Hi all, I just dropped a new short free course in the classroom to help you practise efficiently and use "Learning Jazz Violin" to fuel your progression, at whatever stage you are at!

I recently shared a little solo arrangement of the standard “Easy Living”. It was really just a little “working progress” video of my learning of the tune. When you get to a certain point in your jazz playing I think that learning tunes can be quite a quick process but our might not have a chance to play that tune with others straight away. Meaning that you could easily forget it as quickly as you learned it. I like to make little solo arrangements of new tunes that I’m learning as a way of counteracting this. It helps me work on my technique as I incorporate double stops in there to outline the harmony. It helps me solidify my understanding of harmony too as I have to be creating with the chord tones that I build underneath the melody. It also helps me work on my time as I’m playing on my own and trying make things flow and sound solid all on my own. To unlock my course on learning you first 10 tunes, join any of my paid tiers on here!

It’s often hard to know if a tune, or a section of a tune, is in a minor key. I’d say your first point of call is to check if there’s a dominant chord that can be seen as the V7 chord to the minor key you expect it to be. If so, chances are it’s in a minor key. But what should you actually do here? There are lots of answers to that, but if you’re new to this, a simple approach is to play the harmonic minor scale of that key. For instance, in this video I’m talking about a moment in Avalon where we see a D7 going to a G minor chord. This tells me it’s time for the G harmonic minor scale. The G harmonic minor scale is one of the only places where both chords, D7 and G minor, can be found. It’s really that simple. Can any of you theory heads tell me what other scale contains both of these chords? Right now my coaching package (4 lessons, practise plan and everything else on here) and my VIP subscription (Jazz Violin Practise Club and all the material) is at a super low price, about to change on the 1st of December. If you are interested in getting simple help with your playing, now is the time to get in.