I Wish I Learned Jazz Scales Like THIS – Stop Wasting Time
Most Jazz beginners spend hours on scale practice that doesn’t help them play better solos. I used to do this as well, until I discovered how easy it is to create scale exercises that fit right into your solos as great licks. And this didn’t only work for me, it has helped 1000s of my students learn to play solos with a real jazz feel.
So in this video, I’ll show you exactly what to practice and how to easily turn it into solos with great jazz vocabulary!
Please Don’t Do THIS!
Let me first quickly go over some mistakes you want to avoid that waste alt of time with this. Then I’ll show you what to practice to make your solos sound better, including some tricks that I learned from Barry Harris.
Mistake #1 – Not Just Scales
This might sound like health or diet advice, but “YOU PLAY LIKE YOU PRACTICE”. If you only run scales, your solos will sound exactly like that – predictable and mechanical scale lines.
My take on this is heavily inspired by what I learned from Barry Harris and checking out Bebop. Take a look at this part of a Charlie Parker solo. There is a LOT more going on than just running up and down scales.
I’ll show you what to work on later in the video.
Mistake #2 – Fretboard Overview
A huge goal for a lot of guitarists is fretboard freedom, and it is tempting to think that running scales all over the neck will let you play anything, anywhere. But that’s like trying to run before you can walk. If you don’t have any real vocabulary anywhere, then you are just learning to sound boring all over the neck.
It’s actually faster to master one position, then expand outwards making sure that you can actually solo everywhere.
Mistake #3 – Scales Are Inferior For Jazz
An important part of jazz improvisation is focused on locking in with the flow of the chords in the song, but scale exercises mostly ignore this, so you don’t learn to see the harmony in the scale. That way, the scale practice isn’t helping you play better solos at all.
But how should you set up your scale practice to help you play better solos? Let me show you!
Start simple & Start With Music!
Let’s be honest—just running up and down a scale isn’t what makes a jazz solo sound amazing. Sure, you need to know your scale, like this C major scale you probably already have under your fingers:
But if you check out jazz solos, you’ll notice there’s a lot more going on than just scales.
One of the biggest secrets? Learning to play arpeggios—specifically, 7th chord arpeggios. These are like the salt and pepper of jazz. Without them, your solos end up bland and forgettable.
Why are 7th chord arpeggios so important? Two reasons:
They are everywhere in the solos! You can see that already in this short part of a Charlie Parker solo, there are more arpeggios than scale runs. The other reason you want to learn the 7th chord arpeggios is that for jazz songs, the basic chords that make up the songs are all 7th chords, so having that already connected to the scale will make it a lot easier to use them and solo over the song.
But there is a way to make it easy to learn them with a step-by-step process. Let’s dive into that.
The Shortcut To 7th Chord Arpeggios
You already know your scale. Now, let’s build up to 7th chord arpeggios step by step. Luckily, arpeggios are stacks of 3rds, so a good exercise to start with is playing the scale in 3rds,
which is this exercise:
This is a lot easier, and the magic goes even further because if you stack two 3rd intervals, you get the diatonic triads.
When I say diatonic triads, I mean the triads that you get by stacking 3rds on each note of the scale.
And now you just add another 3rd interval to get the 7th chords:
Keep in mind that it is very useful to know which notes are in the scale and which arpeggios you are playing. That will help you already in the next exercise. You want to explore using this in real music, and especially real songs.
This can be about playing arpeggios through a song, like this example on the beginning of Fly Me To The Moon
But don’t stop there, you also want to create lines with the arpeggios, putting together arpeggios, scale notes, and chromatic phrases, something you will see a lot more examples of in this video:
Now that you have some basic exercises and easy ways to connect them to the music, let’s look at how you create scale exercises that make your solos sound better!
Exercises That Are REAL Jazz!
If you want to sound like a real jazz musician, just playing the “right notes” is nowhere near enough. Jazz is all about rhythm, melody, and phrasing—the way you play the notes, not just which ones you choose. And that is the problem: Most people practice scales without any of that. It’s like trying to learn woodworking, but insisting on only using a hammer. There are other tools!
Let’s fix that by building exercises that sound like real jazz, starting with rhythm.
The Bebop Arpeggio
This is another exercise that I learned from Barry Harris that really changed how I thought about practice because it immediately clicked with the music I was listening to, and I recognized where it came from and how I should use it.
Explainer Bebop Arpeggio:
If you look at the Au Privave solo, you have two arpeggios that are played as triplets: This Fmaj7 arpeggio and this Bbmajor arpeggio.
Both are played as 8th note triplets with a leading note before the first note which for the Cmaj7 that is this:
And to show that it is a chromatic leading note, it would be this for Dm7:
This clearly sounds great, and really flows, and obviously you want to write a LOT of licks using arpeggios like this. But it also makes sense to turn this into an exercise which will not only make it easy to play these triplet or ‘bebop’ arpeggios, but also help you explore them for ALL the diatonic arpeggios. That would be this exercise:
And that will make it a lot easier to come up with lines like this II V I lick using the arpeggio from the 3rd shortcut over Dm7, G7 and Cmaj7. I’ll explain the arpeggio from the 3rd in a second, that is a bonus you get from this exercise without putting in any work!
The arpeggio from the 3rd concept is about using arpeggios over a chord that contains a lot of chord tones, so it sounds like the chord, but it also adds beautiful colors to your solo.
For the II V I you have Dm7, G7, and Cmaj7. You can see how the diatonic arpeggio from the 3rd of each of these contains mostly the same notes as the chord, and then add a 9th over each of them.
So practicing diatonic arpeggios in the scale gives you more arpeggios you can use in your solos, and you now have a way to add some Bebop rhythm as well. Before we get to a triad trick, let’s quickly cover a variation of this that is also very useful.
The Other Bebop Arpeggio
This is a very easy variation of the Bebop arpeggio, which takes out the leading note. It’s a great way to lead to an important note in a chord, but I’ll demonstrate that in a bit:
Can you hear how the melody is really framing the A here. Let me show you how well this works for highlighting a note. If I use this on an Em7 arpeggio, it really frames the C.
And I follow it up with a chromatic enclosure–a quick way of surrounding the target note with notes just above and below Check it out:
And you can easily turn this way of playing the arpeggio into an exercise like this to really explore how it works for all the chords in the scale:
But this doesn’t only apply to the 7th chord arpeggios. Let me show you how you can take a great Parker-inspired triad lick and use that to both get flexibility in the scale and learn some beautiful bebop vocabulary.
Parker’s Triad Tricks
Here’s a trick I picked up from Barry Harris: If a phrase sounds great in a solo, try turning it into an exercise. That way, you can use it all over the place.
I see this as a scale run:
Where I am adding a 1st inversion C major triad on the C:
Breaking it down like that makes it a lot easier to move it through the scale. You might not have thought about it, but turning a phrase like this into an exercise is super useful. You get a better overview of the fretboard, build your music theory chops, get more flexible with scales, and add some classic bebop vocabulary to your solos. It’s pretty impressive for just one exercise!
So, try making this next exercise yourself—and experiment with creating your own exercises as well—to get the most out of these ideas.
Another Bebop Shortcut
Arpeggios and triads are a HUGE part of what you need to be able to play bebop —but as you’ve seen in these exercises and examples, they’re not the whole story. To really nail the Bebop sound, you need a solid foundation with enclosures, chromatic passing notes, and good phrasing. That’s exactly what I cover in this next video, where I also break down Barry Harris’ genius system for chromatic notes. It is guaranteed to transform your playing! Check it out!
Learn Jazz Make Music
Why Barry Harris’ Approach Is So Much Better Than Bebop Scales!
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