This is the 7th lesson in my series on improvising on the saxophone, and we’ve been building things up to this point – where we can tackle a complete chord progression! In this lesson we’re going to get you improvising over the 12 Bar Blues, arguably one of the most important chord progression in jazz for you to master!
For the purpose of this lesson, we’re going to work on a fairly straight-forward version of the 12 Bar Blues which just uses dominant 7th chords. We’re also going to focus exclusively on playing chord tones as doing this is going to better help you become accurate with improvising over a chord progress, and help you lose any vagueness.
First 12 Bar Blues: Part 1
This video lesson is rather big, so I’ve had to divide it into 2 parts. Therefore, in Part 1 we going to focus on the Structure of the Blues; the arpeggios of the Dominant 7th chords used; and then get you playing the arpeggios and their different in versions and applying them to our form of the Blues.
There’s 29 exercises in Part 1 alone and so this video is meant for repeat viewing. That way you can really get the chords and their arpeggios under your fingers as well as internalise the sound and form of the Blues.
This is great for your technique on the saxophone, but it’s also great ear training for you. Stick with it, and the work will certainly pay off in the long run.
So, let’s get to it!
First 12 Bar Blues: Part 2
In Part 2 of my lesson on getting you to play and improvise over the 12 Bar Blues we’ll take this increased understanding of the Blues’ chord progression, and its arpeggios, and build on it.
This second section of the lesson then moves on to focusing on improvising over the 12 Bar Blues.
First off, I’ll get you playing a number of shapes that will help you use your arpeggios in a more musical way when in improvising (not just playing them vertically), and then we move on practising guidetones once more, building in speed/intensity as we go. Finally, you get to go for it and improvise over whole form of the Blues as we trade 3 choruses, looking to showcase our command and understanding of our arpeggios as we solo with purely chord tones!
This is all great practise for you, and this method is something that I still work on today when I learn a new tune that I want to play with my band!
I can’t recommend this enough, so go for it and most importantly have fun with it!
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I hope you enjoy the video lesson and the exercises, and please do let me know how you get on in the comments! I love hearing about how you find content of the videos and your input really valuable in shaping my future video lessons.
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Happy practising!
Best wishes, Nathan