If you are starting from scratch and have never improvised before, or are more advanced but are struggling to sound convincing in your solos, then this article is for you.
“At the moment jazz guitar improvisation to me is like when you start a drawing or a painting – you have a big blank canvas and you just don’t know where to start!“
I can really resonate with this. I studied for years with many gifted teachers and learnt a ton of tunes. Although I could comp well, play licks and knew all my scales and arpeggios, I had no idea how to improvise convincingly. What was going on?
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Today you’re going to see an improvisation practice method I’ve assembled together over the years from various tips given to me from several teachers and also through my own observation.
Note that this isn’t the only way to skin the cat (jazz cat?), but if you’re struggling to get started or feeling stale in your improv this could be a good starting point for you.
A big misconception about improvisation is that everything you play has to be a new idea on the spot, as if plucked from thin air.
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As Joe Pass outlines in this interview (fast forward to 0:47 in the video), improvisation is more the act of spontaneous music making, drawing on ideas and vocabulary you’ve already learnt or listened to, i.e. the raw materials stored in your subconscious mind.
Jazz is very similar to having a conversation. A fluent English speaker is not consciously remembering what words to say, he is just drawing on those words stored in the subconscious mind and uses them for the purpose of communicating.
Every study of improvisation that I do directly relates to a specific recording that I’ve listened to. This gives you a wealth of raw material to draw on when it’s time to do a gig with the tune.
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For a great guide on how to find suitable recordings when you’re embarking on learning a new tune, check out this one by Steve Nixon, creator of freejazzlessons.com and pianolessonsonline.com.
If you’ve never listened to this album before, stop everything and check it out right now. This is the greatest selling jazz album of all time and it had a big impact on defining the genre.
For any tune you study, check out a few recordings and pick the one that really resonates to you – something that you feel would be worth the effort and interesting to you to devote quite a lot of time to.
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As an aside, at this point you should also learn and memorise the melody to the tune. We aren’t covering learning melody in this article, however this is a good step here as it can help provide a lot of good ideas for improv and can help your solo sound more cohesive with the tune.
Even though this article is all about improvisation, the first thing I would do when approaching a tune is to not to go straight to the improv, but to learn the comping (chord changes) instead.
Practicing comping is a good initial step to being more secure in your soloing as doing this helps your ear to get used to the changes. Aside from that, most of the time as a guitarist is not spent soloing but comping instead, so it’s important we have this base covered anyway.
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*Note – the chords shown above are from my own composition “Says Who?” which happens to have the same chord changes as So What, but as they use the same harmonies it’s worth looking at here…
Knowing the chords will give you a good foundation for soloing later on. Next, it’s time to analyse the harmony i.e. the chord progression of
It’s difficult sometimes to determine which scale choice to use on modal tunes, but if you listen to the recording it’s clear that in this case the scale choices are primarily Dorian mode:
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Note about the scale patterns – don’t just stick to the one box pattern I’ve given you above. Try to practice the scales over the whole neck, to give you a bit more range on the guitar:
Contrary to what many people think, scales won’t actually help you much to improvise in a jazz style. This is just the framework, the ‘blank canvas’ for our painting.
Now that we have these scales figured out over the chords, try the exercises below to get the fingerboard’s ‘lay of the land’ clearly in our minds.
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(Note: I don’t like to play initially with backing track, as I find if I do that with new scales or material it can cramp my style a bit too much, and it’s hard to get the music to ‘flow’.)
The next step to establishing the foundation for our improvisation is to work out what the corresponding arpeggios for the chord progression are.
Like scales, arpeggios are a good foundation for understanding the layout of the guitar neck, which is crucial for being able to improvise. Arpeggios also sound more jazzy than scales due to their angular melodic shape.
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There are only Minor 7 chords in So What, so you only need to apply min7 arpeggios that correspond to each scale pattern you’ve just learnt (root notes in red):
This is where many guitarists end up when they study jazz guitar improvisation. They have a clear understanding of scale choices, arpeggios, and the chord progression. And that’s it.
Whilst scales and arpeggios are essential to study, they serve only as a foundation for improvisation and a fallback. They are not an end in themselves.
Jazz Guitar Improvisation
If you don’t study anything apart from scales and arpeggios, it might not sound like you are doing any wrong notes, but it will sound very vanilla flavoured – there will be very little jazz colouring in your solos.
In the end, you don’t tend to consciously refer to scales and arpeggios very much whilst improvising jazz. Rather, the key ingredient to improvising jazz convincingly is by learning jazz vocabulary. Let’s cover this now.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, improvising is all about learning the language of jazz (i.e. vocabulary) and then using it to communicate. It’s not consciously trying to invent your own words up on the spot – if you take this approach, it’s likely no one will be able to understand you!
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It’s is the time honoured way for any jazz musician to incorporate new ideas into their playing and get some raw materials for spontaneous creative expression.
At this point, listen to the recording and be on the lookout for some ideas and musical phrases (‘licks’) that appeal to you in the solos you hear.
Important transcribing tip: try not to slow the recording down if at all possible. See if you can transcribe at the full tempo of the recording. Only if it seems impossible to do this then slow it down to 75%.
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Try to wean yourself off using any ‘slow down’ functions the software may offer because it’s much better for your ears to be able to transcribe at full tempo (and it’s a lot faster to transcribe too).
If you really struggle with transcribing, an alternative is using a transcription someone else has already done of the solo. In a way this is a much faster process as you can quickly find tabs for the lick that you’re interested in studying.
However, you’ll find that when you do a transcription by ear you get much more attuned to the licks that appeal to you, as well as a more intimate understanding of the solo. It’s also excellent ear training.
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If time and interest permit you can do this. Learning and memorising a great jazz player’s solo is a good way to study how a great player structures their solos, how to create high points in the solo, and how a great soloist articulates their notes.
However, this actually isn’t necessary for getting material for your own improvisation – in fact it could be a bit of a red herring in terms of our specific goal of learning to improvise.
Some people think if they simply learn a full transcription all the way through they’ll be able to improvise, but that’s not necessarily the case – it very much depends on whether or not they have studied the vocabulary in the solo deeply enough.
Guitar Chord Exercises
If there’s only a few licks that really stick out to you in the recording, just transcribe those – it won’t take too much time and you can quickly accumulate a wealth of jazz vocabulary by doing this.
Put any licks you find in a licktionary (lick dictionary), either in a digital or paper form. I arrange my licktionary according to each recording I study.
Upon listening to this recording, I’ve come across a tasty line that Miles uses early on in his solo. I’m going to grab that and record it in my trusty licktionary:
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*Note that for copyright reasons this and the rest of the licks that follow are not the licks from the recording but my own that are in the style of the players. They are similar enough though so is a good example of what I’m trying to demonstrate
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