Tenderly (Eb Lead Sheet Course)

Practice Inspiration
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This is my practice video for July. Basically it was an exercise to get a good feel for the 1-5-3 left hand roll and focus on simple 3rds and 7ths spread voicings. Definitely not perfect but I feel good enough to move on to Over The Rainbow and finish of the Eb section of this Lead-sheets fundamentals course. Thanks for watching.

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Nicely done, @Ivan.C

That’s one of my favorite tunes.

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Hey @Ivan.C :wave:

Thanks for sharing - your arrangement is sounding great!

From what I can see you are not reading from the lead sheet which is a very good habit to form when playing jazz standards. The quicker that we can commit our jazz standards to memory, the better, as this also allows us to play more creatively and spontaneously as our attention is not divided between the piano and the lead sheet.

Here are a couple of suggestions for you:

1) Upper Structure Triad Fills

You might like to check out this seminar where we explore Upper Structure Triads using the tune Tenderly:

Upper Structure Triads are an intermediate level jazz topic, but I recommend new jazz piano students to dive into this theory as soon as possible. Don’t worry if the numeric analysis doesn’t make sense right now, the main thing is to start exposing your ears and hands to the sounds and shapes of these chords.

Arpeggiating the upper structure triads in our right hand is a nice way to fill the space when the melody and harmony rests, here’s a little demo for you:

Tenderly is a great tune for exploring this style of chord voicing. Here are the formulas to create the triad fills in my right hand:

  • Bar 2: Bb major triad over the Ab7
  • Bar 4: F major triad over the Ab7
  • Bar 6: Eb major triad over the Db7

As long as you know your basic 7th chords, and basic triads, you can combine then to create the upper structure triad chord voicing.

2) Minor 11th Chord Voicings (Chord Extensions)

In my video above I am also playing minor 11th voicings for the Eb-7 in bar 3, and the F-7 in bar 5. You can find a lesson on that voicing below.

See around 6m20s in the video where we apply the minor 11 chord voicing to Tenderly…

The chord extensions course will be the next theory course you study so I think now is a perfect time to ‘sprinkle’ some of these extended voicings into your arrangement of Tenderly.

At the end of my performance above, I used the 1625 progression that we covered in our recent seminar to connect to song to Over The Rainbow - you mentioned you were working on that song too.

I hope that gives you some inspiration. Now that you are comfortable with the basic arrangement, you can gradually enhance it as you learn and discover new theory.

Start with the suggestions above and congrats on your progress Ivan!

Talk soon.

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Thank you very much.

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Thank you Hayden. Will definitely have a look at the seminars.:+1:

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Thank you very much Scott…