The Soloing Exercise That Changed My Life
There is one exercise that, once you learn to play it, will make your playing sound 1000 times better!
Why? Because working on this exercise improves your rhythm, fretboard overview, and phrasing. I would never have learned Jazz without this exercise, and I wish I had discovered it sooner. It would have saved me years of struggling.
I’m talking about chord tone soloing that will help you get over one of the worst problems in jazz: thinking about the notes and forgetting the music, the phrasing, and the rhythm!
Let me show you how this works so your solos don’t sound like a robot playing all the right notes—but with no meaning at all.
Step #1 – Foundation & Basic Exercise
Jazz blues is fun to play and not too complicated, making it the perfect starting point. Let’s take a Jazz Blues in C and focus on the first four bars.
To solo over this, you need just two arpeggios—C7 and F7. The key is to stay in the same position on the neck,
making it easier to connect melodies between the chords. Here’s a simple way to play them:
At first, you might wonder why we’re only using one-octave arpeggios, but as you will see, this is all you need to start making music and improvising. It’s not about spending hours practicing arpeggios—it’s about making music with them.
Now, let’s move to the next four bars.
You only need two more arpeggios: F#dim (which is just an F7 with one note changed)
and A7.
For the final 4 bars,
you need to add an II V in C major, which is Dm7 and G7.
I have a PDF of the arpeggios on the form on my website that you can download and work through to get you started soloing on a Jazz Blues. The last 4 bars would be:
To practice this, start by playing the arpeggios in time over the form.
With just one-octave shapes, it’s easy, and you’ll really start to hear the chords and the form, which helps you avoid getting lost when you start improvising.
To build more flexibility, try playing the arpeggios descending instead of always starting from the root.
You can also experiment with starting on the 3rd of each chord rather than the root, which opens up new melodic possibilities.
Another great way to internalize the sound is to create small licks and take them through the form. Since there are only four notes per chord, it’s actually easier than you might think to start improvising.
The thing most people focus on with this exercise is not the most important, or the first thing you should work on. Let’s start improvising!
Step #2 – Making Music with Just 4 Notes!
I’ll add more notes soon, but even with these basic one-octave arpeggios, you can already start playing great music. There are so many melodies to explore, rhythms to experiment with, and dynamics to shape your phrases.
The important thing is making melodies—don’t just run up and down the arpeggios or always start on the root. Try changing the direction of your lines, mixing up your starting notes, and focusing on phrasing.
One common problem for jazz beginners is that their lines fit the chord, but what happens from chord to chord feels disconnected.
If your phrases don’t relate to each other, there’s no story—just a series of random notes. This exercise is a game-changer for fixing that.
Here’s the solo:
Check out how the phrases connect in this solo—then I’ll show you some simple exercises to help you develop this skill. The beauty of working with just four notes per chord is that it actually makes this a lot easier!
This is an overlooked superpower when it comes to creating more melodic solos. It helps you develop both Motivic Development and Call-Response phrasing.
Let’s start with Motivic Development.
Motivic Super Power
Motifs are one of the most powerful tools you can use to make your solos melodic.
With just four-note arpeggios, moving a motif around becomes incredibly easy. Since you’re only working with chord tones, you can transpose a phrase from chord to chord easily.
Let’s say you play this simple motif:
And relative to the chord that would be these notes:
Since it’s built entirely from chord tones, shifting it to F7 is as simple as thinking of the notes as 1, 3, 5, and 7 and applying the same shape.
You can even turn this into an exercise by moving the motif through the entire form.
This is a great way to develop your fretboard overview and get comfortable with the arpeggios. But to avoid sounding boring and mechanical, you need to start changing the way you play the motif. Try altering the rhythm, adding or removing notes, or shifting the phrasing slightly. Even though it’s still the same motif, it suddenly sounds much more interesting.
And there’s a similar hack for Call-Response phrasing—let’s check that out next.
Call-Response Shortcut
Call-and-response is an effective way to build conversation and movement in your solos. The idea is simple: you play a phrase, then follow it with a contrasting phrase that responds to the first one, creating a back-and-forth exchange.
The formula that you can use to get started is incredibly simple: Play a statement on one chord as a call, and play the reverse statement as a response.
Try this simple C7 line:
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And the reverse version of this could just be the same shape but descending. There is not only one way to do this, but this is easy and it works:
You could also practice doing this on the Jazz blues. Then, we should move on to some phrasing tips because that is another way to make these four notes come to life.
By now, you can see that this exercise is so much more than just running arpeggios and sounding like a robot.I am curious if you work on this and how you practice chord tone soloing, so let me know about that in the comments.
Let’s explore some phrasing.
Step #3 – Phrasing & Dynamics
What makes a solo, or any other piece of music, really great is often the subtle details. Things like changes in dynamics, timing, or a well-placed grace note adds meaning to the phrase you are playing.
Again, soloing with this limited set of notes is a great way to explore and develop these skills. Check out this phrase, like this it is a bit boring:
And it becomes a lot more alive and interesting if you add dynamics and phrasing:
Working with your timing, slides, legato, and dynamics is important as you improvise. The next example also highlights something else you’ll learn by working with this approach:
At the end of this example, you can hear how I use the C7 notes to transition to the F7 in bar 5 smoothly.
This kind of phrase connection is a key jazz skill, and this exercise will help you develop it.
While you should eventually expand the arpeggios to full positions, don’t forget how much music you can make with these four notes. If you can’t make music like this, more notes won’t help—it’s about rhythm and phrasing, not how many notes you play.
Step #4 – Expanding The Arpeggio
How you turn the 4-note or one-octave arpeggios into full positions will depend a bit on what you are used to in terms of scale positions, so you should do that in a way that fits you. If some of my choices don’t line up with what you usually play, feel free to adapt them to your own style. Another key point is that with these full positions, I don’t always start on the root of the chord.
For the C7, you get this:
For F7:
The next chord is F#dim:
And then it’s back to C7 before you get A7:
The II chord, Dm7:
And the V chord, G7:
For me, the trick is to view these full positions as an extension of the 4-note version so you don’t have to learn an entirely new set of patterns. Once you’re comfortable with the full positions, start improvising over the Jazz Blues to get used to having more notes available.
You can also try this challenge: The never-ending arpeggio exercise. Play the arpeggios in the 8th notes and switch to the nearest note in the next arpeggio as you move through the form. It’s a challenging but great way to become more flexible with your arpeggios.
Step #5 – Connecting Chords
With the full positions of the arpeggios, it is much easier to play from one chord to the next. Just using the one-octave arpeggios, there wasn’t always enough overlap to get the really important transitions in there.
The skill you want to develop is to play melodies with the arpeggio of the chord you are on now, but also to be able to see the arpeggio of the next chord on the fretboard so that you can play towards a note in that chord.
If you are on C7:
you play a phrase on that chord that ends on a note on the F7:
The important thing is thinking ahead and playing toward a target note in the next chord. The 3rd is a great and clear note to aim for, but you can quickly start adding others as well. This flow—thinking ahead and connecting your phrases—is an essential part of the jazz sound.
Check out how this line over Dm7, G7, C flows smoothly across the three chords, creating one melodic movement:
Jazz Chords -> Music
Similar to how you want to avoid sounding like a robot when you are soloing, you also need to be able to turn chord symbols into music. It’s not just about playing complicated chords—it’s about staying connected with the music, not getting lost, and avoiding the trap of just playing long chords on beat one without any rhythm. That’s exactly what I dive into in this video. Check it out!
Learn Jazz Make Music
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