IFR Jam Tracks Level 4: Mixed Harmony Essentials
In Mixed Harmony Essentials you will begin improvising over chords that use notes from outside the key of the music. This opens up a truly infinite palette of colors for your improvising, and it also enables you to create some of the most beautiful sounds in popular music.
IFR Jam Tracks Level 4: Mixed Harmony Essentials
In Mixed Harmony Essentials you will begin improvising over chords that use notes from outside the key of the music. This opens up a truly infinite palette of colors for your improvising, and it also enables you to create some of the most beautiful sounds in popular music.
The Mixed Harmony chords that you’ll learn in this collection are 1D, 2D, 3D, 5- and b7. I think you will be amazed at the incredibly rich harmonic landscapes that we can create when we add these new chords to the seven Pure Harmony chords that you have already mastered. I think you’ll also be surprised at how familiar these new chords sound to you, because you’ll be learning the most important Mixed Harmony chords that appear in popular music.
Each jam track is a complete lesson
Every IFR jam track is a complete lesson in harmony and improvisation. Each jam track builds on concepts you learned in earlier tracks, and each track is accompanied by illustrations, teaching notes and practice tips.
Important concepts explored in this collection are the use of secondary dominants, preparing different tonal centers, and the “minor 2-5-1”. All of these foundational skills are essential for improvising with Mixed Harmony, and so IFR Jam Tracks Level 4 will also open the door to more advanced courses like the IFR Blues Mastery Course and the IFR Standards Workouts.
All jam tracks provided in all 12 keys
There are 15 lessons in this collection and each lesson is accompanied by beautiful backing tracks in all 12 keys. Each backing track includes special versions for bass players and pianists to practice improvising bass lines and comping chords.
There are 180 backing tracks in all. Below are some samples of the tracks you’ll be improvising over:
Neo soul with chords 2D and 3D
Voice leading with chord 3D
Major and minor 2-5-1
Four powerful benefits to your improvising:
- Greatly expand your harmonic repertoire. The new chords from Mixed Harmony that you will learn in this course will greatly expand the number of songs that you can understand and play. The reason for this is because most popular songs use at least one chord from Mixed Harmony. And by far, the most popular choices of Mixed Harmony chords are the ones we'll be studying in this course. So what you'll find is that by just learning a few of the most important chords from Mixed Harmony, suddenly the number of songs you can play is multiplied many times over.
- Gain more confidence and mastery of the IFR Tonal Map. All throughout this course I'll give you ideas about how to simplify and streamline your thinking so that you can access just the notes you need whenever you want them. This streamlined mental model is essential for working with Mixed Harmony so that we can express ourselves effortlessly and stay focused on our own musical storytelling.
- Expand your own personal improvising vocabulary. One of the best ways to enrich your own improvising vocabulary is to know many beautiful, exotic chord progressions that give you insights into the melodic possibilities of each note. So one of the benefits of studying Mixed Harmony is that you can bring all of these exotic sounds into your own improvising even when you're playing over a much simpler tune.
- Recognize chords by ear. The chords that we'll be studying in this course are the Mixed Harmony chords that appear most often in popular music. These sounds are essential to rock music, blues music, jazz music, R&B, bossa nova and even classical music. And so adding these chords to your awareness will massively increase the number of songs and chord progressions that you can recognize entirely by ear.
IFR gives us an invitation to develop our own 'personal understanding of music'. It is a generous invitation and the rewards develop overtime. Like any brilliant teaching system, the individual IFR lessons and concepts work together on micro and macro level, introducing small building blocks that link to create a full picture over time.
– review by Paul Spence — Melbourne, Australia
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When you join, you’ll have complete access to our entire library of video courses, audio courses, jam tracks, and ear training lessons. Everything works together as one unified method to help you master the art of musical improvisation.
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