Learn some classic song endings to add to your arrangements!
Hey everybody, Willie Myette, creator of jazz edge. Welcome to episode number nine of the confident improviser podcast. So today we’re going to be talking about three easy song endings, and you’re going to learn some classic endings that you can add to your arrangements. As usual, this podcast is really best designed to be in conjunction use in conjunction with the confident improviser program found a jazz edge. If you want more information, just go back to the confident improviser.com. And you can get more information there and also catch replays of the podcast episodes as well. So today, we’re going to be going through three easy song Enix. Now of course, remember the term easy is relative, what’s easy to some will not be easy to others. So remember, take a take your time, you can listen to this over and over again, if you check it out the podcast and if you happen to be a member of jazz edge, be sure to take a look at the video of this because it will be extremely helpful for you to be able to see exactly what it is that I’m doing. Alright, so the first ending is this. Oh, and by the way, all of these endings are designed to go at the end of the exercises. At the end of the lesson, I’m going to give you some other resources of some other lessons that are on the jazz edge site for endings. But these endings, I kind of built them and design them to, you know, work with the exercises that you already have been learning. That’s not to say that you can’t use these exercises at the end of songs you most certainly can. And I actually I use some of these endings as well at the end of songs, I’m sorry, I think I said you can’t use these exercises at the end of songs, I meant to say you can you can use these endings at the end of songs. Most definitely. Alright, so first of all, ending number one, it goes from the four chord right to the one chord. So for in the key of C, we’re going to go from an F chord, which in this case, I’m going to play it as an F dominant seventh chord, and I’m going to resolve to my C. Now that’s c by the way that resolution chord could be a C major, it could be a C dominant, it could be a C minor, it really doesn’t matter. The f7 to C works whether going to f7 to C major, or, or to C minor. Okay, so, in the right hand, I’m going to just come right on down the blue scale 321432121. That’s my fingering, right, and the note notes are C, D flat, G, G flat, F, E flat, C, B flat C, we get this.
It’s usually best when playing this ending to retard the tempo as you go. Okay, so to retard means to go slower, right, so we instead of going
kind of like slow it down as we go.
Hold that out. Now I’m going to show you examples of each of these three endings. So let’s just move on for right now. That’s the first ending. Ending number two is the Duke ending. And this is the Duke Ellington ending, you’ve probably heard it before.
Right or
so it’s a very, very common jazz, and then definitely something to put into your practice routine. Now, you could start up here and see. So right now I’m just playing lefthand, it’s see that it drops down into E,
F sharp, and then thumb on G, G, A, B, C, C, E, F, F sharp, G, A, B, C, you could also start with the see down here, that would still be C, E,
F sharp, G, A, B, C.
And the way that I have it written here is like this.
Go right into that C, but the reality is, you could do this.
See, I took a little bit more space in there a little bit more time before I came down to this note. Now once I hit this note down here, it’s usually best to hit some kind of chord up here, maybe a C seven chord, maybe even a C major, major seventh, okay? C minor, whatever chord you want to end on, that’s absolutely fine.
You could also play it hands together. Now the only thing with this ending is it doesn’t really work well for minor. Okay, so if you’re gonna play the minor, you’re not gonna want to come down to a natural, you could come down to an E flat
and then hit a B
Flat up here or a B natural, either one would actually work.
You could do that, although that’s not your typical Duke ending, ending. So. So you know, Duke Ellington ending is
usually not played a minor, but you could tweak it to play it in minor, you’ll make a little bit more central, we get to the examples. And then the last ending ending number three, here, we end on our, whatever the first note is of the exercise. So I’m playing a C here, and then I’m playing
isn’t nice voice and right here, we break down this voice and explain what I’m doing. First of all, left hand, just root five. So we’re going up a half step, we’re playing D flat major seven. Okay, so I’m playing a root five and the left hand, which is D flat, and a flat, and then I’m coming down to a root five, for C major seven. Route five, again, is C and G. So D flat and a flat, down to C, and G, D flat, and a flat down to C and G. In the right hand, I am playing the third of D flat, the seventh. And the ninth, those notes are F, C, and E flat. And this see right here is middle seat, so you kind of know where it is on the piano. This is F below middle C, middle C, and an E flat.
And then the right hand notes just come down to how stuff as well. So I’m playing at the end D in the right hand. So F C, D flat, then coming down to E, and D, that’s all right.
And you can play around with this rhythm as well, it doesn’t have to be two quarter notes. So the way I have it right now is 12341234. All right, it doesn’t have to be that it could be to
do that as well, a quarter note, eighth note. So you see how I can anticipate that C major. So that’s a cool sound. Now there is an alternate ending to this. And rather than playing D flat major with the C natural change that seemed natural, to a C flat,
and then change this B natural to a B flat for a C seven, this is a D flat seven chord going down to a C seven chord.
And this C seven chord could also be minor as well. So I could change that thumb down here, you know, is playing an E, I could play an E flat. So again, notes in the left hand exactly the same D flat, a flat, C and G notes in the right hand,
B natural or C flat, and E flat.
And then resolving down to E, B flat, and D four c seven.
Or if I want to play C minor, it would be B flat, B flat D.
So this ending obviously works well for our minor progressions. Okay, so here’s an example, for ending number one. So here I have the exercise number eight. Okay.
So I have the I’m sorry, exercise number nine, it is.
Literally, I could play the exercise, but
go through it again. This time, I’m going to end I’m going to go to the f7.
And then I end on the C right. So I literally, just, as soon as I’m done with the exercise rather than coming back and playing c again. I just go right into ending number one. So again, that would be
f seven.
And then going to see right on I gotta send a shout out to my student Joe, she had the idea of doing this ending podcast. So thank you, Joe for that. Alright, so here is ending number two. Here. I think I’m doing I forget exactly which exercise it was, I believe it was number four in the left hand here. So
right so is one of these exercises that has that baseline, right. So it might have been four or it could have been number six as well. You know what I’m going to do I am going to find out for you right now.
It was not number believe it was number four. Let’s just double check here. Yep, number four. Okay, so this is exercise number four that I’m playing
Now, for those of you who are listening to the podcast and can’t see the music in front of me, I have a C minor chord for one measure. And then in the second measure is an F minor chord for two beats and a g7 chord for two beats. Okay? So it’s C minor,
F minor g7.
c, see my, Alright, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to play the exercise, right.
And it would normally go back and play the exercise again, and just keep looping it. Okay, so what I’m going to do this time, is I’m going to add on that Duke ending. Now, even though I said, hey, look, it doesn’t really quite work all that well and minor. The point is, try it right, you never know what’s going to work until you actually try it. And then once you try it, if you find out that a second, I really like the sound of it, then you can tweak it a little bit. So let’s take a look. Take a listen to what that sounds like.
So say, she doesn’t sound all that bad. Let’s try it again.
Do it one more time.
And now the ending.
This time I ended on a C minor chord. So I kind of kind of mix these together and play around with it. then figure out from my ears, what I like the sound of remember endings and intros which you can also use these as intros as well. But we won’t get into that today. But endings are, you know, it’s almost like copying and pasting, right where you could like, kind of copy the ending or like I let me paste it here, let me paste it here, let me paste it here, you could try putting it at the end of many different songs or exercises, it’s not always guaranteed to work. But the only way that you’re really going to learn what works and what doesn’t work is to try different things out and kind of make some judgments for yourself based upon what it is you hear. Alright, so one thing that I circled in the music is this last note in the baseline. So the baseline for exercise number four here is C, G, C, I’m an octave, then G flat, F, F, G, and then going down to D. And then we’re going to resolve down to this C down here. So we have the D right here. But the way that the ending is written, we’re going to come up to our two up to the C up here. And it’s going to sound a little bit weird to do that. So
sounds like an awfully big jump. So in that case, as I said, in that Duke ending, we can either play this note here, or down here.
So you want to pay attention to where you’re leaving off in the baseline and make sure that the ending that you’re going to choose is not some dramatic jump, right? So if I go from D, to C there, that’s gonna sound like a big jump versus if I go D to C right there.
So just remember to pay attention to pay attention to where you’re ending and making sure that you’re not doing these large skips or jumps in your baseline. The end is, what if we tried this exercise along with ending number one, right?
But then ended on minor versus major? Well, let’s try it
one more time.
Sure, you can do that there’s nothing wrong with that, that would work out fine. What you might want to do in that case is writing going G and then down to D like that, just play the G twice, and then go to the F so that sounds like this.
F, F, G f7.
And then play C minor. You can play a full C minor chord, it would probably sound better than just doing the root three shell. Okay. All right. So, point is you can mix and mingle these endings and try out different stuff. All right, let’s take a look at the last one, which is ending number three. So this is using exercise number. Exercise two, right, so
sorry.
So we have our simple bass line down here to the left hand, just C, E flat, F, G. So take a listen to this. I’m going to play the action
sighs and then go into the ending, listen to how cool it sounds.
It’s pretty sweet, huh? It’s a nice sound right there. Alright, so what’s going on? Well, I’m literally just playing the exercise. And as soon as I’m done with the exercise, I go right into ending number three. But remember, I’m going to play that first note of the exercise. Now, in ending number three, I wrote the first note, as a see up here, obviously, if you’re playing the baseline, and starting down there, that’s the C that you play, you play the lower one, you play this one down here, so you’re not gonna do this.
And then come up to this scene of here, and then play.
That’s not gonna make sense. So instead, you do,
go to the lower seat, pull that out to bees.
There’s the anticipation.
You could also play that two or three times like that. So it sounds like this.
In the right hand, I just went up an octave, went up an octave went up an octave, and I kept the left hand where it was, I could have gone up an octave with the left hand as well.
Right. So hopefully, what you’re hearing and understanding is, it’s absolutely okay to play around with these endings. And to try and figure out new ways of utilizing them, right. So you don’t want to just have the ending just be one ending that you use one way, play around with it. So the best way of doing that is take these three endings, and try adding them to the end of any of your exercises. Now I have set it inside of the lessons, but in case you’ve missed it, you could always just end your exercise by going right back to the very first note that you played in the accompaniment, and just hold it out. So in this case,
go back to see and hold it out for like I don’t know, 234 beats, and then, you know, take your hand off, right. So that’s the easiest ending that you could do is just play that first note, hold it out. But if you want to try adding on some of these other endings, I think you’re going to find that it really elevates your
you know, it elevates your, you know, the sound of the exercise, it makes it also a little bit more fun starts to sound like okay, there’s a nice closing out of the exercise.
There is one other thing I want to say on ending number three, because remember, we also had that we also had that major one as well. So where would that one work? Well, if you have any major progression, like you know, in exercise number eight or number nine, okay?
Number nine.
And then what remember, what you want to do is, you don’t want to go down to a baseline like that, right, hit the seat down here, if that’s not part of the exercise, you want to play the first note of the accompaniment in the exercise. All right, so the accompaniment in exercise number nine, again, is the root three and C seven on a three and D seven on G. So when I’m going to play that first note of the exercise, right that it says in this half step resolution, and then that means I’m going to go to C and E, I’m going to play that chord show, I’m not gonna come down here and play a similar note baseline, because this exercise is like using the baseline. So again, it would sound like this.
Play the first few notes.
And then now I come down to my D flat major seven, down to C major seventh, okay.
So it’s
three.
And the beauty of this ending and all of these things is that it should not matter if you have a large hand or a small hand reach, okay, whatever your reaches, you should be able to hit all of these relatively easily.
The largest stretches this in the right hand, F C and E flat, but honestly, that should be fine for most people’s hand size. So they’re very versatile endings for all types of players. Alright, so some other endings
lessons, take a look at the jazz and blues Made Easy course. Take a look at lesson number 25, three easy blues and things out of my noble guide to jazz piano. And I also have an intros and endings course as well. So there are many, many different options for you to be able to learn a whole bunch of different endings and introductions at the jazz head site. Alright, so that’s it for our podcast. If you have any questions as a member of the confident improviser Remember, you could always join in on Thursdays and ask me questions live right so that’s it. Have a good one guys. I’ll see you in the next episode.
