Step-By-Step Standards

In this lesson I will break down the Rogers and Hart standard My romance into 5 easy steps. We are using the chords right out of the Real Book with limited re-harmonizations. Many students have asked “How do I play from a fakebook?” Well, this is the lesson for you! The information in this lesson can easily be applied to thousands of other standards.

In this 4-step mini course we will cover different ways to arrange, improvise and accompany oneself using George Gershwin's standard Someone To Watch Over Me. Step 1 is perfect for beginner and intermediate level students who want to learn how to arrange standards. But I like Gospel or Rock or Latin music, is this lesson for me too? Oh yes. These techniques are important no matter what style of music you play. I explain why in the lesson!

In step 2 I am going to show you how to re-harmonize the song using some simple concepts at first, then moving into more advanced techniques. The first part of the lesson (part 1) is great for beginner - intermediate level students. Part 2 is perfect for those intermediate and advanced students who want a few more "tools" for their arranging toolbox.

In this 3rd step we are focusing on intros, endings and accompaniment. Wether you're interested in accompanying yourself while singing or you're working with others, these techniques in this lesson will help you be more effective and 'clear' in your accompaniments.

In this lesson, we will cover all of the scales for improvisation. How often do you get confused when it comes to making these scales start to sound like improvisation? Well in this lesson, I'll show you some techniques that will help you make more musical sounding lines from scales.

In this last step we will learn how to go from scales to improvisation. Using these simple exercises and concepts that I've laid out, you are able to create improvisation lines from the scales that we created in step 4.