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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There are so many people who seem to be focusing on the wrong things and slow down their progress when they want to learn Jazz. This video is going to give you some suggestions about how to think about what you are learning so that as a Jazz Guitar Beginner, You actually work towards learning Jazz and don’t drive yourself crazy practicing exotic scales.
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You need to learn scales, arpeggios, and vocabulary to play solos and to get it to sound like Jazz, but there are other aspects of improvising a solo that you need to develop as well if you want to sound good.
This week, the focus is on some of the other essential skills you need to develop to become good at improvising Jazz. So it is not really about scales, arpeggios, and vocabulary. I take a standard and go over some of the exercises you can start to do to really learn how to become a better soloist.
The focus is on playing solos that:
Play real phrases
Make the solo one piece of music
Play what you hear
It takes more than just scales and arpeggios to play a great Jazz Solo
11:06 How to play over chord changes and make sense
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It is probably mostly a problem you are teaching yourself but organizing your Jazz Practice and getting the right things in there is something that is often going wrong. At the same time, this is so incredibly easy to avoid and all you need to do is take a step back and look at what you are trying to learn without getting lost in the details.
I say it all the time: Learn Jazz, Make Music but for you to make music you need to focus on learning some pieces to make music with and that is very often not on the list when people start practicing and studying Jazz.
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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.
You Need to be able to improvise over a II V I or 2 5 1 in Jazz. In this video, I am going to show you how you can get started improvising over this progression using the scale and the diatonic arpeggios in that scale.
The examples are a 2 5 1 in C major, a scale position and the diatonic arpeggios in that position. Then I am going to give you some examples of lines using the basic arpeggios of the chords but also a few other very useful suggestions. Then I am going to add the triads in there, and in the end, you have a lot of material to work with from this very basic approach.
This is the most important part of how I improvise. Having a set of arpeggios that work for a chord in a progression is a great way to have lots of options when you improvise. So you learn to think the chord but you have 8 or 9 different arpeggios that you can use when you are improvising.
The 2 5 1 chords and scale
One of the most important and common chord progressions is the 2 5 1, sometimes written with Roman numerals as II V I.
In this lesson I am going to focus on how to improvise over this progression in the key of C major.
First let us look at how t play the C major scale and then the chords contained in there.
Building Diatonic Chords in C major
If you build diatonic chords in a scale then you stack thirds in the scale. In C major that would be:
C major : C D E F G A B C
Stacking 3rds:
1 C E G B = Cmaj7
2 D F A C = Dm7
3 E G B D = Em7
4 F A C E = Fmaj7
5 G B D F = G7
6 A C E G = Am7
7 B D F A = Bø
How to play these chords is shown here below
As you can see I have added numbers to each of the chord signifying the degree in the scale.
This is how to understand the 2 5 1 progression. A 2 51 in C major is shown below:
Practicing and Playing Diatonic Arpeggios
The next thing to check out how to play the arpeggios of all the chords in the scale. Playing each of the chords within the scale is shown here below.
Of course there are now more chords and arpeggios than we need, but that will become very useful later.
Putting the arpeggios in the Progression
The first logical thing to practice now is to take the arpeggios throught the progression. That is what is shown here below:
Making Great Licks with Basic Arpeggios
Already just using the arpeggios, so the basic chord tones of each chord. You can make some great licks:
Really using Arpeggios (so not just playing the arpeggios..)
When you check out solos from famous Jazz Artists you will notice that their lines are not only consisting of the arpeggios. The melodies are a mic of scale notes and arpeggios, but the arpeggios are on the heavy beats and work as a frame to hold the melody together.
An example of this is shown here below:
The most important Other arpeggio
Now that you know the arpeggio for each chord and can work on incorporation it in lines that also mix it with the scale. We can haveea look at the next arpeggio to check out which wil almost always work in a line: The arpeggio from the 3rd of the chord
For the progression we have these arpeggios:
Dm7: Arpeggio Fmaj7
G7: Arpeggio – Bø
Cmaj7: Arpeggio Em7
Practicing this on the progression becomes this exercise:
Making lines with the Arpeggios from the 3rd.
Now with two arpeggios for each chord you can make a lick like this:
And mixing it with the scale then something like this is possible
Adding the mighty Triad!
One of the strongest melodies we have is triads. The diatonic triads as arpeggios in the scale is shown here below.
Finding triads for the chords
There are several triads that fit with each chord.
For a Dm7 you can use the three below.
Notice that if you have a Dm7(9) arpeggio: D F A C E then you have all 5 notes that make up the 3 triads.
The same approach applied to G7 is yielding these 3 triads. So a triad from the root, 3rd and 5th.
And finally we have the C, Em and G for Cmaj7:
Using Triads in a 2 5 1 Lick
Putting some of the triads to use in a lick could give us something like this:
If you want to explore more ideas with Arpeggios and scales in the key of C major then check out this lesson based on a solo on the Strayhorn tune Take The A-train:
You can also download the PDF of my examples by entering your e-mail here. You will be forwarded to a download page automatically.
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What if the way that you practice makes sure that you don’t feel like you are practicing something that you never get to use? Jazz Practice is difficult to get right and there are some mistakes that I see people make again and again.
What if you could work in a way that you could feel that your playing was improving? Maybe it is often better to take a more practical approach and practice in a way that is really focused on fixing a problem in the music that you are playing.
If you start with the music and choose goals to fix problems you encounter while making music you are much more likely to improve and also able to feel yourself improve.
In this video, I am going to talk about how to learn jazz guitar and how to choose the right strategies for some of the problems we encounter. It is easy to get lost in empty exercises and not work on something that is directly related to the music you play, but that can quickly leave you drowning in exercises.
Content:
0:00 Intro 0:12 Solve problems in your playing? 0:38 Strategies and how to Improve specific things in your playing. 1:23 Two Types of Solutions 1:54 The Two Examples in this video: Soloing and Comping. 2:13 #1 Soloing: How to Learn New Vocabulary 2:45 Long-term Goal and solution 3:51 Short-term Approach – Specific and Fixing the problem in the song 4:49 Less information more focus on using it while making music 5:42 #2 Comping: Learning New Voicings 6:18 Long-term for Learning All Voicings and Inversions 7:22 Short-term Approach – Think about what you already play and Add to That! 8:54 Be Practical if you want to improve your playing fast. 10:33 Teachers does this as well! 10:56 Like the video? Check out My Patreon Page!
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Setting up an efficient Jazz Practice is both important and difficult. You have to take care to spend your time efficiently and not have unrealistic goals or expectations. This video goes over some things that you want to think about and consider when you are learning jazz or any other style of music like jazz (though it probably applies to studying other styles as well). It is coming out of my own experiences with a few suggestions from people like Allan Holdsworth and Peter Bernstein.
Having the right mindset when studying and learning music is extremely important and I am curious what you think about this 10 topics, so please chip in with thoughts and suggestions!
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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
Comping is a lot more than just what chords or chord voicings you play. It can be very difficult to practice, but there are some things you can be aware of to perform a lot better when comping in a jazz setting. In this video I will try to highlight and describe some of these approaches.
I will also go over why being a great at comping will make you a much better soloist!
There are two important skills you can work on to get better at playing better solos and most of the time we never talk about them because they are either forgotten or under developed. Yet they are both essential parts of what we end up playing.
In this video I will go over how you can use harmonic analysis and compositions as tools in developing your ability to play better lines and also how to increase your vocabulary. The examples make use of both Charlie Parker licks as an inspiration and a way of implementing an arpeggio in your lines.
PDF with sheets/tab for the examples available on my Patreon Page!