There is a trap that you can fall into when it comes to practicing. Usually, we spend a lot of time learning songs and trying to hit the right notes in your jazz solo, but it can be very a huge problem if you only take your playing to that stage. That is not where the music is, there is a lot more that you need to develop to sound great when you are improvising, but most of it is fairly easy to improve if you are aware of it and focus on it in your practice routine, as you will see in this jazz guitar lesson.
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What to focus on when learning Jazz Guitar: The Pentatonic Scale, that you know or the arpeggios that everybody keeps talking about? It is difficult to make the right choice, but you also want to get it right so that you don’t practice something that won’t help you get what you want from playing Jazz!
This is a very common question in YouTube comments and my Facebook group.
Surprisingly the answer is not that simple, because it is really about what You think is important and what you want to achieve, but it is still important that you make the right choice.
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You know the feeling: You are practicing and in your jazz guitar solo you are using the right notes, the right scale, and arpeggios but it is also really boring. In this lesson, I am going to go over some of the things I like to mess around with and try to change things up a bit with different arpeggios, rhythms, and melodic ideas. It should give you some inspiration and a way to change things up a bit in your own playing.
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You are practice playing jazz guitar solos because you want to get better at it, and you probably also discovered that it really helps to record yourself and listen to how the solo sounds because you don’t really have time to listen if you are playing the guitar.
But what do you listen for, and how do you figure out what to improve your jazz guitar skills? In this video, I am going over some of the things you can learn from recording your own solos.
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There is a great way that you can create new lines over a chord progression which is a simple way of changing the chords and outline other chord sequences. This way you get more movement in the lines and another logic to the melody. And checking out a few of those options on basic progressions like a II V I or a static chord can add a lot of variation to your solos.
In this lesson, I am going to show you a few examples of this. Some are staying within the key and others add a few outside sounds, and later I will also show you how this works if you open up the rhythm a bit.
The Basic Chord Progression and Concept
To show you how this works, first we need to set up a key and a II V I to work with.
We have a basic II V I in G major: Am7 D7 Gmaj7 and often if I play these chords then I can also get away with these chords: Am7 Bm7 Cmaj7 D7 (see example 2 below)
Using this progression in a solo
If I do that in a solo in a really basic way then that sounds like this:
You can hear that the comping is just playing the II V I, but it still works and a freer solo line that still sounds like this: could be something like this:
As you can see I am still using the super-imposed chords (short rundown of the arps)
A Modal or Static Variation
You can hear that I am using the direction of the “alternative chord progression” to give the line a specific direction that works great, almost as a counter-point to the comping underneath.
And of course, the same concept used on a static Am7 chord works as well:
More Diatonic Reharmonizations
The previous example was moving up the scale, and there is a very easy way to use the same principle and move down through diatonic chords like this:
The Ab7 is there because it fits in the descending motion, but a D7 would work as well, of course.
Strong Triad lines
A good way to clearly use the descending movement on top of the standard harmony is to use basic triads like this:
Adding Chromatic Passing Chords
There are two obvious ways you can add a chromatic passing chord in this context, namely using a side-slip up or down.
The two examples below shows how that might sound:
And if you translate these into solo lines:
Example 10 using a Bbm7:
And example 11 using Abm7:
More Creative Rhythms and Polyrhythms
Until now the chord progressions have been used as if the chords are placed on the heavy beats of the bar. This is of course what you usually find with chord changes, but when you solo you can be a lot more open and have more fluid barlines.
These 3 examples have a more open approach to the rhythm and also make use of polyrhythms.
A loose Bbm side-slip
Example 12 is a more loose way to quickly insert a Bbm7 line (actually just a Db major triad) and here it almost sounds like an added Eb7 in the context.
The triad is introduced by moving up the preceding C major triad a half step.
Dotted Quarter note arpeggios
The example below uses the Am7 Bm7 Cmaj7 D7alt chord progression, but the melody uses a 3 8th note long melody for each of the chords.
Another great 3 8th-note grouping
Again triads are a fantastic resource to create melodies. This example is using the basic triads of the chords and spelling out the Cmaj7 Bm7 Am7 Ab7 chord progression. The last two beats are covered with a quartal arpeggio that is essentially an Ab7(13).
Level up your Jazz Lines with Bop Embellishments
Another great way to add more variation to your jazz vocabulary is to use more interesting phrasing:
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In Advanced Jazz Guitar Techniques I provide more deep insights into the techniques and theory of contemporary jazz guitar.
You’ll discover a practical, no-nonsense guide to jazz guitar topics that have mystified even experienced jazz musicians – such as effective soloing with triad pairs, applying quartal harmony, how to use altered scales, and much more!
Master the advanced guitar techniques and melodic concepts you’ve heard in the music of everyone from Charlie Parker and Wes Montgomery, to Kurt Rosenwinkel, Michael Brecker and Mike Moreno.
What you’ll learn:
How to use tritone substitution more effectively in your playing
Chord and scale substitution ideas to create new sounds with scales you already know
How to use triad pairs from the Altered Scale
How to combine triads, arpeggios and scale runs to create melodic, modern-sounding licks that avoid clichés
Intervallic patterns to introduce exciting melodic leaps into your jazz soloing
The Augmented and Tritone scales and how to use them
I am so proud of this book. I think it really presents some information on soloing in with a more modern sound that is not really available anywhere else but is certainly a key ingredient for a lot of the Jazz Musicians of today.
If you want to learn Bebop then this Blues solo with Doug Raney on Jazz Guitar is a great place to look. This solo has Doug Raney playing an amazing Jazz Guitar Solo on this Bb Blues. This is off the Something’s Up album and really demonstrate how Raney has a solid grounding in Bebop tradition and also can take in some more modern jazz sounds.
The Blues is the Charlie Parker classic Mohawk and Doug Raney’s solo feature great examples of Chromatic enclosures, Playing across the barline, Lydian dominant.
9:28 Octave Displacement and displacing the phrases across choruses.
11:14 Example 5 Slow11:29 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!
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What do I think in a Guitar Solo? A Jazz Guitar Solo is not as much thinking as you may assume. In this video I improvised a solo, transcribed it and then I go over the solo discussing what I thought or about or what I might have thought about when playing the solo.
This should give you some insight into how I improvise and also maybe what you should not worry about when playing a song. Jazz is a genre of music that lends itself to over-thinking.
Some of the topics I go over is how and why I think certain things like altered dominants or motifs. I also talk about the construction and thought process behind double-time lines and some polyrhythmic ideas.
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We all have a jazz guitar solo that we really love and we dream of being able to play a solo like that. Often the advice that you get is to transcribe the solo and use that to learn to figure out what is going on, but that can also be a way for you to zoom in too much on the details. Often it isn’t that important if it is an E or and Eb, but it is much more important that he is developing a motif or only using short phrases or playing triplets in groups of 4.
In this video I am going to focus on what you can learn by listening to solos and focus on other things than what notes are being played, a lot of topics that are just as important and that we forget to talk about.
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Here’s a part of a jam session with two friends. We are playing Bill Evans’ fantastic Jazz Waltz: Very Early – Guitar solo and then out theme..
As you can tell by the ending this is a jam session and not a rehearsal or a real band, but I really liked how it sounded and thought the ending was funny.
