Ideas for jazz guitar solos (modes and scales)

[p4chuss2]

Cool. I think it's only about $20/mo ... hard to beat. Same with Andreas O's online school ..

Thanks again. Can't find the "Andreas O's online school" on google. Did find the Jimmy Bruno one and will give it a look. Thanks.

[p4chuss2]

BINGO. We have a winner. As my teacher says, "if you play the way you sing, you can never go wrong".


You have to be able to sing those notes, and then be able to INSTANTLY find these notes on the guitar.

Or as the erudite author of "Forward Motion", Hal Galper, declared, "you may think the problem is that you can't play what you hear. In fact... the problem is that...you. are. playing. exactly. what. you. hear"

If you can't say anything interesting in your solo, it just means your hearing/singing is NOT VIVID enough.

Lately, I've put my guitar down and just gone over to the piano and tried to sing along with it.

I love the Dizz story he tells to Mr. Galper, wherein the esteemed bebop trumpeter says, "sometimes, people ask me, 'Mr. Gilespie', what goes in your mind when you're playing?'. And I answer, 'well most people think I'm just going "do-do-bee-bee-bop" In fact, I'm actually going 'DO-DO-BEEEEEE-BEEE--BOP!"

Should be that way. But I am too far away... Maybe once I can see the notes, chords, and arpeggios in my fretboard I can try to sing, write down, and then try to play. If I just try to play what I instantly hear, I get lost. And if I try to write it down I just get lost, too... The thing is not getting vices with fingerings and playing just licks around, something I usually end doing when playing the blues. I forget playing what I hear and end up playing what I know that sounds good. I know it's a mistake and should try to avoid it. But I think that if I do so with jazz I can do a lifetime learning without playing any songs. And I want to end having fun and starting playing jazz. Maybe once I get more knowledge I should do the "sing, write, play", and then "sing, play" and then just "hear, play"... but it isn't a path for me right now because of my limitations.

But thanks a lot anyway for your answer and contribution. I really appreciate every answer. Thank you!

[p4chuss2]

That's perfectly natural. I guess it's a bunch of hard work
There are a few ways to approach this, but heres' one:

It might be useful to start with something like a turnaround or two chords. For know let's just take |F7| Bb7|. You could take other chords or part of a song you play, it is not that important, only try to make sure that it is not the same scale for both chords.

You want to feed your ear right information so you don't get lost and you want to play the changes clearly. You do that by playing chord notes on beat 1 of the change (and/or beat 3 if there are more changes in the bar)

Play A on F7 then Ab on the Bb7.

Try to compose a few licks that contain notes from the F7 and which ends on the note Ab. Keep it simple and play only 8th notes that way you are practicing feeling the subdivision of the song and are also helping to avoid getting lost.

Get used to playing them in time with your licks that move from F7 to to Ab on Bb7 (on the 1) that way you hear the change.

When you can play a few lines in a slow tempo start to vary the melodies but still aim for the Ab on the Bb7 (for know you don't need to play anything else on the Bb7 chord.)

What you are practising is composing clear lines and in from the material you compose you should end up with building blocks for soloing.

Repeat the proces going from Eb on F7 to D on Bb7. Try other changes.

I am ignoring your 2nd point because you will in the beginning feel restricted buy the changes so that it does not feel like soloing on one chord, that's perfectly ok and part of the process. Once you get better at composing lines and put some hours (or months? years?) into it it'll get better.

Sorry for the loooong post..

Jens

Thank you very much Jens!! What you are suggesting is going from the 3rd of the first chord to the 7th of the second. And from the 7th to the 3rd. Right? While playing arpeggios and other kind of notes in the first and third beat.... I will definitely try that, too.

So:

1) Know the arpeggios for that chord on that particular position
2) Start playing as the first note, the 3rd in first beat, third beat using another note from the arpeggio and ending on the 7th.
3) Try to listen to the sounds of that arpeggio and possibilities

Thanks!!

[JonnyPac]

Whoow, thanks JonnyPac!! I started reading it but now I need my guitar to try the examples. Thanks a lot for the contribution!! A lot to learn!! Thanks!

My pleasure- I hope you dig it! Let me know if you have questions.

[p4chuss2]

I tend to agree that scales has a rather limited effect when learning to play changes. I practiced quite a lot of scales when I was young way before I started playing jazz. Thought that would help me but it didn't. I practically stopped practicing scales now. I focus on arpeggios, eartraining, transcribing and building a vocabulary (learning licks I like in all positions). It seems to work for me atleast.

Now if you don't know your scales at all I think you should keep practicing them a bit. But not too much. The things I mentioned are more important I think.

A couple of other things that seriously helped me getting started which I don't understand why people don't mention more often.

1) Learn the basic chord inversions. Try to relate each one with arpeggio (and scale) positions.

2) Once you have gotten the basic arpeggio shapes into your fingers do the socalled "connecting game". Take a jazz standard and go through the chord progression playing the arpeggio of each chord. When the chord changes try to start the next arpeggio on the note closest to the last note of the previous arpeggio thus connecting the lines.

Anyway that is my 2 cents...

Thanks for the advices!! I know the major scale pretty well and the blues and pentatonic. I have practiced other scales also (all the modes, minor, harmonic and melodic one, etc.) but I don't feel like I really got the scales from memory. I have to think them... Do you think it's a good idea to end learning the scales before going into arpeggios?

I also need to think about inversions. I really know them but since I don't end using the chords I end up forgetting them

I think I will try to make a solo with an easy song like Fly Me To The Moon learning arpeggios and trying to connect them as you say. What do you think about it? Thanks!!

[p4chuss2]

By the way, what do you think about Aebersold methods for me? Is it too advanced or would it be a choice for you to recommend me?

[JakeAcci]

Thanks JakeAcci. How would you practice it?

Well, if you feel your ear is capable, you could try transcribing some short improvised lines by Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, Sonny Rollins, early John Coltrane, etc. They could be one or two measures and then you could/should try singing them and matching all the pitches, and being aware of how each note relates to the chord of the moment. Then you could do another lick, and, well, after a while you've integrated some jazz vocabulary into your ear. And of course, you figure out how to play the lines on the guitar.

If you don't feel comfortable transcribing yet, then singing the examples in Johnny's write up about connecting chords would be very useful. I've only skimmed his material, but it is heavily influenced by Bert Lignon's "Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony" which is a really great and practical book for understanding some basic bebop "making the changes" vocabulary. Singing and playing the examples in that book would be a pretty practical thing to do. Same with Forward Motion, really good book.

Books and methods are great, but I do think that using your ear is by far the best. Just my personal opinion, but I believe it's going to be infinitely better to figure out a one measure lick by ear from a recording (even if it takes you a very long time) rather than going through a book or any other sort of method. (but a balance is probably ideal.)

I think we all use some combination of ear and method, intuition and strategy, but it's important to keep in mind that this music became popular (and the players became proficient) mostly by using their ears, lifting things off recordings, and just putting in a lot of time, playing constantly. When some of these giants were roaming the earth (Coltrane, Bird, Sonny Rollins, Wes, etc) there did not exist all these method books, college courses, aebersold's, etc.

Now that we have these resources it's great to take advantage of them, but if your ear is capable I personally think that's the angle to focus on. We can all buy 1000 books and try 1000 different fretboard strategies but I do think it really comes down to listening to the music and figuring out what's going on, and figuring out a way to relate to what's happening on the recordings. If you don't feel like you can hear and accurately transcribe some short lines from these recordings, then your ear is the thing you probably need to be working on.

There is a lot of math and technical intricacies in jazz improvisation, but it is still music and I think all music has an extremely strong intuitive component. It's tempting to get lost in all the strategies and methods, but it is just music - listen to it a lot, try to sing it, play it, and I think a lot will get ingrained.

For example, when I first started getting serious about jazz, I had a teacher who instructed me to learn several Charlie Parker heads and just play them all day, as well as listening to Charlie Parker all the time. So that's what I did, and I started to "get" jazz on a more organic level - it was the music I listened to, and I was playing, on guitar, the music I was hearing.

Of course there's more to it then that, and all the suggestions here so far have been great. We all have to get more detailed and figure out more specific ways to tackle specific issues in the practice room, I just wanted to throw into the mix my perspective on the more big-picture issue of how to play jazz convincingly. Then practice strategies and books are great for the things that are not coming together intuitively.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

Back to So What -- I love these sorts of videos!

[mr. beaumont]

Why is it that you say up to 1959? What changed after that? What songs would you recommend me to start up with? Thanks!

"Kind of Blue" happened.

Just like suspended chords had to resolve until the Spring of 1965. (Maiden Voyage)

I always reccomend starting with some standards...you learn song forms, common movements, how to play changes, etc...All the Things You Are, Blue Bossa, Autumn Leaves, Tune Up, Misty, any and all of the "Real Book Ballads" really...lots of choices...

[richb2]

p4chuss2, I know exactly where you are coming from. I am sort of in the same boat. What I have been doing for the past about 6 months is taking Sherpa Lesson's from Sheryl Bailey. These are online (ie we send each other videos) lessons and she has a huge library of pre-recorded ones too. Her Sherpa lessons are available at the truefire.com website. I would say that it has help me get out of the "scale thing" and into arpeggio playing and substitutions. I am not nearly "there" yet but I feel like I am finally starting to make progress. If you do a search on my posts via my member name, you will see that in the past I had the same questions (on this forum) that you have. I followed a lot of "free advice" up here and spun my wheels for what seemed like forever. Personally, right now I am working on my comping. It is very hard for us to see our playing strengths and weaknesses as others see them. The Sherpa lessons with Sheryl worked well because I was looking for "self-directed" learning. Highly recommended!