Conclusion

[NOTE: To read this essay, please start at the Introduction or use the navigator at the right to choose a section.]

I’m hoping this essay helps someone on the journey of learning to improvise.  Obviously there’s more to music than the pentatonic scale, but it’s a great place to start.   I look forward to feedback on how to make this better. Please comment on this blog or email me at HowToJamOnKeys@gmail.com. Thanks.

  

That’s a lot of information. Now what?

Now you have to practice.  

The advice you usually hear is to learn to play the pentatonic scales as scales. Start with C major pentatonic. Then G, F, D and so on like I outlined above.

Let me just confess I’ve been playing pentatonic and blues scales for a long time and I still know some keys a whole lot better than others.  I can do some fast and some not so fast.  I can do some up and down about the same and for some I’m much better on the way down.

I’ve notice many lousy pianists (like myself) will do some of them with two fingers.  For example, I play the C blues scale thumb on C, third finger on Eb, thumb on F, third finger on F#, thumb on G, third finger on Bb, thumb on C...   From what I can tell, this is pretty bad technique.  I should try to engage more of my hand.  I also note that I’m generally better going down the scales than up, which is probably something else I should be practicing to fix.

There are plenty of resources on the Web about pentatonic scales.  My favorite (probably because it’s so far out of my league) is Dick Hyman’s two minute lesson explaining Art Tatum’s use of descending pentatonic scales.  Hyman uses a three finger one octave fingering, where the thumb and second finger span the “skips” in the scale (e.g. for C major pentatonic ascending it’s thumb on e, second finger on g, and thumb on a, second finger on c, third finger on d).  There’s another guy on the web that’s come up with a two octave fingering that engages the entire hand.  It’s complicated, being different on the way up on the way down.  Note that what this guy calls the pentatonic is what I’m calling the minor pentatonic here.

I haven’t done the tedious work of writing out the pentatonic and blues scales in every key.  I’m sure you can look them up, but I think it’s better if you figure them out for yourself.  You can figure out the notes of any major pentatonic by adding the 2 to the major sixth chord.  Similarly, minor pentatonic starts from the minor seventh chord and adds in the fourth (and for the blues scale the tritone, aka sharp fourth or flatted fifth too).

I know the reason you quit piano lessons in the first place was that you hated playing scales. And here I am asking you to do it again.  It won’t be as bad as you remember.  There are only five different pitches in the basic scales.

Blame the piano.  If instead of five black keys and seven white pattern it just went white black white black you’d only need to learn things two ways to play in every key.

OK, I changed my mind.  Forget scales.  What you really need to know is for each inversion of each major and minor chord, where the extra notes of the pentatonic fall.  For C major inversions, learn where to find the D and the A, etc.  The pentatonic gives you a couple of notes to add to your triad when you know where to find them.

One thing I’m trying to work on is getting rid of the meandering quality of my pentatonic leads.  I have to remind myself to play phrases, rather than just a jumble of notes.  The easiest way I’ve found to practice this is to think of the vocal to a song I know, and just play pentatonic notes in the rhythm of the words.  This will naturally divide up a jumble of notes into hopefully meaningful phrases.


Next: Conclusion

You Make It Sound So Easy and Perfect

Well it’s not that easy, but it’s not that hard either: Learn the 12 pentatonic scales (not too bad, they only have five notes each) and learn the 12 blues scales (starts on the minor, adds a note), and learn which ones to play for each key or chord.  You only need to learn a couple to start jamming.

It’s certainly not a perfect system. In this section I note the places where a pentatonic scale doesn’t quite work.  Rather than being a problem, let’s treat these as opportunities to learn and grow.

Dominant chords. As discussed above, I find the options for the dominant seventh chord to be suboptimal.  If you play C blues over C7, you nicely get the minor seventh (Bb) in both, but you get the minor third in the scale  (Eb) against the major third of the chord (E).  This turns it into blues, which often isn’t appropriate.

Over C7 (perhaps about to resolve to F) the “R+7 blues” advice is to play G blues, basically Bb major pentatonic.  It’s OK, but it has the 4th of the C (F, not in the chord) and doesn’t have the third of the C (E, in the chord).  I sometimes play a modified C pentatonic, C dominant pentatonic, where instead of the sixth (A) I play the Bb (the minor seventh, the 7 in the dominant C7). This modification is really just the notes in a C9 dominant chord. Since I know my 9th chords in most of the keys, I can usually conjure that up.   

The usual jazz advice for dominant chords is to play in the Mixolydian mode, i.e. treat C7 as if C was the 5th scale degree, so play notes from F major.   This would be the combination of Bb majpent and C majpent.

Sometimes I just add the seventh to the major pentatonic to solo over the 7 chord.  Sometimes I add the seventh to the bluesy scale, which adds in the minor third.  The result is a seven note blues scale based on the major pentatonic, different than the six note scale based on the minor pentatonic we’ve been using.  Over C7 the scale would be: C D Eb E G  A Bb.  

This seven note blues scale contains the 7#9 chord, also known as the Hendrix chord.  Think Foxy Lady, but also Taxman (Beatles).  D7#9 is also the second to last chord in Breathe before it returns to the Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progression.  [I often see mistakes in charts for the B part (“long you’ll live...”), so as a public service, I give you the correct progression: Cmaj7 Bm7 Fmaj7 G D7#9 D#dim7, and returns back to the A-part: Emadd2 A.]   The #9 is really the minor third, so the Hendrix chord has the major third, minor seventh and minor third in it.  C7#9 is usually voiced like this: C in the bass, E Bb Eb above.   (I called the #9 Eb here to emphasize it’s the minor third).  

Leave out the root and play the jazzy rootless voicing (E Bb Eb) with your left hand.  That same rootless voicing appeared in jazz long before Hendrix got to it, often with the tritone as the root, making it F#13 or Gb13.  This rootless voicing (minor seventh, major third, major sixth) is probably the most common way to play a dominant seventh chord in a jazz piano context.  Viewed as a Gb7 chord, E (more properly, but more obscurely, called Fb here) is the minor seventh, Bb is the major third and Eb is the sixth, aka the thirteenth.

I mentioned Emadd2 .  When you add 2 to a minor chord, that’s outside the pentatonic scale, but it’s still a Pink Floyd staple: think Breathe and Comfortably Numb.  It’s a minor ninth chord without the minor seventh.  It has a special sound all its own.

Diminished and Augmented.  The pentatonic doesn’t work that great for diminished or augmented chords either (the dominant seventh has a diminished chord embedded, which is why the pentatonic isn’t ideal for it either.)   In general, the tones of the pentatonic will be the most consonant.  You don’t want your music to always sound consonant -- a little dissonance is needed to spice things up.  The tritone in the blues scale helps here, but there is plenty of interesting music beyond the pentatonic and blues scales.  Like I’ve hinted at above, you can think of major scales and modes as the combination of a pair of pentatonics.  That’s just one possible jumping-off point to expand your playing beyond the simple pentatonic and blues scales.

Next: That’s a lot of information. Now what?

What About Comping?

Comping is accompanying, i.e. playing behind a lead instrument or vocalist.  The key is listening.  If you can’t hear the lead instrument clearly, you’re playing too much or too loudly.  Turn down and play less.  Stepping on the lead is the cardinal sin of comping.

Comps can be simple whole note chords, especially if you’re playing an organ.  For the most part, organ pads need to be at a very low volume.  Too loud and it turns everything into a dull drone.  Experiment with dynamics, turning the Leslie on and off, pulling out some drawbars occasionally for emphasis.  But keep in mind an organ pad is more like glue that holds the other parts together than something that demands attention to itself.  A little goes a long way.

For more rhythmic comps, try to stay tight with the band and get a groove going.  The whole band together still has to be behind the lead instrument.  If you can’t hear the lead you’re playing too loud.  It’s no excuse that that those other guys in the band are playing too loud too.  Stop playing and shame the rest of them until they stop making the singer yell or the lead guitar turn up to painful levels.

I was going to go into a long thing about how you can use the pentatonic and add2 chords to spice up the chords in your comp, but I’ll let you figure that out for yourself.  In general, the comps you come up with at first will be too busy, and you’ll want to pare them down so as not to detract from the lead. The best advice I can give you is that in situations where there are two guitarists and a bass and drums in addition to your keyboards under the vocals, you don’t really need to play much if anything at all for much of the accompaniment.  If the band sounds good without you in the verse, why risk messing that up?  Even the worst player in the band can be the best at not playing, which is just as important.

In a situation when there are many players, you need to find a place to fit in.  If you just bang over everything, things will get muddy and loud.  With vocals, especially in verses, I try to limit myself to certain bars or certain beats of certain bars.  I try not to play when the vocals are going, and when other players are making little lead parts between the vocal lines.  I  put in my own lead parts between vocal lines, usually based on pentatonics naturally, when I find my space.  The bass player in my band calls these diddles, and one of his highest complements for a musician is, "he does good diddles."

Next: You Make It Sound So Easy and Perfect

Can You Organize All That?

[I really have to make this better. Not sure why it's grey, but I'll leave it that way until I produce a better version.]

Let’s make up some notation so we can be a bit more terse.  Let’s use majpent to mean the major pentatonic scale, minpent to mean the minor pentatonic, and blues to mean the blues scale, i.e. the minor pentatonic with the added tritone.  I’ll write R as the root of a general chord, and use R+s to represent the note gotten by adding s semitones to R, and R-s similarly.

Here’s a handy table summarizing the discussion of what pentatonic scale to play over each chord.

Chord	Scale to jam	Other Scales to try	For example, over this chord	play notes from this scale
R (major)	R majpent	R+5 majpent R+7 majpent	D	D majpent
R m	R minpent	aka R+3 majpent	Gm	G minpent
R m7	R minpent		Am7	A minpent
R m9	R+7 minpent		Fm9	C minpent
R 7	R majpent or    R blues	R+5 blues R+7 blues	C7	C blues
R 9 (w/dominant seventh)	R blues	R+5 blues R+7 blues	C9	C blues
R maj7	R+4 minpent	aka R+7 majpent R majpent	Dmaj7	A majpent
R maj9	R+7 majpent		Emaj9	B majpent
R sus4	R+5 majpent	R-2 majpent	Dsus4	G majpent
R 7sus4	R-2 majpent		D7sus4	C majpent
R add2	R majpent		Gadd2	G majpent
R 6	R majpent		A6	A majpent
R sus2	R+5 majpent	R-2 majpent	Ebsus2	Ab majpent

Here’s another table to help you add semitones:

R	R-2 (whole step down)	R+3 (minor third up)	R+5 (fourth up)	R+7 (fifth up)
C	Bb	Eb	F	G
C#	B	E	F#	G#
Db	Cb	Fb	Gb	Ab
D	C	F	G	A
D#	C#	F#	G#	A#
Eb	Db	Gb	Ab	Bb
E	D	G	A	B
F	Eb	Ab	Bb	C
F#	E	A	B	C#
Gb	Fb	Bbb	Cb	Db
G	F	Bb	C	D
G#	F#	B	C#	D#
Ab	Gb	Cb	Db	Eb
A	G	C	D	E
A#	G#	C#	D#	E#
Bb	Ab	Db	Eb	F
B	A	D	E	F#

Next: What About Comping?

Some Real Life Examples

My Girl

You already know the pentatonic scale, having heard it all your life.  For example, you’ve probably heard the Temptations song My Girl  many times.  Smokey Robinson wrote the song, but it was Funk Brothers guitarist Robert White who conceived of and played the classic guitar riff (clip):

As you can see, this is the C major pentatonic scale followed by the F major pentatonic scale.   Instant rock history.

The Way It Is

Let’s look at some examples of using add2 chords.  Here’s my transcription of the piano riff from Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is (clip). I think it was these few notes, all based on add2 chords, that first made everybody take notice of Bruce Hornsby.

There’s not too much to say about this example.  The second chord is Fmaj9, but I’ve named it Fmaj7add2 here to draw attention to its add2 essence. Maybe one day you’ll get famous playing your own riffs based on add2 chords.

Dr. Wu

I saw Steely Dan a couple of years ago in Boston on Internet Request Night, and it was apparently the first time they ever played Dr. Wu live.  Awesome.  I scanned this transcription I made quite a few years ago because I can’t seem to find the file.

The introduction (clip) is a little master class on mu (add2) chords.  The first chord, which I called D/E, is the mu chord Dadd2 played with E (the 2) in the bass, resulting in a cool slash-chord sound that’s very characteristic of Steely Dan.   Since the chord is Dadd2 hopefully by now you’re thinking D major pentatonic.  

Next come some tinkly high notes immediately repeated an octave lower.  If the chord was G, this would be the country third.  But we’re still holding the pedal letting the D/E ring, so we should think of this as D6. Adding the sixth (the B) to the chord makes this a D69 -- all the notes in D pentatonic.    

Next comes C/F.  You might also call this Fmaj9no3.  You see the 9 in the chord, so you could be thinking about F major pentatcall onic and Fsus2.  C/F is Fsus2 plus the major seventh (E), So you could think of C/F as Fmaj7sus2.  If you had to solo over this chord, C pentatonic should work nicely.  F pentatonic picks up the A (not in the chord) and loses the E in the chord, so is less ideal.  Similarly G/C is Cmaj9no3 or Cmaj7sus2.  

The last chord of the introduction shown here (there’s a bit more I cut off) I called Em(4), but it’s perhaps more properly notated as Em74.  Em74 you might recognize from above as the chord name for all the notes in the Em pentatonic scale.  In this case the fifth, B, is omitted from the chord, giving the Astacked4/E voicing we see.  If we rearrange the stacked4 as a sus2, we see it’s Gsus2, which implies G major pentatonic (there’s no harm playing the third, B) which of course has the same notes as the relative minor, E minor pentatonic.

The Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progression

Am D (picture above totally unnecessary) is the Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progression.  I think the name originated with Zappa -- that’s where I got it, anyway.  You not only hear it in Santana (Evil Ways, Oye Como Va) but in lots of other classic rock as well, like Pink Floyd’s Breathe and Great Gig in the Sky, Neil Young’s Down By the River, Stevie Wonder’s I Wish and many others.  One of my favorites is Mark-Almond’s The City, a particularly pure example of the jam that repeats this progression for eight minutes.  Like many basic progressions, in practice the chords often appear with a few more thirds stacked up, for example Am7 D9.

It feels like it’s in A minor, and indeed, A minor pentatonic and A blues work just great over this.  Even though the progression uses a major chord for the IV chord (usually a minor key would use the minor chord for the four), the minor pentatonic doesn’t have any preference for a minor sixth or a major sixth, the sixth being the third of the four chord.

The usual advice for this progression (and indeed many minor key tunes where the four chord is a major chord) is to jam this in the Dorian mode, A Dorian.  I personally find modes confusing because they’re yet another way of counting or naming small numbers in music that you have to remember: Ionian=1, Dorian=2, and so on.  Then you have to remember what the number means: for example A Dorian means the major scale where A is the second (the 2), i.e. G major.  So the advice to play A Dorian means play notes from G major, which is A minor pentatonic plus the b and the f#.

You could also play A minor pentatonic over the Am chord and D major pentatonic over the D chord.  That works great too.  Not coincidentally, the union of the A minor pentatonic and D major pentatonic (taking notes from each) is G major, also know as A Dorian.

We got at this obliquely, talking about minor keys and modes.  More directly, you can form a major scale from the union of the major pentatonics of the fourth and fifth scale tones.  So, G major is the union of C pentatonic and D pentatonic.  (You could add in G pentatonic too, but that doesn’t add any new notes.)  You can understand why this works by going back to the circle of fifths (see above).

Bloody Well Right

The electric piano introduction to the Supertramp hit Bloody Well Right has a very blues scale sound to it (clip).  I deliberately didn’t label the chords for the left hand part pictured above, but they’re Ab and Bb in the intro.   I’ve seen a similar progression later in the song notated as Fm7/Bb Bb, which is a variation on the Santana secret chord progression with the 4th (Bb) in the bass in both chords.

From the chords, you might reasonably expect the right hand to use Ab bluesy (F blues), Bb bluesy (G blues) or Eb bluesy (C blues).   The Eb comes from the fact that these are the IV and V chords in Eb major.  In fact, the intro switches between all three of these scales.

Somewhat surprisingly, the right hand is mostly Bb bluesy (G blues).  It’s an unusual choice that hints at the Bb bass pedal tone to come.   The intro does slip into Ab bluesy (F blues) for a few notes, which is what I’d probably play over the Santana-like Fm7 Bb.  But it quickly goes back to G blues.   C blues crops up too a bit later.

One way to determine which blues scale the player has in mind is to focus on the three note chromatic runs in the solo.  The pentatonic scale has no semitone intervals, so the half-step motion gives a strong hint to what the blue note is, and thus what blues scale it is.  When you hear a run “c c# d” there’s a strong possibility that the blue note is c# and thus the scale is G blues.   Similarly, when you hear “f f# g” the blue note is f# so the scale is C blues.  The (non-chromatic) Ab note you hear (as in “f Ab Bb”) indicates the solo has ventured into F blues (or at least F minor pentatonic) at that point.

Next: Can You Organize All That?