When you play jazz you are improvising over chord progressions that move through different scales. And you need scale positions that you can connect and have an overview off in a way that makes it easy to improvise solos.
In this video, I am going to go over a basic way to practice and test your fretboard knowledge by taking progressions and use them to work on scale positions on the guitar neck. This will help you memorize the right information in the right context for when you want to improvise solos and will help you become freer when you play.
The 3 Levels
I am going to go over the exercises in 3 levels getting more and more difficult, but the exercises are essentially quite basic. This is about knowing essential chord progressions, scales, and arpeggios in a position and being able to improvise with them.
Working on this is not really something that belongs to every day practice for hours and hours, just go check this and find ways to work on this that also involve the repertoire you play.
2 Approaches
When you work on this type of exercise you can do this 2 ways: Staying in one position and going through all keys or choosing one key and going through all positions. Both are useful and you should try what works better for you.
Level 1 – 1 Position, Basic Scale and Chords
The idea is to work on knowing essential material for a position. If you improvise in G major, then the G major scale and the arpeggios for the basic cadence are essential to know. The same goes for the arpeggio from the 3rd of these chords.
For G major we have this scale position:
And the basic cadence is Am7 D7 Gmaj7.
These arpeggios are shown below:
And the arepggios from the 3rds of these chords would be
Am7: Cmaj7, D7: F#ø, Gmaj7 Bm7.
Once you know these arpeggios you should work on being able to make lines with them in this position on a II V I.
Two examples of this, one with the basic arps and one with the arpeggio from the 3rd are shown below:
Level 2 – Altered Dominant
A logical next step would be to alter the dominant, in this case D7.
Let’s first take a new position for G major:
And for the D7alt I am using an Ab7 and a Cø arpeggio.
Both are found in the D7 altered scale and contain the C and the F# really spelling out the D7 sound.
And the arpeggios from the 3rd (with Cø being the arpeggio from the 3rd of Ab7)
Improvising with these arpeggio sets could yield lines like these two:
Level 3 – Making it a complete Turnaround
The next thing to do is to add a secondary dominant for the II chord. This is one of the most common dominants to come across so it makes perfect sense to add this to the exercse.
First a new scale position:
For the E7alt I am doing the same thing as the D7alt which gives us a Bb7 and a Dø arpeggio.
And then the basic arpeggio positions:
The Arpeggio from the 3rd:
Get Your Changes Playing from Turnarounds to Giant Steps.
If you want to check out some more material on how to really nail changes and still play great lines then check out this lesson on using Target notes on Rhythm Changes:
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