Use This Exercise To Get The Most Out Of Arpeggios!
One of the biggest problems you have learning Jazz is that practicing arpeggios as exercises does not help you make them sound great in solos. If you just play exercises and start improvising, it is almost a waste of time.
But there is another way to approach this, and it is a lot easier than you might think.
Playing Jazz like cooking. The arpeggios are one ingredient, but it doesn’t work if it is the only one, and you need to learn how to combine ingredients. This is why you have recipes for food, and luckily, there are also recipes for arpeggios that help you turn them into solid lines your solos.
It Is Almost Counterpoint (but not really)
Going through this, I am sure you will find options you never tried, but let me know in the comments along the way. Exploring this exercise is a bit like using counterpoint rules, but also not really; you’ll see what I mean. We need an arpeggio to start with. To keep it easy, take this Cmaj7 in the most simple form: C E G B
No Position?
As you can see, I only use a one-octave arpeggio and not a full position.
Arpeggio Positions are good for some things, but if you look at Jazz solos, 90% of the arpeggios used are just the root position,
so it is not a big problem if you start with that, and you can explore the rest later using the same principles if you want to. This just makes it a lot easier.
Sometimes you think of an arpeggio as a set of notes or intervals, like root, 3rd, 5th, 7th,
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but instead, it can be useful to think of it as a melody, in fact, a melody with two variations: Ascending:
and Descending:
You could make more permutations, but these are the easiest to use. Start with the ascending arpeggio. How you want to think about this is similar to counterpoint, where the arpeggio is like a leap in one direction that you need to resolve by moving in the opposite direction. The first simple recipe is similar to a very common scale exercise: Arpeggio up, scale down:
As you can hear, I am not sticking to the scale-down too strictly, and you don’t have to either. That rarely sounds great. Go with what you can get to sound good. That is the goal. In this case, it might look like I am using a C major triad at the end, but the way I think about it is a Barry Harris half-step between F and E. Barry’s method is that when you don’t have a chromatic note in between two notes, in this case, F and E, you can use the scale note above.
I won’t go into it too much now; I’ll link to a video in the description that talks about that.
In general, you will see me add chromatic phrases and similar things all the time since that is also a part of how Jazz sounds.
With this example, it is a bit tricky to add a chromatic note immediately after the arpeggio, but it is possible:
Two things about this example: You have the leading note from the previous example, but it is now moved so that the half step, G, is on beat 1 of bar 2. This might be a question of taste, but I find it stronger to have the leading note resolve up instead of down in this case. That gives you this and let me know what you think:
There are many more options for using ascending arpeggios, but before we look at them, let’s first explore the descending arpeggio because that can be used in a way that doesn’t work for the ascending version, and it almost shouldn’t work.
Remember that I am just showing you one example of an arpeggio. Of course, you should work on composing your own variations, combining them with the rest of your vocabulary, and, in that way, learning to use the arpeggios as each of these different melodies. But it is best to take them one at a time. That will help you build your vocabulary and skills faster. Doing everything at once is rarely a good strategy.
Descending Arpeggios – The Basics
Chances are that you are not using descending arpeggios as much, and they are less common if you transcribe a lot of solos, but it is a beautiful sound, especially the 2nd recipe, but the basic version is also great:
And, of course, you can start here and then later make lines like that are more complicated.
Descending Arpeggios – This Shouldn’t Work
But you have two more ways to use descending arpeggios. This first one is the most exciting: Imagine that you have a descending scale run like this:
Then, you can insert the arpeggio, play it, and continue down the scale. It is almost like “taking a break” from your scale run, and it sounds great:
As you can see, this does not follow counterpoint guidelines but is great for Jazz lines and certainly worth exploring.
Descending Arpeggios – Not So Flexible
All of these examples had the arpeggio as 8th notes, but before you start changing the rhythm of the arpeggio, check out the final descending example: cascading arpeggios. You can do this once in a while, and it works, but it mostly just sounds great at higher tempos because it is flashy and very active.
You can move the arpeggios stepwise in the scale like this example, using Em7, Dm7, and Cmaj7:
But you can also use arpeggios in 3rds distance, here it is Em7 Cmaj7 and Am7:
Let’s change the rhythm a bit to get some more options.
The First Bebop Triplet
The most common rhythmic variation for arpeggios is to play the arpeggio as a triplet with a leading note. Usually, it is a chromatic leading note, but for Cmaj7,
this is a B,
which is also a scale note; as an example, you could look at Em7. Here it would be a D#, a “real” chromatic note.
Changing the rhythm from the 8th notes to the triplet adds a bit of energy, and there is another bonus as well.
The basic version sounds like this, and I am again combining it with a scale run and that Barry Harris half-step, which makes the scale-melody a lot less boring:
This clearly works, and one change that makes it great for Jazz is that the top note, in this case, the 7th, B, is now on the downbeat,
which makes it a lot easier to add chromatic notes right after the arpeggio. This next line is something you will hear Charlie Parker do again and again, and it is also a favorite of George Benson:
When you work on using arpeggios like this, you will also recognize them in the solos you learn and the transcriptions you encounter, similar to how I referenced Parker and Benson. This is great because you also get better at learning from those sources and start to understand how their lines work. It’s pretty powerful!
Let’s look at another way to turn the arpeggio into a triplet.
The Second Bebop Triplet
You can also create a triplet without a leading note. This gives you a natural way to frame the note under the 7th, which sounds like this:
And you can hear how that really leads us to that A. This becomes a great line like this:
How many of these do you already know or are you getting a lot of new options? Let me know in the comments! Next, let’s take a look at descending triplet arpeggios.
Descending Triplets
You can get the same things to work with the descending triplet arpeggios, so add a leading note in front, and here it becomes a “real” chromatic note, A# leading into the B.
The other variation without a leading note also sounds great. Here, I am mixing it up with an enclosure of E that you have probably heard before!
and using a descending triplet arpeggio as an interruption in a scale run also sounds great, even if the note right before the arpeggio is in fact, the root of the arpeggio:
Leading into the Arpeggio
You already saw one example of leading into the arpeggio with the chromatic leading note before the triplet arpeggio, but of course, you also have a lot of great options here. Different things will work for different arpeggios, so explore things and see what you like. Here are some of my favorites:
Enclosures work well with arpeggios because an enclosure ending in a chord tone is usually a very strong melody:
And this sounds great with a descending arpeggio as well:
Enclosures give you many options, which make your melodies much more interesting than just running up and down scales and arpeggios.
Another thing you want to explore is combining arpeggios, like using an Em7 arpeggio to get to the Cmaj7
But to really come up with great lines with the arpeggios, you need to find the other ingredients that you can use, and chromatic phrases are a huge part of that, as you already saw in my examples. The best place to check this out is definitely Barry Harris. This video shows you how to use his system for adding half-steps, which is by far the most powerful system for this. It is instant Bebop with great phrasing!
Check it out!
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