The Altered scale is a very common sound in Jazz and also one that can be tricky to get into your playing. In this video, I am quickly going to cover how you get it to work in your playing and what to practice and focus on. Then I am going to go over some examples of what you can use and how you can get that to sound fantastic in your solos with a little bit of practice.
The Altered Scale is a mode of melodic minor, and there are many great sounds in there that you can use in your own playing.
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If you are trying to learn to play Jazz Guitar and especially comping songs then you have probably already found out that it is not only about knowing the right chords, there is a lot more to it.
In this video, I am going to show you how I comp a slow medium jazz blues. I have transcribed a chorus and I will go over the chords but I will also show you how I play the chords and make the comp more interesting by using melodies, arpeggios and other tricks to color the chords. In fact, it may surprise you how rarely I “just” play a chord.
The Blues Transcription
Let’s first check out my comping with the transcription, then I will break down 5 of the techniques I use to make it sound more like a piece of music and more interesting.
The next thing to do is to have an overview of the voicings. If I play through the blues with just the chords because that is the backdrop for what I am doing.
Just the chords
After that, I am going to talk about how I am using melodies and fills, inner-voices and arpeggiation to make it come alive and I am going to give you some easier examples to work with.
As you can see most of the voicings are really simple and for the most part chords you probably know already.
If there is a chord that you don’t recognize then try to play or imagine playing the root under it.
bar 1 Bb789,13) magic chord
bar 6 Edim
bar 8 Dø G7 – It is a II V, and the movement is done by moving the 7th(C) of Dø down to the 3rd(B) on G7(b9)
Melody is more important than voice-leading
The first two bars are more about the melody I am playing than connecting the chords. I am using the chords to fill in around the melody.
The first chord is just a color, after that, you get this melody and on the long note in bar 2 I add the rest of the chord but I arpeggiate the chord to create a little extra movement.
The same type of thing is happening on the Eb7 moving to Edim. First the chord, then a melody that takes me to a G, and under that, I add the rest of the chord.
Playing Jazz Chords One Note at The Time
In the previous example, you could see how I arpeggiate the chords and in that way get more movement out of a single chord.
This is something that I use quite a lot. Two examples in this blues are bar3:
and bar 7
Both are using the same basic Bb7 voicing and the notes are spread out across the bar.
In bar 6 I do this as well, but here I am adding an extra note while arpeggiating and in that way starting to have two melodic layers, something that I use to create almost a counterpoint in another place.
Notice how I actually use voice leading to go from the Edim to the Bb7 even though it is hidden by the way I play Bb7
Electric Counterpoint (in a Jazz Blues)
In bar 8 we have this fragment:
Here I play a sustained F as the melody on Dø, and then add the rest of the notes and that turns into a second melody under the F that yields the G7(b9) voicing. This is an example of adding the chord tones in arpeggiating and that gradually takes on its own meaning as a melody and I treat it like that as well, not just as an arpeggio.
Grab what is easy to get by
Being efficient is important when you comp, also because you need to be ready to react to what is happening around you.
One of the ways I use block chords in comping is to just change the melody and keep the same chord which is what I am doing in bar 9 on the Cm7.
Improvising with the harmony
Since you are improvising when you comp then you can also change the chords a bit. The final turnaround has two examples of this. The 2nd chord is written out as a Db7, though you would expect a G7 there I play (and think) Db7
Whenever you have a dominant chord that resolves then you can choose to use the tritone substitute. That is what I am doing here. And added bonus is that the Db is the #9 of Bb which makes it sound like a harmonized blue note. That is also why I have that note at the top of the chord. In Music context is everything.
In the last bar, I am also changing the harmony, but I am doing so by delaying the F7. II V cadences are very flexible and you can often get away with leaving out one of the chords or as I do in this case, leave the F7 until beat 4 and then use it almost as a chromatic leading chord for the Bb7 in the next chorus. The quarter note triplet rhythm also adds extra energy by being a sort of tension against the groove.
Learn some amazing drop2 voicings
The majority of chords that I use in this video are drop-2 voicings, and a lot of the other ones can easily be seen as derived from drop2 by being drop2 without a root note for example. So studying drop2 voicings and being flexible with them is very useful if you want to be good at comping and free to choose what to play.
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Maj7 chords have a great open yet resolved sound, but even if they sound very much at rest you can easily use them in some very interesting chord substitution concepts.
In this video, I am going to show you some of the great sounding chord progressions you can make using maj7 chords in chord substitution, and later in the video, I am going to show you how changing one note in the voicing gives you a lot more beautiful sounds.
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Jazz Standards are the songs you need to know to learn to play Jazz. I always say “Learn Jazz – Make Music” in my videos and the Jazz Standards are the songs that play when you make that music.
This video is a list of 50 Standards that are really useful to have in your repertoire. I have split them up in some different categories because that is practical for when you are playing. You don’t want to play 5 medium swing songs in F major next to each other in a set, you might find yourself playing the wrong theme at the end (true story!) Having variation in a set is very useful.
You need strategies for Jazz Comping in modal or static chord sections of songs. When you start learning Jazz comping on the guitar then you learn to play progressions, focusing on how to connect the chords play through the changes and get that to sound good and natural.
But the skills you develop with this won’t help you when there is a long stretch of one chord, like modal jazz, and there is no chord progression that automatically makes your jazz chords sound interesting.
In this video, I am going to go over some examples of how to comp jazz guitar on a static chord, develop some phrases, add extra chords, chromatic sounds and other things to make your jazz guitar comping more interesting.
Other great lessons on Modal comping and Jazz Comping
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Think about how you would feel soloing over your own comping.
That is probably the best way to evaluate how you comp. There are some things that you need to get right if you want to be effective in comping. You don’t want to just play jazz chords while the music is happening. You want to be part of the music. That is what this Jazz Guitar Lesson is all about and if you can comp then you get asked to play at sessions and gigs.
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Exploring the Fretboard and the options you have for chords is a great exercise. This video takes one melody note and one chord and I go through 57 maj7 chords and show you how I come up with voicings, how I listen to harmony and think about the chords.
This video is a bit of an experiment, but exercises like this are very very useful for developing your fretboard knowledge, your taste in harmony and your understanding of chords and how they sound.
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You want to learn Jazz, and everybody is saying: Learn Bebop scales and altered chords, upper-structure triad pairs. All these fancy things, and you can do great things with that, but in the end, it is not that which makes it sound like jazz. It is the phrasing, it is how you play it.
In this video, I am going to go over some examples of fairly simple things that do sound like Jazz and talk about how you start sounding like that what to work and what to practice.
Jazz Phrasing – What To Listen For
To give you an idea about what I mean here are a few very simple II V I licks in C major, just using the notes of the scale, no chromaticism or alterations everything is just in C.
Then I am going to analyze that and give you two great ways to work on improving your phrasing.
What is important is to start hearing about a line like this is that the notes are note played with the same volume or intensity. Jazz lines are not just a row of notes that are either on or off like this PLAY same note equal dynamic
If I played the line like without accents and dynamics it would sound boring and not like Jazz at all.
So I add some accents to the line. In this line, I have accents on the 1, 2& and on the 2& in bar 2. This is shown below:
The first note naturally gets an accent, but within the line then the interesting accents that make it sound like Jazz are on a note that is off the beat and higher than the following note.
Notice how I am using legato to give one-note and accent and make the following softer, this is a very common way to use legato for phrasing.
Accent on a note that is off the beat and higher than the following note.
Here we have accents on 1&, 3& and 2& in bar 2 as shown here below:
Again I am just using the scale and the diatonic arpeggios, so it is clearly more about how you play the lines and how the melodies are constructed than what notes you are playing.
The Dorian #4 Bebop scale will not automatically make you sound like Bebop.
How To Learn Jazz Phrasing
Now you have an idea about what is happening and how to get what you play to sound better.
But if you really want to sound better then you need to get this way of playing into your system so that it becomes automatic, something that is a little more difficult.
There are two exercises that you can work on that will really help this the first one is a great way to learn some repertoire as well. I also have a WebStore lesson dedicated to this that you can check out here: Jazz-Blues – 4 Easy Jazz Phrasing Etudes
One way to really dig into phrasing is to learn bebop themes and really try to analyze them and figure out how to phrase them. This way of working is a bit technical or theoretical and you need to work on it for some time and with a few tunes to get it to work in your playing., but it can be a great way to start hearing better phrasing and you can also reference different recordings of the bebop theme to get a sense of how people phrase the lines.
An analysis of Charlie Parkers Au Privave is shown here below with possible accent notes circled:
Of course, playing along with a recording and really nailing the phrasing is also a great exercise.
It could open up a completely new way to hear the melodies.
Transcribing
The other way to work on this is by learning solos by ear. For me, this was the most important takeaway from transcribing and still is. If you learn a solo and can play along with the recording then you really start hearing the phrasing and it is going to be a lot easier to get that sound out into your playing.
Learning solos by ear can seem really difficult compared to the previous exercise, but the advantage over working from a piece of written out music is that you have to listen a lot to a recording, really try to hear how it sounds and then reproduce that so the process is much closer to how you hopefully will end up using the phrasing and therefore it is much more effective as a way of learning.
Even if this was the only thing you would learn from learning a solo by ear and playing it with the recording, then phrasing is so important that it is more than enough reason to start doing this. I think that is obvious from the first part of this video.
What solos have you checked out by ear, do you have recommendations for good easy solos to learn? Maybe especially because of the phrasing. Leave a comment on this video!
A really important part of improving your phrasing is to hear what you sound like and see how it matches what you want to sound like. The only real way to do this is to record yourself. This is a great tool for learning and especially self-teaching. If you want some solid tips and advice on how to work with this then check out this video on that topic.
I have other videos on phrasing and how to interpret jazz lines like these. I find myself much more hearing drums when I am hearing how a line is supposed to sound.
You can also download the PDF of my examples here:
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.
What makes a phrase sound like Jazz? Even if you know the chords and can play the right notes there is more to get it to sound like Jazz. This video is going to give you 3 examples of Bebop licks which really use some of the core elements of the jazz sound. I also give you some exercises so that you can get them into your playing and add them to your own solos.
The techniques and the licks
The topic of this lesson is jazz and bebop sounds so it makes more sense to also work with a moving chord progression like the II V I. But at the same time the techniques and exercises will work just as well on static chords, and you can easily convert them.
#1 Lick using Arpeggios and how to use them
The first example here is using arpeggios on the different chords of the II V I.
On the Dm7 the arpeggio from the chord is played with a C# chromatic leading note. On the G7 the melody is created from the arpeggio from the 3rd of the chord: Bø. Here I am adding a scale note between the F and the A.
When you improvise with arpeggios the melodies are created by mixing arpeggios and the scale that fits the chord.
Arpeggio from the 3rd and the Exercise
Something that I have discussed earlier is the concept of using the arpeggio from the 3rd of the chord.
The concept is really simple. Let’s look at a Dm7: D F A C.
You were to build a chord from the 3rd(F) then you would have an Fmaj7: F A C E. Obviously these two chords share a lot of notes and the Fmaj will sound great on the Dm7.
Using that logic we have two arpeggios per chords, the one from the root and the one from the 3rd:
Dm7 – Fmaj7
G7 – Bø
Cmaj7- Em7
Practicing these two arpeggios through the progression could be like this:
#2 Lick using Chromatic Leading notes (and an alteration)
Another very characteristic part of Jazz is the use of chromaticism. Chromatic leading notes and Chromatic enclosures .
This lick is using chromatic leading notes. The two places where they are used are both to lead to a chord tone, so the G# resolving to the 5th of Dm7 and the A# leading up to the B on G7.
Notice how the A# is used to transition to the G7 and in that way really drive the progression and the lick forward.
Practicing leading notes
A great way to work on this is to play through the arpeggios and then add a leading note to each chord tone. This is shown in the example below.
#3 Lick using 8th note triplets
Jazz and especially bop-oriented jazz consists of a lot of 8th note lines. An amazing way to add variation to 8th note lines is to use some 8th note triplets, and especially when playing arpeggios.
8th note triplet arpeggios move quickly over almost an octave range and nicely break up the 8th note flow.
The lick below is using a Dm7 arpeggio played as a triplet and with a chromatic leading note before the root.
Similar to the first exercise this can be used on the arpeggio from the root and equally well on the arpeggio from the 3rd of the chord. This is what the exercise below shows:
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Learning Jazz Standards is essential to learning jazz, in fact learning the repertoire is everything with any genre of music. There are of course many ways to go about this, but since it is important and you want to learn a lot of songs then it is also useful to do this in an efficient way.
The first time I started to learn a Jazz Standard it took me about two months, and there are better ways to do that how I did it. And that is what this video is about.
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