Inverted Major Arpeggios

Dr. Bob Lawrence (00:33.134)
Welcome to Jazz Piano Skills. I'm Dr. Bob Lawrence. It's time to discover, learn, and play jazz piano. Well, we've done it. We've completed our three-week study of the timeless jazz standard, George Gershwin's standard, Lady Be Good. We've analyzed it harmonically, melodically, and of course improvisationally, just like we do with every tune that we tackle here at Jazz Piano Skills.

Our harmonic analysis takes a tune, determines its form, the chord changes, harmonic function, common harmonic movement, and of course, voicings, traditional block voicings, traditional left hand shells, contemporary left hand shells, and of course, our two handed structures as well. Our melodic analysis has us transcribing the melody, learning it by ear, establish fingerings, identify the melodic phrases, the target notes within those phrases,

as well as exploring traditional jazz treatments like the ballad, bossa, swing. Our improvisation study, wow, last week was fantastic. We constructed eight inverted arpeggios for each chord of the A section of Lady B Good and played four etudes using those inverted arpeggios.

What we discovered was the importance of having a multi-dimensional understanding, a multi-dimensional perspective and command of arpeggios. And as a result, we discovered that we are unfortunately taught arpeggios and of course scales in a way that has us develop a single dimension understanding or I should say one dimensional understanding and perspective of arpeggios and scales. In other words,

There's a C major arpeggio, a C major scale, singular. Right? For a musician wanting to develop jazz skills, the ability to improvise, this one dimensional approach is the kiss of death. So today I'm devoting this podcast episode to the exploration of inverted arpeggios. A much deeper dive than what we did last week. So, so that you can move forward with

Dr. Bob Lawrence (02:54.359)
broadening your understanding and perspectives of arpeggios, and as a result, begin broadening your jazz vocabulary needed for successfully improvising. So today we are going to discover inverted arpeggios for all 12 major chords. We are going to learn how to formulaically construct inverted arpeggios.

and we are going to play ascending and descending inverted arpeggios, launching from the root, the third, the fifth, and the seventh of each of the 12 major chords. Today is going to be a challenging but fun, yes fun, day. A day of significant growth both conceptually and physically for all of us. So as I always like to say, regardless of where you are in your jazz journey,

a beginner, an intermediate player, an advanced player, or even if you are a seasoned and experienced crusty old professional, you're going to find this Jazz Panel Skills Podcast lesson exploring inverted major arpeggios to be very beneficial. But before we get started, I want to, as I always do, welcome all of the first time listeners to the Jazz Panel Skills Podcast.

And if you're indeed a new listener, if you're new to jazz piano skills, welcome, I want to personally invite you to become a jazz piano skills member. Your membership does a couple things. Number one, it keeps jazz panel skills podcast 100 % ad free, which has been my goal from day one. I want 100 % educational content, no ads, please no ads. In addition to that, your membership comes along with

quite a few perks that will be very beneficial in helping you discover, learn and play jazz. For example, number one, as a member, you have access to premium podcast content. What this basically means is that you get to listen to the entire episode. Now, the first half of every podcast episode is free for everyone to enjoy. We deal with the question of the week, I lay out the educational agenda and the lesson rationale.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (05:18.912)
The second half of the podcast for members only deals with the lesson content, the demonstration, demonstrations, and of course, the educational exploration of the podcast packets, the illustrations, the lead sheets and the play alongs. Now the podcast packets are designed and developed for every weekly podcast episodes. And this educational material, I encourage everyone to have these in your hands when listening to the podcast episode to get the most out of it.

course, and then have them sitting on your piano or your music stand at home when practicing throughout the week. As a member, you also have access to the online courses. These are comprehensive, interactive, self-paced, and sequential courses. You also have a reserved seat in the online weekly master classes that I hold every Thursday evening at 8pm Central Time. And I realize that

8pm on Thursday night is not necessarily the best time for everyone around the world. However, all of the master classes are recorded and you can watch and rewatch the video of the classes when convenient and as often as you wish. As a Jazz Piano Skills member, you also have access to the online private Jazz Piano Skills community, which hosts a variety of educational forums, podcast, episode specific forums.

as well as general jazz forums. And finally, as a jazz panel skills member, you have access to educational support, private, personal, professional support, which you can access through the website. There are web forums that you can submit for support this speak pipe. And of course, you could always give me a call here at the Dallas School Music as well. My office number is published on the website. So you can you can contact me directly or you can

if you're old school like me, you can use email as well. So anyway, visit Jazz Panel Skills, check out the membership packages that are available. And of course, once you get to the site and you're poking around, if you have any questions, by all means, feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to spend some time with you and answer any of the questions that you may have and help you in any way that I can. I also want to take just a few minutes to plug my YouTube channel. I'm

Dr. Bob Lawrence (07:39.839)
I'm producing educational content videos daily that I think you'll find to be beneficial for your jazz growth. And I currently have several playlists for you to check out. There are the daily challenges that deal with harmony, melody and rhythm. And those challenges, by the way, are not only posted at YouTube, but are posted at the Jazz Panel Skills website and organized by category by harmony, melody and rhythm as well to make it easy to navigate through.

specific skills that you may want to study. There are jazz talks that you can listen to at YouTube as well as all the podcast episodes are published there now as well as well as my podcast guest episodes. And again, I'm populating these playlists with new videos every week. So be sure to subscribe to the channel so that you are notified when new Jazz Panel Skill, Jazz Panel Skills videos are are published. Needless to say, I'm excited about the

new dimension to jazz piano skills and looking forward to growing the YouTube channel to help us all discover, learn and play jazz piano or whatever instrument that we are studying. Okay, so typically at this time, I do the question of the week, but since today is really more of a lecture series episode with a lot of music demonstrations to get through, I'm going to skip the question of the week, kind of, because I'm going to deal with last week's question a little bit here.

as well. And then of course, I'll return, it will return next week as usual, as we usher in. Well, wait a minute, we don't usher in a new month next week. We have another whole week. Man, July is going on forever. But anyway, it will return next week as usual. Okay. So let's talk about inverted arpeggios. I mentioned earlier that when it comes to learning arpeggios,

and scales, we are typically taught in a way that one assumes there is one arpeggio and one scale for each chord. How many times have we heard a teacher say, let me hear you play the C major arpeggio singular, or let me hear you play the C major scale again, singular.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (10:03.711)
the way arpeggios and scales are taught, one would only make the assumption that there is a singular scale for C, and there is a singular arpeggio for C, and so on with each of the 12 notes of music. This one-dimensional presentation of arpeggios and scales is definitely without question on the

top 10 list for why students have difficulty improvising. And another item found on that top 10 list of why students have difficulty improvising is the failure of the teacher to connect melody to harmony. In other words, melodic invention flows from harmonic understanding. In other words, harmony first, melody second.

In other words, if you want to get good at composing or improvising melodies, you need to study harmony. And this is precisely why when I teach the 60 chords of music, 12 major, 12 dominant, 12 minor, 12 half diminished and 12 diminished in block format, academically referred to as root position,

first inversion, second inversion, and third inversion, I always make sure to let the student know that this is actually an improvisation exercise. Now, of course, they look at me very strangely, because going through their mind is the thought, how in the world is the practicing of chords an improvisation or melodic exercise? After all,

Harmony and melody are two different aspects of music, right? Wrong. Harmony and melody are the very same thing. They just happen to be in different forms, like ice and water. Melody is the liquid form of harmony. And this is why

Dr. Bob Lawrence (12:28.219)
I have decided to abolish the academic labels of root position, first inversion, second inversion, and third inversion, and I now refer to them as melody block one, melody block two, melody block three, and melody block four. The labels of root position, the academic labels of root position, first inversion, second inversion, and third inversion, fail horribly.

the relationship between harmony and melody. Whereas melody block one and so on insinuates that there are melodies hidden within the block. Our job is to find, to uncover, or to extract the melodies hidden inside the block. So now

let's bring these two problems together. The problem of being one-dimensional with our understanding of arpeggios, with our failure to see our harmonic shapes as melody blocks. If we place these two problems side by side, we begin to see the arpeggios inside the blocks, and we begin to see the blocks

as arpeggios. You know, I know I'm dating myself a lot, but most of you listening will get this reference. And if you don't get this reference, Google it and you'll be able to watch these commercials from the late 70s or early 80s. So you get what I'm talking about. But do you all remember the Reese's

Dr. Bob Lawrence (14:28.201)
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials where, you know, one person is walking down the street eating a chocolate bar and another individual is walking down the street. You know, they're both heading towards each other and the other individual walking down the street eating peanut butter. And both both of them are not paying any attention or looking to where they're going. And then as a result, bam, they run into each other. The individual, the individual with the chocolate bar and

ends up with peanut butter on his chocolate. And the individual with the peanut butter ends up with chocolate in her peanut butter. And they look at each other and one says, Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate. And the other one says, Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter. They then both take a bite and they look at each other with love. It's hilarious. They look at each other and go, delicious. Well,

Again, if you Google it, you can watch it. Again, that's exactly how it is with arpeggios and melodic blocks. Right? Hey, I see melodic blocks in my arpeggios. Wait, there are arpeggios in my melodic blocks.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (15:49.429)
That was a long ways to go to make that point. in times like this, I'm thinking, I've been teaching a long time. Maybe I should consider retirement. Never. Never. So anyway, I think you get my point, right? So just like chocolate and peanut butter go together, so do arpeggios and melodic blocks. I mean, I have been teaching a long

Right? So melodic blocks, arpeggios, they go together. So last week, interesting, last week, the question of the week was fantastic. Michelle, a student of mine, asked the question, how do you practice jazz?

I just like to think about that question for second because it's so I mean, really, I mean, that's the question, right? That is the question that we all should be asking. How do you practice jazz? My answer was isolate a sound and attach a skill. Today, we are going to practice jazz.

We are isolating a sound major, and we are attaching a skill arpeggio. So the educational agenda for today is as follows. Number one, we are going to establish a formula for creating inverted arpeggios. Number two, we will construct four ascending inverted arpeggios for all 12 major chords.

Number three, we will construct four descending inverted arpeggios for all 12 major chords. And we will be creating these inverted arpeggios based on melodic blocks, launching from the root, the third, the fifth, and the seven. This is going to be a lot of fun. So

Dr. Bob Lawrence (18:06.801)
If you are a Jazz Panel Skills member, I want you to hit the pause button, take a few minutes right now to download and print your podcast packets, the illustrations, the lead sheets and the play alongs. Your membership grants you access to premium content for every weekly podcast episode, which of course includes all of the podcast packets. And as, as I mentioned earlier,

you should have these podcast packets in your hands when listening to this episode to get the most out of it. And of course, you should have them sitting on your piano or music stand when practicing. So okay, so now that you have your podcast packets, I want to just quickly talk through them before we break everything apart. Okay, so here we go. Let's start with the lead sheets as we always do in your lead sheets packet, you should have 12

lead sheets. One for each of the 12 major chords. Okay, so you should have 12. Now the play alongs or the backing tracks, you will see you have three backing tracks, various temples, each of the backing tracks, various temples, allowing you to choose the one that is the most comfortable for you and allow you to successfully experience

these shapes and these sounds, these inverted arpeggios, so that they can become, begin to become part of your vocabulary. All right. And then finally, we have the illustrations. And you'll find in your illustrations a beautiful template that you should use, especially after today, you should use to construct, to compose,

inverted arpeggios, either the ones that we are exploring today, nothing wrong with rewriting them out yourself. There's something very powerful about taking the information that we study today and you actually physically writing it down yourself reconstruct reconstructing these inverted arpeggios that we explore today. There's something very educationally profound about doing that. Or you can use the template to construct or compose

Dr. Bob Lawrence (20:24.911)
your very own inverted arpeggios. Either way, I mean, in fact, shouldn't be an either or it should be a both and do both. Okay. So okay, so you got your lead sheets, you got your play alongs, you got your illustrations, we are loaded and we're ready to go here. So it's pretty cool stuff. And when using these podcast packets, these materials correctly, which I know you will,

they will have a profound impact on your musical development, both conceptually and physically. No doubt about it. Okay. All right, so now let's get down to business because we have a lot to get through today. I mean a lot. So grab lead sheet one, lead sheet one . . .

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