3 Mistakes Self-Taught Jazz Guitarists ALWAYS Make
You know this: The problem is not notes, scales, or arpeggios, but all your solos still sound bad. This is surprisingly easy to fix once you hear it!
When you are just getting started with Jazz, it is technically demanding to figure out what scales work and how to play the arpeggios of a song,
but that makes it much more frustrating if you have all that under control and your solos still don’t work at all!
Fix The Flow In Your Solos
Let’s start with the one that might require the most work, but that will also really level up how your solo sounds. Then, I can show you some phrasing strategies, which borrow advice from Barry Harris. But first, see if you can hear what the problem is with this solo on the first few bars of All Of Me. It is not what notes I am playing:
In this example, the notes are fine; the problem is with the melody and the flow.
This is something I often help students fix in my course, The Jazz Guitar Roadmap.
You need to develop one of the most important skills when it comes to playing music.
When you are learning to play jazz and improvise over chord changes, you are probably still in the process of learning the arpeggios Cmaj7 and E7 and finding the right notes so.
That means that when you solo, you still have to spend a lot of energy on what to play on each chord, not how your phrases sound and they fit together.
Often, that means playing phrases per chord. Cmaj7 comes along, and then you play a phrase over that. Stop and wait so you have time to think about the next chord, and when the chord changes, you play a new phrase on that chord, stop, and wait for the next chord change.
There are a few problems with this:
- Your solos become boring and predictable because they start in the same place.
- There is no energy that helps the music flow forward because when something changes, you are waiting for it to happen.
- Like this, It’s impossible to connect phrases across chords and tell a story with the solo.
The important skill I am talking about is thinking ahead. You want your solo to flow from chord to chord, which is not as complicated to learn as you might think.
The Bebop Flow
Let’s look at how to get that forward motion and bebop flow in there.
If you look at the beginning of All of Me, you can start by practicing Cmaj7 lines worrying about what fits that chord and making sure to end on E7. This is where you need to think ahead,
and instead of thinking of all the notes you can play on an E7 or all the chord tones of the chord, it is much more practical to take one note at a time and practice playing towards that.
In this case, I am using the G#, the 3rd of E7, for two reasons: That note is very clear on E7, so you can hear the chord change, and it is also not there over the Cmaj7, which makes it stick out even more.
You can turn this into a 3-step process:
Step #1 – Find A Single Target Note
Find one G#, one place on the neck. Keep it simple so you don’t confuse yourself, and remember that this is more about learning to hear the melodic flow than learning to play towards all G# notes on the neck.
Step #2 – Construction and Composition
Start composing short and simple lines on Cmaj7 that end on that G#. For now, I want to transition to the G# stepwise to make it as smooth as possible.
You can gradually make the lines longer and more complicated
And even start to add chromatic passing notes as well, just explore what you can create.
Step #3 – Back To The Song
After doing this for a bit and getting to the point where you have made some lines that use Cmaj7 material that flows to the E7, you can start applying this to the song. You probably want to explore this first for other chords, but that process gets a lot easier along the way. Check out this example:
As you repeat this process on other chords, you will naturally get used to soloing like this without having to find specific target notes in advance. Let’s talk about a few other common phrasing mistakes that are much easier to fix.
David Gilmour Solos Are Not Jazz
Most students getting into jazz come from rock, metal, and blues, but one aspect of those styles when it comes to soloing is a bad habit in jazz. This is due to Jazz being more focused on rhythm and locking in with the groove, not only playing on top of it. Try listening to this example; then I’ll show you what the problem is and an easy way to practice towards fixing it:
The problem with this solo is that all the phrases end on long notes. A long note has less rhythm than a short note because the short note has a clear beginning and an end, and both are related to the rhythm.
In fairness, most good rock or blues solos will also vary this and not only end on long notes, even if some of the most famous rock solos rely a lot more on long notes:
In Jazz, there is much more tradition for ending phrases on short notes, and even if you never thought about it then that is something you can hear in a lot of songs like Tenor Madness.
Of course, I could give you thousands of examples of this, but if you listen to some of your favorite Jazz solos and pay attention to this, that might be even better and get you closer to fixing this.
How To Not Sound Like Bebop Pink Floyd
Keep in mind that I don’t want to set up a rule that you ALWAYS end on a short note—that is not how it works—but I do want you to be able to control and make choices about the length of the notes you play, especially if you are just letting notes ring as a habit. The length of the note is as important as dynamics in solos; it is a part of the music.
This exercise is one of the most painful and one of the most helpful exercises that I know: Start recording your solos and listen to them. With this topic in mind, you should focus on how you end phrases and not get distracted by other things in your solo. That can be difficult, but you do need to focus on the specific thing you are trying to improve, and getting distracted by other aspects like timing, note choice, etc., is not going to help you do that.
If you realize that you always just let notes ring at the end of phrases, then you can practice soloing and pay attention to always ending on short notes. Over time, you will start to gain control of how you use note length, and it will become a part of your musical vocabulary. But even ending your phrases on a short note you might run into another problem…
This Is Why It Is Called Bebop
In a way, fixing the two other mistakes I talked about in this video can cause this problem, but the solution will also help you work with an exercise to make your solo lines sound 100x better.
If you play towards target notes and end on short notes, then your solo could still sound like this:
As I already mentioned, Jazz is about rhythm, and a part of the Jazz language is syncopation and accents on the offbeats, which you don’t have when you are ending all your phrases on a chord tone on a downbeat with a short note, as I have just taught you.
But let me show you two ways to fix that. First, I will use a very simple but incredibly useful tactic. Then, I will add some Barry Harris tricks with his 5432 licks and give you an example of George Benson using two of them.
Be-Bop
The first way to deal with this is to avoid ending on the downbeat and always end with a short tail of a few notes. The easiest way to start with that is to add another chord tone after the target note, which is also why the music is called Bebop.
Take a simple phrase like this:
All you need to do is add another chord tone after the resolution to E on Cmaj7. The root works:
But the 5th is also great
And you can also skip up to the root an octave higher:
Those two notes are the Bebop notes, which describe the phrasing in this style of music, which features fast syncopated phrases over changes.
You practice by first composing lines with that ending, gradually incorporating that into solos, starting to get it to work as a natural part of your playing. Expanding on this simple solution, you can incorporate complete phrases instead of just adding a single note. I like to use a set of phrases I learned from Barry Harris for this.
Barry Harris 5432 Licks
These four phrases often appeared in the Barry Harris masterclasses, and you can use them as building blocks—they are almost Bebop Legos. They work well for this but are also very useful in general, and you can find them in a lot of solos. I’ll show you a George Benson example in a bit.
The first phrase is all diatonic but has some nice melodic skips:
That would be what Barry called 5. You also have 4, which is a very nice chromatic enclosure:
Of course, anything related to Barry Harris and Bebop must have a pivot arpeggio and an arpeggio from the 3rd, so The 3 is an Em7 pivot arpeggio over a Cmaj7 chord:
Two other important Bebop ingredients are chromatic passing notes and 8th note triplets that is what 2 gives you:
But as you probably noticed, these are still ending on the heavy beats, which needs some attention. Another important thing is that the phrases are very flexible and can be used on different chords. George Benson uses 5 on the dominant and resolves that to 3 in this example from Billie’s bounce, and here you also see how Benson adds an extra note after the 3 phrase to not end on a downbeat:
And Just like George Benson, you can add notes after the phrase. Here’s an example with 5
And you can substitute the 5 phrase with 4 pretty easily and do the same thing:
And with a different G7 line, then 3 fits perfectly, and here I just end it a bit earlier, which also sometimes works:
And check out how great this chromatic phrase sounds:
:
Taking one of these and working on adding it to your solos is a great way to start hearing jazz phrasing. Rhythms that don’t end on heavy beats are essential to the sound of Jazz and Bebop and something you need to master.
Another part of Bebop you want to explore to improve your solos is adding chromatic passing notes. As you will see in this video, Barry Harris has an amazing system for this. It has the right phrasing built in. This system can transform your playing on several levels and is a great place to add more Bebop sound, not only chromatic notes but also phrasing. Check it out! Learn Jazz, Make Music!
Why Barry Harris’ Approach Is So Much Better Than Bebop Scales!
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One response
Hi Jens,
dit artikel gelezen, een duidelijke uitleg hiervan, de manier hoe je er naar moet kijken.
het spelen van akkoorden , dan denk ik ook in akkoorden en niet een noot er van , ik denk dat het meer ballast geeft voor improvisatie.
ik ga er vanavond mee aan de slag.
Mvg
Freek
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