Most of us practice scale exercises, but how much of that is just running up and down the scale or playing 3rds or diatonic arpeggios, and is that the best way to go about it?
In this video, I am going to talk about how you can start practicing exercises that are much closer to what you need in your solos and be more free when you improvise. This can really open up your playing so that you find it easier to create and play lines that sound great.
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It is important that we practice and improve our technique, and often a good way to do this is to work on jazz guitar exercises like a phrase or musical fragment. In this video I am going to go over some technical topics you can work on and a few phrases to help you develop your technique.
The format of this lesson is different from what I normally do since it is a set of exercises to work on that will work as technical and musical exercises teaching you.
#1 Triads are great Jazz Chords
#2 Mix Triads with 3-part Quartal chords and sus4 triads
#3 Advanced 3-Part Jazz Chords
#4 Drop2 chords
#5 Drop2 chords with extensions
#6 Beautiful Inner-voice movement
#7 Must Know Drop2 voicings
#8 Medium-swing Bop Lines
#9 Chaining Arpeggios together
#10 Charlie Christian Inspired
#11 F7 Blues line #1
#12 F7 Blues line #2
#13 F7 Blues line #3
#14 Challenge your right-hand
#15 String Skips in arpeggios
#16 Quartal arpeggios
#17 Using Legato in lines
#18 Using Slides
#19 Legato in arpeggios
#20 8th note triplets in lines #1
#21 8th note triplets in lines #2
#22 8th note triplets in lines #3
#23 Sweeping Arpeggios #1
#24 Sweeping Arpeggios #2
#25 Sweeping Arpeggios #3
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If you want to play jazz and want to learn how to play jazz solos then you are probably also practicing scales and working on scale exercises.
In this lesson, I am going to go over a few scale exercises that you probably already know or at least should check out and then I am going to talk about how to connect them to chords and really use them to make music.
It is very important that you don’t just work on moving your fingers with exercises, you should always try to practice the things you need when you are playing.
Getting Started – Basic Scale Exercises
So first I am going to go over a few exercises and then I am going to relate this to a little simple music theory and show you how you can turn that into something you can make music with.
Let’s look at some of the fundamental things you check out in a scale, just playing the scale and playing thirds.
Lets take a Cmaj7 chord and this C major scale.
You want to play these two exercises because they are going to help you develop the technique to play the things that you can use in lines. Of course, you can use both 3rd intervals and scale runs in solos, but that is something I will save for another lesson.
The Mighty Triad – Powerful Melodic Structures
For most of this lesson, I am going to focus on how to practice and use triads because they are both flexible and powerful tools in soloing. But the process is really the same for all sorts of arpeggios.
There are a few great ways to practice triad arpeggios in the scales. First here is a basic version: play Diatonic Triads
But you can also give it more of a jazz sound already at the exercise level by adding leading notes both ascending
and descending:
Now we can start working on making some really great sounding licks with these exercises, but first, we need to figure out which triads will work over a Cmaj7.
Music Theory (just a little..)
Now, we have 7 triads in the scale. They don’t all sound that great on the chord, so first we need to find some that work.
The only note that sounds funny on the Cmaj7 is an F. I don’t like calling it an avoid note, but if we are looking for triads then that is not the greatest one to use.
We have all these triads: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim,
C: C E G Dm: D F A Em: E G B F: F A C G: G B D Am: A C E Bdim: B D F
If we remove the triads that contain an F then we get these 4 triads C, Em, G, Am
These fit!
C: C E G (1, 3, 5) Em: E G B (3, 5, 7) G: G B D (5, 7, 9) Am: A C E (13(6), 1, 3)
Now we can start making lines with these exercises and then I will show you another exercise that is great for creating solid melodies
Making Lines with the triads
The first example is using an Em triad and adding a leading note to the 5th:
Another way to work with the Em triad is to play the triad as a triplet to change up the rhythm:
You can also chain together triads as I am doing here with G major and Em triads:
Another Great Exercise
Since the triads work so well in licks it is also possible to change the order of the notes. Until now it was always 1 3 5 or 5 3 1 but if you practice other patterns you can really get some great melodies as well.
Here is a simple pattern that starts on the third: 3 1 5 pattern example
If I make some licks with this pattern then you get something like this:
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The ingredients of most common approach to jazz guitar: Scales and Arpeggios. never thought I would hear myself say this, but you can make some really great lines by ignoring scales completely. This way of thinking is quite different from the idea of assigning scales to the chords the way we usually do. At the same time it is a traditional way of making lines and a very useful approach to changing things up.
The problem with too much scale movement
The way of making lines that I am going to cover here is at the very least helping you get rid of lines that sound as predictable and boring as this:
Of course in the long run you probably want to learn you scales just the same. It is better to have more options after all. I will talk about why later.
The George Benson Connection
I came across this way of making lines while analyzing a George Benson solo and I realized that if create lines with this concept you can make some really strong lines that don’t move in a predictable way but still make sense.
In this video I am going to show you how it works and how you can start experimenting with it in your own playing.
The basic concept: Triads and Leading notes
This is a really simple concept. Instead of making lines with scales and arpeggios (my entire system for guitar just fell apart) then we can also just think in simple triad arpeggios and leading notes. So Lines are constructed by having triad tones as targets and adding small melodies of leading notes that point towards those triad tones.
The Chord and The Progression
For this lesson I am going to focus on how to use this on a II V I in Bb major, and especially the Cm7 in that progression!
Cm Triad and leading notes – Two Exercises
So the way the melodies are made are from using the simple triads for example: Cm. The basic material I am using is an enclosure and a leading note on a Cm triad like this:
Putting the idea to use in a II V I lick
And an example of a line using this could be something like this:
Above the triad targes are first Eb, then a low G and finally a C. The beginning of the F7 line is also using a chromatic enclosure to move to the 3rd.
The big advantage to Chord and Leading notes approach
What is liberating is that when we play like this then it often works to just jump from one place to the next and you don’t have to think so much about the direction of the scale run or arpeggio run, and because it is using a very basic arpeggio then the leading note melodies make a lot of sense.
Here’s another example on a II V I. Again using chromatic approach phrases to move to both Cm7 and F7 chord tones.
Of course there are also some things that this doesn’t do, and I would not only use this way of playing as a total approach to everything, but it is a nice way to come up with some lines that sound different and still work with the chords. Using this method to create lines with more more extensions gets a little difficult because the extensions also want to sound like leading notes and the leading notes for the extensions are often chord tones.
This example is using one of the lines that Benson uses a lot on the dominant. It is in fact a Parker lick that Benson learned.
How to work on this approach
So the best way to work on this is to mix it with another approach. This is also what George Benson does in his solo. I will link to my video analyzing this in the description of this video.
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Most great Guitar Players mix a lot of different techniques when they are playing, and if that is the end goal then the scale exercises you do should also contain that element!
In this lesson I am going to go over some ways to take simple exercises and use them to combine legato, alternate picking and sweeping or economy picking.
Technique and Scale Exercises are for sound
For me it is in the end much more about having techniques so that I can play the music that I want to play and get it to sound right and having a flexible technique in terms of legato and picking is very useful for this.
Technique is there to help me play the Music that I want to play with The Phrasing and Sound I want to hear!
The exercises in this video is My take on how this works it is important to remember that the best solution is for you to
Find YOUR way of combining different techniques incorporate it into your practice routine and playing
Basic Scale Exercise and a few options
Example 1 is a C major scale in the 8th position played with a 3NPS fingering.
In the video I play it with alternate picking:
You can do this mixing with legato as well. Let’s do that like this: Down Up Hammer-on:
and of course you can also do Down Hammer-on UP:
Technique priorities – what to choose
The way I think about this is no that it has to sound the same, different techniques sound slightly different and when I play I am going to use the technique that is playable or easy AND that sounds the best.
The goal is to use the different sounds and dynamics of the technique in our phrasing
So it doesn’t have to sound the same!
Actually you make choices on this already with the exercises.
Here’s the scale in 3rds with alternate picking:
And you can try to add as much legato as possible by doing this:
But somehow it’s nice to have one more picked note to get it to sound a little more natural:
With all of these exercises I am choosing the approach and techniques that I like and that fits to me, but of course this is different from person to person so you might find that other combinations work better for you. The important thing is to make sure you can play it in time and that you get the phrasing or sound that you like.
Adding Economy picking to the mix
Of course you can also work with sweeping or economy picking, When playing arpeggios this becomes very practical. For example with diatonic triads.
And we can combine all of it in an exercise like this with triads up one down the next
It is up to your imagination and you get to challenge yourself and develop your ability to mix
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