Most Popular Lessons

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 13

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been combining blues melodies with chord voicings and moving toward a fuller chord melody approach.

This week, we use a very simple melody:

👉 “C Jam Blues”

Because the melody is so minimal, it gives us room to focus on something else:

👉 Dense harmonic movement underneath the melody

This lesson introduces several important concepts:

Creating Your Own Etudes Pt. 3 by Behn Gillece

Dampening and Technique

Do you know the chords!!! :-)

🎵 Harmony Without Chords – Pt. 10: Putting It All Together

In Part 10, we bring together the core concepts from Parts 1–9 into a single, musical chorus over Minority by Gigi Gryce. This etude is designed not to feel like a technical study, but like a complete improvised statement — one that clearly implies harmony through line construction alone.

Throughout the chorus, you’ll hear:

Check out the attached PDF!

Real simple, play this etude. Make it sound good. Look at the music, I put in some of the changes. you should be able to figure out the rest. 

After you figure out the cords, look at each bar and add all the upper partial so you know it's being played. A lot of these voice things are rootless voicings.

I didn't use a bass track because I want you guys to hear the harmony work all on its own without a bass so you can see that these are rootless  and that they work even if you're playing only Vibes or maybe Vibes and singer or Vibes in sax any of those combinations.

? Working on Time Pt. 3: Simple Blues with Four-Note Voicings

Goal:
Play through a simple three-chord blues using four-note voicings, while locking in your time with the metronome on beats 2 and 4 at a medium tempo. This lesson builds on Part 2 by applying the foundational third and seventh movement into fuller voicings across an entire 12-bar form.

What you’ll practice:

Here's my version. Where is yours! 

? Lesson 4: Expanding the Blues with Functional Harmony Goal: 

Strengthen time feel and harmonic fluency by adding functional variations to the 12-bar blues form, while maintaining steady comping with a metronome on beats 2 and 4.