In this lesson, I am going to show you some techniques and ways to play simple phrases that make them sound more like Jazz. There are some very common phrasing techniques in Jazz Guitar that are a huge part of the sound, and you can quite easily start adding them to your playing if you want to work on your Jazz phrasing.
I am going to go over how you might play them and also give you some good examples of how they can be added to a line.
In the lesson, I will show you how to get better sounding lines by adding them to a basic Cmaj7 arpeggio, and while I was preparing this video I was actually quite surprised about how they really give you a lot of sounds, especially some of the longer embellishments at the end of the video.
Slides (and the triplet trick)
The basic Cmaj7 arpeggio can be played as is shown below.
I am also going to play it with a leading note and then making it a triplet which is also a very bebop thing to do, which is shown in the following bar.
Adding a Slide to the top-note
One of the easiest ways to get this slightly boring arpeggio to have a little more life is to use slides, so you can slide into the top note, which serves as a sort of target for the arpeggio when you use the triplet.
Notice how I play the notes at the end of the phrases short most of the time, that is also a way to connect with the groove and make the lick sound better.
This is a big part of Wes Montgomery’s phrasing vocabulary like this from his solo on Unit 7. which is a Gm(11) arpeggio over a C7 chord
Delaying the target note
Chromatic passing notes are great for getting things to sound like Jazz, and this is a quite simple way to make that work on the Cmaj7 arpeggio. As I said before, the “target note” of the arpeggio is the B, and delaying this works really well:
Sometimes you will get told that chromatic leading notes have to be on the offbeat and resolve back on the beat. As you can hear in this example that is not true, but don’t take my word for it, ask Charlie Parker:
Above you can see how Parker uses a leading note on the beat. In bar 2, beat 4 and in bar 6, beat 3 and 4.
Turns
The names for embellishments like this are a little open, so sometimes what I am calling turns here are also called trills and slurs. It’s like chord symbols, just try to figure out what is meant and don’t worry about it.
For this video, a turn is more or less a short faster phrase with notes close to a target note. The examples will make it easier to understand what I mean.
There are a few ways you can add turns to this arpeggio.
Turn #1 – 16th note pull-off
The first variation is shown here below:
The easiest way to work on this is probably to play the scale with the turn on one string like this:
Turn #2 – 16th triplet – Mid Phrase
The 16th note triplet is also a good way to get into this. It should be executed with a quick hammer-on/pull-off and is a very common and very effective way to break things up.
Turn #3 – 16th triplet – Begin Phrase
Another way you can use this embellishment is at the beginning of a phrase.
That is what I am doing in the example below, think of it as a way of sending off the arpeggio. The line continues with a slide to the high B.
Joe Pass using “Double Turns”
To give you an example of how this is used by jazz artists, here is a lick from Joe Pass on a II V I in D major.
Pass uses the turns in the 2nd half of the A7 bar, and the last turn is used to introduce a b13 and create a little tension before resolving to Dmaj7.
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