Adding chromaticism to your lines. for this podcast, we'll only have one topic as an experiment, as the previous ones, they had two topics each. So we'll see how it goes for this one. Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Marc, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe.
So about Chromatics. it's a question I get often asked by students on or through the website. how do I get my jazz lines to sound like it's jazz and all that jazz thing? or people feel they're playing too much inside. Like inside of the scales. People ask me, how can I play outside of the scales and still know what I'm doing right?
And so we'll address that today. My first answer to this question would be if you want to add outside notes, you really have to know what notes are good with notes or inside, right? often you'll simply go more chromatic, to come back inside. If you're playing on a certain, chord or certain progression, you may stretch it out and say, okay, this is a major.
And then I'm going to do a bit of B-flat major and a bit of C major, and then come back to A major. So by studying whatever the tune of the progression, you want to improvise on, you are unlocking the other potential. there's an, a tremendous potential in the inside notes, because this is a diatonic scale.
It has seven notes. Let's say we're in the key. we'll do B-flat blues.
So that's B-flat seven. If you know exactly what's what notes or inside the score.
You only have five notes left to to ornament. It means that out of the 12 chromatic notes, you're playing seven of them. So you're playing more than half of them. So half of them are good. Half of them are well outside. So you could basically be playing randomly, and your chances of hitting your, inside notes over 5060.
It's seven out of 12. like this.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.
So what I will do now is we have a better idea of what I'm doing. I'll flick the metronome at 80 on two and four, which is a tempo of 160, and I'll try to play clear lines that are inside and right after play, lines that are outside and go back and forth. More often than not, the types of lines I like to do is be inside, go outside and come back.
Ready? 1201234.
Boom boom boom.
Boom.
Boom.
So.
Boom boom boom. Back in the boom.
So.
Back.
So that might give you some ideas. try to be very clear as to what is outside and what is inside. And to know that you have to know the seven good notes of the diatonic scales. Next up, we could discuss the chromatic scale. If you know well what the chromatic scale is, you can use it to glue your lines together, so to speak.
the chromatic scale is basically all the notes that all the 12 notes in existence in our system. So if you took the guitar and you played your little string, then you played that's open string and you played fret one, fret two, etc.. You could do that with just one finger. That's your chromatic scale. on the guitar, you could be playing just, on a single string like this, which is pretty obvious.
Up or down.
But what I like to do, and I created a page on the jazz guitar lessons at that website. It's called Chromatic Scale. Hey everyone, just a quick break here. If you're loving this episode and you want to elevate your own jazz stars skills, reach out to us. We've gathered thousands of guitarists and becoming accomplished jazzers beyond their wildest dreams, so check the link in the description or visit Jazz Guitar Lessons dot net to get started today.
Okay, now back to the episode. You can learn to play that in a sort of, awkward position. It's called for restraint. So let's start on a C note on the sixth string, eight fret. And then use my fingers one, two, three, four and then move to the next string, one fret down.
Etc.. Got to be careful with the third and second string. There's a change of tuning and back down.
Once again.
So that's four notes on each string. If you really want to go diagonal and have some phrasing options, I recommend learning the six notes per string, which is also found on the on the page on the website. What you do is you start on the third fret of the sixth string on a G note, and your index there will play two notes by sliding.
Then your other three fingers will play one note each, and the pinky plays two. So your two outside fingers play two notes. That's all on the same string. 123456. Repeat the process on each individual string until you reach G three octaves later.
On. So if you've never really done that, that type of stuff, you don't necessarily have a lot of chromaticism available to you. So learn the chromatic scales first. For example, we can play beautiful strictly chromatic stuff.
Boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo. Then. This is all. This is not in a key, right? This is all, from the chromatic scale.
But as I was doing previously on Blues, what you can try to do is start your line in a key and then play just chromaticism stuff and with good rhythms and good Northern Quarter notes, and then try to resolve back. as an example, we'll use a major.
Break. Here's a major.
Break.
Outside.
Inside. Etc.. This is fairly vague as you can, you will have to try to apply this stuff on your own as a third approach. it's nice to know a few ways to to be able to ornament chord tones. So that's my third suggestions. You know, it's like playing around arpeggios really. For example, if I'm on a C major, major seven.
That's just the arpeggio 135715712. So you could practice exercises like be able to approach it from below.
So the same arpeggio.
And then you could approach it from above from the next scale down a but not necessarily chromatically, but you.
Will. And then you can mix and match and you can start lower.
To.
Do the.
So basically what you're targeting is the arpeggio. You build some exercises around it and you try to only think of the arpeggio when your fingers will do the magic for you, you know, go above, go below, do a little chromatic line like.
Another example of this is you're augmenting arpeggios now, but you could also say, all right, the ornament is only the same thing. I have said that on C major. But you try to reflect this within a melodic line. So this is called side slipping. You could do half step down half step. But for instance I'm in C major.
And in B. Or you could repeat the same line.
Or you could could kind of bury your sight slipping inside of a line.
Moving. Of course, this is also very vague. You have to try this process on your own and see what works as a component of this chromatic thing. I think it's very good to practice bebop scales in general. It's good, but it's a meaningful way to play more chromatically. bebop scales as you may have read or watch a video on on the website, it's all about taking a scale that has seven notes and transforming it into a scale that has eight notes.
So it's more aligned, rhythmically with a bar for four, for instance, on C major chord. Scale C major. Bebop.
if you really want to be serious about adding bebop scales to your playing and chromatically, a very nice approach I've done. I think I recorded a video about this. It's called Bebop Modes, so that you take each starting note of C major, which is a mode on its own, and you add a passing tone to each. So in total you will have five passing tones, and C major has seven notes.
So you're left with the whole chromatic scale to decide from. So basically this will teach you to play any of the 12 notes at any time when you're only just playing on a C major. It's a lot of fun. if you start, especially if you start, okay. On the C. Now, starting on the.
Starting on E. Starting on F. Starting on G. This is Mixolydian, right? on a, something on B. And back on C.
You should be able to play them. Of course. Up and down and down and up and whatever on two octaves. On three octaves with different fingerings. my personal favorite way to approach this bebop scale with mode, thing. You can start with a pick up. Right? So if you take any of those seven modes that you build for yourself and you start with a pick up on the end of three, I think I did then the video to, instead of doing C major like this.
You started like this 1 to 3.
So if you're able to play every mode like this.
One it means that you can play anything at any time, and you can still figure a way to find the core tones back. So it comes back to my first suggestion, where are the good notes, is where it's happening, and then you ornament around it. One last suggestion. It's a bit, maybe a bit more advanced. but it will be my first and last suggestion for this podcast.
I don't know if you're aware of the great saxophone player. George Corazon is a guy he teaches in, in Boston. He's great. I mean, he's one of the best guys around, and he's been developing that thing for about 20 or 30 years. And he pulled out the DVD. It's called The Music of George Garzone and the triadic Chromatic approach.
what I want to discuss here is the chromatic approach. George teaches, the DVD is about much more than what I'm about to talk, so no spoiler alert. don't worry about that. it's whole approach takes triads. Major triads, minor triads, augmented and diminished triads, and takes it through a process that makes you play somehow, like, randomly or freely.
But what he does to glue the lines together? Exactly. And in the same way I think of the chromatic scale as being a glue. He takes a short interval and says, play any notes chromatically, all in half steps or whatever inside that thing. But don't repeat yourself. So it's it's super fun on the guitar because you can see that on one string.
Let's say we, we take the C note on the fifth string. That's the third fret. all you have to do is think of one, two, three, four, five frets.
And within that interval of a major third, you can play anything, but you try to avoid repeating yourself. Let's say you do this. Don't do or don't do. This is too repetitive. You have to make this thing as as random as possible. And you play very, very slow. This is a nice little way to add chromaticism to your to life in general.
What I would do is take the metronome and say, we'll say 50 here. So at 50 you play it with each click, I'll do it on this interval of a key.
