Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Jazz improvisation: from scale to lines

I am recommending yet another lesson by this superb jazz guitar teacher Jamie Holroyd. I always find it difficult to apply scales that I practiced into musical lines while improvising. As a matter of fact, if one only plays the scales as-is, it doesn't sound good at all. Of course there is no magic formula (if it exists, I wasn't able to find it after all these years. Neither did my Berklee teacher) Still, it is possible to compare and think about the differences between "non-musical-simply-playing-out-the-scale" vs "musical-improv-lines":

  • where do you start the line? one could start on the last beat before the measure of the chord. And also, one could start on the 6th of the chord instead of the root (see his Example 2) or the 5th (probably easier to identify!) like his Example 3. 
  • 8th note is like the "default" for improv but obviously it's boring to hear all 8th note during your solo. Mix it up with some 16th note like Example 2 (easy to play on guitar as hammer-on and pull-off.) Or mix it up with some 4th note like Example 3. 
  • move up the scale and then come down like both of those examples.