I think we all know how it is: You are improvising over a song and there is a place or one chord where you always feel like you are playing the Old Jazz Guitar Licks.
One of the ways that I go about finding some new material that I like is actually pretty simple and that is what I am going to show you in this lesson.
In my experience, you are better off working on taking the things that you already know and get better at using them instead of trying to learn a million Star Trek scales that
you can’t make music, so this is actually pretty down to earth.
Very often when I listen to the jazz guitar solos that I love, like Wes on Four on Six or maybe a Kurt Rosenwinkel, then some places really stand out to me, and when I transcribed those passages they were always using very basic things but just creating great melodies with that.
So this is more about getting great melodies or licks out of basic things and that is what I am going to show you a way of exploring in this video because you can make 1000s of great licks with stuff you already know.
For this lesson I am going to take a C7 and the scale that it belongs to which will be an F major scale, so the basic framework is
And it is important to see the Arpeggio or the chord in the context of the scale (Neck Diagrams) Making music is about connecting things, not playing separate ideas one after the other.
We are making licks for a C7 so let’s first try to make some melodies just with the arpeggio and then add in the rest.
The Arpeggio works really well, but for a melody to be interesting then it probably needs to be a little less predictable than just the arpeggio.
#1 Change the order of the notes
The first two suggestions for making licks is really about knowing the arpeggio better and being freer to improvise with it. And this is what you need to work on to do that:
And you can put the 2nd bar from the example above to work on the beginning of a Blues in C:
You don’t always have to play the notes in the same order, we think of them as 1 3 5 7 but when you improvise you can play a lot of other melodies with the same notes in different orders.
#2 Inversions = New Melodies
Just like chords, there are ways you can also change the octave of some of the notes and in that way create inversions which are really just more solid melodies with the same notes.
#3 Repeating Notes
A lot of Great melodies use only arpeggios and one thing that they mostly do is that they also repeat the notes in the arpeggio, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik comes to mind.
In general you can just explore diffierent ways to make patterns by repeating notes as shown here below:
And if you put this to use on a Blues you have this:
#4 Add The Scale Notes
Until now, everything was done using only the arpeggio but we can also add the rest of the scale and create this exercise, which I usually refer to as the Barry Harris exercise:
If we take a few arpeggio patterns to add scale notes to then they could look like this:
And adding the scale could yield an example like this:
