II V I - You Need To Practice This For Solos

- The II, IV, I is the most common chord progression in jazz . In this video, I'm going to show you some of the basic things that you should practice if you want to improvise over it and I'm also going to show you how you take that material and turn it into some great lines so that when you're improvising over a II, IV, I it actually sounds like jazz and not like you're just noodling in a scale . My name is Jens Larsen, learn jazz, make music . If you look at the C major scale . (guitar plays) Then for each note in that scale we have a chord that's what's called the diatonic chord s and for C major, that gives us (guitar plays) C major seven (guitar plays) D minus seven, (guitar plays) E minus seven, (guitar plays) F major seven , (guitar plays) G seven, (guitar plays) A minus seven, (guitar plays) B half diminished , (guitar plays) and C major seven . The II, IV, I progression is a progression that sort of takes us to the root of the key so the C major . Starts on the two, so that's a D minus seven . (guitar plays) Then it moves to a G seven . (guitar plays) And then resolves to the C major seven . And if we put those chords together and play them a little bit closer . (guitar plays) Now that you know where the II, IV, I progression is then we can start looking at some exercises that are going to give you something that you can use when you're solo on this progression . When you play a solo in jazz, you're improvising melodies and lines that are closely related to the chords so that means that it makes sense to practice the melodic version of those chords , which is the arpeggios . A great way to practice them would be to play them directly on the chord progression . That would be something like this . (jazz music) Notice that I'm playing these arpeggios as one octave arpeggios and they're all in the same position . And that's just because I want to have it so that they're kind of easy to play