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Stop Being Lazy With Your Triads (Jazz Guitar Secrets)

Triads are only 3 notes but you can use them in so many ways for both comping and solos.

If someone asked me what 3 things are most important to learn for your solos, Triads would be on that list!

Often people hear triads and just think about campfire chords and country music, but I am going to show you how much you can use triads when it comes to Jazz.

Let’s start with some chords:

#1 Triads Are Great Jazz Chords

On-screen: chord progression arrow written out chords(fancy)

Playing Jazz Chords is about taking a chord progression and turning it into exciting and beautiful harmony that fits the song, therefore you want to have flexible chords, and here, triads are a fantastic option.

Let’s say you have this

That’s Dm7, G7 and Cmaj7.

For all of these chords then if you take away the root you get a triad:

Dm7 becomes, F major, G7 becomes Bdim and Cmaj7, E minor

And the 3 note voicings are a lot easier to play, and you can do stuff like this:

But before we get into using triads for soloing, you can actually take this a step further, with something that I think is often overlooked:

#2 Open Triads Are Amazing Chords!

The basic triads that you just saw can do a lot of great things, but don’t forget to also check out the open triads which are also easy to play but gives you a different sound.

The method is pretty simple:

The Open triad version of an F major triad gives you these 3 inversions:

And using these on a II V I sounds beautiful and is a really nice, but more unusual way to use 3-note chords

And you can do this on the other inversions as well

and since it is only 3 notes you can also easily add some extra things to embellish the progression:

But it is not all comping, and triads are solid for soloing as well!

#3 Getting Free From Scale Melodies

One of the most boring types of melodies is to just play scales in your solos:

Example 4

And both triads and arpeggios are great ways to fix this, so you want to practice your scales in diatonic triads:

and like this, you have a connection between the scale and the triads,

so using the same triads I used with the chords: F major, Bdim, and Em then you can create lines like this:

But you don’t want to forget to also check this out in other scales than the major scale. Diatonic triads in Melodic minor are incredibly useful as well, and there is actually a nice trick to using them that I’ll show you.

Here are the triads for Ab melodic minor which is what you use for G7 altered.

With this you don’t have to only play altered licks like this:

Instead, you can use a B augmented and an F dim triad,

and actually, also make a line that fits over some other chords as well:

The beauty of melodic minor is that if you move up the altered lick a half-step then you have a great lick for an Am6 chord:

So knowing your diatonic triads in other scales will give you a lot of different sounds and melodies.

#4 This is REALLY knowing your triads

Now you have the diatonic triads that you can use but you are actually still missing something. Listen to Wes, just using a Dm triad on a Dm chord:

Here Wes is using the 2nd inversion of the Dm triad.

And you want to start practicing both 1st and 2nd inversions of the triads as well, not only as exercises like this

But also in make some lines, mainly just because they are incredibly strong melodies that you can use for a lot of nice things. Here is an example using the same Dm 2nd inversion triad on a II V I in C major:

Let’s look at another way to work on creative melodies with triads.

#5 Getting Melodic

Triads are amazingly strong melodies, but you want to take advantage of the fact that they are only 3 notes and therefore also very flexible and easy to do things with.

So instead of just playing up and down the triad all the time like this

Then you also want to be able to turn them into something like this:

In this line the triads are played in different patterns for the F major (partly voiceover slow version), B diminished, and Em triads. Still just using those basic choices. that I showed you at the beginning

And it really pays off to work on taking some of these patterns through the diatonic triads in exercises to get them into your ear and into your fingers. Here is an exercise using the melody I used on the B dim triad:

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Triads – You Are Missing 3 Skills In Getting The Most Out Of Them

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Triads are essential building blocks in the strongest solos and melodies, and you want to make sure that you not to miss some of the great ways they can be put to use.

You already know that even though Jazz is mostly using chords with a lot of notes and extensions then triad melodies are still incredibly strong and something that should be a core part of your playing.

It doesn’t matter if you look at a Parker Lick – Parker Billie’s bounce lick

Or classical music – Mozart or Beethoven

The triads are always in there and they should be in your playing as well.

Getting Your Triad Practice Right

There are probably two ways that you are practicing triads:

In positions, playing the triad across a position, hopefully visualizing or keeping in mind what scale it is found in (voice-over)

The other way that you want to practice triads is by playing diatonic triads

This exercise will help you find all the triads in the scale and give you an overview of the harmony.

Both of these are great ways to work on the material, but not directly help you use them in solos and what is more important: a lot of very useful triad melodies are also left out, so let’s fix that.

Practice All The Melodies

One of the most common triad melodies both in Bebop themes and solos is the 2nd inversion triad. You have clear examples of this in Anthropology.

or Blue Bird :

And the 1st inversion major triad is also great for solo lines like this:

So if you are not practicing those then you are leaving A LOT of great melodies out of your vocabulary.

It is not that difficult to get used to playing the inversion so that you can start incorporating them into your playing, and actually it is also a great exercise for your ear, and the connection between what you hear and what you play.

Incorporating the inversion into a triad position would mean playing it like this:

But working through the triad inversions in a scale position is a great exercise for quite a few things:

So of course, just playing these is already giving helping you be more flexible with what you can play in the scale, but it is also introducing some string skipping,

but maybe the most useful part of the exercise is that you take a predictable 3-note melody and then try to play that through the scale.

When I start working on this then I am not really thinking about which notes or which triad I am playing, as much as I am hearing a melody and then hearing it move up through the scale. This may sound a bit vague, but it is actually a great exercise that will help you become better at playing melodies by ear. If you have never tried this before then take 3rds through a scale, and notice how your ear will tell you if you are playing the right notes or not.

Now that you know the triad and the inversions then you want to start getting this into your playing.

The Power Of Simplicity

An important part of how we use triads in Jazz is as upper structures, mainly because it ties together extensions in a strong sound and make the chord or melody make more sense, similar to this line and I will talk about how you can use triads like this later in the video, but this is not the strongest melodic tool when it comes to triads.

The first thing you want to do is to become better at making lines based on the basic triads and then really get good at using those in a creative way so that your skills are already in place when you move up into the thin air of more tricky extensions.

If you think about the Charlie Parker Lick from Billie’s Bounce that I used in the beginning then that is using an F major triad over an F7. Another way that Parker uses the F major triad is in the opening of the solo:

So, as you can see, it really pays off to start making lines that are using the basic root triad and also do more than just play it up and down, but use it as a skeleton for the melody you want to play.

For example, you can use scale notes as passing notes as I do on the Dm7 and the Cmaj7 here:

And because the triad is such a strong melody then you can also change the order of the notes and skip around more, as I do on the Dm7 here:

So if you find something that works, like the Dm triad melody here then try to explore using it in different ways like playing it backward:

Or explore how changing the order of the notes sound:

There are some great melodies in there for you to discover.

The easiest way to start doing this is to play the triad and then add a scale note between the notes in that inversion:

For the root position C major triad, you can add either a D or an F between the triad notes, for the first inversion then you can add the F between the E and the G, and for the 2nd inversion you would add the D between C and E.

This is just how you start, and in the end, you can, of course, do a lot more. The reason for starting here is just that it makes it easier to keep the sound of the triad in there.

But triads are also great for adding extensions and colors but also how it helps with some strong melodies.

Shifting Colors On Top

There are two levels to using upper structures. First, let’s look at how you can use a system to create shifting lines and the second is creating a flow of shifting colors on a single chord.

The best way to understand this is to look at the available triads over a Dm7. That is easy if you write out the scale in 3rds from D.

This gives you Dm F Am C triads, the rest are not directly useful for the sound of the chord.

You can build the same thing for G7 altered, for voice-leading purposes then I am starting on Db, but the result is as you will see, the same:

That gives you: Db Fdim Abm Baug Eb and Gdim and Bbm. For the G altered chord then pretty much everything will work, so there are more options.

In the line then you can see how I am using an Am triad over Dm7 and then moving that to Abm on G7 altered, so I am really just voice-leading or shifting the upper structure triad to create the lick.

You can even do this moving up from Am instead of down so you go to Bbm:

What is Better Than One Triad?

The previous example was using two triads on the G7 altered: Bbm and B augmented, and constructing melodies like this is a great way to create interesting lines and also often lines that span a larger range.

For the G7altered this is equal to the sound you get if you change several notes in the chord

The easiest way to get a triad pair like this is to just take two triads that are next to each other. Because, this works better if there are no common notes between the two triads, especially for the next approach to creating melodies.

A basic version of this type of lick using Abm and Bbm triads on G7altered could be something like this:

You can see how the Dm7 lick is also using an Am triad and that helps make that transition stronger.

Another way to make more adventurous lines is to work with melodies that connect inversions of the triads.

If you take B augmented and Db on the G7 altered then that could give you something like this:

Modern Jazz Sounds

An incredibly useful tool that, like triads, can really add something to your soloing is using pentatonics in your jazz lines. In this video, you can see how pentatonic scales can create completely different sounding melodies and how to put them to use on pretty much any type of chord. This approach is a great shortcut to a more modern sound in your playing.

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Minor Chords – Unlock Some Beautiful Jazz Chords In Your Music

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When you play chords or if you are writing songs then you reduce the harmony to chord symbols like Dm7 Bb7 Cmaj7. But the great thing about Jazz harmony is that you can make a lot of choices when it comes to how you want to color the chords, and especially with minor chords there are some incredibly beautiful choices that are not getting the attention they deserve, so let’s start easy and then go to the extremes with some minor chord options.

Level 1 – Jimmy Page Got It Right

The basic chord where it all begins is of course just a minor triad:

You have a root, a minor 3rd, and a 5th.

But it is only 3 notes, so you can add combinations of the remaining 9 notes and get a lot of different colors. The first, and most common one is level 2.

But Minor chords can even work as substitutions for altered dominants, which is a great way to make some interesting chord progressions. I’ll show you in a bit.

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

On the Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness. I am going to give this the minor triad a “This is great if you are in Guns And Roses or another stadium rock band”

Level 2 – They Are Everywhere, So What!

The most common extension to add to a minor chord is probably the b7 which makes it a m7 chord:

This is the typical first chord in a II V I

But you actually have m7 chords in 3 places in the major scale, on the II, III and VI:

And two variations of a m7 chord that you can very often throw in there would be chords with the 9th:

or the 11th:

These are all nice, beautiful, calm sounds but also sometimes a little bit boring.

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

So this is a clear “You Still Need To Check Some Things Out But Don’t Use The Real Book!” on the Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness.

Let’s take this in a different and more colorful direction!

Level 3 – You Are Missing Out!

This is what I probably consider the most overlooked option.

Instead of adding a b7 you can also add a major 6th to the chord:

A C E G → A C E F#

And the m6 chord is a great sound that works especially well with tonic minor chords for example the Gm6 in Autumn Leaves which is also what is often played as a riff under that chord.

When you are soloing then the m6 chord is usually associated with melodic minor:

A B C D E F# G# A

This sound is often with the next type of minor chord, but a very common variation that you want to know is the m6/9 chord:

You want to explore how to use this chord and test how it sounds in different places, it can be a great sound and also add some much-needed variation to playing m7 chords everywhere.

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

On the Herbie Hancock scale of harmonic goodness this gets a “Now we are talking!”

Level 4 – So Much More than Pink Panther!

You most likely already know this sound as the ending chord of this:

Or a more recent song like this:

The basic chord type here is a mMaj7 chord,

so that is a minor triad with a maj7 7th

A C E G#

This chord is dissonant and at rest at the same time and is a nice more spicy color you can add to a chord progression:

The mMaj7 chords sounds great if you add a 9th to it:

or even a 13th:

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

On the Herbie Hancock scale of harmonic goodness, this gets a “Rick Beato Approves”

Level 5 – You Are Playing A Wrong Chord!

This chord is almost like a mistake!

Most of the time when you have a m7 chord then it is put to use as a suspension of a dominant chord, so a more independent version of a sus4 chord.

If you listen to a II V I then that is:

and it is really just a bass note away from:

If you look at how this chord works then the point of it is to move one note.

The 7th of the m7 chord down to the 3rd of the dominant. Here that is a G on Am7, down to an F# on D7.

That means that the one note that you don’t want on the m7 chord is probably the 13th because that is the note that you are trying to save for the next chord.

But if you just listen to it m7(13) chord is a great chord to use as a sound in itself, and as Herbie Hancock has demonstrated quite often. Paired with an altered dominant it sounds great in a II V I.

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

Clearly, this should get a “There Are No Wrong Notes” on the Herbie Hancock scale of Harmonic goodness. But there are even minor chords that are so strange that almost don’t exist.

Level 6 – This Doesn’t Even Exist

If you have watched any mediocre YouTube guitar lesson on improvising then you have probably learned that Lydian is way better than Major. While that is of obviously complete nonsense then that does make you wonder:

“What is a Lydian m7 chord?”

The pragmatic and boring people will tell you that it is Dorian because of the major 6th interval, but the truly visionary out there will tell you about the legend of the m7(#11) chord.

This sound is mostly just a special effect that you can throw in there if you want to change things up on a minor blues or a song with a static minor chord for some time, but you can use it in a cadence:

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

On the Herbie Hancock scale of Harmonic goodness, this is an obvious “Don’t Play The Butter Notes“

Level 7 – That is Not Even A Minor Chord!

With all these options then you can start to use the different minor chords as substitutions for other chords.

A great example of this is to use a mMa7 chord as an altered dominant, here it is EbmMaj7 instead of D7alt:

You can hear Jobim do this in the bridge of his song Dindi, and it is something you can get a lot of beautiful harmony out of.

You can also use a CmMaj7 instead of the D7:

Herbie Hancock Scale Of Harmonic Goodness

These need to be somewhere between “You Are Fired and Don’t Steal My Gig” on the Herbie Hancock scale of Harmonic goodness. Let me know in the comments which one!

Why Your Comping Doesn’t Work

Colorful chords are great and a big part of what is fun to explore about Jazz harmony and playing jazz songs, but if you want to get started playing Jazz then it is as important that you dig into the type of chords that have room for you to add extensions and colors to them. This video will introduce you to shell-voicings and also show you how they are fantastic for a lot of things from walking bass and chords to bossa nova and a great starting place for building some beautiful chords.

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This Is Ruining Your Jazz Solo – A Powerful Bebop Breakthrough

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You have a problem if your Jazz solos sound too much like this:

In a way, this should work because a lot of things are right about this:

It is nailing the changes
There’s a place where you can add a nice Bebop accent
It is actually also a motif that is being moved through the changes.

But it still doesn’t really sound ok, So what IS the problem?

“It is Jazz! It needs chromatic notes!!!”

Still not really working, let me show you why:

A great jazz line should surprise you, it should not only change direction on the heavy beats like this or even the previous one did.

Because that makes it sound heavy, the lines should have more life and more interesting rhythm, not just go from heavy beat to heavy beat like a lawnmower.

Instead, you want something that is more like this:

Of course, It isn’t so that you can never change direction on a heavy beat, but not all the time, and it pays to figure out how to make the line more surprising, so let’s look at some surprisingly easy strategies for that.

Flipping Chromatic Enclosures

A simple chromatic enclosure that you probably already know is a great hack for this!

So if you have a Dm triad

then you can add the enclosure around the notes like this:

These are called diatonic above chromatic below.

The great thing about these is that they have a direction, and can go both up and down:

And that is much more powerful than you think.

Let’s say that you are playing a Descending Dm7 arpeggio:

But you want to add a chromatic enclosure around the last note, the D. The arpeggio is descending, so if you also take a descending enclosure then you get:

But if you have the enclosure go against the descending melody then you get this:

I am sure you can hear how HUGE that difference is!

And this will help you create lines like this:

Throw In A Triad

Another useful tool is to use the diatonic triads like I am using the Am triad on Dm7 in this example:

The concept is pretty simple if you have a note where you can dip down and take a triad that fits the chord, then that will work as a way to skip around and still be a strong melody.

In example 10, I did this on the E adding an Am triad. But you could also just take the A and use the Dm triad:

That will work in a line like this where I also use it on a D diminished triad on the G7(b9):

Steal a Bebop Trick

B-roll: Illustration of the F and E -> add low A?

Often a fantastic solution is to get a large interval skip in there but that sometimes sounds very unnatural. Luckily, we can lean on the Bebop greats to give us some tricks for this!

If you are playing a melody in the scale with a half step apart, so for example F down to E on the Dm7 chord then you can throw in a lower chord tone like the 5th, A:

And this always sounds great, another place where you can use that is on the G7 between the b9 and the root adding a low B:

One of the most powerful places to learn this and also get a ton of inspiration is of course to study the Bebop Greats, and especially Charlie Parker. Check out this video, If you want to see what you can pick up from him and also how I use that in my practice and playing. I can promise you that it is worthwhile and a lot of fun!

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5 Habits To Help You Learn Jazz Faster

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You don’t learn to play Jazz Guitar in 20 minutes, it is a process and a set of skills that you build over time through practice. That is why you want to get used to doing things the right way, build the habits that help you progress faster so you are not wasting your time.

In this video, I want to discuss some of those habits that can help you level up your playing a lot faster because some of these are not obvious but they are all incredibly effective!

Practice Consistently

When I was studying mathematics at the university in Århus there was a summer where I decided that now I REALLY needed to start practicing every day, something my teachers had been telling me forever. And I still remember going to practice with my band for the first time after practicing daily for a few weeks. The instrument had just opened up for me, and I could play all these new things that I had never been able to play before, which felt amazing!

To be honest, I never had that again, but I immediately learned the lesson of consistent practice and what it could do. Which is maybe one of the most important things I have learned?

But it is more than just playing every day. If you want to improve something then you need to work at it until it really gets in there, and that often takes fairly long, like weeks or months.

The main thing to keep in mind with this is that you want to keep working on the same exercises for some time and track how you are progressing.

Here you keep playing the exercises to get better, and you track your progress to stay motivated. What you want to avoid is that you just scratch the surface and practice something new every day without really getting better. That is a lot less efficient.

This has often been a part of how I have worked when I have really improved my playing, especially with technique and speed but also with other things like improvising over difficult chord changes.

It is useful to often remind yourself that nothing will suddenly be something you can just do, you always have to practice, but you will see that later in the video as well.

Evaluate Your Practice

“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results”

This is often put forward as an Albert Einstein quote, but it probably isn’t.

While Jazz Guitar may qualify as some type of mental illness, then what this will teach us is something else. You need to check if what you practice also helps you get better at the skills you want to improve.

If you are following the advice of practicing consistently then you also need to look at what you practice and compare that to what is improving in your playing, and maybe look at what you want to get better at and change or come up with exercises that focus on that skill.

You can do this by trying to have a list of goals that you want to improve. That is anyway a good exercise, because the more specific you can be about what you want to learn, the easier it will be to learn it. It is amazing how much time is wasted fumbling around in the dark. You won’t learn to improvise over a Jazz Blues by practicing scales or get better at comping by just practicing chord voicings.

This is very important so that you don’t spend hours working on something that won’t help you get better at the things you want to level up, and one of the main things to have in there is the next habit:

Use What You Practice

I say this very often in my videos, and it is something that I have to remind students of all the time!

“Work on using the things that you practice if you want them as a part of your playing!”

And this goes for diatonic arpeggios, drop2 voicings, or pretty much anything else. If you don’t have a strategy for getting it into your playing then you are probably wasting practice time.

Building this habit often means that you have to find a way to go from a basic technical exercise into something you use while playing, and often the missing link here is to use some form of composition and explore how you can connect the new material with all the other things you already have in your vocabulary.

This is something you want to keep in mind with your evaluation of your practice routines and pay attention to so that you make sure that you get the most out of all the exercises you do and that you are not wasting time on stuff that you can’t use.

It is also something that you want to think about when you come up with exercises, if you practice something that you have no idea how to use then you should wonder if it is really what you should be practicing.

Borrow Other Peoples Ears

I guess I am old-fashioned with this, but I am pretty sure that the most efficient way to learn is to take lessons with a good teacher. You can always disagree in the comments.

The important thing to realize is that if you are learning something new then you have to rely on your own ear to figure out if it is good enough or what is wrong, and sometimes we forget that you need a trained ear to recognize things like phrasing problems, swing-feel or even just how melodies lock in with the changes.

That is the biggest part of why you take lessons to get access to an experienced listener that will tell you what to work on. That is also why I use the community in my online course to give feedback on how the students are doing, which even helps with things that I don’t always talk about in the course.

If you don’t have access to a teacher in some form then you can also find people to practice with or even use Facebook groups like my Jazz Guitar Insiders group. Posting a video and saying what you are working on can give you a ton of useful feedback. With posting videos on the internet you do want to be aware of the amount of nonsense you can also get, so it pays to know who is commenting so that you know who to listen to and who to ignore

Play With Other People

Jazz is not a solo art form. It was developed in bands and it is about making music together and communicating with each other while improvising, but there are more reasons why it is very useful to make music with other people.

For me, this was always the most fun part of playing Jazz; Making music with others, and that is also clear from the fact that I learned a huge chunk of my repertoire playing in the streets of Copenhagen with a bass player before I started studying in the Hague.

What I see as the most important advantage is that you

Are forced to play and make things work
Have to take everything to where you can use it
Have more fun and stay motivated.

And these are all 3 more important than you might think when it comes to learning, so if you don’t play with other people and you want to play better Jazz, then seek out the opportunities and find people to play some songs with and both learn and enjoy that experience.

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An Overlooked Skill That Will Give Your Jazz Solos A Massive Boost

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It is funny how sometimes a single solo that you hear can really change the way you think about music and what you are trying to learn.

In this case, it was a pretty obscure video and a single solo, that I kept coming back to and that has influenced what I practiced for years, and I never even transcribed it, I just realized that I needed to figure out how to get that one thing a lot stronger in my playing.

The solo I am talking about is this incredibly low-resolution Jon Damian solo, where he is playing Sweet Georgia Brown in a duo with Jake Langley, both, of course, amazing guitarists.

A part of what made it stand out is probably the contrast between Jon and Jake’s solos, where Jake is playing a lot more traditional Bop-oriented 8th-note lines and Jon is relying almost purely on sparse melodies and A LOT of creative and swinging rhythms.

When I first listened to this then I did not immediately get what it was that I liked so much about the solo, but that is why I kept coming back to it and I tried to figure out why I thought it was great. Gradually I started to realize that it was about playing more interesting rhythms and not focus as much on 8th note lines which is what I had done until then. I needed to learn to hear phrases with that type of rhythm.

What Is The Difference?

Let’s first look at what I am talking about. A great but dense 8th note Bebop line could be something like this:

But Jazz is also about syncopation and rhythm and what you also want to be able to do is improvise lines like this:

And here you have fewer notes, but there is a lot of energy and tension in the rhythm that really comes to life, Who said early Jim Hall?

Get More Creative With Rhythm

So How Do You Practice This? Ironically the best way to get more options is to limit yourself and use that to develop your skills.

Let’s start with a simple rhythm, something you compose or take something from a solo that you like. Actually, there are some great themes and solos to check out for inspiration, but I will come back to that later.

In this rhythm, I am just using a few notes to keep it flexible. Here, I am using 2, but 3 would work as well. Just make sure that you don’t make a long complicated phrase like this:

And that is because you want something you can work with, and make variations of and eventually even take through an entire song.

Displaced Rhythms

Displacing rhythms is actually a very important part of jazz phrasing and jazz melodies if you listen to songs like Bernie’s Tune or Broadway.

You can practice is to take the basic phrase and then move it around, that can be in like this where I am shifting the phrase around one 8th note at the time:

Example 5

Of course, this is a pretty intense exercise and you can also just work with this as a way of composing lines and in that way expand the rhythms you use. This could give you a II V I line like this:

Another thing that can be fun is working with this on a one-chord backing track is a great way to learn to hear more rhythms and in that way expand what you can do, and gradually start to move it over to more complicated progressions.

Developing Rhythm and Melody

There is another way that you can develop more rhythmical playing, which will also lead me to give advice that I usually never give..

What you can do is explore simple ways to make variations of the rhythm.

Since there is a fair amount of space in the main rhythm that you are using then you can easily explore how to make variations by adding more notes here and there.

When you have very active rhythms like this then it is often easier to use very basic melodies. Usually, I suggest working with arpeggios, but you should probably start by using scale melodies here because that is less likely to sound like abstract skipping around.

You can of course also explore removing notes or shortening the phrase instead of adding to it and in that way take it further

Who To Check Out?

Anything you want to learn, you also want to learn at least partially by ear. You need to know what it sounds like.

I have already mentioned that you should check out themes similar to Bernie’s Tune or Broadway. Actually working on Bebop themes in general, is very useful, because even if Charlie Parker often plays more dense lines then these rhythms are certainly there and most of his compositions are not great examples to learn from. This is also one of the main reasons why Donna Lee may not be written by Parker since it is a lot more dense and on the bear than the rest of his compositions.

Call-Response

As you can probably tell by now, I am using the same tools for the rhythm that I use when I am working on melodic skills in solos. Another great way to work with melodies is to use Call-response.

The concept here is that you listen to what you play and then come up with a response to that.

In this case, the main statement is relying mostly on off beats, which creates tension, and then a logical response will be more resolved and have more downbeat. That is also what you can see in both of the examples of responses.

Of course, these are just examples of what I hear as a response, and you might hear something completely different, which is actually great.

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The 5 Reasons You Are Not Getting Better At Jazz Guitar

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A part of playing what is fun about Jazz is that you keep getting better at it and enjoy the new things you learn.

But sometimes you feel like you are not getting anywhere and it gets harder and harder to keep going and stay motivated and that is what I want to talk about using my Jazz guitar practice habits and horror stories as examples.

#1 Don’t Practice

If you are not practicing you are not going to get better fast. For me, it is easier to practice if I have a steady time to do so, and usually, that is in the morning after maybe bringing the kids to school and shopping. Then I can sit down with my guitar and a cup of coffee to get started with some technique. I try to have some things that I do every day and then a lot of things that I can change and vary to keep my mind, my ears, and fingers awake.

You might be in a period where it is difficult to find a regular time or to practice or maybe just time at all, and if it is difficult to be motivated to practice then make sure to focus on the fun things first so that you are playing. Once you build habits then you can become more focused on covering everything you want to practice while also allowing you to have fun.

Lately, I realized that I don’t spend too much time on chords in my practice, probably that was not a problem until COVID because I was anyway comping for several hours every week on different gigs, but now I started to add some chords in there because it felt like that was slipping away.

My point with that is that a practice routine should not be static you want to adjust it according to how things are going, something that I will talk more about later in this video.

#2 Not Getting Far Enough

Maybe, like me, you have the discipline to go through some sort of regular schedule and you are used to practicing, but then you can get stuck by falling into another trap.

If everything you practice is only played as an exercise and not really put to use in the music you play, or maybe you don’t even practice playing music regularly, you may be wasting quite a lot of time.

If you think about it it is pretty obvious, just learning to play up and down the pentatonic scale doesn’t make you the next Stevie Ray Vaughan. You need to learn how to make it sound good as well, and that part does not come by itself. It is a part of what you need to practice.

Improvising over an altered dominant is not that different. You need to do more than just practice the melodic minor scale.

In my practice this is mostly about doing two things: 1 – writing lines with what I practice or what I want to add to my vocabulary and 2 – Making sure I can use to use this while soloing on a song. I think you need both of these steps, and you should always look at whether you can use the material you practice in solos, otherwise, why are you practicing it?

If you want some general ideas for beginning Jazz, then check out this post:

How To Learn Jazz Guitar – Suggestions To Begin Studying

Another aspect of getting things far enough is that you also need to practice making music and not just sounding like an exercise, so that you can sometimes play with more space, vocal-like melodies, and not always just spell out all the changes and try to play the “correct” arpeggio.

#3 Always Playing The Same Things

A thing that I have found myself doing is getting stuck with the same things, these can be the same exercises that you don’t improve on or it can be always playing the same song, not challenging yourself to expand your vocabulary, places where you can use that vocabulary. It can be in terms of tempo but it can also be in terms of songs, keys, chord progressions.

This is something I try to catch whenever I can, and it can be tricky to figure out if you need to go to another song or break up the technique schedule that you are really used to, but doing so every now and again is very healthy for your playing and always doing the same things can be very inefficient even though they are nicely automatic and doesn’t require much effort.

So if you are only practicing one song, like a blues, or like me playing Out Of Nowhere way too often then it is time to change things up and make sure that your musical diet is healthy and varied.

#4 Don’t Know Enough Songs

The easiest way to learn to improvise freely on harmony is to learn a lot of songs.

I have talked about this quite often, and it ties together all the things I already talked about in this video. Studying songs is where you put it all to use, you learn how to play over the important chord progressions, harmonizing melodies, using chord voicings with the right extensions, and also tying it all together in a story, when to play a vocal melody, a bebop line or something more abstract and modern.

Learning songs and playing songs is where everything you practice comes together and where your artistic and personal take on the music is created, don’t rob yourself of that.

For me, it is about sitting down and playing a song from start to finish and really get the whole thing to make sense as if I am playing in a band. I sometimes find it difficult to practice like that but it is also the place where you are really in the zone and new things can happen.

If you are looking for songs to explore I will link to a list of 50 Jazz Standards that are really useful to have in your repertoire, and Misty is not on that list.

#5 Information Overload

When I was starting out trying to learn Jazz, I didn’t have internet and the library only had David Baker books on Jazz that I didn’t like and also were not useful for me. Most of the music came from borrowing the few LP’s and CDs available at the library. At the same time, compared to my teachers I actually had a ton of information available, they were wearing out singles and using the radio.

I also remember seeing David Liebman’s “A chromatic approach to jazz harmony” and buying that because Pat Metheny recommended it, even though at that time I couldn’t even play a solo on Autumn Leaves, and that is also a good description of how useful that was at that moment.

Today you have everything a few google searches away and can pretty much find information about anything about Jazz at all levels, but we end up with another problem, overload. It is impossible to choose and you never know who to trust and what fits together. Even on my channel the amount of videos is so immense that it is hard to navigate.

The important thing is probably to try to stick with songs as smaller end goals because they are practical and will help you gradually develop and use your skills. I have a post where I talk about this on my website, I will link to it in the video description.

That is also one of the reasons I decided to create my course the Jazz Guitar Roadmap because in that type of content you can go step-by-step for a longer period of time something that would never work on YouTube where nobody watches part 2 of anything, and certainly not part 43 of 67 videos.

The Jazz Standards You Want To Know

It is important that you develop your skills for soloing over chord changes and if you check out this video then you can learn to nail the changes and have an easier time learning songs, which will really boost the development of your skills as a Jazz guitarist, or musician, would that be Jazz guitarist AND musician? I don’t know…

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How To Go From Scales to Great Jazz Phrases

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You are practicing scales so that you know what to play in your solos, but, like me, I am sure that you are quickly realizing that running up and down the scale is a pretty boring solo. Scales is just not music. You need to learn how to take the raw material of the scale and turn that into musical phrases that you can actually use in a solo.

Scales Are Boring

This is about how you think about what you are playing, and realizing that Jazz is a language that you need to learn to speak on your instrument, but, as you will see, once you get used to that thought then that can also help practice in a much more efficient way and get to enjoy your own playing more.

You already know your scales and hopefully, you also checked out some of the essential exercises like the diatonic triads and 7th chord arpeggios in there since those are very useful for not sounding like you are just running up and down a row of notes.

If you don’t know those exercises then check out this lesson on practicing scales.

You want to avoid playing solos that just sound like you are running up and down the scale without any direction, completely at random.

Which doesn’t really sound like something that works in a solo.

How To Play A Jazz Phrase on a Cmaj7

So how do you solve this? You need to find a way to construct lines that are not just using random scale notes and that also make sense as an interesting melody and sounds like Jazz.

To keep it simple, let’s just say that you are improvising over a Cmaj7 chord and then I will show you how to start making lines that actually work.

Instead of playing random notes then you want to play something that connects with that chord. A Cmaj7 is C E G B (chord with diagram, right side) and if we play those notes then that will work really well with the chord.

With this you can already start to make something that sounds like music:

The difference is that it is not just running up and down the arpeggio, but instead, you try to hear a melody with the notes, adding some rhythm and hearing where it ends. But it is still pretty limited, so let’s add in some more notes in there, which is easy because there are 3 more notes in the scale.

Scale Notes and Phrases

If you make a line with the arpeggio notes and then start to add in the scale notes around it then you can create something like this:

As you can see the most of the notes are still the chord tones, and the way they are placed in the melody then they still help us connect to, or hear the chord, in fact, you can remove the scale notes and still have a great sounding line:

Sounding Like Jazz – Rhythms and Accents

One of the most important parts of getting a phrase to sound like Jazz is to get some syncopated rhythm in there. You can do this by either using syncopated rhythms like this:

Or by accenting notes so that the accents give you a syncopated rhythm

You get those accented notes by having a high note on an off-beat. In the beginning, you probably need to practice making and hearing melodies like that, but then it gradually becomes a natural part of how you hear melodies and how you improvise.

Adding Some Beautiful Wrong Notes

Another thing that you hear in something like a Wes Montgomery, George Benson or a Charlie Parker solo is chromaticism, which essentially means using wrong notes to create some tension that resolves to a right note. If you just play the “right” notes then it is as if you are missing something, and if you just play the chromatic notes then that sounds like you are just playing something wrong.

It has to make sense in the melody and resolve in the right way.

In this example, you have two types of chromatic phrases. Passing notes that resolve to chord tones, like this:

You can create chromatic phrases that resolve to a chord tone. Here it is connecting 7th to the 5th, G in half-steps. You can also have chromatic phrases that move around the resolution like this:

The enclosures you have here are targeting chord tones, first the 5th and then the 3rd: l (isolate enclosure of G and E)

And of course you want to end up with phrases that combine the two like this:

How You Practice Making Phrases

What you have seen until now are different options for building blocks, so small fragments that you use to build phrases with like the arpeggio, the scale, and two types of chromatic phrases. If you want to work on playing better lines then you should work on putting together phrases, but you can also learn a lot from studying how your favorite soloist plays. The way you do this is by analyzing the solo and try to figure out what building blocks are used and how the different blocks are put together.

Transcribing and analyzing phrases is really powerful because it comes from music that inspires us, and you start with what you hear.

This is not the only option, you can also work with making variations of building blocks by moving them around the scale, onto other chords or using rules not unlike what you find Barry Harris doing in his workshops.

In this video, I was only talking about using the arpeggio of a single chord, but there are many other options that you can work on. If you want to explore how you can start using different arpeggios for a chord and also how you make bebop inspired lines with them then check out this lesson on: “the most important scale exercise in Jazz”

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What Really Makes It Sound Like Jazz?

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You already know that just playing the pentatonic scale doesn’t really make it sound like a great blues lick. There are other important things like bends and vibrato that make it sound great.

Of course, this is true for Jazz as well: It is not enough to just run up and down the arpeggio to make it sound like a great Jazz line. You want to play things that sound like this:

In this lesson, I am going to show you some of the techniques you can use to add some jazz phrasing or flavor to your playing, and you don’t need a million scales and arpeggios for this, and this is more important and much more effective

It is Not a Rule Book, It Is A Sound

I am going to use Blues as a reference in this video because most people already have some experience with that and a clear idea about when something sounds like blues or not.

I don’t know if you ever thought about it, but you probably did not learn to play or recognize Blues by reading a list of rules, at least I certainly did not read a Blues rule book.

You just heard it so much that you can recognize the general sound. I think it is important to keep that in mind, and in this video, I am going to give you some examples and then in those examples point out what gives it a Jazz sound.

That way you learn to recognize it and also have a way of using it in your own playing.

Sliding Into It

Here I am making the line work by sliding into the B and then continuing down an Am7(9) arpeggio. This way of changing how some of the notes sound really makes the line a lot more interesting.

And you can use this with any type of material, it also sounds right if you are just sliding into notes in the pentatonic scale:

One of the things you really want to avoid is that all the notes sound the same, this is just one trick, let’s look at some more that you can add to your playing.

Fast and Easy Embellishment

One problem that you can run into as a beginner jazz guitarist is that you play long winding 8th note lines, and they have all the right notes and arpeggios, but it still doesn’t really work.

But one of the things that can make a line like this a lot more interesting is to add some embellishments like this:

And you can practice playing these small legato embellishments and insert them into your playing. Some common ones to know would be these:

Notice how they are all small clusters of fast notes targeting a chord tone in Am

You already heard how the first two sound. The last one could be put to use on an Am7 like this:

Here I am targeting the 5th of the chord using a variation of the last embellishment in example 7

Changing The Rhythm

Of course, there are many other ways you can change the rhythm besides embellishments, but one that I think deserves a mention here is 8th note triplets, and especially playing arpeggios as 8th note triplets. This is pure Bebop or instant Bebop, and a great way to make an 8th note line more varied.

Here I am using it on the Am7 arpeggio. You can also use it on descending arpeggios as I did in the beginning of the video or like this:

I have a few other videos where I talk about practicing arpeggios and I am not going to go over it in too much detail here, you can check those out through the link in the description. Let’s look at maybe the most important part of how you get a line to sound like Jazz: Dynamics

The Notes Are Not The Same

Not every note is the same, and they should also not be played the same. I have mentioned before how Bop lines are all about the rhythms that are hidden in the accents and also how that is a big part of why Jazz is rarely played with overdrive or distortion because we want to have the ability to make the notes have very different dynamics.

What this is really about is making lines where you can add accents in the right places. Something where we, frustratingly enough, don’t have a rule book.

But!

You should work on adding accents to your lines and also work on writing lines that allow for interesting accents.

A lick that doesn’t really work would be this:

But if you try to create melodies where the high notes are on off beats then you can end up with something a lot more interesting like this:

Here the melody has a high note on 3& in the first bar and on 2& in the second bar that I can give an accent, and this makes it a lot less heavy and much more groovy.

Starting to hear the phrases as these flowing notes with some notes popping out is a huge part of Jazz phrasing and if you start to get that into your system then you can make almost anything sound like Jazz.

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Get This Right About Everything You Practice

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It is difficult to find time to practice and keep learning, so it is very important to not waste time with the things that you practice. Exactly what you practice is going to be different from person to person, but there are some useful questions that you can ask yourself about what you have in your guitar practice that will help you check that it will make sense to spend time on and is not a waste of time.

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Content:

00:00 Intro

00:28 Clear Goals

01:29 What Do I Need?

02:16 What Do I Learn?

02:44 The Right Way To Plan Practice

03:18 How Do I Practice Better?

03:30 Raw Material

04:02 Basic Application

04:30 Make Music With It

04:59 Going Through A Song

05:28 Use It Or Lose it!

05:58 Like the video? Check out my Patreon page!

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