the idea of systematically switching.
In any case, I hope it resonates with you. The key of the week ideas. And it's a wonderful tool, mostly for intermediate players. But even if you're a beginner, you can start to look into it. All right. So that's it for podcast 19. I'm Mark from Jazz Guitar Lessons. Dot net – improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher and I'll see you in podcast 20.
Take care.
