The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    I think that arguing that beginners shouldn't be taught to only play box pentatonic scales is a bit of a strawman here. The question was whether a beginner should start with the blues with the concern that their ear should not be exposed to the b3 over a major harmony. I think blues can and should be taught without encouraging a complete reliance on the minor pentatonic scale. That doesn't define the blues.

    Further, I think that the blues is a great place for an improviser to start. It has a relatively simple structure. Its chords do not change frequently. It allows the improviser to deal with a changing harmonic background. It has a lot of dominant 7 chords which opens a whole array of possibilities. And probably a bunch of other stuff.

    I think we all agree that beginners should not be encouraged to think that all there is to playing a blues is to play the minor pentatonic scale that is associated with the first chord.

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  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by ColinO
    I think that arguing that beginners shouldn't be taught to only play box pentatonic scales is a bit of a strawman here.
    Maybe preaching to the choir, but just in case there are novices reading here, it's good advice all the same!

  4. #28

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    and the difficulties of understanding the M3 and the m3 and to be able to have those sounds in your ear and be able to contextualize them.

    As the OP wrote "but I'm questioning if it's a good idea to start by teaching a beginner to play minor sounds over a major sounding harmony (Blues)."

    I would say... lets not start there till I know your ears can differentiate/hear and apply the difference.

  5. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by OPherman47
    Its funny because after going down the jazz hole, I had to get solid on my pent shapes and sounds again to get those sounds (I had gone so long without playing them).... Of course my application of those sounds was way better than when I started.

    I guess I never had the ear problem because I came out of 8 years of classical piano and the pent shapes were something that I never played on piano but other guitar players showed me to get those rock sounds.

    I never saw it (i am guessing) in my already experienced students because I immediately started breaking down all the stuff they didnt know. The note names of the entire neck (I would always joke, you paid for the whole guitar why not use the whole guitar) the triad shapes etc.

    Like you said about the horns. I would tell them. Every other musician knows this stuff... What makes you so special. especially when it comes to knowing where all their notes are on the neck.

    Every other instrument player knows where all the notes are on their instrument.

    Cracks me up. I can only guess that it comes from our folksy/self taught background that is rampant on guitar.

    I find the hardest barrier is getting guitarist to be intentional (i.e. pre hear) their music and not be on auto pilot. I get confused as to what those players actually think they are doing.
    Well, I can only say that from my own teaching experience, what helped me understand my student's struggles was recalling my own.... If you started on piano, you probably will never truly understand how young players get hooked on guitar shapes way before they're prepared to learn to "hear" what they're doing. Not saying it will inhibit your effectiveness as a teacher necessarily, but try to remember where they've come from, they're probably shape noodlers! Not very Jazz, infact that's why I don't like Burrell or GG much, but that's a whole 'nother thread!.....

  6. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Maybe preaching to the choir, but just in case there are novices reading here, it's good advice all the same!
    I agree completely. I just saying...baby...bathwater.

    Cheers.

  7. #31

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    Quote Originally Posted by ColinO
    I agree completely. I just saying...baby...bathwater.

    Cheers.
    Hey, not advocating banning pent/blues shapes altogether! Just under strict supervision maybe ...

    Seriously, it's like a parent severely limiting sugary snacks in their kid's diet. Now you could say their over-zealousness cold be spoiling the poor kid's fun, and chance to be like the other "lucky" kids who are allowed snacks all the time... or the kid may grow up to thank you for encouraging them to not turn out fat, lazy and stupid... No right or wrong here, just your prerogative as a parent or teacher.

  8. #32

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    My playing started out resembling a lot of the blind box soloing that is basically taught to all beginning guitarists in the blues/rock realm. And I think the people harping on the pitfalls are obviously right that you'll never really get past a certain point until you have command of the notes you are playing with respect to the harmony... BUT the blues scale is invaluable in getting the feeling of improvising.

    I remember being in "jazz" band in 6th grade... we really didn't play jazz as much as old pop songs (where blues scales were fine and there was no navigating of tricky changes). Horn players are, indeed, taught to solo differently and target notes and have a much more cerebral thing going from an early age. Guitar players, like me, just had to focus on keeping the drool from hitting the floor while we noodled around on the blues scales... The thing was, my solos were way better than everyone else's (at the time... everyone got better and I was still playing the same lame licks, whatever). The reason, though, is that the horn players were too busy doing calculus trying to sort out what notes to play, then oops the chord changed, more math, next chord... the solo goes by and they're just kinda poking their saxes at it without playing anything... Since I was limited to just 5 or 6 notes, I wasn't burdened with all that thinking so I could just try to play something cool, albeit simple. If the chords were anything different from bluesy pop music, I'd be SOL, but for that style, at that age, the mindless noodling was actually the strategy that produced better results. That's why I think so many guitars never advanced past that stage, because it takes relatively little effort and skill to get something that sounds pretty cool... that's the danger: Teach a man to fish, and he might forget that steak is actually pretty tasty too.

    Eventually all the thinking the horn players had been doing paid off and everything got so internalized they could just kinda shut it down and just play musically with their ears... just like our drooling guitarist, but with a much bigger and cooler palette, that's the goal. Our guitarist has to go back and do all that work they skipped, but they have the benefit of already knowing the feeling of improvising.

    It's just two different paths that I think can take you to the same point.
    Last edited by mjgp3; 02-10-2014 at 05:40 PM.

  9. #33

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    Quote Originally Posted by mjgp3
    Eventually all the thinking the horn players had been doing paid off and everything got so internalized they could just kinda shut it down and just play musically with their ears... just like our drooling guitarist, but with a much bigger and cooler palette, that's the goal. Our guitarist has to go back and do all that work they skipped, but they have the benefit of already knowing the feeling of improvising.

    It's just two different paths that I think can take you to the same point.
    Welcome to the forum mjgp3, and nice first post! I'd only argue that "feeling" your way through a box shape is quite the different thing to feeling your way through chromatically embellished substitute arpeggios and what not, and that given the choice over again personally I'd learn like the horn players learn, calculus first, music later!

  10. #34

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    My 2c...

    First of all there is a major pentatonic for those major chords as well...
    Second of all most modern blues masters combine the major and minor pentatonic scales tastefully to create interesting licks with tension and release... dissonance and consonance.. bending notes into key for chromatic effect jazz cats love.
    Thirdly if you combine the major and minor pentatonic scales as stated above you get 7 distinct notes. Add the blues note and it makes it 8. You'll also find that in addition most modern blues players play lots of other passing tones as well. Don't look down on the blues. There are as many different blues licks as there are jazz licks. Bert Ligon reckons you can get pretty far in jazz by just altering 3 licks. I get annoyed when jazz cats talk about blues clichés without recognizing the boat loads in jazz. Every music has vocabulary because it sounds good! a II-V-I progression is the same sound over and over again just dressed differently...

    My verdict and personal conclusion of studying great jazz players is if you can't play the blues you can't play jazz. In most cases those who can't sound boring and emotionless to me. Even those cats like Bill Evans who supposedly didn't have a lot of blues in their playing can still play a mean blues.

  11. #35

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    I've never heard a great blueser hang on to the m3 over a major chord without bending it in tune or moving up to the M3

  12. #36

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    It's been a while since I've dropped by here so this is the first I've seen of this thread. I felt I just had to offer my two cents. Several of the posts here I found myself agreeing with and others sounded more like they were proscriptions handed down by grammarians who took dim views of violating the sacrosanct.

    My musical background is probably a lot different from most of the folks here, and it has colored the way I approach things like improvisations. But just so's you know, I'm not a jazz player. I'm here because it is my desire to learn, at the very least, the fundamentals of jazz soloing. I was barely into my teens when I was turned onto blues by a bass player friend of mine. And I studied the gamut -- from the likes of John Lee Hooker and Albert King to the more refined sound of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. And those Brits! The things they did with the blues was profound.

    To me the I IV V progression was the vehicle that provided me with a solid means by which I could begin to express myself. So many of you refer to blues players as just noodling around within the perimeter of the I IV V progression. Really that is not at all indicative of what's going on with a decent blues player. in fact, it's a straw man. No blues player worth his salt that I'm aware of sticks strictly to a pentatonic scale. And most don't noodle. They have specific licks that they use and specific ways of connecting these licks to produce the sound that has become their "style." If anyone noodles, it's the jazz player, not the blues player.

    The original question that started this topic was asking about the advisability of playing a minor third in a major blues progression. My short answer is: Don't do it. To me this question presupposes that the player either can't hear or can't be bothered with hearing the difference between major and minor keys. So my first response would be to the player and it would be to suggest that he or she take the time to learn the difference, and then perhaps the "problem" will take care of itself. I had been exploring the blues for not very long at all when I discovered my first "mode," although I wouldn't know that's what it was called until years later. I had learned some cool licks that were played in a minor pentatonic pattern, but I noticed right off that they clashed during certain parts of a blues progression that had a major chord as its root. And I knew why -- that is I knew that the licks used a minor third but when I played them against the root chord, it just didn't work. It was around that time that I discovered that if I moved my licks down three frets, they worked great against the root of a blues played in a major key. Problem solved. I also found that playing licks three frets lower worked in other parts of the blues progression too, whether major or minor, so I had effectively doubled the real estate available to me as a soloist. It wasn't until much later that I found out about relative majors and minors and how they shared the same notes because they were both just modes for whatever key signature I was in.

    So if a player adopts that approach, he need not have to resort to playing that minor third against a major chord because there's plenty of room to play something else now.

    It was also about this time that I picked up a lick that is used so often in blues, the extended version of which establishes the "key" as the Mixolydian mode. I'm sure most everyone here knows it. You play the minor third then hammer on the major third, and noodle on from there. Playing the minor then major third in quick succession makes it sound like the minor third is just a passing tone, but it's also popular, I suspect, because it keeps the hand in the minor pentatonic scale pattern's position. The extension of this lick is where the soloist either convincingly hits or lands on the 7th scale degree and stays a while. And as we all know, a major 3rd played with the minor 7th suggests a dominant 7th harmony, which rather convincingly establishes the "key" as Mixolydian.

    Adding the major third has broken the player out of the pentatonic scale. Another very popular note to add to the pentatonic scale is the 6th scale degree -- played within the confines of the pentatonic pattern as the 3rd fret, 2nd string (first fret being the notes played by the first finger, of course). The other 6th an octave lower would require that the player move out of the basic pentatonic pattern, so I don't include it here. Once the player has added this note to his inventory, when using it in a minor pattern, he's just discovered the Dorian mode, although it may be some time before he realizes that's what it is. That's the way it was for me.

    A keen player will soon notice that the 3rd fret 1st string also works, it being the 2nd or 9th depending upon how you look at it, regardless of whether the blues is being played in a major or minor key. And it is at this point that the player is now playing diatonically, whether he or she realizes it or not. That's the way it was for me, at least. By the time I'd been playing the blues for -- oh, I'd say less than a year -- I was using all seven tones of a scale. But most of the time my scales were either Dorian or Mixolydian and almost never true major or minor. The flat sixth and sharp seven just didn't fit well with the style of blues I played.

    Not too long after that, I discovered licks that required the player to change positions as one played them. It was at that point that my discovery of the fretboard truly began.

    So what I'm getting at is it is a flawed premise to state or believe that a blues player sticks strictly to a minor pentatonic scale pattern -- or a major pattern three half-steps lower.

    At the outset of this post I mentioned that my musical background is probably different from most others here. I was a self-taught blues and rock guitarist with 8 years of playing under my belt when I discovered classical guitar. The discovery came at a time where I was growing increasingly frustrated with my playing because I felt it lacked depth or any sort of a foundation. Classical had all that -- in spades. So for the next 6 years, that was all I played. I even sold all my electric gear -- burned the boats on the beach. No going back. So I threw myself into classical, was a guitar major in college for my first two years of schooling, which was enough to give me a lasting foundation in music theory that I still apply to this day in my musical compositions. I'm even rather formal when it comes to musical composition. I prefer to score out my music on staves. I don't "speak" piano roll. Or tablature.

    After the six years of exclusive study, I bought an electric, and then an amp, and began to play in bands again. But I was a completely different guitarist than before. All those hundreds of hours of playing scales and arpeggios had paid off. I found myself mixing scale passages into my solos, using chromaticism more and even adding harmonic passages that I would have never thought of before. But this hasn't been so much a style change as it has been an increase in noodling. Which is why I'm here. I feel I have the chops to play some decent jazz passages, but I need to start thinking in a jazz style, if you will, so I'll have a halfway decent sounding output. I've already picked up some valuable advice here and I expect to pick up much more.
    Last edited by cooltouch; 02-11-2014 at 11:29 PM.

  13. #37

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Welcome to the forum mjgp3, and nice first post! I'd only argue that "feeling" your way through a box shape is quite the different thing to feeling your way through chromatically embellished substitute arpeggios and what not, and that given the choice over again personally I'd learn like the horn players learn, calculus first, music later!
    Hey thanks! I'll grant you that it is a different process and is insufficient on its own. I could've probably put it a little better. I just think having all the notes/arps/scales/whatever in your fingers and having the understanding of how and when to use them is a separate skill from improvising beautiful lines... I think the advantage to learning the blues scale first is that you gain some ability to improvise beautiful lines and that ability can become better informed with more learning and practice. If you learn all the other stuff first, you still might not be able to play something musical over a simple blues change... teachers will then tell you to 'solo using only 4 notes' or 'limit your choices' or whatever in an effort to get you to play more musically, it's essentially the same thing as the blues people but the other way around. I just think it's better to limit your choices when your faculties on the instrument are already limited and learn to play simply, but meaningfully, right from the get.

    The good blues scale noodlers have a way of outlining the chords without changing their thinking. They tweak that m3 a little whenever they play it over the I chord, or they only really hang on it over the IV chords (in that case its the b7)... little things like that. They are doing it because their ears tell them to, not because they have any knowledge of the theory. I think this is the place you want to be in when you are improvising regardless of skill level. All that practicing is just educating your ears so that eventually they will eventually tell you to play different, more interesting things, but your theory should never guide your fingers more than your ears... Unless I'm wrong

  14. #38

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    Quote Originally Posted by mjgp3
    ........They are doing it because their ears tell them to, not because they have any knowledge of the theory. I think this is the place you want to be in when you are improvising regardless of skill level. All that practicing is just educating your ears so that eventually they will eventually tell you to play different, more interesting things, but your theory should never guide your fingers more than your ears... Unless I'm wrong

    Well I think the whole "debate" actually pre dates guitar box noodlers. Take the Swing players (horns or piano), infact, consider Lester Young. He was big on major and minor 'blues" scales, yet where Coleman Hawkins would spell out every single chord change, Pres would "float" over them, trying to make the line make sense horizontally more so than vertically. It is true that he "felt" his way through the changes, letting his ear guide him. You'd say that the great Chet Baker played the same way, and quite a few others too. But these were exceptional players, saturated in the language of the era where they were hearing lines where chord tones were being addressed by most players at that time. This seeped into their playing. Post rock guitar players are steeped in a much more "modal" tradition, play one scale against everything....

    So I suppose that a good balance should be sought, even by the beginner, when attempting to play in a Jazz style. Vertical and Horizontal. Heck, even modal jazz guys mix up their bag quite a bit, inferring all sorts of implied changes or subs, even over static vamps. But yeah, playing blues and pent scales make it easy to make musical lines without much thought. Good for confidence in the early stages, but too many guitarists will never venture too far beyond what they learn in their first year! It's those damn boxes I tells ya....

  15. #39

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    The best way to start, is to play any music that you like, to the best of your ability.
    That provides a solid foundation for whatever music you take on next.

    The blues emerged from the same cultural continuum as jazz, which makes
    it an excellent springboard to jazz.

    There are situations in life where what worked in one environment will not get the job done in another.
    If we are listening, we will notice and make adjustments, figure out an alternative course of action,
    do some research and ask questions. Mistakes are part of the game, we start with dumb mistakes and progress to nuanced mistakes. Tomorrow, hopefully we will play just a bit better than today.

  16. #40

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    I think the blues is a great place to start but only if you can escape from there to see the bigger picture of music. The problem is that too many get stuck in the blues.

    So while I used to think it would be a good idea to start people on the blues and expect that they will progress to jazz, I think that progression happens very rarely...and so I'd probably start them on easy-to-digest jazz instead.

  17. #41

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    When I was studying with Jimmy Bruno, we tackled improvising over ii-V7-I progressions using notes and arpeggios drawn from the major scale right away. I wish someone had taken a similar tack when I started learning to play jazz on saxophone many years ago.

  18. #42

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    Of course blues should be taught from the start. How can this even be a question? If you're studying jazz you should also be studying blues. They're not separate. A minor 3rd over a major chord is not much of an advanced approach.

  19. #43

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    How can we address jazz without blue notes? It wouldn't be jazz.

  20. #44

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuitOp81
    IMHO the most beneficial thing for anyone, beginner and advanced, is to learn to play without thinking about scales, positions and substitutions, but just following the sound, and nothing could be better than something simple such as a limited set of notes (pentatonic) and a simple chord progression (blues). A simple diatonic major scale over a I-IV-V progression would work as well.
    I completely agree. I started out with the blues and feel it worked great for me for the reasons GuitOp81 states. When I hear bad jazz playing, or read posts on here about problems people are having soloing, it's always apparent to me that the number 1 problem that people are having is the ability to play by ear and with feeling. Or in other words they are over thinking. I can't state it enough on this forum, and I have stated it in several posts: a lot of jazz students over think and that's the root of your problem. There is no better solution for this than learning to play the blues, properly.

    One aspect to good soloing that the blues helped me to develop early was what I like to refer to as "the flow", i.e. the ability to play fluidly and seamlessly up and down the neck without ever dropping out of the pocket. This is what a previous poster referred to (forget name sorry) when he said he could play better solos then the sax guys who were doing math in their head, this is exactly my point.

    Having said all that, I made the decision years ago to give all my students the major scale as their first scale. There are many good reasons for this. It is the most flexible scale of all scales: it works in almost all styles (including the blues i.e. mixolydian). The same can't be said of the "blues" scale. It's the "mother scale" from which the pentatonic scale is derived or at least can be found within. The major scale is the scale that all formally / professionally trained musicians have started with for centuries. The other thing is with private guitar students you never know how long they will stay with you, so if someone is going to take only a few months of lessons, I want them to leave with the undisputed, most important scale learned.

    But eventually if they want to learn to improvise at a high level, I'm going to tell them: "You need to learn the blues!"
    Last edited by Guitarzen; 02-12-2014 at 04:00 PM.

  21. #45

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    Despite the fact that we are well away from the OP question... I don't feel bad cause we answered it... So here goes.... I get it ....the feeling of the blues, playing from a place of feeling... However I will posit that jazz is a thinking mans game... You gotta have feeling but also know where you are on the changes... An easy way to see this is take away the bass line or chords and most I would venture almost all "blues scale only" solos will sound like strung together licks and will sound lost.... ie no relevance or almost no relevance to the underlying harmony.... Jazz guitar is hard for guitar players because there is soooo much to get together to play from a place of freedom... But blues allows a simple structure to "start"from..... However I fight with my students all the time to stop cutting off their brain and to stay aware etc. also after they have comfort with the 1 4 5 blues, with chords and triads and arps, scales with the mixolydian mode, I then add the blues scale... At that point they have the harmony in their head... After this I go immediately to jazz blues in all twelve keys with both minor and major 2 5's. Then standards... But jazz is a thinking mans game
    Last edited by OPherman47; 02-12-2014 at 06:32 PM.

  22. #46

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    If we are talking about jazz improv, I think Ed Tomassi has an excellent take on it. Berklee Press.

  23. #47

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    Quote Originally Posted by Guitarzen

    I made the decision years ago to give all my students the major scale as their first scale. There are many good reasons for this. It is the most flexible scale of all scales: it works in almost all styles (including the blues i.e. mixolydian).

    The same can't be said of the "blues" scale. It's the "mother scale" from which the pentatonic scale is derived or at least can be found within.

    The major scale is the scale that all formally / professionally trained musicians have started with for centuries. The other thing is with private guitar students you never know how long they will stay with you, so if someone is going to take only a few months of lessons, I want them to leave with the undisputed, most important scale learned.

    Yes I agree, the notes of the Major scale seem a better place to start teaching a beginner than the notes of the blues scale.

  24. #48

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    It is worth noting, however, that the "beginner" may already have the knowledge of the major scale and its intervals. A beginner at jazz playing may have already been exposed to scales from another style of guitar (eg, classical), or from another instrument (eg, piano, sax, etc.). And when this is the case, obviously one need not linger on the major scale before advancing to other modes.

  25. #49

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    Quote Originally Posted by cooltouch
    It is worth noting, however, that the "beginner" may already have the knowledge of the major scale and its intervals. A beginner at jazz playing may have already been exposed to scales from another style of guitar (eg, classical), or from another instrument (eg, piano, sax, etc.). And when this is the case, obviously one need not linger on the major scale before advancing to other modes.
    Merely being exposed to the scales on other instruments may help with the sound, but it doesn't replace "lingering" on the scales on guitar to fully integrate the technique.

  26. #50

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    If you got 'em, play 'em.