Chris Parks · Stage 4: Running scales over tunes
Scales on the blues
Chris’s first episode: before improvising on a C blues, learn the handful of scales that outline its changes and play them in time, so the sound of the blues gets into your ear. He explains how Barry calls a scale (tonic to seventh) and how Barry treats a ii-V as just the dominant.
Step by step
- 0:36Take a blues in C and first learn the scales it needs, starting with the C7 scale
- 1:12Run a scale ‘up’ as Barry means it: tonic to seventh only, so C7 goes from C up to B flat, not back to C
- 1:58Know four scales: C7, F7, C major up and down ending on C sharp (the third of A7), and G7
- 2:37Set the metronome to 70 on beats 2 and 4 and play each scale in time: rhythm comes first
- 3:17Bars 1 to 4: C7 scale up, F7 scale up, then C7 up and down
- 3:57Bars 5 to 8: F7 up and down, then C major up and down to the third of A
- 4:20Bars 9 to 12: G7 up and down, then C major up and G7 up
- 4:31Treat D minor 7 to G7 as G7 alone: Barry puts the ii chord away and thinks only of the dominant
- 5:28Play the scales through all twelve bars with the metronome
- 6:56Then learn it in F and B flat, keeping within the first five frets at first
Barry’s own words on this
In the course
Rhythm, rhythm, rhythmUp, down, and up and downKnow it everywhere on the guitarThink the dominant: put the ii awayScale outlinesUp and down to the third ofHear the changes; know where you areThe tunes you have to knowThe blues the Barry wayWhat Barry’s class was like
Transcript
- 0:00Hello and welcome to episode one of the things I’ve learned from Barry Harris. My name is Chris and I’ve been a student of Barry since 1993 and I thought that I might make a channel to explain some of the things obviously that I’ve learned from Barry over the years that have been super helpful and super insightful to learning how to improvise and learning how to tackle soloing over certain things. So for episode one, I thought we would start with a very important thing,
- 0:36which is the blues. We’re going to choose the key of C to get started. And we’re going to learn how Barry approaches, or at least how he approaches teaching, getting the sounds of the chord changes in your ear so as to be able to improvise more fluently and make sense of it. So the first thing we have to do is we have to know what scales we have to know how to play in order to be able to accomplish this. The first scale, since we’re going to choose the key of C, is you have to know how to play your C7 scale. Now, there are certain things that Barry talks about
- 1:12when he says running scales up and down. One of the things is when he says run a scale up, he only means tonic to seven. So in other words, if we’re playing a C7 scale, it means C up to B flat. He doesn’t do tonic to tonic. So to give you an example, here’s C7 scale. That’s tonic to flat 7, so the C to B flat. So that’s one thing that you have to know when he’s talking about running scales. So the first scale, obviously, that we have to do is C7. The second scale is going to be F7. The next scale that you’re going to have to know is C major 7. up and down which means you’re going to go up and down but instead of ending on
- 1:58C we’re going to end on C sharp which happens to be the third of A so this is the scale the next scale that we’re going to have to know is G7 which is so those are our scales. The scales you’re going to need to know are C7, F7, C major 7 up and down to the third of A, then you’re going to have to know G7. Those are the scales. So whatever instrument you’re playing, those are the things you have to work on first. You have to know how to play those scales, whether
- 2:37it be guitar, saxophone, anything. The second thing we’re going to be able to do, or we’re going to work on is playing them rhythmically correctly. That is a huge emphasis of Barry’s is that you have to really work on your rhythm. It’s the number one most important thing he focuses on. So I have metronome here set to 70. Now I like to use the metronome on the two and the four so if we’re figuring it out it would be one, it would be one, three, one, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
- 3:17And that’s how I like to feel the scales. So if we take, let me just turn this off for a second. So if we take the first two bars of the blues, it would be a C7 scale up to an F7 scale up. So it would be C7, an F7. Then it would be C7 up and down. So if we did that together it would sound like this. So that’s the first four bars.
- 3:57The next four bars are going to be F7 up and down, and then that C major 7 up and down to a third of A. So let’s try the F7 up and down. And now here comes that Cmaj7 up and down to the third of A. Now the next four bars are going to be G7 up and down, and then it’s going to be Cmaj7 up and then G7 up.
- 4:31So it would be this. Now C major up. Then G7 up. Now you might be saying, well, wait, there’s a lot of other things going on there. There’s a lot of other chords. There’s minor 7 chords. He’s not really dealing with that. One of Barry’s principles is if he sees a 2-5, and for instance, in the key of C, we’ll see the D minor 7 to a G7. he doesn’t look at it as D minor 7 to G7. He thinks of that completely as G7
- 5:07and all the beautiful things you can do on G7. So it kind of simplifies it. A lot of people approach it from, they play something on D minor and something on G7. He doesn’t do that. He just stays with G7 entirely, which I find leads to a lot of other options too, which we’ll eventually go over in a lot of the episodes to come. but let’s try to play the 12 bars the the scales in the 12 bar blues and see let’s get our tempo one two one two three four Let’s do it again.
- 6:22Now if you’re able to do that on your instrument, that is a great start. And again, the only purpose of that is so that you start to hear the sounds of the blues changes in your head. Now eventually I’m going to get into the tritones of some of these dominant scales and some other things that you could do. But I felt for the first episode, the blues is such an important thing and a lot of the old time musicians always talk about in order to really play this music correctly, you have to know how to play a blues, you have to know how to play I Got Rhythm, and you have to know
- 6:56how to play, obviously standards, but a ballad like Body and Soul or something like that. So this is really important, but the blues is really the first thing that we should really look at. I’m going to make videos coming up about I Got Rhythm also, but this is extremely important. So now I happen to be doing it in C, other common keys are F, or you should also know know it in B flat and on guitar obviously there’s a lot of different places to play it. So if you’re at that level that’s also good too but maybe try to stay within the position that I was in.
- 7:30I was within about the first five frets of the guitar. So yeah but that’s the important thing about a blues is that it has very important changes in it that we all really have to work on that are very important to any other song that we then move on to. So if you can play those scales to the blues in that tempo you’re starting off really well. But like I said the reason why I’m making some of these videos where I felt it was important is taking Barry’s class for so long I can remember the first time I was in the class and I think we were going over
- 8:08blues in F and I remember he said play F7 and I didn’t know where F7 was on the guitar and it was super frustrating and I was saying to myself I love this it sounds so beautiful but man I’m so far behind but I stuck with it and stuck with it and stuck with it and found some very important people who really helped me through it and now when I go to class I mean I haven’t been there in a while but now when I go to class I I’m at least a little bit on top of what he’s talking about so maybe this can help you when you start to see some of his videos online and he talks about things in kind of a fast way hopefully all of these videos will help you to understand his language. Anyway, I think that’s pretty
- 8:46good for the first video. Try that out. Leave me some comments in the bottom and let me know what you think of it, how I can work on these differently, any questions you have, and yeah, anyway, thanks. Appreciate it. See you in episode two where I think we’ll be working on the scales to I Got Rhythm. Thanks.