A little over a year ago, I made a video on the most Important Scale Exercise in Jazz(b-roll exercise maybe licks?), and once in a while, I get comments that I have no right to say that and all scale exercises are created equal.
That is not the case, some things are useful in some genres and not in others.
Take an exercise like this:
This is a great exercise if you want to be the next medium swing Yngwie Malmsteen, but it pretty much sucks if you want to sound like Charlie Parker.
The Most Important Scale Exercise
So in this video, I am going to show you why it is the most important scale exercise in Jazz, and then I am going to show you how you can use it to make your own great sounding licks!
So first let’s just look at why this exercise is important, or actually, just very useful and practical, and then I will go over how to use it.
Here’s Why It Is Amazing!
So the exercise is playing the diatonic arpeggios in a scale position like this:
The Arpeggios you get would be this exercise:
Why is this so useful?
When you play the exercise then you are playing the arpeggios of all the diatonic chords in that scale, so for C major you now have arpeggios for these chords:
It fits the harmony of Jazz songs!
If you look at a Jazz Standard then the basic chords in there are all 7th chords, so if you have to improvise over a G7 or an Am7 in the key of C, then the diatonic arpeggios are immediately clear because you have already practiced that and you know where the arpeggio is.
In that way, it links the scale to the chords and the arpeggios and directly gives you something to play on the chord.
More arpeggios per chord
The other thing that you can use this exercise for is that you can link several different arpeggios to a chord and that gives you a lot more vocabulary, so on a Dm7 chord there are other arpeggios that work well besides the Dm7 arpeggio, and you already know how to play them and where to find them because you played the exercise.
Obviously, a Dm7 works on a Dm7 chord because you are playing the same notes as you find in the chord. Fmaj7 works as well because the notes are almost the same, except the E which adds a 9th on top of the Dm chord and that sounds fine.
Dm7; D F A C
Fmaj7: F A C E
Am7: A C E G
Let’s just check out what they sound like:
Keep in mind that right now, I am talking about this for a Jazz standard, but this is also true if you are playing over a static 7th chord vamp: You can use more arpeggios on the chord and, knowing them will give you more material for your solos
Before I show you how this also works for other chords then I will give you some great examples of how you can use this in your playing, because THAT is what makes it a great exercise: It gives you a lot of stuff you can use.
Arpeggio Combinations
Now that there are several arpeggios that you can use then you can also work by combining them.
Here I am using an Fmaj7 arpeggio and a Dm7 arpeggio on the Dm7 chord.
A great way to play these two arpeggios could be to put them together like this, so first the Fmaj7 and then the Dm7 naturally follows AUDIO
Now you can do the same with the combination of the Am7 and Fmaj7 arpeggio
Taking It To Other Chords
The same concept using the G7 and Bø on G7:
Here it is the same priniciple:
G7: G B D F
Bø: B D F A
And using this in a line sounds like this:
And you can use it on a Cmaj7 as well combining the Am7 and Cmaj7 arpeggios:
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