Welcome to the Neo Soul workshop with your new teacher, Jack Gardiner. Over this series of lessons, Jack is going to break down all of the music theory, chord voicings, techniques and tools you need to not only play Neo Soul, but to write more harmonically interesting chord progressions across a range of styles.

Before we kick things off, Jack covers all of the intervals in an octave as they will be referred to throughout the workshop. It is important to familiarise yourself with these.

The CAGED system is a great starting point if you want to be able to play familiar chord shapes all over the neck.

Triads make up a huge part of playing and improvising in neo soul. You can use them to outline chords and add more texture to your lead playing. Jack breaks down the root, first, and second inversion triads for all of the chords in the C major scale going up the neck as well as across the strings.

Moving on from triads, Jack harmonises the C major scale with 7th chords. A 7th chord can be played by adding one more note to the triads covered previously. A 7th will soften the sound of a chord voicing, and you can use them throughout your playing.

The v chord plays a very important role in diatonic harmony, and the movement from the v chord to the i chord gives a feeling of resolution. In the key of C, the v chord would be G7. Playing G7 to C (or Cmaj7) resolves perfectly. As you start playing with more complex chord progressions, you will find that the v chord gives you a "way home". Tension is built on the v chord, and released on the i chord. A perfect cadence.

A shell voicing is typically a chord voicing where the 5th has been removed. Typically when we're building chords, the 5th adds no harmonic information, and it can be dropped to allow our fingers to play other, more harmonically interesting notes.

Taking the shell voicings from the previous lesson, Jack builds min9, maj9, min11, maj11,maj13 chords and more!

The m7(b5) chord or the half diminished chord is built on the 7th degree of the major scale, or the 2nd degree of the minor scale. Jack teaches a couple of alternative chord voicings.

Altered chords are a great tool for creating tension. Jack runs through a bunch of shell voicings and shows you how you can modify them to create an array of altered chords.

A triad pair is typically represented by two triads that are the same type and are right next to each other, i.e. two minor triads a semitone apart. By playing Dm and Em triads over a C root, you can outline Cmaj7 sounds.

Reharmonising has been made popular by artists such as Dirty Loops or Jacob Collier. There are a lot of tools you can make use of to reharmonise a song, bending the harmony to make it sound more complex and interesting. Jack covers secondary dominants, passing diminished chords, tritone substitutions, and more.

On to improvisation and single line playing! The pentatonic scale is a logical place to start. Jack covers a major pentatonic scale, and how you can use it as a foundation to write interesting single lines without getting stuck in boxes or falling victim to modal shred.

Jack uses the pentatonic scale to teach how to build modes, and talks about how you can use altered pentatonic shapes or stripped down 7 note scale shapes to play interesting single lines.

Arpeggios are fundamental to outlining chord changes and they're a fantastic way to make your improvisation sound more interesting.

So far the lessons have covered concepts in diatonic harmony, i.e. from one key. Non-diatonic harmony refers to when the key is changed, and in neo soul and jazz, this happens a lot! This is a huge subject that we could probably make another course about, but for this lesson Jack gives some simple examples you can apply to your playing.

We couldn't do a Neo Soul course without teaching some of the synonymous techniques and flourishes used by the style's most influential players. Once you start, you won't be able to stop!

Before the end of the course, Jack sets some expectations for how you should apply everything that we've covered so far. Whether you've raced through the lessons or you're back for the tenth time, there is a lot of information to take in here. The chord theory and harmony is going to take months to ingrain and apply throughout your playing. The best thing to do is take it slowly and add little chunks at a time.

"Kodama", the track Jack wrote for this course is broken down in full. Enjoy!

A standalone playthrough of Kodama for you to come back to as many times as you want and play over!