Welcome to Jazz Piano Workouts — a structured practice system designed to help you build real jazz vocabulary through harmony, chord–scale relationships, and ear training.
This series currently includes:
• Jazz Piano Workouts — Beginner · Vol. 1
• Jazz Piano Workouts — Intermediate · Vol. 1
The approach is simple and deliberate: one key at a time. Rather than rushing through all twelve keys, each workout stays in a single key long enough for you to absorb how the harmony moves, how tensions behave, and how jazz progressions actually sound under your hands.
Although these workouts sound musical and expressive, they do a lot of work beneath the surface. Each weekly workout develops:
• Jazz voicings
• Functional harmonic progressions
• Chord–scale relationships
• Voice-leading awareness
• Ear training
Beginner · Vol. 1 — Building the Foundation
The Beginner volume is designed to start your jazz journey at the piano in a clear, structured way. Each workout is divided into two sections:
Section 1 — Diatonic Foundation
You’ll work with scales, diatonic seventh chords, drop voicings, inversions, and circle-of-fifths motion — all within a single key. This section helps you assimilate the sound of the key and develops strong harmonic hearing before introducing jazz color.
Section 2 — Introducing Jazz Color
Once your ears are prepared, you’ll begin working with essential jazz concepts such as shell voicings, guide tones, upper-structure triads, modal interchange, consecutive 2–5s, tensions (9 and 13), rootless voicings, swing feel (2 & 4), and a basic walking bass line.
The entire workout for a key takes only a few minutes to play through, making it possible to practice every day, in every key, without turning practice into a marathon.
Intermediate · Vol. 1 — Expanding the Language
The Intermediate volume builds directly on this foundation and focuses on deeper harmonic color and chord–scale integration.
Chords and Scales Are the Same Thing.
A chord is simply a scale played simultaneously, stacked in thirds. When you play the notes one at a time, you hear a line; when you stack them vertically, you hear harmony. Same notes, same sound world — just a different presentation.
For that reason, every chord in the Intermediate book is treated as a chord-scale. Adding scale motion to a chord is not adding something foreign — it is extending the harmony horizontally.
Each workout is built on a core jazz progression: ii – V – I, followed by V7 of ii, allowing the progression to loop naturally.
In C major, that is: Dm7 → G7 → Cmaj7 → A7.
Within that framework, special focus is placed on the V chord, where much of jazz’s color and tension lives. You’ll explore multiple dominant sounds over the same progression, including:
• Basic dominant (Mixolydian, with optional bebop color)
• Augmented dominant (Whole Tone)
• Dominant with ♭9 and natural 13 (Half–Whole Diminished)
• Altered dominant via tritone substitution (Lydian ♭7 / Altered sound set)
How to Practice the Jazz Piano Workouts
Each exercise is practiced in three passes:
1) Chords only — establish the harmonic landscape.
2) Chord-scales — connect horizontal and vertical harmony.
3) Improvisation — improvise using only the active chord-scale, listening closely to tension and resolution.
These workouts are primarily ear-training exercises. Precision and speed are secondary to clarity of sound and harmonic awareness.
12-Week Practice System
Each volume is organized as a 12-week program. Stay with each key until the sound becomes familiar and predictable — until you can anticipate resolutions without thinking.
Every book includes:
• Clearly written workouts in all keys
• Reference material
• Additional challenges
• Video demonstrations in every key
Use the QR codes (or click them in the PDF) to watch the demos on YouTube and follow along with each week’s key.
