You're Failing At The Blues Scale

foreign [Music] hey everybody welcome to amy and ultimusic i'm not going to beat around the bush here that was a bad example was a an example of me playing the blues scale badly it was an example of me kind of trying to copy the solos that i hear from high school students middle school students when i go to different jazz festivals and it's a great start but here's the problem and it's why i mean i don't really think you're failing but it's why i think you could do better if the blues scale is the only thing we've got to work with and it's not i've got other videos about how you can improvise over the blues without the blues scale but let's just say that it is because a lot of times a teacher will write on the board all right tony you're going to improvise for a chorus c blues these are the notes you can use c e flat f f sharp g b flat and c tony go and then tony does just what i did at the beginning when i showed you my bad example the thing that the teacher often neglects is to tell tony that you don't have to play the notes in order you don't have to play all of the notes you can take a break sometimes and you can be creative and soulful with these notes if you just write a string of notes up there of course the kid's going to play all the notes of course they're probably going to play them in order and of course they're probably not going to ever think i could rest sometimes so i'm going to show you just three things you can do to up your game if the blues scale is the only thing you have at your disposal and again it's not but what if it was here's the first thing i'll show you instead of using all six of those notes just choose one how about that could i take a whole chorus on one note and make it interesting let's see how about the b flat two three four [Music] now i don't know about you but i really wanted to play more notes you probably wanted to hear more notes as well but you probably also thought is she ever going to play another note if you were in the audience you would think is she ever going to play another note man she's really making this note i mean she's doing what she can with it dang that was kind of tasty at least i hope so i hope that's what you thought if i'm going to make one note interesting i've got to take a break sometimes i've got to rest for a while i don't know if you noticed but sometimes i would rest for quite a while and then when it was time to play that note again i made sure to play with intention so i played really strong jazz rhythms rhythms that i know will work i've got a whole video about strong jazz rhythms it's one of the first videos i ever made the rhythms like this [Music] da da da da like that strong intentional rhythms that swing now when you add more notes to the mix you have to keep these things in mind so what if we just add two more notes to the mix what if we set a rule that you can only play three of these notes let's call them c b-flat and g all right any order but keep in mind we want to play with intention we want to take rests and we want to have good strong jazz rhythms two three four [Music] big long rest oh i didn't quite execute you saw what i wanted to do [Music] not bad right it gets a little more interesting all right so that's my first advice just take a note just take two notes just take three notes and see what you can do with them don't just play one chorus like i'm doing for the sake of time on my youtube video play ten choruses put on your eye reel play along whatever play if you could just go to youtube and type in c blues play along and get a bunch of them put it on play for 10 choruses and only let yourself play two notes or three notes or one note whatever you decide limit yourself like that for a while that's the first piece of advice the second piece of advice i have is to play a melody a melody that you create in yourself that somebody else might want to sing some time i don't know about you but i'm never gonna want to sing [Music] i'm never gonna want to sing that but if you take these notes and think about them in a more intentional way a way that screams sing me i think you're going to think of more ideas and better ideas let's try that i'm going to sing along just because i want this to be really singable and memorable [Music] be [Music] not bad did you notice some of the devices that i used in order to make a melodic solo long notes some skips from low to high from high to low i used some repeating phrases some phrases that i did over and over again so that you might have some connection with me while i'm playing you might understand what i'm doing or predict what comes next even those are important things when you're building a solo to make your audience feel like they're a part of the experience all right so that's the second thing play with melodic intention third thing is to make silly rules up for yourself about certain notes i say silly because you probably wouldn't really ever do this while you're soloing but when we practice you know sometimes we do silly things so let's take these notes [Music] let's think about a couple of them what if i tell myself that every time i play an f i have to play it twice [Music] it gave me something new didn't it let's make a different silly rule what about every time i play a b-flat a g has to follow [Music] oh that's the first note i played that wasn't in the blues scale i lose the next rule i'm going to make is that i have to choose one strong rhythmic figure and stick with it the whole time all right so let's see how about that one [Music] change it slightly [Music] you can take your figure and decide to put it in different places so sometimes i put it on beat one right but maybe i put it on two here you can be extra creative if you just give yourself one strong rhythmic figure and let yourself go with it you might want to start a little easier maybe you just start with ba boo let's start on three one two two three four one two three now let's do it on one one two three four let's do it on four [Music] then at some point i swear after you limit yourself to these new kinds of ideas and you're not just running the scale up running the scale down at some point you're going to start to put these ideas together and make your own amazing solos just using the notes of the blues scale and one thing that i forgot to say is that you only need one blues scale over the whole blues you don't have to change to the four blue scale or the five blue scale like f or g c will work over the whole thing if you don't believe me just ask bb king so i'm gonna keep these things in mind i'm going to just use a couple of notes a couple of places in the blues scale to focus on i'm going to use strong rhythmic figures i'm going to play melodically i might not set silly rules i might throw that one out the window for now but let me see what kind of a solo i can take my very best blue scale solo two three four [Music] it's nice to run that four and sharp four and five together like that [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] ah one v natural [Music] hope that gives you a lot to think about when it comes to the blues scale and how you could do better i think you could do better i'll see you next time on amy nolte music

Channel: Aimee Nolte Music

Views: 35,046

Keywords: amy, nolty, jazz, piano, blues, scale, solo, improv, earthworks, hallet davis

Id: PQSvjkgL0AU

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022