3 Exercises That Will Make Your Jazz Solos Sound Pro
I am sure you know how scary and horrible it can be to listen to one of your own solos, even if you know the song and can play the changes. But which exercises will help you play solos with better phrasing, more melodic, and better rhythm? That is NOT about scales or arpeggios, but there are exercises you should be practicing for those skills.
Make It A Story
Rhythm is incredibly important, and I will give you some ways to work on it. But first, I want to talk about an exercise to develop your melodies and play what you hear. Barney Kessel has a sort of surprising opinion on this, but we’ll get to that as well. As you will see, this exercise will make it easier to work on the rhythm exercise that follows it.
This is true for any style of music: You want to make your solo a story, and you don’t want the story to be random sentences dictated by the chords. You do that by making sure that there is a connection between phrases, which is a bit like making sure that your story is about the same main character or hero.
Where Is Your Story Taking Place
Hopefully, this will not come as a surprise, but if you want to improve this, you should work with a song that you know really well. With that, I mean a song where you know the melody and the chords by heart, plus you can play a solo over it. This doesn’t work if you are playing over a looped II V I or a static chord, and most likely, the music you play or want to play is not like that, anyway. This is similar to how most stories don’t take place in a single room but often have the hero travel around. Imagine that all Harry Potter movies were only in his room under the stairs, and you never saw Hogwarts.
How do you practice playing a solo that does not have The Swedish Chef as the hero for one chord, then Captain Picard, followed by Dobby for the next?
One way to make sure that you have the same main character throughout your solo is to work with the same phrase. That way, your solo is clearly about one thing. This is called motivic development, one of the strongest melodic principles in existence. You will find it in most songs, from Happy Birthday to Autumn Leaves.
But those are songs, not solos; how do you practice improvising solos like this? In the beginning, You need to play the song out of tempo. It is essential that you give yourself time to listen to what you just played and then take the time to listen to how that will sound on the next chord. Eventually, you will be able to do this in time, but in the beginning, you want to explore this rubato to make it easier. We’ll get to the rhythm later.
Level #1 – Getting Started
Start with simple and short melodies. I chose this song because you can easily hear the chords change when I play rubato.
Keep it short and simple so you get used to how it works. Later, you can make motifs longer across several bars. The same goes for playing in time; you can begin to do that once you are more familiar with the process. Remember that you can try to explore different motifs a few times.
And that is important as Barney Kessel describes it, because you need to develop your taste as well:
“important that you develop the ability to play what you hear. And there’s two steps involved. One is to develop the ability to play what you hear. And the second is be sure that what you hear is worth playing because just because you can play what you hear doesn’t mean that it has any real musical value.” – Barney Kessel
This is also a huge aspect of the last exercise I will cover in this lesson, but let me show you the next level to take this.
Level #2 – Developing Your Story
It is still useful to think about the motif as the hero of the story. By moving the motif around the chord progression, you make sure that the hero is present in the story at different locations. But, as you probably know, an important part of the story is how the hero changes, like Luke Skywalker going from a farmboy on Tatooine to a powerful Jedi Master who can take up the fight against the emperor.
You also need to be able to develop the motif you are playing and try to find the balance between a motif that is recognizable but also develops surprisingly and interestingly.
Again, you want to start by practicing rubato or out-of-tempo. Now, you might also find yourself making longer motifs. If you go on for a longer time, then the motif becomes completely different, but again, that is also something that will happen in a story where the main character develops into something new, for better or worse.
For these exercises, you stick to a motif for a long time, but in a solo, you won’t use only one motif throughout a whole song just like there is more than one main character in a movie.
An easy way to develop motifs is to play a similar beginning but then change the ending, so instead of just moving the motif:
You can start making simple developments by changing the ending or even leading into the phrase:
You start by exploring this rubato. The next step is to take this into time, and after that, you’ll see how this exercise helps you create a great exercise for improving your rhythm vocabulary.
Level #3 – Music Is About Timining
Once you start moving this to play in time, you will probably start with simple, more mechanical motifs and then gradually explore making them more complicated and adding more development.
This is a very powerful strategy; I believe it was Peter Bernstein who said that it is playing “one simple phrase at the start of the solo and the rest is voice-leading.”
Playing in time also helps you add one more important way to develop motifs that are difficult to convey in rubato: rhythm.
You can even stick to the same melody moved through the changes and only work with the rhythm. The basic motif is one melody that is voice-lead through the changes:
And adding rhythm, it becomes:
This approach and thinking are great ways to develop your ability to play more interesting rhythms. Let me show you.
The Trick To Improving Rhythm
There is a video that I came across 12 or more years ago that inspired me when it came to rhythm. While it is important to learn to play the right notes and follow the changes, I love the rhythms that make the notes sound right. This video of two great guitarists jamming on Sweet Georgia Brown made something click for me. It was this solo with Jon Damian playing these great, fairly simple rhythmic phrases with only a few notes in there, not relying too much on longer lines, that inspired me to rethink how I practiced and what I wanted to focus on.
Limitation Exercises
But how do you practice stuff like that? If you want to develop one aspect of your playing, one effective strategy is to limit the other variables so that you can focus on that skill. In this case,
if you want to become better at playing more rhythmic phrases instead of 8th-note lines, try limiting the number of notes you use.
Again, there are two levels I’d suggest you try with this.
Level #1 – Only These Two Notes!
The first variation is very similar to an exercise I use in the Jazz Guitar Roadmap Course to help students get started soloing over changes,
but it also develops rhythm. For each chord in the song, you have two notes,
and you try to make them close to each other across chords so that you have a decent chance of playing simple melodies that make sense over several chords.
You could take these notes for the first few bars of “It Could Happen To You”, and finding those notes becomes a lot easier with the skills you get from moving simple motifs through a progression similar to the previous exercises.
Then you solo only using 2 notes per chord, and since you are limited to two notes when you solo, you have to focus on using other things to make it interesting, like rhythm, repeating notes, and rests:
Hopefully, you can become more aware of rhythms and spark ideas that you also incorporate into your usual solos.
Level #2 – 2 or 3 note phrases
Once you have explored what you can do with the 2-note exercise, you can open it up a bit and not stick to two specific notes. Instead, try to play 2- or 3-note melodies while focusing on the rhythm.
In the next example, I am still sticking to the motivic part of the melodies to create something that makes sense over a few bars:
Vocabulary Through Songs
When it comes to improving your phrasing and vocabulary, you can also rely on motivic development as a strategy. This is about exploring what you can do with a phrase and making that phrase a flexible part of your vocabulary. Take a not-too-long lick and move that around a song. First, explore how you can move the phrase around the progression.
Take a phrase like this:
So, challenge your technique and imagination to move that around the song. Start rubato and give yourself time to develop a line that fits both chords and has the same flow. This does mean changing the lick most of the time, but as long as you hear that it is the same phrase, it is fine, don’t try to be mechanical about it.
You can keep working on this a bit to make the phrase more flexible, and gradually, you can start to improvise solos where you insert the phrase into your solo in ways that make sense. That doesn’t mean using it every bar; you just have to try to use it as much as you can.
Where Do You Find Good Phrases?
There are many places you can find licks to learn and use for this exercise, but one of the best places to do so and a way of studying that will also improve your phrasing, your ears, and your timing is to learn solos by ear. This can be very difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. In this video, I show you 5 classic solos that are all good places to start if you want to sound more like Jazz and learn some great music. Check it out!
Learn Jazz Make Music!
5 Easy Solos to Learn By Ear and Boost Your Jazz Guitar Skills
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