Stop Playing Scales (Practice This Instead!)
The Scale Problem!
Most Jazz beginners listen back to their solos and think: “I don’t sound like Jazz—I’m just running scales.” But you can change that. You can make your solos tell a story, not just outline the chords. It’s frustrating when you’ve learned all the right notes, but your solos still sound robotic.
In this video, I’ll show you a few simple exercises you can add to your practice routine. Just a few minutes a day can take you from this:
To this:
All it takes is a few choruses of focused soloing, a minute or two!. And to show you what’s possible, I’ll break down how Wes Montgomery turns incredibly simple ideas into unforgettable music—because he’s one of the best teachers for this skill.
Level 1 – Fewer Notes = More Music
Before we dig into Wes’ solo, let’s build a foundation to work with. For this video, I will use a Jazz Blues in C,
because I am sure you already know that progression, and you want to work on this with a song and progression that you are very familiar with.
The problem with your playing right now is that you are too busy thinking about what scale, arpeggio, or chromatic enclosure to use. That means your solo doesn’t have a beginning or an end, and you could rearrange random phrases, and it would still sound the same.
It is pretty easy to fix this and start soloing so that you worry more about how you play than what notes to play: Limit the Number of Notes.
The best place to start is 2 notes. If you are only playing two notes ,then you are not worrying about what notes to play, and you spend time trying to make it music in a different way. For the first four bars of the blues that could be something like this:
When you limit yourself to just two notes, long, meaningless 8th-note runs disappear—and that forces you to focus on rhythm, phrasing, and dynamics instead, which makes you sound a LOT better.. I am only using two notes per chord:
C and E on C7, and F and Eb on F7:
I’ll talk about how to find the notes in a bit, but let’s say that you already have 2 notes per chord through the blues. And because you can’t fall back on running long 8th-note phrases or copying the same lick over each chord, you naturally start developing the other skills that will make your solos more interesting. You can get very far if you practice this for 2-3 choruses every day. That takes about a minute.
Just by limiting yourself to 2 notes, you’re already starting to think in phrases—not scales. That’s the shift this exercise creates. There is another important skill that you will also start to develop by practicing this, but I will get to that in a bit—let’s first talk about choosing notes.
Initially, it is advisable to allocate some time for preparation by mapping out the two notes in advance. This will work as a sort of contract with yourself, and it will also help you think a bit about the harmony and the melodies you can create with two notes.
For my example: You already have notes for C7 and F7.
So, C and E for C7, and F and Eb for F7. For the transition from F7 to F#dim it seems logical to change F to F#.
Same thinking works for C7 to A7, where C becomes C#.
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Now D and F is a natural choice for Dm7, and you can keep that for G7.
Remember that you don’t have to clearly spell out the chords in this exercise, and you also want two notes that you can actually play melodies with, so the guide tones or a 7th interval is not really going to be great.
I use this exercise in my course The Jazz Guitar Roadmap as well.
Here it is a great stepping stone to help the students develop rhythm and also feel and hear how it is to play the changes of a song. It builds a great foundation for all the flowing jazz lines that they play in the later chapters.
I personally return to practicing 2-note soloing fairly often, but you should also explore using slightly longer phrases and work with 3 or 4 notes like this 3-note example:
Now, let’s explore how Wes works with phrases only containing a few notes.
Wes Montgomery’s Melodic Clarity
When people talk about Wes and what is great about his playing, they mostly talk about octaves and chord solos, but to me, that is just technique. What really sets him apart is the melodic clarity in his solos and how fearless he is in playing incredibly simple, but incredibly strong melodies! That was his true genius, and he is by far the best to learn this skill from.
Using Wes’ solos is always a bit tricky in videos because of copyright, so you’ll have to settle for me playing the examples. Let me play you the first 8-bar segment of his solo on Four On Six—listen for two things: how much space there is and how long the phrases are:
So the phrases are very short and very clear, mostly 5 or 6 notes. He relies much more on rhythm and phrasing.
A later part of the solo is a pickup and then a repeated two-note phrase. I think you want to ask yourself: how often do you play something that simple and effective? Wes clearly thinks “Less Is More”—and he proves it. So I guess not all Swedish shredders are huge Wes Montgomery fans.
Hearing how Wes uses short phrases gives you a clear example of how to add simplicity and clarity to your playing. Let’s look at how to start connecting those phrases into longer stories, so you don’t sound like random phrases next to each other.
Level 2 – Start Talking To Yourself
The next step is to start connecting those ideas. And one of the best ways to do that is by using call and response—essentially, having a musical conversation with yourself. You’ve worked on playing shorter, clearer phrases using just a few notes. But if you stop there, each phrase is still isolated, and your solo is not a story. Imagine if Shakespeare wrote one sentence of Hamlet at a time… but immediately forgot the sentence he just wrote. That’s what it’s like when you play without listening to yourself.
Luckily, playing short phrases means that you have space between phrases,
The next level is for you to listen to what you played and use that to decide what to play next. This is how Call-Response works,
and the easiest way to start is by playing that rubato so that you give yourself time to stop and imagine what to play between phrases. As I am doing here using the 2 notes from earlier in the video. Once you have explored this rubato a bit, and keep in mind it is more efficient if you are using notes you already worked on with the limitation exercise, then try it out in time:
In a way, the most important person to listen to is yourself, if you are not listening to what you just played and use that to figure out what to play next, you are not going to make any sense at all. But working like this you start to tell stories and connect phrases.
Let’s move on to a related skill, maybe the strongest melodic concept we have? It will certainly help you develop your ability to think in phrases.
How Wes Tells A Story
Again, Wes plays phrases that are clear, simple, and still amazing! Repetition is what makes a solo sound composed, not random. Check out this example and I’ll explain what you should take away from it:
You can easily hear that this is Wes playing the same phrase twice—starting with octaves and then the arpeggio—but changing the ending.
Keep in mind that if he had just played the same lick twice, it would not have been nearly as interesting. In fact, it would have felt a bit boring. So you want to repeat phrases but you need to develop what you are playing. You already heard Wes do this earlier: first a very short burst of notes, then he moves it up, repeats it, and adds a tail to it.
This is called Motivic Development, and I’ll show you how to incorporate that into your solos!
Level 3 – Can You Repeat That?
For this, you want to start with more notes than 2, but it is certainly easier to still keep it short and simple. Rubato is the way to begin, just to get started, and also have the ability to explore several options for developing a motif. For the C-Jazz blues maybe you have this:
There are a few ways you can develop the phrase on the F7. Voice-leading:
Or you can transpose the phrase to the F7 chord:
And don’t forget that it makes sense to develop the rhythm as well:
Once you have tried this rubato, you can try it out with a motif playing in time. Here I am starting with a basic major blues phrase:
The Soloing Exercise That Changed My Life
A great place to start if you want to both work on being able to play changes and create longer stories with your phrases, as you just learned, is working on chord tone soloing. I cover that in this video, and that exercise has done amazing things for my playing, even if it is incredibly simple, and it fits perfectly as a next step to what I have covered here!
Check it out!
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