Why practice Giant Steps as a ballad?

1. You have time to hear the harmony At a slow tempo, you don't have to rely on muscle memory or fast patterns. You have to actually hear where each chord is going and anticipate the next tonal center.

2. It turns a harmonic exercise into music One of the biggest problems with Giant Steps is that players approach it as an intellectual puzzle. Ballad tempo forces you to think about melody, phrasing, space, dynamics and expression.

3. You can develop longer melodic ideas At fast tempos, players often default to short eighth-note patterns. At a ballad tempo, you can sustain notes, use rests, repeat motifs, and develop an idea across several bars.

4. You expose whether you really know the changes At 300 BPM, you can hide behind techniques and patterns. At 60–80 BPM, there is nowhere to hide. You must have a beautiful sound and beautiful ideas!

5. You can hear voice leading more clearly The major-third relationships become much easier to hear. You can focus on how individual notes move from one chord to the next rather than thinking of each chord as an isolated event.

6. It gives you a different relationship with the tune Instead of thinking: "How can I survive Giant Steps?" you start thinking: "How can I make Giant Steps sound beautiful?" And that's a much more musical question.

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