Hey guys, welcome back to Jazz Star Insights. In this short podcast episode, I want to give you a tremendous boost in your playing and tell you why your jazz solos sound stiff and exactly what to do about it.
So you may find yourself having all the right notes, having all the right arpeggios, studying the fretboard, even looking at standards for years and then taking solos and going bluh. I'll give you the secret sauce. It's not that secret, but let's put it this way—it's the sauce. Let's get going.
Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists to learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Mark, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy a French accent, make sure to subscribe.
All right, so does this sound like you?
I will be playing. I don't have a backing track, I have nothing, I just have the guitar plugged in here. Right. I'm going to play on the two, five, one in the key of C major and let me know if you recognize yourself in that solo at one, two, three, four.
Tap it.
Right. So you have something like the chord happens and then you start to play stuff on it. And then the next chord happens, the G7 happens. And then you start to play something on it. Then a chord happens, and you play something on it. So here's the easy fix. I'm going to sound like a broken record. Maybe I am a broken record. Who knows? The trick is to aim at where you are going more deliberately, more often, and hopefully most of the time. And that's a great Miles Davis quote also, which is a really short quote I think is really deep. He said, "Everything's a pickup." Actually, when I start to play on something, I just start with a foot in the air and then I land somewhere else.
So you might have heard this, the solo I just played, like, "Man Mark, if I could play like this," like, yeah, you probably can, because all I played is D Dorian to G7, maybe G7 altered to C major or something. I didn't play crazy notes, so probably integrating the crazy notes into chromatics and this arpeggio and this and that is much, much easier and much more appealing. And it sounds like it's supposed to be the right thing versus working on the phrasing of it, working on the landing aspect of it. So here's a reprise, as we say in French. I will just go and solo the way I would, and you will completely hear the changes. You'll probably hear the drastic difference between the two types of playing.
I want a two and one, two, three.
One. Two. Two. One.
So, see, each line has the purpose of setting up its destination. So very deliberately, the line in and of itself doesn't mean anything. It only means something if it's put somewhere in a bar where I can deliberately resolve it. Another way to say it would be I'm making what's coming after very, very inevitable. Think about it like an elastic band. So the beginning of the line, when I start, I just pull on that band—I pull, pull, pull, pull—and then when it gets there, it becomes really easy. It's like, "Oh, that's where we wanted to go." So that's the opposite approach of having a chord. You know, you hit it, boom, it sounds. And then I go like, "Oh, I got to play something on that," and "Oh, the next one happens, oh, I got to play something on that."
So basically, it's going to be really, really easy and stupid in ways. But it's almost as if jazz players just shift their timeline two beats ahead or more. But let's start with two beats ahead.
So let me transform your playing. I'll go in and use syncopations and words like attack, attack, attack. I'll use my mouth to say it. It's not, "Dagger that, dagger that." It's like one three. But it's—you ready? Bada bada. I'm not mad at that. It's, "And four and one." And land on four. One.
So you transform, say, a scale. Instead of starting, say, C major 1-2-3-4, you go like this:
Bad bad bad bad. Pick up and land. Pick up and land. Pick up and land. Pick up and land. And if you do this well, it's going to sound a little bit like what I'm doing. I know, easier said than done. So for this, you require knowledge of the fretboard, of the chords that are passing by. You need knowledge of the chord that's happening later.
And that's how I teach my coaching students. Actually, when I'm improvising, it's seldom about the current chord. It's always about the chord I'm going to land on next. Whatever I'm doing now is about that, because once the chord is hit, it's too late to start doing stuff to it. It has landed. This ship has sailed, right? It's like, "Oh, we hit C major." So yeah, forget about C major now. There's nothing else you can do.
Hey guys, just a quick note. If you're enjoying this content and you're eager to boost your own jazz guitar playing, then connect with us. We've transformed the jazz skills of thousands of guitarists. You can find the link in the description or head directly over to Jazz Guitar Lessons dot net to begin your journey. All right, let's dive back into the episode.
Another good analogy for this is if I'm now talking into a microphone, the words that I mouth are too late. Like, when it's coming out of my mouth, actually, my next ideas are already queued. That's the only way I'm able to speak fluently—well, semi-fluently in English. That's the only way I can keep the flow coming. Because if I were really looking into the word that's sounding now, it would really stop my ideas to a halt and wouldn't really make sense, right? So it's the same in soloing. It's like we have to look ahead.
So start with this idea. I'm just going to leave you with that. As soon as we have a C major, that's our landing point, right? And you say, "Well, my landing point for this is going to be the third." I love landing on the third. You could pick the fifth—C, D, E, F, G, right? The fifth or the third—C, E. Set yourself up an exercise where you have a C chord on beat one but start up from C, so from F. A-1-2-A-1-2-3-4, A-1-2-3-4. You go three, four, and one.
So it's not any new scales, any new crazy arpeggios, whatever. And then once you get good at that, see if you can make it longer. Pick up. And one of my favorite ways to do it is to go again for one, two, three, land. You know, other than a one, two, three. Better that. I can guarantee you don't need to learn any new scales or arpeggios. Just reframing where you put the placement of these rhythms in your phrasing is one of the biggest, most tremendous impacts I see in my students from one day to the next. Like, "Now I hear it ahead of time." Yeah, exactly.
I can guarantee if you take Black Orpheus or Blue Bossa or Autumn Leaves or whatever, and you do that exercise on all of the chords, and then you let that pickup mentality inform your soloing, you will go from, say, a rock-blues decent improviser into someone that sounds like, "Wow, this sounds like jazz."
On that note, thanks for listening to the podcast. Keep coming. I receive all your emails. I love reading your comments, and I'll see you soon in the next episode. Take care. Bye!
