Jazz Guitar Lessons
Improve Your Improv
Guitarist Greg Chako shares a few exercises that have proven very effective with his guitar students.
Gene Bertoncini once told me that most guitarists simply play what they already know. I believe that’s true, and over the past year or so, I have developed some exercises to help my students avoid that pitfall. I believe that with repetition in weekly group lessons, these exercises are very effective to make more engaging solos. I’d like to share some of these ideas with you in the hopes that it will help you improve your own approach.
My two most advanced guitar students are in their 60’s in age, and came to me with an already developed skill set. In fact, they both have played professionally. In other words, they were somewhat “set in their ways!” But when I listened to them improvising on a standard song, I noticed that the solos sort of meandered, and often their lines had no definitive starting or stopping point. And it seemed to me that the lines failed to adequately highlight the guide-tones (the 3rd and 7ths) of the chords, and/or neglected primary chord tones at the key moments (for instance, with a lines resolution). These issues make the changes harder to hear. It appeared that they relied far more on scales than on anything else, which contributed to a more notey or rambling effect. To my ears, these problems make the solos less interesting, captivating, and engaging to the listener.
One thing I like to explain is meaning of “Leitmotivs” in Wagner’s operas, as an introduction to the concept of playing short melodic motifs of 3 to 5 notes only. All of the following exercises are reductive and restrictive in nature, forcing the student to ‘slow down,’ and to play less notes and scales, in order to encourage better development of melodies.
The first exercise is to sequence a short motif. Sequencing involves repeating a melodic passage at a different pitch, or arranging notes, chords, and rhythms into patterns. Here are two basic examples of how one might sequence a motif (Examples 1 & 2):
Once one becomes adept at doing this, it’s relatively easy to embellish the original 3-5 notes by reversing the direction of the line, which is called “inversion,” or adding more notes to develop the short motifs into longer, more complex lines that might also utilize scales and arpeggios. The point of the exercise is to encourage thinking in terms of melodic motifs (instead of a scale). In my opinion, motifs can serve as a springboard for more lengthy or complex lines as the solo develops. It also gives the listener something easy to ‘grasp’. In my experience, listeners are more captivated (drawn into) to your solo if you begin it with short melodic and rhythmic motifs, before increasing the number of notes or the complexity of the solo line.
Another exercise we’ve tried is to deliberately limit your solo to mostly whole-notes and half-notes, with only rarely a quarter or eighth-note. This is to encourage sensible note-choice while avoiding the running of scales; that is, deliberately focusing on making a melody while simultaneously being aware of the chord tones, chord scale, and/or guide tones of the moment. If you’ve read any of my past articles discussing Guide-Tones and Melody, it should come as no surprise that in the sample exercise below, the Guide-Tones of the chords are frequently chosen, just as they are so predominant in the melodies of The Great American Songbook. These restrictive exercises can, in my mind at least, give students specific (practice) ways to begin to approach their improvised solos more like they are composing melodies on the spot, rather than simply playing what they already know and overemphasizing scales. Something like this, (Example #3):
This exercise can be expanded on (or slightly altered) to highlight alternative approaches to comping, and/or to strengthen one of the (only) 3 primary things that any guitarist can do. What 3 things are those? They are:
#1 – play chords (3 or more notes at a time);
#2 – play single lines (one note at a time); or
#3 – play “double-stops” (2-notes at a time).
Some of my students rely heavily on the most popular and well-known 4, 5, or 6-note chord voicings, including the infamous “Barre-Chord.” I’m speaking of well-known chords like these (Example #4):
While all these chords are well and good, it’s my experience as a teacher, that some students play these chords often because their first introduction to them might have come from a book with chord diagrams, and they’ve more or less memorized the diagrams without necessarily knowing for sure what each note in the chord actually is (what specific chord tone it is), and without having any formal training in voice-leading.
Guitar and piano are the two best instruments for developing contrapuntal voice-leading, which basically means two or more independent melodic lines happening simultaneously. It also can be described as “counterpoint,” or at least, good voice-leading is dependent on the rules for good counterpoint. The best jazz guitarists do this routinely, players like Gene Bertoncini and Howard Alden for instance. These exercises can help put us on the right track to approach this best method of playing and comping.
Again, the emphasis of these exercises is reductive in nature, presented to get us to think, play far fewer notes, and to enjoy practicing something brand new. Being asked to comp for each other using only “double-stops” is intriguing and very useful in my opinion. The following exercise uses the very same single-line half-notes of example #3, but with a 2nd note added below it, forming a double-stop. It describes the harmony fairly well due to the prevalence of guide-tones. (Example #5):
I believe that a prerequisite to exploring exercises like these above, and indeed, pretty much the only thing one really needs to know about theory in my opinion, is how to spell! That is, we need to know what the actual chord tones are of any chord, for example: Cmaj7#11 = C(root), E(third), G(fifth), B(major 7th) and F#(#11), etc. When serious students begin studying with me, one of the first things I do is quiz them on chord spelling and make sure that they understand how chords are derived from the Diatonic scale, and how to “spell.”
Another very fun exercise, especially if you have two improvising students at a time, is to practice a 1 to 2-bar “call-n-response” with the melody of a song, or in a trading “dialogue” with each other, each soloist playing just a 1 to 2-bar phrase. In this exercise, the student “answers” the initial statement of the melody, or the 2nd guitarists’ line, in a similar fashion to how a brass or reed section of a big band might fill the space after the lead-line vocalist finishes his or her melodic phrase. This exercise also develops on-the-spot ear training and is fun practicing with someone else in a group context. The ear training aspect is vital, because sometimes, a student is so immersed in what they’re going to play for their solo that they forget to listen carefully to what’s going on around them … i.e. what the other players are playing. This exercise encourages the student to listen more closely as he/she will be responding to either the melody or what the second soloist just played, so it’s just like a sharing conversation instead of only one person doing all the talking! Listening better to each other is vital – in my experience, good rhythm section players (I’m thinking of bassists and drummers) do this intuitively, and guitarists should also!
It is well known that Miles Davis might walk up to one of his sidemen and play a riff, encouraging them to imitate and embellish that riff on-the-spot ‘by ear’. Similarly, but without the being onstage stress(!), this exercise helps each individual player get ‘out of their own heads’ for a moment and instead, makes them pay more attention to the music happening around them. It’s certainly a win-win technique! This is (Example #6), using the melody of “Out of Nowhere”:
There are other practices that may accomplish a similar goal. Those herein are only a few examples that have had proven positive results in the eyes of my current students. Space limitations are in effect, so I encourage readers to contact me directly with any questions or comments . . . I encourage dialogue about effective practice routines that can improve our improvising and be fun in the doing!
Greg Chako’s New Album: ‘My World On Six Strings’
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!