The 3 Jazz Soloing Skills Every Pro Uses (But Nobody Teaches)

Everyone will tell you what scales to learn and arpeggio positions to practice, but nobody teaches you how to turn them into real jazz solos.

The reason your playing doesn’t sound right isn’t more scales and exercises. You need a different set of skills.

So in this video, I’ll show you 3 skills that finally get your solos to flow through the changes, stop sounding like scale runs, and actually sound like jazz.

How It Should Sound

I hear students playing solo lines like this all the time:

In this video, I’ll show you how to shift how you practice and think about soloing, which makes it a lot easier to play like this:

Let’s start with why the first example doesn’t go anywhere and never connects from chord to chord. Because if you know that it becomes easy to fix

#1 Where Are You Going?

Check out how Joe Pass talks about solo lines:

“The secret to to filling something up is not playing arpeggios or playing runs it’s actually playing runs but it’s actually like making sure that you make the connection to the next phrase”

What he is talking about is playing solo lines that go somewhere. They have a target note, and the line flows toward it in a logical way.

Check out how the G7 line doesn’t connect to the melody on Cmaj7 in the first example:

There is no connection from G7 to Cmaj7, the line stops, and a new idea begins on the Cmaj7

Compare this to what happens in example 2:

Here the entire G7 line points toward the E on Cmaj7 — that E is your target note — even adding chromatic notes to build tension before getting there.

You want that natural forward-moving flow, where your lines connect across the chords instead of stopping on each one, and almost beginning a new solo every bar.

The biggest part of this is thinking ahead.

Instead of thinking about what to play on the chord you are on, you choose a target note on the next chord and build a line that gets you there.

The simple way to practice this is to find specific target notes ahead of time, which makes it 100x easier:

For an II-V-I in C major, start with simple and clear target notes, like the 3rd of each chord:

First, just practice coming up with short lines that move to the next chord. Work on this rubato, so out of tempo, and get used to hearing how the melodies move to the target note.

Like this from Dm7 – G7:

Gradually, you get to a place where you can start making lines that flow as a melody through all the chords, like this:

Here, the line moves you to the next target note. The phrases have a purpose and direction that drive the music forward.

It’s the same idea as the short exercises — you’re just doing it across the whole progression now.

You don’t have to memorize these examples off the page. If you want to work through them and start adding target-note flow to your soloing, then get the free PDF with all the examples.

You can download it here: GET THE PDF

But even playing towards target notes, you can end up with lines that get a bit mechanical. Stuff like this:

The melody has direction and hits the targets, but it’s flat — we need more rhythm and some surprising twists inside the line.

It reminds me that we’re still figuring out how to teach melody in jazz. As Pat Metheny talks about in the Rick Beato interview:

One part of playing stronger melodies is having tools that add little changes of direction — where the line turns back on itself, which creates rhythmic accents and surprises the listener. Let’s look at a simple but strong way to do that.

#2 Is Your Jazz Solo Robotic?

I think this is both one of the simplest things you can learn AND the gateway to some of the most sophisticated phrasing you will ever play.

The simplest tool for these direction changes is probably the basic diatonic-above/chromatic-below enclosures.

It’s about as basic as it gets — and I ignored it and got it wrong for years.Please don’t do that; that’s a waste of time.

Here’s the simple exercise on the II V I, just applying it to the triad chord tones of each chord:

This concept is simple and the same for every note in the chord:

For the root, C: D, diatonic above and the B, chromatic below.

Same for the 3rd, E: F, diatonic above, and D# chromatic below.

For the 5th, G: A above and F# as chromatic below.

And this is a LOT more powerful than you’d think.

A simple line from Dm7 to G7 is

But check out how much 2 enclosures improve this and make it a LOT more exciting:

Obviously, enclosures aren’t the only way to get this into your playing, but they’re one of the most powerful and practical places to start.

Now you can start constructing and later playing lines like this, and notice how the target notes are still there. It all fits together.

If you want to use target notes, enclosures, and chromatic approaches to build solos on a real jazz standard — not just exercises — that’s exactly what my Jazz Guitar Roadmap course is built around. More than 8,500 guitarists are using it to learn to play real jazz solos on an actual jazz standard.

Check it out; there’s a link in the description.

The last skill is a small thing and a fairly easy fix, but it’s the one that can wreck how your solos sound if you get it wrong.

#3 Jazz Is Different

Here’s something that is different in Rock.

Listen to famous solos from artists like David Gilmour and Gary More.

You’ll notice that in rock, it is fine to end on a long note, but if you do that in jazz, it doesn’t really work:

This clearly doesn’t work even though it has target notes and direction changes.

A short note has a clear start and stop, so it is very defined rhythmically. A long note just hangs there and drains the energy out of the line. In Jazz, that becomes a problem.

Two things you want to do with this:

Listen to players you love and watch specifically where their phrases end — you’ll notice how rarely they sit on a long note.
Practice ending your phrases with short notes, and not on a heavy beat.

Something like this:

Remember you can grab the free PDF with all the exercises, so you can practice these away from the video. The link is in the description.

Once you start working on creating lines like this, you’ll also discover how it helps you play much more interesting rhythms in your solos, just because you take control of the length of the note.

So those are the 3 skills:

Target notes give your lines somewhere to go.
Direction changes and enclosures make them fresh and surprising to the listener.
Ending on short notes gives them rhythm and life.

On their own, these are easy to add to your playing, and together they’re the difference between running scales over the changes and actually playing jazz.

Barry’s Boring Scale Exercise

There’s another way to stop sounding like scale runs: take your scale practice and apply it straight to songs. Barry Harris had a simple but brilliant system for exactly that — and if you want to understand jazz melody, he’s the best teacher to study. That’s what I break down in this video. Check it out.

Learn Jazz make music

This “Boring” Scale Exercise Will Save You Years (But Most Skip This)

This Boring Scale Exercise Will Save You Years (But Most Skip This)

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