"Just Friends" Tutorials

Hi Groovers :musical_note:

I’ve tried something slightly different with this jazz standard tutorial, I made 2 lessons for the tune “Just Friends” - one for beginners, and one more advanced arrangement.

Here’s an overview of the lessons:

Lesson 1: Beginner Arrangement

The first lesson caters for our beginner students. We highlight the most basic voicings which includes the roots, 3rds, 7ths of each chord, and of course the melody on top.

This is the absolute foundation of the harmony and it’s important to be able to visualise these ‘essential ingredients’ before progressing to more advanced theory.

Check out the lesson here:

This has been added to our “Jazz Piano Foundations” course.

Lesson 2 - Advanced Arrangement

For the second lesson, we create a full solo piano arrangement incorporating more advanced jazz theory including chord extensions, chord alterations, upper structure triads, inner voices, and the 1625 progression.

Check the lesson out here:

This has been added to our course on "Altered Harmony & USTs" where we have covered lots of the underlying theory and now we apply this theory in the context of “Just Friends”.

I like the idea of making 2 versions of each jazz standard I cover,

The first will always be nice and simple to accommodate the needs of our beginner students.

Once the foundations have been mastered this, our students can then progress onto the advanced arrangement to ‘get their toes wet’ with more complex theory :grinning:

Cheers!

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Love it!! Great lessons - both of them! I often still find ‘pearls of wisdom’ in the beginner lessons well after I have learned the more advanced version of the same song.

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