The Diminished Scale: Lesson 1 (Audio & PDF)

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Diminished Scale is a fantastic sound that provides endless opportunities to the jazz musician. This is the scale that defined the post bebop era and is now an integral part of the jazz language. In this first introductory lesson on The Diminished scale, I teach you the 3 diminished Scales and show you how to utilize them over both diminished and dominant chords. I discuss various ways of conceptualizing the Diminished Scale, so that you can move on past simply trying to understand the scale and start getting this fantastic sound under your fingers and into your playing. I explain and demonstrate how the three Diminished Scales can be played in a variety of ways, from the patterns that all players utilize, to a more intervallic approach that will make sure you need never sound cliched.
I explain and play numerous examples for you as I discuss how I practice these scales over the different chords and use them on tunes. I show you how you can start to really get these scales down and how, by doing so, the whole language of modern jazz starts to make a lot more sense. When you understand and become proficient with the Diminished scale, all those Bird, Stitt and Coltrane solos start to make so much more sense. A command of the Diminished Scale will give your playing that hip, more mature sound you hear from all the great players. This lesson comes with a PDF sheet that includes the three Diminished Scales, as well as the various patterns and progressions I demonstrate. There's enough material here to get you started and keep you going for quite a while as you discover a whole new world of sound.

Click Here for a Sample from the Lesson