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

Practicing arpeggio positions is a huge waste of time. This single “boring” scale exercise connects your chords, scales, and arpeggios — it’s really all you need.

Once that clicked for me in a Barry Harris Masterclass, jazz soloing made so much more sense.

So in this video, I’ll show you the exercise, how it directly maps arpeggios to scales, so you can just see licks on the fretboard, and stop wasting time on full arpeggio positions.

 

Getting Everything To Work

One of the hardest things about jazz soloing isn’t the technique — it’s that everything you practice separately has to come together in real time.

And if you’re practicing the way most teachers show you, you’re actually making that harder.

Most teachers will tell you to learn full arpeggio positions. The problem is that when you get to an actual solo, you now have even more to juggle — chords, scales, arpeggios, rhythm, phrasing — and none of it feels connected.

But here’s what it actually looks like when it works.

Notice what’s happening there. Those aren’t full positions — they’re one-octave arpeggios over each chord.

And that’s not just in my solos; that’s how arpeggios show up in jazz solos across the board.

Look at this Charlie Parker solo. One-octave arpeggios, starting from the root, all over the place.

So practicing full arpeggio positions isn’t just inefficient — it’s practicing something that doesn’t fit with how arpeggios are actually used in a solo. There’s a place for the full positions later, but if you want your lines to sound like jazz, you really need to start somewhere else.

Barry Harris Solution

Barry Harris understood this, and here’s the exercise he taught me.

In a masterclass in the Hague, he told us: “play a major scale from C to C.”

Simple enough. Then he said: for each note in the scale, play the 7th chord arpeggio starting from that note.

That’s the exercise. And it looks simple, but look at what you’re actually doing — you’re practicing the scale, learning all the diatonic arpeggios, and getting all the diatonic chords of the scale, all at the same time. One exercise instead of a scale and seven separate arpeggio positions. And that is just the beginning.

As you already saw in that Charlie Parker solo — this is exactly what you need for your solos to sound like real jazz.

When Barry Harris showed us this, I could see it made sense, but it didn’t fully click yet. But that came a few minutes later — and it changed how I thought about soloing completely.

First, let me show you the easiest way to actually learn this exercise.

Easing Into The Exercise

Here’s the easiest way to build up to the full exercise.

Start with the scale on its own.

Step #1 – The Scale

Now play the same scale but in 3rds — so for each note you add the note two notes above.

Step #2 – Play It In 3rds

Once that feels comfortable, stack two of those 3rds together on each note and you get all the diatonic triads. Which are also very useful to know

Step #3 – Diatonic Triads

And then you add one more 3rd on top of each triad — and now you have the full exercise, the diatonic 7th chord arpeggios through the scale.

Step #4 – Diatonic 7th Chords Arpeggios

Each of these steps is small enough that you can get comfortable before moving to the next one. And once you can play the full exercise, you’re not just running a drill — you’re seeing the scale, the chords, and the arpeggios connected in one place on the fretboard.

If you want to work through this away from the video, I made a free PDF with all the steps so you can practice at your own pace. Link is in the description.

That’s the exercise — Now let me show you just how powerful this really is when you put it to use.

From “Boring” Exercise To Jazz

It really clicked for me when Barry gave us the next exercise — because this is where you go from running a drill to actually playing jazz.

See if “extra example 6 works on top as a sort explainer, you can just leave it there as disabled if you don’t think so”

He told us to put a half step before each arpeggio and play the arpeggio as a triplet.

For the Cmaj7, that gives you this:

Now take that same lick through the whole scale:

That one small change turns the exercise into seven bebop licks — one for every chord in the scale. And actually more, but we’ll get to that.

The moment I played that, I knew I’d been wasting time on arpeggio positions. This was a direct line to sounding like jazz.

Something I immediately recognized from the solos I’d been checking out.

It’s not just an exercise — you can hear this exact approach in Charlie Parker’s solo. Here it’s on the Fmaj7 chord.

That’s it. That’s the exercise you’ve been practicing, showing up in a famous jazz solo.

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Let’s move on to the other reason this exercise will change how you solo.

It is NEVER one-to-one

So far you’ve seen the exercise and how it connects directly to real jazz solos. But here’s where it gets even more useful — because the diatonic arpeggios don’t just give you one option per chord, they give you several.

You already heard me use it at the beginning of the video

Most players think about soloing like this: I’m on Dm7, so I play a Dm7 arpeggio. That’s the 1-1 thinking that limits you.

But look at what the diatonic arpeggios actually show you.

For Dm7, the 3rd of the chord is F.

And if you look at the diatonic arpeggio starting on F — that’s Fmaj7. Which means Fmaj7 is a completely natural sound over Dm7, and it adds the 9th, E, which is a beautiful color on that chord.

Another option is the arpeggio from the 5th — that’s Am7 over Dm7.

All good notes and a strong melody on the chord. Especially if you use it to land on the F like this:

The same logic works on G7.

The arpeggio from the 3rd gives you Bø,

and from the 5th you get Dm7

— both strong options.

At the beginning of the video, I was using the Am7 arpeggio over Dm7, and the Bø arpeggio over the G7:

And you can now start composing licks with these and the other options. Here’s an example using the two other arpeggios over Dm7 and G7. It borrows the chromatic phrase from the Charlie Parker solo:

That is how you start building a real jazz vocabulary: composing lines and turning these arpeggios into licks that sound like Jazz.

If you want to take this further and actually apply it to a real jazz standard, my Jazz Guitar Roadmap course does exactly that. You learn to take these kinds of building blocks and use them in your own real jazz solos on a song. Over 7,500 students have been through it — there’s a link in the description if you want to join them.

Diatonic Power!

So that’s the exercise. One scale, all the diatonic arpeggios, all the diatonic chords — and a direct connection to the licks and lines you actually want to play.

Most players skip this because it looks boring. But now you can see what it actually gives you — and that’s why it’s worth more than hours of practicing full arpeggio positions.

Start with the scale in diatonic arpeggios. Get comfortable with it. And use i to play solos that actually sound like jazz.

The “Boring” Triad Exericse

There is a similar triad exercise that is incredibly simple and might feel boring, but it is the key to nailing the jazz sound in your solos. Pro jazz players obsess over it for the same reason, but most players ignore it and don’t realize what they are missing.

Check it out!

Learn Jazz Make Music

This “Boring” Triad Exercise Will Save You Years! (But Most Ignore It)

https://jenslarsen.nl/this-boring-triad-exercise-will-save-you-years-but-most-ignore-it/

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