Presented by Dr. Bob Lawrence: Want to instantly spice up your solos?
In this video, you'll learn how to unlock the power of Altered Dominant Scales—fast. Whether you're into jazz, fusion, or just want your V7 chords to sound next-level, this is the secret scale you've been missing.

I'll break it down step-by-step, show you how to apply alterations to dominant scales, and give you practical examples so you can start sounding 🔥 right away.

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Keywords
dominant scales, jazz piano, music education, altered sounds, piano techniques

Summary
In this conversation, Dr. Bob Lawrence discusses the concept of dominant scales in jazz piano, emphasizing the importance of understanding the five dominant sounds and their practical applications. He explains how these sounds derive from major, harmonic minor, and melodic minor scales, and provides a clear method for teaching students to grasp these concepts without overwhelming academic terminology. The session concludes with an invitation to join the Jazz Piano Skills community for further learning.

Takeaways
Many pianists get overwhelmed by dominant scales.
There are five dominant sounds: pure and four altered.
Dominant sounds come from major, harmonic minor, and melodic minor scales.
Understanding modes validates the practice of dominant sounds.
The pure dominant scale is the foundation for alterations.
Alterations include sharp 11, flat 13, flat 9, and fully altered.
Practical application is key to mastering dominant sounds.
Students should focus on playing alterations as per chord notation.
The five dominant sounds can be applied across all 12 keys.

Transcription
Okay, quick video on dominant scales. Dominant scales. This is an area where many pianists get overwhelmed, especially if we approach learning dominant scales from an academic perspective using mode names, right? Modes. So I want to just share with you how I teach students here at the Dallas School of Music. How to approach getting familiar with and learning the dominant sound and the dominant scales. The first thing that I teach them is that we have five dominant sounds. We have a pure dominant sound and then we have four altered sounds. Now all these sounds come from one of three scales. The major scale, the harmonic minor scale and the melodic minor scale, okay?

So with the modes, all the modes, the academic mode explanation is actually a validation of why we practice these sounds, that it validates their legitimacy, okay? That they actually come from somewhere. They're just not made up by someone. They actually are produced by one of our three scales, our major scales, harmonic minor scale, or melodic minor scale. So let me go to the keyboard here and show you the very first scale that I teach students, dominant scale. It's just the pure dominant, right? Illustrating it on C7, C dominant. Pure sound. And it makes sense, right? If we have a major scale, I'm gonna play a major chord here, and then I'll play the major scale to the major seventh. Well, if we turn a major chord into a dominant chord by lowering the seventh, we're going to change the major scale into a dominant scale by just simply lowering the seventh. So now we get this.

Okay, now we have a dominant sharp 11 sound. So we're gonna take our dominant scale, right? And all we're gonna do is sharp the 11. We're gonna actually do what the chord notation tells us to do. Play C dominant, sharp the 11. So now we get this. The next altered sound, dominant flat 13. So we take our dominant scale and what are we gonna do? We're gonna flat the 13. So again, we're gonna do exactly what the scale notation tells us to do. Dominant flat 13. The next alteration we have is a flat nine, flat 13. So we start with our dominant scale, flat the nine, which is the second, flat the 13, which is the six. So again, we do exactly as we're instructed to do by the chord notation. C dominant seven, flat nine, flat 13, sounds like this.The next alteration we have, altered dominant sound, is the fully altered sound. So that means that the nine, the nine is flat and sharp, and the fifth is flat and sharp, okay? So we start with our dominant scale. We flat the nine, we sharp the nine, we flat the five, we sharp the five, we have to have our third. So the easiest way to go about this, start with. the root third and seventh of our dominant sound, and then our flat nines are in between the root and third, our flat and sharp five are found between our third and our...