How to Reharmonize a Melody in REAL TIME

Today I'm covering one of the most sought-after skills an aspiring jazz pianist can have: how to reharmonize any melody on the spot. The ability to do so can completely open up your sound and expand your creativity over any tune you find yourself playing.

This exercise should help you to really hear alternate harmony at a more advanced level; I am also going to show you how to take a single melody note and find nearly endless harmonic options to play underneath. In other words, you'll leave today's video having the tools to create a unique chord progression under just one note.

To begin this exercise, you're going to want to choose one single melody note which is going to become the top note for all of our voicings. I've chosen F here, but I encourage you to try many different notes in your practice. Underneath this top melody note, we are simply going to move our bass note up chromatically, trying different options to harmonize with the melody. Once you have these two outer voices covered, we will fill in the space between with different chords. Continue moving the bass note up, and test your knowledge of what chords work with the two outer notes that you have playing together. As you go on, you'll being to see how our top melody note begins to take on different roles in each of the chords you create - from the root note, to the major seventh, a minor third, a sharp eleven, and so on.

The exercise doesn't have to stop there! Try some variations in the left hand changes - can you complete the same exercise, but moving up in whole steps instead of half steps? What about moving the bass note up in major thirds? These are all great ways to continue challenging yourself to come up with new chords and progressions beneath the same melody note.

For a more in-depth tutorial on how to implement this concept into your practice, check out this video:

7 MORE Sick Runs & Arpeggios Every Jazz Pianist Should Learn

In today's post, I want to take one of me previous video topics one step further by outlining seven more modern jazz piano runs and arpeggios. These selections come from my PDF bundle "20 Sick Modern Jazz Piano Licks" which you can find here for downloadable versions of these licks.

In this video, I'm going to highlight a few more of my favorite examples from this collection. These licks really focus on expanding your right-hand modern jazz vocabulary while also providing some great left-hand voicings and progressions to follow.

You might be asking yourself: What makes a lick modern? In my definition, these licks are going to include more intervallic structures as well as dissonance formulas (formulaic ways to play "out"). I really like to break these licks down into small building blocks so that you can not only learn the vocabulary, but understand why these patterns work. That way, you are more equipped to implement the theory and structures rather than simply reuse and duplicate these exact licks each time you play.

Check out the full video below to learn all seven of these licks:

The Right Way to Use Diminished 7 Chords for Jazz Piano

How do you use diminished chords & harmony in a way that actually sounds good?

In this jazz piano tutorial, we answer that question.

Using the diminished sound can be a surprisingly tricky piece of the jazz piano equation. Here are some exercises that will help you quickly improve and advance your chord progressions and technical skills!

So how do you feel about your confidence with diminished chords and improvisation?

I have to admit— it took me a really long time to get it down.

Let's put an end to that lack of confidence! Check out the full lesson here:

P.S. I've been having a blast chatting with you all on strategy calls!

These are short zoom calls that you can actually book completely free with either myself or one of our Neo Jazz Coaches (who I trained and are awesome musicians and people).

If you need a little help clarifying your next steps for how to improve your skills, you can schedule a quick call with us and we'll discuss your goals, what's holding you back, some next steps you can take, and whether it makes sense for you to join any of my programs.

Worst case scenario, you'll leave the call with more clarity about what you need to work on and how to approach it. Best case scenario, maybe we can work together in some capacity!

Schedule your free call here.