5 Jazz Licks That Turn Beginners Into Pros

It’s not enough to just play the right notes. Like me, you probably found that out the hard way. Let me show you 5 Jazz licks that teach you how to make the notes sound right – and explain how you get that into your solos. Because just playing the right notes will never be enough.

If you’re working on soloing over changes, you might sound something like this:

But when you listen to great solos, there are 3 things missing:

The five licks in this video will show you exactly how to fix that — using things you already know.

#1 Fix Your Arpeggios

This first step takes something you’re already using and makes it sound 10x better. Skipping this often makes your solos lack rhythm and energy, and with that tweak you can fix that.

One of the most common ways to sound “correct” but still boring is playing arpeggios or chord tones with no rhythmic or melodic shape. It’s the easiest way to kill a solo. I really struggled with this when I was getting started. I knew my solos didn’t sound right, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

Barry Harris gave me a solution — and it changed everything.

One of the mornings in the Barry Harris workshop in the Hague back in 1998, he told us to play a major scale from the root up to the 7th:

I don’t remember if he used this scale, but that’s not the point.

Next, he told us to play the Cmaj7 arpeggio

But now he also pointed out that you had an arpeggio on every step of the scale, and you need to know all of them, so he asked us to play all the diatonic arpeggios:

Now this was incredibly useful, but it wasn’t yet that mind-blowing in terms of getting solos to sound like great Jazz lines, but of course, Barry Harris managed to turn this into a much more inspiring sound. He told us to put a half-step before the Cmaj7 arpeggio and play the arpeggio as a triplet,

Which was this melody:

And THIS immediately sounds like what I heard in Charlie Parker and Joe Pass solos all the time. Not surprisingly, the next exercise was to take this through the scale:

When you play diatonic arpeggios like this, you add more energy to the solo, like this:

Lick #1

I am starting on the 3rd E and, with a passing note, moving to D, then skipping down to the B to play the triplet arpeggio.

Notice that I am ending the line on 4&. It feels much lighter to end solos on short notes and also often to end on an offbeat.

Now let’s explore the most common problem Jazz beginners encounter with their phrasing!

#2 Stop Playing Predictable Solos

Here’s one thing you don’t want to have too much of in your solos: If I play this…

Then you can already hear this coming…

It is too predictable, which is a problem and makes it boring. You want your solo to make sense, but also surprise the listener — keep it fresh and interesting. A lot of beginner jazz solos tend to sound like this:

Even though the notes are “right,” the line is still boring. There are two main problems: It changes direction only on the heavy beats, so beats 1 and 3, and it moves too much in a stepwise motion.

How do you fix this? This video has a few solutions, but this one is the easiest to start with.

First, I’ll show you a simple exercise. Then, I’ll give you a recipe for using it in your own solos.

The exercise is this simple enclosure exercise: For a triad, add enclosures around each note, such as a diatonic note above and a chromatic note below. For a C major triad that gives you

D and B around C because the diatonic leading note, B, is already chromatic. For the 3rd, E, you get: F D# E.

and for the 5th, G, you get A and F#.

That gives you this exercise:

Since this is about melodic direction, it also helps to reverse the order of the enclosure:

You want to get started using this by focusing on the chord’s triad. For our Cmaj7, that is easy; just use the C major triad.

The recipe is as follows: Start with a chord tone and then play an enclosure around the next chord tone.

If you use that recipe and also add a triplet arpeggio, you can create lines like this:

Lick #2

There are two enclosures here,

I start on a chord tone, the 5th G, then an enclosure around the E, and since that is a chord tone I follow that with an enclosure around the C leading into the triple arpeggio.

The difference is that the melody skips around a lot more and doesn’t move predictably in one direction all the time. Whenever it skips around, it comes back to a chord tone so that it makes sense to the ear.

Let’s explore another approach to arpeggios that adds more character to your solos.

#3 So Much Better Than Inversions

Let me save you a lot of time: A mistake I definitely made — and that I see a lot of students make — is focusing too much on arpeggio inversions. In Jazz, we often explore many different ways to play the same thing, just like how we used two versions of the enclosure exercise earlier. And yes, triad inversions show up in Jazz solos. But when you start checking out real solos, you’ll notice something: 7th chord inversions are actually pretty rare. I didn’t realize this when I was starting, so I spent a ton of time practicing 7th chord inversions… And I really struggled to make them sound good in my solos. They’re not completely useless — but once I started practicing diatonic arpeggios and the Barry Harris exercises, I stopped working on inversions.

But that doesn’t mean you always play arpeggios the same way. You already saw how rhythm—like using a triplet makes a big difference.

Here’s another variation that’s a lot more musical and that you hear all the time in great solos:

Start with a basic Cmaj7 arpeggio, and notice that I’m adding a scale note after it:

Now, take the first note, the C, and move it up an octave. That gives you this beautiful, large interval skip:

You can do this with every diatonic arpeggio. This is a great exercise:

This adds a lot more excitement to your solo lines:

Lick #3

This sounds more complicated than it is — it actually makes a lot of sense to the ear, which also makes it easier to play, and the big intervals open up your lines and add excitement.

These examples are on Cmaj7, but the principle works on other chords too. Now, let’s bring in chromatic notes — because that’s where things really start sounding like Jazz.

#4 Chromatic Notes (and that great exception!)

You’ve already seen chromatic notes in the enclosures earlier, but there’s a lot more you can do with half-step approaches to really bring your lines to life.

There aren’t any hard rules when it comes to using chromatic notes, but Barry Harris had a really great system for this, and it’s a perfect starting point if you want to create beautiful Bebop lines!

Let me show you how that works in C major:

This is C major from C to C.

Adding a half-step between C and D is easy, you just use C#,

same between D and E,

But how do you fit one in between E and F? This is where Barry’s approach comes in: You take the scale note above the target — so to go from E to F, add a G before the F.

It sounds a bit odd as a rule, but as a melody, it really works.

There are notes to add from F to G, G to A, and A to B, and between B and C, you can take the scale note above D.

The descending version of this is the same, which means that you still use the note above.

Notice that I tend to choose where to play the chromatic note depending on where it is resolving, so ascending and descending are not identical. Ascending, I use this C# to go to D, but I use this Db to go down to C.

For me, that was always more practical, but that might be different for you.

The cool thing is that once you understand this, you can move around chromatic phrases in the scale, and they still sound logical. Let’s say you have this lick with a C major triad and a chromatic run:

That is a chromatic run from B to G and then a descending C major triad.

If you move that up a 3rd in the scale, you would start with a D, and the chromatic run would become this melody:

So you can move all chromatic melodies around in the scale and get licks that not only make sense rhythmically but also sound really solid!

I have another video that explores this concept in more depth. I’ll link to it in the description.

With this, the licks you can make are getting pretty hip for just being Cmaj7!

Lick #4:

So you have a pivot arpeggio, and followed by a half-step between A and G, skipping down the chord to E and connecting from D to B with half steps before ending on a low G.

Now, let’s get into something that really adds surprise to your solos: Octave Displacement

#5 Bach Wants His Bebop Back!

This lick was giving me a lot of trouble when I was starting to check out bebop lines. At the time I had never heard of Pivot arpeggios or Octave displacement, but I clearly remember coming across this incredibly beautiful, yet simple line:

Eventually, I figured out that it was essentially just a descending scale run with a part of it moved an octave:

But when I tried to move the melody an octave in different places, it didn’t work at all:

But it did work if I used a diminished arpeggio on G7 instead of the scale run:

You can also use the pivot arpeggio version of that arpeggio, even if it is resolved on a different note.

As you can see, pivot arpeggios are a specific type of octave displacement. But all of this is difficult to use on a maj7 chord. If you start to check out classical music, and especially more dense melodies like Bach, you will find octave displacement all over the place.

But here, I want to focus on other examples that you can easily use.

One example that sounds amazing on a maj7 chord is a transformation of this common Am7/Cmaj7 melody:

Here you can move the E down an octave to get this melodic interval skip:

And here is how that sounds in a line:

Another place where you can use that transformation is this similar melody:

That becomes this:

And if you combine that with the triplet arpeggios, enclosures, and chromatic runs from earlier…

Then you get a line like this:

Another way to explain these great intervallic melodies is what I cover in this video, together with a deeper exploration of Barry Harris’ chromatic scale. This is a powerful tool for upgrading your solos that will do amazing things for your phrasing. Without that, you will never sound like Jazz! Check it out!

Learn Jazz Make Music

https://jenslarsen.nl/why-barry-harris-has-the-best-method-for-chromatic-notes/

Get the PDF!

You can also download the PDF of my examples here:

Get the PDF and GuitarPro on Patreon:

You can get the PDF and GuitarPro files on Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/129500152

Get a free E-book

If you want to download a Free E-book of 15 II Valt I licks then subscribe to my newsletter:

https://jenslarsen.nl/sign-up-for-my-newsletter/

Jazz Guitar Insiders Facebook Group

Join 15000+ Other Jazz Guitarists Join us in the Facebook Jazz Guitar Group Community: http://bit.ly/InsidersFBGroup

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for topics, then send me an email or leave a comment here or on the video. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.