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What do the pros say?
I'm a newbie to jazz, but no stranger to music, and have decided to finally make the switch to Jazz, and I was wondering if you guys think in terms of scales when you improvise?
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09-10-2012 07:15 PM
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Doing a search through this forum for CST or "Chord Scale Theory" will result in quite a lot of reading.
I try not to think scales OR arpeggios, but instead, melodies.
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A real can of worms! The emphasis on 'scales over chords' is a more recent development in jazz history and many players who were taught this way sound good. Other people sound find thinking "chordally". I prefer the latter approach. A lot depends on the kind of jazz you want to play. For example, if you love bebop, well, Charlie Parker thought in terms of chords and extensions rather than scales. (I think the educator, and musician David Baker has done a lot of good work, but I always thought it, well, ironic that he wrote his 'how to play bebop' series on the playing of people who didn't learn to play that way! His books are good, I'm not knocking them, but obviously, the great bebop players learned to play bebop before there was a 'method' for it! They thought "chordally".
You could look at both ways---and the different methods of learning those ways---and see which one suits you. 'Many ways up the mountain,' as they say.
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I'll second Jake and vote for melody. There's a lot more to a good jazz solo than just playing scales, but most good jazz musicians have a deep and thorough knowledge of scales.(The more you listen to great jazz soloists, the clearer what is really going on becomes.) To make a sports analogy (is it football season these days?), scale practice is like drills, weightlifting, sprints, etc. The guy in the best shape is going to have an advantage on the field but if you start doing push-ups in the middle of the game, you're going to grind things too a halt.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are different perspectives to scales, physical facility(chops), an intellectual understanding of their construction (theory) and your ability to hear and distinguish different scales when they're being played(ears). These don't always develop at the same rate for everyone, you might need to put in more work in one area vs another. Best of luck!
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I totally agree with both of you! Chord scales make sense from an arranging stand point, but improvisation, it just doesn't feel natural. I know I'm pretty new, but it feels better to approach it the way Parker did, by the way thanks for the tip, I didn't know that!
I have been using an Aebersold book and running down the melody first, a chorus of just chord tones, followed by some blowing. I don't know it seems like one can get over whelmed with book overload, sometimes you just gotta go for it and have a blast and if you get lost, stop, listen and try to find your way back. Old school! hahaha
can you guys imagine what it must have been like in Parker's day? One had to summon up a ton of courage to throw themselves into those jam sessions to hone their craft! It must have been pretty rough and you had to have some thick skin! Thanks for the your insight guys!Last edited by rcaballero; 09-10-2012 at 08:31 PM.
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Interesting P!
How would you suggest practicing scales? For years, I would go through the major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, pentatonic, in all 12 keys, but to be honest it just seemed boring and repetitive, I saw huge leaps in my learning process when I started coping lines from albums. Now, this is when I was playing rock and blues, but perhaps it's different for Jazz? I have been working on Coltrane's solo on Blue train, some stuff is rough, some lines are rather difficult to hear, however I've got a nice chunk worked out. I have worked out Take 5 and most of Desmond's sweet solo. On Autumn Leaves, I worked out most of Cannonball's and Mile's solo from Something Else. Just curious do you guys suggest learning the whole solo? Or say just a chorus?
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I'm a big fan of the Mick Goodrick/Advancing Guitarist approach, so my short answer would be up and down one string. Beyond that, it really depends on your goals and priorities. I will point out that scales do go straight up and down in the common positions, but they also break up into 3rds, 4ths, 5ths 6ths, 7ths, triads, 7th chords, inverted triads/7ths , spread triads/7ths, 3 part 4th voicings, etc etc. There's also plenty of classical literature (like the Hanon piano book) that deals with melodic patterns in scales.
I've always tried to reverse engineer my practicing: if there's a guy playing something I dig, I try to imagine what he needed to practice in order to play that way. Your scale practice might be very different depending if your hero is Jim Hall or Jimmy Bruno.
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To me you have to work with all approaches over time. They are all tools you need to explore and have available. But as Jake points out it all about good melodies/line.
Last edited by docbop; 09-11-2012 at 09:55 AM.
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There is absolutely no reason to NOT practice your scales. It will only make you better.
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It will make you better at playing scales, yes, but it won't necessarily make you a better improviser. Herb Ellis cautioned players against devoting much practice time to scales. (It's good to know them but you don't have to play them daily to know them.) He thought it was better to relate melodic ideas to chord shapes, not scales. Charlie Christian worked that way too. You hear a lot of the same thing in Joe Pass. Many great jazzy lines are actually *harder* to learn if you think of them in terms of scales rather than as built from triads.
Originally Posted by timscarey
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I completely agree MR!
I usually slow down the music and sing the lines I'm coping, and paying close attention to the harmonies. I may spend extra time doing this over a few seconds of music, until I can sing it all. I find it to be time well worth spent then, what a teacher of mine called Berklee hallway chops! hahahaha This wasn't a put down, this was him telling us, don't forget it's about making music. It was a real pleasure to just watch him in class blow, this cat sang everything the played! He was one with his axe. It was a real revelation for me! Gotta give Norman Zocher his props! This cat could blow and is an all around great person!Last edited by rcaballero; 09-11-2012 at 10:33 AM.
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I try to think of the melody, not scale or arpeggio while playing. But all the exercises I made when I started learning guitar (like playing scales and arpeggios in 5 positions) helped a lot to make me learn where the notes, the "sounds", the relations between those notes were all over the neck. It helps to get your fingers to the right place, according to what you ear in your head.
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I think there can be some reason to not practice scales. If you already know them well enough, time might be better spent assimilating vocabulary, or working on voicings, rhythms, a number of other things might be a better use of time. Originally Posted by timscarey
When I started taking jazz seriously I already had pretty good scale and mode knowledge (both theoretically and on the fretboard) and my teacher at the time actually strongly discouraged any scale practice. At that time, I needed to learn some vocabulary. Just one example.
In fact, for most of the time that I've been playing jazz I've barely practiced scales at all.
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Norm is a great player, I have a Norm&Abby CD lying around somewhere that I should dig out for another listen.
I've never understood the distinctions that get made around scales. To me, a knowledge of a scale means dealing with it in all combinations of intervals, triads, 7th chords, etc. Sure, targeting 1 3 5 of a triad gets you inside the changes in an efficient manner, but you have to know where the 1 3 and 5 come from.
That said, just running up and down a pattern you already know while neglecting to develop other areas in your playing (jazz vocabulary, etc) is not a recipe for success. I look at scales like the alphabet. If you never put in the work to learn the alphabet, you won't be able to read and write, but you don't have to run the ABC's for an hour every time you sit down with a book.
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This pretty much sums up how I feel. I've logged some serious hours on scales back in the day, so the familiarity is there, but I mostly focus on chord tones and vocabulary. Originally Posted by JakeAcci
Also, someone earlier suggested that Charlie Parker played a lot of scales? Hmmm...you sure about that? I've transcribed him more than I've transcribed any other player and I find that he primarily plays chord tones with embellishments. When he deviates from chord tones, it's usually to play 'colour' notes like b9's, #9's, #11's, etc that are outside the scale anyway if you think primarily in terms of major, minor and dominant chords. Of course, I've only transcribed a small part of his total playing.
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I don't think about much of anything when I improvise. I'm too busy listening. Thinking is for the practice room.
I practice chords and arpeggios more than scales, but I practice scales too. Never limit yourself. But when it's go time that stuff has to have been done already. Thinking about scales or arpeggios while soloing makes you mechanical at best, freezes you up at worst.
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That's an important distinction to separate jazz improvising from practicing the building blocks of music. You can't just indiscriminately 'use' scales and arpeggios and expect a coherent solo any more than just 'using' nouns and verbs will write you a coherent story.
It should go without saying that you don't need to keep rehashing what you already know. If you know your scales, move on to other stuff. But depending on where your music leads you, you might find you didn't 'know' them as well as you thought, and need to give them another look. For about 2 weeks in the mid 90s, I lived downstairs from Ben Monder in Brooklyn. He played slow, whole-note scales up and down for hours and hours. He ran them the entire range of the axe,incredibly smoothly; I could never tell when he was shifting positions (Granted, I was listening through the floor) I don't know if those were the only two weeks he practiced that way, but he obviously found some value in playing simple scales, even though he was an accomplished player. He also played a ton of violin etudes (Kreutzer?) moving gradually from painfully slow to blisteringly fast.
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The OP is a little imprecise. Thinking about scales can be simple or complex. Intuitive or systematic. It is more a question of how do you think about and practice them.
From what I read, the trend seems to be toward thinking chordaly. But most people seem to also be familiar with several types of scales.
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I can imagine a teacher saying to a student who wasn't likely to get very far with music as a career, leave the scales alone, you'll only get yourself bored and depressed (and confused, if the student thinks modes are the key to everything). Teachers have to make a living, and a contented student comes back the following week. But I can't imagine a professional performer in any serious genre who didn't practise scales for hours a day, most days. For example, Segovia's dedication to scales is well known - he always said that one reason he got to be as good as he was was that he spent his military service practising scales, no pieces, just scales. And later in life, for preference, he would practise little else, he considered that there was always something fresh to find in them. Originally Posted by paulkogut
Excuse me if I've told this story before, but years ago there was a TV interview with Jaqueline du Pré, which I mostly remember because it was a perfect example of the interviewer being deaf. Russell Harty asked her if she practised a lot (Jaqueline du Pré! The impertinence! Can you imagine?), to which she answered, No, not a lot. Well, goodness, he said, lots of mums and dads will be surprised at that. No, no, she said, I meant I don't practise pieces much, I prefer them to be fresh in my mind when I come to perform them - I practise scales and arpeggios for practically every hour in the day. The dickhead journalist just didn't hear this, and kept on chuckling about her not practising.
Before you get to be that good, of course, there is more to music than scales and arps, you need to learn all the other aspects of music, dynamics, expression, etc., and, in the case of jazz, how to improvise on a chord sequence. Once that's under your belt, though, how can you keep yourself in condition, and maintain or improve on your level? Scales, arps, and more scales and arps.
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I don't think in scales when I play. I guess I just try to play what I hear (and at times listen to what I am playing, but that's a different discussion I guess..)
Why is practicing to make music with a scale not considered part of practicing a scale? I think I do that much more when I am trying to learn a new scale than I do technique exercises etc.
Jens
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Isn't it? I thought it was. Originally Posted by JensL
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Wow, some really great stuff on here!
Thank you all for your input! Just curious, I was wondering what you guys all thought of Mickey Baker's section on arpeggios? Have any of you used this in your practice regiment?
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I've heard rumors of a young Pat Martino practicing a lot out of the Mickey Baker book in the 1950's.
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I agree, you need to have that stuff under your belt but while playing I'm listening and following the line that's developing, responding to what is being played, playing things to be responded to. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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I've got my bebop vocabulary related to chord tones, arpeggios and scale shapes(really key center box shapes). So I don't think in terms of scales for this vocabulary - it's all visual where I see the lines overlapping chord shapes, arpeggios and I see the chord tones with embellishments.
Then I have diminished scales which are obviously organized into a category of their own, because the visualization is different - but they still overlap the basic key center I'm in. So I'm not only seeing my diminished scale but also the destination to where I will resolve. This is important.
Same goes for whole tone scale and certain applications of melodic minor(primarily lydian dom, altered, locrian nat 2, and lydian augmented which are the ones I favor. Basic melodic minor is so similar to the minor scale that I view it as a modification of my basic key center shapes).
The symmetrical augmented scale, which I've been working on recently certainly doesn't adhere to any present system in my playing so that's an entity on it's own. But I do like to visualize it around it's inherent triads.
I do that with diminished as well. Triads help so much with making sense of the scale and helps you avoid sounding like a scale player.
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