Jazz Guitar Improvisation for Beginners

you so you might not think this but improvisation is actually quite straightforward to learn it's very similar to learning a spoken language it's just the musical spoken language now it's not black magic or anything like that but I think where a lot of people get tripped up when they try to learn improvisation but just haven't got their process sorted out their method for learning it so today we're going to cover an example of how to implement improvisation into your playing using a very simple scale so in today's lesson I'm not going to get too much into the theory of the nuts and bolts of what's going on harmonically when you improvise and things like that what I'm going to do is show you a very simple pentatonic minor scale pattern so use a lot already by rock players blues players and we're going to justify it a bit and show you the process of what you can do to break out of just playing the scale up and down and create come up with something a little bit more creative and original even though the pattern is very standard ok so let's get into it we'll go to a close-up now so if you need a diagram for this and anything else I'm covering in this lesson today you can find it for the on the post for this lesson video at my website fret dojo comm and you can download all the PDFs there and work along with this video ok so let's make a start here what we're going to do first is play the minor pentatonic scale pattern the famous scale used by nearly every rock guitarist on the planet but we're going to treat it more as I mentioned in a jazz context today so let's play this pattern first just to get the feel of it okay so now that we've got the pattern sorted out I want to show you what we're aiming for today so I'm going to show you an improvisation using various approaches and permutations of this scale pattern over a simple minor jazz progression okay so let's give it a go okay so the first thing you should do with this scale pattern exercise is simply play with the backing track that I've provided on the post and mess around with playing the scale up and down a little bit you don't have to play the full scale up and down just take a few notes here and there and improvise with that I'll just quickly show you now what that should sound like okay so as you can see that sounded okay but it sounded a little bit plain a little bit vanilla-flavored it wasn't hip enough so what we're going to do is use this scale in a different way and take some ideas from the jazz vocabulary and apply it to this simple scale so but a lot of horn players playing fourths and that's a very convenient interval for a guitarist as you can make that interval most of the time by just crossing a string like this from a lower note to the same fret on a higher note so what we're going to do is I'll show you now how to play this scale with that in mind it's it uses what my teacher map calls a left left right right pattern so you take if you're kind of looking from my angle the left side of your hand so and play two notes and then take the pattern on the right side of your hand and play these two notes yeah so left lend can you see what I'm doing that so instead of going just up the scale like this I'm going left left right right left left right right left left right right and you can do that down as well that sort of thing you can find the detailed exercise for that on the post for this lesson so let's now in not actually just play the scale up and down we're going to exclusively focus on this first idea or piece of vocabulary so let's play this backing track again and then try to improvise just using that idea of the left left right right playing in fourths okay let's try related to this you can use that similar idea to branch your vocabulary out even further and now play fourths but descending kind of as you move up the up the fretboard so instead of starting with this note go in reverse and you could then play the backing track once again try that technique and then until it feels really under your fingers until it feels like it's kind of going into the subconscious part of your brain instead of the more conscious thing you can just do it more spontaneously so I'm kind of showing you a crash course today in the process but keep in mind that you you should really stick to just one or two ideas per practice session and not try to cram it in too much okay cool so we've played the backing track with those first two ideas and now we're going to introduce the next idea so this is using the same idea of fourths but this time going not just up all the time or down all the time we're going to combine it so if we look at on the on the exercise sheet there exercise two point three you can go left left ascending and then right right descending yeah descending that's right so left left ascending right right descending okay so let's try to improvise with that idea now and see what it sounds like okay so now that we have mastered fourths and the various permutations you can use on the scale with fourths what we're going to do now is move to a different concept called approach notes so approach notes are used a lot in jazz music it's one of the iconic pieces of vocabulary from the tradition and the way that you can use approach notes on this scale and practice them in is you simply play the scale as you would normally but you put one note one fret down before you hit each note of the scale so I'll show you what that looks like instead of like this you go like this one note down then the scale note one note down then the scale note one note down then the scale note and you can do that going backwards as well so now let's just treat this idea in isolation and I'll give you an example of improvising over that with the same back backing track but this time using these approach notes just those don't try to mix in the other ideas quite yet okay so the final idea that we're going to cover to vary up the scale a bit today is using what's called enclosure notes the guitarist Joe Pass uses this a lot in his playing so check him out for inspiration there now to do enclosures over each scale note what this is how you do it what it enclosure basically is is playing one note above one note below and then hitting the scale note for each note of the scale so instead of going the normal scale what we do is we play one note above one note below and then finally the scale note and we do that for the next one so practice that idea up and down and then once again the backing track comes out solo over the tune using exclusively that idea almost until you get bored with it if you start to get bored with an idea when you're playing it's a good sign because it means that it's starting to filter down to the subconscious it's getting boring because it's getting easier because your subconscious is taking over now that's a really good sign so let's try the backing track again but this time using this enclosure pattern a so we've worked on fourths we've worked on approach notes and we've worked on enclosures so for the final step of getting to what I showed you at the start of the video what you should do is mix it all together now and deliberately kind of try to incorporate these three different ideas as you practice now after you do that for a while you should be able to start to improvise without even kind of thinking about it so consciously and that's where the magic really starts to happen so why don't I show you finally combining all these ideas to come up with what we were aiming for a jazz slant over this very common scale so let's give it a try okay so if you're not there already head to my website frat dojo calm for the post for this lesson you can find all the resources mentioned the backing track but diagrams and so forth so that you can learn to do exactly what I did on this video today and if you subscribe to my newsletter on the home page of my website you can get updates of when the next lesson comes out as well as other posts that aren't videos I do written posts about other aspects of guitar playing too so you can check them out if you sign up there so I hope you've had a good time today thanks very much for your time and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of fret dojo bye for now and a quick reminder before you go to download your free copy of the exercise worksheet for this lesson at WWF ready Joe calm

Channel: FretDojo.com

Views: 292,563

Keywords: Jazz (Musical Genre), Jazz Guitar (Musical Instrument), Guitar (Musical Instrument), Joe Pass (Musical Artist)

Id: 3VULt1Ha6BE

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2015