The Jazz Scales You Need To Know (in Order)
Scales Are Not Everything
Scales are important in Jazz, but you don’t need that many. Knowing thousands of scales and modes without knowing how to make music with them is completely pointless. So, in this video, I will show you the scales you need, discuss a few you should not waste time on, and discuss what scale practice should be about.
It might surprise you, but pentatonic scales don’t make the list, and Bebop scales are also out. The question is whether they are really scales at all, but I will explain why later.
#1 The Most Important Scale For Jazz
The Major scale is the most important scale to start with. Ask yourself why you are learning scales, and hopefully, the answer is that you want a set of notes to use when you improvise solos. The scales you need come from the songs you play and the chords in those songs. When it comes to Jazz, most Jazz songs and pretty much all Jazz Standards use the major scale, and the basic chord type is a 7th chord.
90% of the chords are in the major scale, and it will cover most of what you need. That is why it is important! Besides analyzing songs and chords,
you can also figure this out by looking at solos, but that gets a bit theory-heavy very fast.
Something You Need To Learn For All Scales
Just learning the scale is not going to be enough. Solos are not just created from running up and down scales, at least not any good solos. You need to learn the melodies or what you could consider licks in the scale. For most Jazz, this is about learning the arpeggios of the scale, so diatonic triads and 7th chords, and possibly going on to stuff like adding chromatic leading notes, inversions, and quartal arpeggios later.
You want to learn this for all scales, even if it is less obvious in the weird scales later in the vdeo. Keep in mind that I am NOT telling you to learn the modes; I’ll explain that in a bit.
For guitar, it is incredibly useful to build it up step-wise, so play the scale,
learn diatonic 3rds,
then stack two diatonic 3rds to create the diatonic triads,
and as a final exercise, add a 7th so that you have the 7th chords.
And now you have the arpeggios that fit the chords in the songs.
In this way, you are easing into learning the 7th chords in the scale and learning the triads along the way. It connects different chords and triads with the scale and gives you something to work with once you want to solo.
Connecting different pieces of information is as important as learning that information regarding music.
I have a video that explains and demonstrates this for the major scale in more detail and goes a bit further;
You can check that out here:
No Modes?
Before we continue to the next scale, I want to explain why I am leaving out the modes. Learning Jazz standards is the best place to start if you are learning Jazz. Standards are tonal pieces of music, not modal, so the relationship between the chords and how the harmony flows from one chord to the next is a very important part of the music. Modes are not about that flow; they are about giving you a scale that fits a chord, and then you can use that to improvise, but it is not about playing from one chord to the next.
Connecting things is important, and modes don’t help you understand how the music flows. It doesn’t give you the tools to sum up a few chords in a progression as a building block or tell you what type of progression a set of chords are.
It is also important to remember that you really don’t learn a lot by practicing the same scale as C Ionian, D Dorian, E Phrygian, etc. when you could instead practice the scale and turn the material into the music. Modes can make you waste a lot of time.
#2 Minor Is Complicated (part 1)
But this was all about major, and while that is the most common sound, there are chords and songs where you need a different scale. You can get by with just two more scales for 99% of all songs; the two scales you need are both minor.
The first minor scale to work on is the Harmonic minor scale.
The main reason is that you want to be able to play a minor II V I,
and the harmonic minor scale is great for the V chord in that.
I won’t get too much into the theory to explain the harmony; if you want to see how the 3 scales cover pretty much all harmony you will come across, then I do have a video that explains that.
You can check that out here:
But that will not be helpful if you don’t know any songs and aren’t familiar with some basic Jazz harmony and theory.
Harmonic minor is a good example of a scale that you only use for a few specific chords, but since one of them is the dominant chord in the minor key,
What you want to learn and how you want to practice is the same as with the Major scale, so start with the scale,
go to the 3rds,
and then use that to build triads
and later 7th chords.
Another thing that you want to learn is what triad or 7th chord is on each degree of it. In the long run, having a good overview of what chords are in the scales and what notes are in the chords is a powerful tool for developing new solo vocabulary.
Another chord type that you use harmonic minor most of the time is diminished chords.
I know I threw away the Pentatonic and Bebop scales at the beginning of the video. I will explain that, but first, let’s add the third important scale. After that, the scales become more about special sounds, which are also fun.
#3 Minor Is Complicated (part2)
Many lessons will reduce Melodic minor to something you use for Altered and Lydian dominants, but you want to start somewhere else. You now have a way to deal with the dominant chord in minor, using harmonic minor; you can begin to work on using Melodic minor for tonic minor chords. That is the sound you hear in the background riff for autumn leaves with the Gm6 arpeggio.
And it is easier to learn to hear that sound first before going straight to altered dominants, which are much harder to get into your ears. Check out some of the songs where you have room to dig into that melodic minor sound and really get to hear it, such as Autumn Leaves or Bernie’s Tune. You, of course, go through the same process of learning diatonic triads and 7th chords. Once you can make lines on tonic minor chords, you can move this over to Lydian dominants like Tritone Substitutions or Backdoor dominants. Finally, you can develop altered scale vocabulary by using the tritone sub as a stepping stone. But this is a LONG process in a few sentences so take it one step at a time.
With these 3 scales, you can play most things; so let’s first talk about the missing pentatonic scales, and then check out the strange sounds
How Can You Leave Out Pentatonic Scales?
Why do I leave out the Pentatonic scales?
The focus until now has been on finding scales that fit with the chords you improvise over. When it comes to the pentatonic scale, it rarely contains all the notes that are being played in the song under it. This is true for basic blues in A,
and you only use the pentatonic scale as either a Blues sound on top of the song:
or as a subset of the scale that you can use to create specific-sounding melodies, often something like this:
So, most of the time, the pentatonic scale is more like an arpeggio than a scale. It is something you put on top of the song and not something that locks in with the harmony of that song. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful, but it does mean that it is not directly a part of the harmony. Let’s move on to some of those SpecialFX scales!
#4 Symmetrical Shennanigans (part 1)
The first scale that you want to add after this is the diminished scale, mainly because it is a fairly common sound for dominant chords with a 13th and a b9.
The way I played it here it is starting on Ab and is constructed as whole-step half-step which then repeats.
You can think of it as having two variations, starting with a half-step and the other with a whole step, but I don’t think about that too much. It doesn’t have a root, so I think it is a set of notes.
It is sort of a floating sound between altered and major extensions.
It is a symmetrical scale, so it is atonal. You need to do a bit more exploring to figure out what chords are in there, but luckily, you can move everything around in minor thirds and use that when you solo.
The major triads work well for this, here’s an example using major triads and inversions over a dominant:
I am only giving you a very superficial overview here. For more information, you can look up other videos just ask in the comments if you want some links.
#5 Symmetrical Shennanigans (part 2)
The next scale, which is a little less common in songs but does appear here and there, is the whole-tone scale, which involves moving up in whole tones.
Again a symmetrical scale, this time it fits a dominant with a 9th, a b13 and a b5.
You can move everything in whole steps and major 3rds (which is, of course, just two whole steps)
It sounds like this:
But Bebop Is About Scales?
As I mentioned, I am also leaving out Bebop scales because they are not really scales; they are almost more arpeggios with leading notes, and diatonic harmony within that system doesn’t really make that much sense, something that is also sort of true for Barry Harris’s 6th diminished scale system. There are only two chords in these scales, and you end up playing almost modal.
#6 Symmetrical Shennanigans (part 3)
Another 6-note symmetrical scale is a great sound on top of some chords. Usually, this is just thrown in on top of a chord that it maybe only sort of fits, but it is a fun sound to explore: the augmented scale.
The scale is constructed by two augmented triads a half step apart, lets take C and Baug
B D# G
C E Ab
Which gives you this scale: C D# E G Ab B if you play it from C
Often, you will use the 3 major triads in there: C, E, and Ab major.
And it works on a Cmaj7(#5) type of sound,
or even put on top of an AmMaj7 which has that Cmaj7(#5) as an upper-structure
The Important Thing To Focus On!
Similar to how you should start with just the major scale and not immediately spend a lot of time on exotic symmetrical stuff that is hard to use you also want to have a logical build-up when it comes to chords, and there is a great way to do this which fits with how Joe Pass thinks about chords. I go over that in this video even including a few comments from Joe.
The Biggest Misunderstanding About Jazz Chords And How To Quickly Fix It
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