When you practice Jazz Guitar, then the most fun part of practicing is to work on new things you can add to your playing and enjoy using it while playing music. But often the way you start working on new material actually also stops you from getting it into your playing, and that is what I want to discuss in this video, and of course, give you a few easy ways to fix it.
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You can make a lot of mistakes and waste a lot of time by having inefficient and unrealistic practice plans tie you down. At the same time, a Great Guitar Practice Plan can help you progress and make a huge difference for your motivation.
This video deals with that and helps you make better choices.
Goals and Guitar Practice Plans
If you are learning guitar or learning jazz then a part of what you are doing is setting goals for yourself and trying to reach those goals. That is a natural way of learning, but when you make a practice plan there are some things to be aware of. A Guitar Practice Plan should help you stay motivated and actually reach those goals. It really pays off to be aware of what goals you set for yourself. Especially if you are teaching yourself and don’t have a teacher to guide you.
And that is what I want to talk about in this video: How to set some good goals and work towards them, the 3 things you need to consider when you plan what to work on.
Learn more on Self-teaching
Check out THIS PLAYLIST to see some of my videos on topics related to teaching yourself to play Jazz and Jazz Guitar,
Content:
0:00 Intro – Setting Goals for yourself and learning
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics then please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.
Even if you have lessons you know that most of the time you need to teach yourself and make sure you are improving while you practice guitar. You need to make sure that are getting something out of how you practice and spend your time.
In this video, I am going to talk about how you can easily add something to your practice sessions that will help you evaluate your playing and give you an idea about whether you are progressing. I will also go over 3 things to keep in mind to get the most out of this way of working.
Join 1500+ 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 please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and feel free to connect with me via Instagram,Twitter, or Facebook to keep up to date with new lessons, concerts, and releases.
Arpeggios are huge part of improvising over changes in jazz guitar and especially in the more bop oriented styles. When we improvise we use arpeggios to connect to the harmony and spell out interesting extensions or alterations.
Practicing Arpeggios
This video is going to discuss 5 ways to practice arpeggios so that you get as much as possible out of practicing arpeggios and that you also make sure to make music with them.
I also included a few extra examples for working on creating more intervallic or modern sounding licks or solos. There are a few ways to achieve this, one of the ones that I like to use is experimenting with turning chords into solo lines and in that way access some larger intervals.
We all study jazz licks to add new ideas and techniques to our improvisations and our vocabulary. But I often get told by students how they choose a very in effective way of studying licks and are in fact really just wasting their time. In this video I will outline what is not useful when studying licks and also what is a better approach if you want to add material to your repertoire.
I will also use a part of a Grant Green solo as an example of how he gets it right and uses it in his solo.
Practicing Jazz Licks – Contents
0:00 Intro – Learn licks and increase our vocabulary
0:53 The bad way to practice licks even though they are good examples
1:25 Playing some licks (from paper with a metronome?)
We want to be free when we improvise over difficult chord progressions. This Flexible Scale exercise is a great way to start working on having an overview of the fretboard and the scales you need for difficult chord progresssions like Giant Steps, Moments Notice and Very Early.
The exercise helps you learn to think ahead, know where you are in the bar and play towards target notes. The goal is that your melodic idea is stronger than the movement of the chord progression.
List of content:
0:00 Intro — The Exercise for difficult progressions
0:39 The Chord Progression for this lesson and where this works well
Scale Practice actually goes way beyond having to work on exercises. Taking phrases or licks and moving them around is a great way to expand your abilities on your instrument.
On the guitar moving to another key is maybe not as difficult as staying in the same key and moving around the neck, and you need to be able to do this if you want to be able to freely transpose songs.
In this video I will go over this exercise and demonstrate what the thinking is and what gain from working on it.
The PDF is available in the Patreon Facebook Group.
If you don’t want to waste your time you want to make sure to turn everything you practice into material that you can use when you improvise.
We all practice scales and work on our technique by doing Scale Exercises, arpeggios, diatonic triads and patterns. In this video I want to show you how you can take your exercises and start turning them into jazz licks.
The Diatonic Triads in a Scale Position
Let’s just start with an exercise that I am sure you already practice: Diatonic Triads. Here below I have written it out in the key of C major:
Turning this exercise into a II V I is shown here below where it is used on a II V I in C: Dm7, G7, Cmaj7:
I am using the descending version of the exercise above on the Dm7. It is then used with the triads of Dm, C and finally B dim. From here it continues with a G7 altered lick before resolving to C.
Diatonic Triads in Patterns
A great way to practice diatonic triads is to play them in a pattern so that you break up the order of the notes. In the example below I have written out the diatonic triads in a 3 1 5 pattern:
Using this type of exercise in a jazz lick is a great way to add some larger intervals to your lines.
The lick here below is using the F,G and Am triads over the Dm7. It then continues with a G7 altered line that is based on a Bmaj7(#5) arpeggio before it resolves to Cmaj7.
Triads along the neck
Another way to practice the triads is to play them on a string set along the neck. This is shown in a 2-1 fingering here below.
Turning this into a lick is easy. I am using the F,Em and Dm triads descending and then continue the triad idea on the G altered with Eb and F dim triads to resolve to the 3rd(E) of Cmaj7.
A good variation on this is to use Db and Eb triads on the G7. This idea is shown here below:
Changing the way we practice scales
In the previous examples I had to rely on scale exercises that are stepwise in nature, so the triads are played in stepwise order: C, Dm, Em etc.
The problem with this is that If you use triads on a Dm7 chord then Dm, F and Am are fine, but Em and G are less strong and therefore difficult to use in a lick.
One way of getting around that is to look at how the Dm, F and Am are a 3rd apart in the scale. This means that we have can start working on practicing the triads in 3rds in the scale to get them together in the sets that work together. An example of how you can do this is shown here:
The lick below is using the triads like this, and they are played in a 5 1 3 patttern. The triads used then are Dm, F and Am which are all closely related to a Dm7.
Beyond the triads: Shell voicings
Of course you can apply this to any type of structure. In the example here below I am doing hte same type of exercise as example 7, but now using Shell Voicings.
Turning this into a lick is shown in example 10 where I use Fmaj7 and Am7 shell voicings on the Dm7. On the G7 I am also using a Db7 shell voicing and combining that with an AbmMaj7 arpeggio before resolving to C.
Putting it all together
As you can see in these example it is not only important to try to use the exercises you do, but it can also be a great idea to try to shape your exercises so that they are immediately easier to use when improvising or composing lines.
It makes a lot of sense to try to work a lot with 3rds because it reflects how we build chords and keep the triads closely related to the chord you want to use them on.
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Get the PDF!
You can also download the PDF of my examples here:
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics or how I can make the lessons better then please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.
Every body wants to have good time and work on playing swinging rhythms. But if you only do this with a backing track, you might be in trouble!
With this video I want to discuss why there is a much more effective way to practice to improve your rhythm than using backing tracks. The video will give you a few metronome exercises and a way to start working on feeling subdivision.
Feeling subdivision and working on relating what you hear and play to your subdivison grid is a very useful way to get better time and also to get better at playing together with others.
It is difficult to find a guitar practice routine that is efficient and it is important to think about whether your practice time is spend in the most effective way.
In this video I go over 3 problems that are very common in a guitar practice schedule and I talk about how you evaluate and how to practice guitar effectively. Each segment is turned into a question that you can ask yourself to evaluate your practice and I include a real example of a topic you might work on and demonstrate and discuss how you can approach this.
The examples include a George Benson Phrase and an Imaginary Michael Brecker Lick.
List of content:
0:27 Intro – and the three questions to test your own practice
