Do you feel like you know all the scales and arpeggios, but your solos still sound nothing like jazz? You’ve put in the practice; you know your theory, but it still doesn’t click.
So in this video, I’ll show you 3 simple jazz licks that I wish I had when I started, so you stop sounding like you’re just running up and down scales, and start sounding like real jazz when you solo.
So your solos have all the right notes but still sound like this:
At the end of this video, you can get them to sound more like this using the 3 licks.
The Problem
You’ve probably played a line like that first example and thought —
B-roll “Student-Jens”: “I’m playing all the right notes, but it doesn’t sound right. What’s wrong?”
OA: leave me looking left to right in the OA in there, I might use it:
Most guitarists assume the answer is better notes, so they go hunting for a hipper arpeggio or some theoretical pentatonic-upper-structure. But it’s actually a lot simpler than that.
The problem is melody and rhythm. In the example, the line just goes up on the beat and back down on the beat; it ends up sounding like an ambulance siren —
B-roll: Show Ex 1 – play siren and animate a line showing the up and down so it fits the siren
The notes are ‘correct’, but the line is much too predictable — and that’s not what jazz sounds like. It doesn’t feel right.
The fix isn’t better notes.
We need those twists and turns that are a part of the jazz sound. You get those by changing the direction and rhythm of your melody in a way that actually sounds like jazz.
And that’s exactly what these 3 short licks do — so let’s look at the first one.
The First Ingredient: Enclosures
The basic version of this was something I completely messed up in the beginning.
My teacher gave me the basic exercise on a C major triad, which sounds like this:
Around each note in the triad I use a diatonic note above and a chromatic note below. D B to C, F D# to E, for the G: A F# to G, and then D B to C again.
Or maybe better and less confusing this:
I did practice it — but I remember sitting there running through it over and over thinking: “this sounds nothing like jazz. Why would anyone actually use this?”
The problem was I had no idea HOW it was meant to be used.
Take a line like this:
That’s a bit boring. But if I add an enclosure before the C, you get this:
Hear that? That little 3-note lick before the C is what changes the whole feel of the line — it shifts the direction and makes it more surprising.
Notice that with a descending melody it often works better to have an enclosure that moves up
— just to change the direction of the melody even more abruptly.
Compared to having one that is descending as the same as the melody
So if the melody is moving up, then often an enclosure moving down sounds better, and vice versa.
You want to think of each enclosure as a short lick you can drop in anywhere, especially targeting chord tones.
So you have a short lick to get to an E
and a similar lick to get to G:
They’re great for changing up the direction in a way that’s perfect for jazz.
Let me show you.
Some of you might think that just adding chromatic passing notes might seem easier:
But the flow of something like this is so much stronger:
And all the great jazz guitarists knew that. George Benson used this all the time. Here’s a line from his solo on Billie’s Bounce — I’ve transposed it to C major, just to make it easy.
Here you have an enclosure around the 3rd, then he skips down and adds a leading note before the 5th,
and finally an enclosure around the root before going to the G7.
He uses lines like this throughout that solo, and once you hear it you’ll start spotting it everywhere.
Spend some time adding these short 3-note licks to your lines — targeting chord tones, changing direction in the right places — and the flow in your solos will be 10x stronger.
If you want to work through these examples at your own pace, I’ve put together a free PDF with all the licks and exercises so you can add them to your solos straight away.
The link is in the description.
That’s one way to fix the siren problem, but Barry Harris has a completely different approach that will change how you think about arpeggios entirely.
Barry Harris’s Ingredient
This is one of the Barry Harris techniques that completely changed how I use arpeggios.
Let me show you how it changes a very basic line first, and then I’ll break down how it works:
And check out how much better this sounds:
These are called pivot arpeggios, and there’s an incredibly simple recipe. Take an arpeggio — I’m using a Cmaj7 here:
All you do is move the root — the first note — up an octave:
That’s it. And this works for every arpeggio, so you can take it through all the diatonic arpeggios:
Every arpeggio becomes a new 4-note lick with a built-in interval skip and direction change. And you can use these to create lines with those surprising twists in the flow:
Here you have an Fmaj7 pivot arpeggio over the Dm7 and an Em7 pivot arpeggio over the Cmaj7
notice how the direction keeps shifting in a way that sounds nothing like a siren.
And that’s your second lick. A pivot arpeggio — four notes, one interval skip, and a built-in direction change you can drop straight into your solos.
If you want to take this further and actually apply it to a real jazz standard, my Jazz Guitar Roadmap course does exactly that. You learn to take these kinds of building blocks and use them in your own jazz solos on a real song. Over 8000 students have been through it — there’s a link in the description if you want to join them.
Now sometimes you don’t want to drop in a complete arpeggio, and luckily there’s a shortcut that gets you a very similar sound with fewer notes. It’s a beautiful variation that Doug Raney used a lot — and that’s what we’re looking at next.
The Interval Skip – Diet Barry
The pivot arpeggio is great, but it’s a big 4-note chunk with a very specific sound — and sometimes you just want a quicker way to get that same direction change without usng a full arpeggio.
What if you could make it shorter and less arpeggio-sounding?
You can: the biggest part of the sound is that first large interval skip at the beginning.
After that, the journey back is done with chord tones — but you can also just go directly back to the 7th, leaving out the 5th. It’s a bit like shell voicings in that way.
This is the 3rd lick, a simple extra note added between two notes.
“
The easiest way to think of it is a 6th interval — often the 3rd of the chord — inserted between two scale notes. On Cmaj7, between C and B:
And between E and D:
Grant Green loved these, and you’ll find them in pretty much any bebop-inspired solo.
Here’s an example from his solo on “You Stepped Out Of A Dream” — where he mixes in some slides to add a bit of blues flavour on the turnaround:
You can also add a leading note to the low note, which is a great way to make your solo less predictable. Here’s an example on Cmaj7, inserting the E between C and B:
So the phrase is in the 2nd half of the first bar — and notice it’s not just the low E, there’s also a D# inserted before it to add an extra accent to that melodic twist.
And a variation Doug Raney loved is turning it into a short turn, where it almost becomes a second voice added to your solo:
If you want to work through all of these licks and examples at your own pace, grab the free PDF — it’s got all the licks and exercises from this video. Link’s in the description.
So now you’ve got three ways to stop sounding like a siren and start sounding like jazz — enclosures, pivot arpeggios, and interval skips.
It will change how your solos sound.
The 3 Important Arpeggios
Leveling up your playing is all about learning to create lines that actually sound like jazz — and arpeggios are a huge part of that. If you want to know which ones to focus on first, this video is the right next step. It covers the 3 most important arpeggios for jazz.
Check it out!
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