A Scale for Descending (Jazz Piano Exercises)
Added 2018-09-19 13:29:09 +0000 UTCDec. 13/18 edit: I’ve updated the article and images in “A Scale for Descending” to include anchor points. It’s also more succinct and organized, without the digressions into alternative fingering exercises.
In the previous article, I explored this scale in C Major:
In this article, I’m going to do the same, except using this scale for descending motion (Actually, these exercises are mostly inversions of the ascending scale).
The stable tones make a C6 chord. Each chord tone is approached chromatically above, which all form a Db6 chord. There are five anchor points, on C, E, F, G and A.
As indicated by the red boxes, these clusters can be visualized and physicalized like this at the piano:
As in the previous article, now we can create exercises with different sequences of anchor points. Here are a few for the right hand:
These anchor points are always spaced four notes apart. To mix it up, we can create a six-note sequence:
As seen in the previous article, when skips occur in the above exercises, they always occur in the same place metrically, landing on a non-chord tone, on a weak beat:
So, we can create more variations by shifting the skips by one note:
Let’s looks at some left-hand patterns. We can start by creating different sequence of anchor points. These examples include the six-note sequence:
Again, by shifting the skip over by one note, we get some more exercises:
Now that we have scales for ascending and descending, the next step is putting them together and creating exercises that change direction.
