Jazz Warrior character art

Jazz Warrior

A tune, its bars, and the four moves this music makes over them — computed in whichever key somebody counts off, never typed out once and left there.

The Changes Engine The Shapes The Four Seats Chord of the Day

Free reference for anyone learning the repertoire: the standard forms declared bar by bar as degrees and realized into all twelve keys, five substitution rules declared as conditions and applied by computation, and full chord, scale and key sections for the four seats a small group states its changes from — with every instrument dooring to the sister site that is its deep home.

Four Seats, One Set of Changes

Nobody plays the whole chord. What a small group agrees on — usually without discussing it — is who takes which part of it, and that division is as much the sound as the notes are.

Guitar

  • Three and four notes, the root left to somebody else
  • Decides how busy the middle of the sound is
  • Deep home: Guitar Warrior

Piano

  • Shell in the left hand, colour in the right
  • The only seat that can state a chord and its substitute at once
  • Deep home: Keys Warrior

Upright Bass

  • One note a beat, the change announced on beat one
  • Fretless — every note is found rather than fingered
  • Deep home: Bass Warrior

Electric Bass

  • The same harmonic duty, with sustain the room can hear
  • A note can lean on a chord instead of announcing it
  • Deep home: Bass Warrior

What Lives Here

The Changes Engine

Four forms declared as degrees, five substitution rules declared as conditions, and every realization computed rather than typed.

The Shapes, Measured

Twelve bars or thirty-two, one section or an AABA — counted straight out of the declared bars, including the one that refuses to answer.

The Four Seats

Who states the bottom, who states the quality, who fills the rest — with full reference sections under all four, keyboard included.

A Keyboard Seat

The network's first keyboard outside Keys Warrior: real diagrams from the shared keys renderer, at Keys Warrior's own addresses.

Chord of the Day

The network's shared daily pick, placed in the two bars it belongs to and then shown again with one substitution computed over it.

Free Tools

Browser-local utilities, starting with the theme builder — nothing uploads, nothing to sign up for.

How It Works

1

Learn a Shape

Start with a form rather than a tune. Twelve bars of blues or thirty-two of AABA will carry you through a great many pieces of the repertoire before you learn a second one.

2

Put It in the Key Called

Every form here realizes into all twelve keys on one click, because a form is a shape and the key is a decision made in the four beats before the count-off.

3

Run a Rule Over It

Then see what the idiom does to it: four declared substitutions, applied by computation, with every place they fire and every place they find nothing reported.

The Genre Home

Jazz Warrior is the Warrior Network's third genre site. Its sisters teach instruments one family at a time, in depth, and this one is about the repertoire four of them meet in: the bars of the forms, the changes as a group plays them, and the small vocabulary of edits everybody at the stand is expected to hear coming. It never tells you where to put a finger — every technique question doors to the site that owns the family — and it never explains why a chord resolves, because that belongs to Theory Warrior. Every number in its tables is recomputed before it ships rather than copied from a book.

Jazz Questions, Answered

More on the full FAQ page.

Is this another chord-and-scale site?
No. The sisters already chart the instruments properly, one family each. This site covers what none of them can: the bars of the forms a group calls, and what this idiom does to those bars.
Will it explain why a substitution works?
Deliberately not. Abstract harmony belongs to Theory Warrior, and every chord page here doors straight to it. This site says where a chord turns up and what each seat does while it lasts.
Why is the piano a full seat here?
Because a rhythm section has one. It is the network's first keyboard outside Keys Warrior, drawn with Keys Warrior's own renderer at Keys Warrior's own addresses, so the two never disagree about a diagram.
Why do the pages keep saying “computed”?
Because the forms are stored as scale degrees and the substitutions as conditions, so every chord symbol you read was produced by running one through the other — and re-verified before the site shipped.
Does any of this cost money?
No. Every page and tool is free, with no ads, no account, and nothing tracking you between visits.