Basic Scales of Piano Improvisation in F

Series Summary

The piano has been a very important instrument in the development of western music of almost every genre. Its popularity with composers rests in the fact that the tones made by its keys offer an easy means of expressing a complex melodic and harmonic relationship of notes. Each year, many people young and old alike take up piano, and many of those will seek out an instructor to tutor them in their playing ability. These people are joining a grand tradition with an illustrious history, spanning much of classical and jazz music.

In this free video series you'll learn how to play improvisational piano in the key of F major. Expert Ryan Larson shows you the major scale, harmonic minor scale, and 7th scale on the piano. He'll take you through a song measure by measure, reading the sheet music, and showing you some great improv bebop and blues progressions.

Video Transcript

"So today we're going to learn how to make some simple chords for our left hand. We're not going to go over melody lines or sit reading through melodies. We're going to go over that in another segment. But today we're just going to focus on mainly making some nice simple chords to play, so we can go open up a fake book tune, that's in the key of F, and just start playing through the chord changes like it's a breeze. And we're going to do this first we're going to utilize one major scale. We're going to learn the F major scale, and there's four basic chords that we'll get out of that major scale. And then we're going to use the same scale and we'll alter just one or two notes in the scale, and we'll get four more chords. So we'll get eight simple easy chords that are all relative to F major. And we're going to run through a simple tune, that uses the first four chords we use. And then we're going to run through a bee bop blues, which uses our more advanced chords. So we're going from a nice, easy, simple, sound to a more advance piece, with some more advanced changes, but will transfer from side to the other like a breeze. And it's just nice simple ideas easy to get under your finger, and you'll see as we go through their tune in F major."