(Jazz Guitar)
- Hi everybody my name is Jens Larsen.
We are all practicing our scales and doing exercises
and hopefully you are also taking these exercises
and trying to make some lines with them.
You wanna do that because that's when you really know
that you can play the things that you are practicing
and this of course also a really great way
to expand your vocabulary.
In this video I want to show you how
you can take some of the fairly common scale
exercises that you are probably already doing
and turn them into lines and give you some strategies
about using the things you are practicing
and I also want to show you a few ways
to modify or adjust the way that you are
practicing your scales, so you get some exercises
that are really easy to turn into lines.
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Let's just start with a really basic exercise that I'm sure
you are already checking out, so that would be
the diatonic triads, and if we do that in the key of C major
like it will be something like this.
(jazz guitar)
And a lick you could make with this,
could be something like this.
(jazz guitar)
So really what I'm doing here is I'm taking the
descending version of the exercise
that I didn't actually play so that would be
(jazz guitar)
and then I'm using that on the D minor chord
on the II V I so we have this
and then I'm just really starting quite easily
on the D minor triad so,
and then just going down the scale
(jazz guitar)
and then here on the G7 I turn into a G7 alterline
(jazz guitar)
and then resolve to the G.
And the idea here is of course that we are using
triads that are connected to the chords
so what I'm doing here is that I'm taking
on the D minor chord, I started with a D minor triad
and then just move down from D minor, C major,
down to B half diminished and then I turn
that into the G7 altered line.
Another common variation on this triad exercise
is to not play the triads so that the diatonic triads
in the same direction, so instead of playing the notes
like one, three, five, you can sort of change
the order and make it into some other pattern
and one pattern could be three, one, five,
and if I play that through the scale it sounds like this.
(jazz guitar)
So of course if you want to do this
you need to do the normal exercise first
and probably you want to do exercise like this as well.
If you want to check out that, actually I have
a video on scale practice, where I talk about
these exercises and I'll try to link to it
in the description of this video but also
in a card up there.
A line with this exercise could sound like this.
(jazz guitar)
Also again, just try this next to each other
because that's what the scale exercise is
and they are related to the D minor of course
because they are on the D minor chord,
so the top part of the D minor is of course a
F major triad, so I'm using a F major triad
and then moving up the scales, I'm moving F major,
G and then A minor, and that all kind of will work
just fine on the D minor chord, and then from there
I go into this G7 altered line,
and that's sort of coming out of,
you could call that, like a B major 7
sharp 5 arpeggio, in fact, which is a nice
sound to use on a G7 altered, and then
that resolves to the C major.
Another great way of practicing triads
is to not practice them in a position
like this, but then also just to play them
on a string set and then up the neck
an exercise of that could be something like this
(jazz guitar)
And if you want to turn that into a II V I lick
then that could be something like this
(jazz guitar)
So here I'm really staying with, you can tell that
when I'm playing like this it's really easy to play
the different triads kind of fast, so
and that's really nice to have these sort of triads
that just keep moving as different colors
across the fret board so.
And then really what I'm doing is just taking
different colors out of that one
then when I'm on the, so I'm doing first the F
down to E, then down to D minor, so it's a little bit
like we have one that's sort of really close
related to D minor, one that's a little bit less
then back to one that's really related to D minor
and from here on the G7 altered, I'm sticking
with the triads idea, just because
that kind of works well to just stick with that
sort of melodic movement of a descending triad
and the first one is an Eb, which is a
like this, if you play it as a
as an open structure for G7, so that's really like
a #9 and a b13 and the root
and then the next one is, is an F diminished triad
which is really just the open part of a G7b9
so really all the getting of very clear G7 altered sound
and then I'm resolving that to the third of the Cmaj7.
But of course, when I'm doing this movement
so if I played as chords, it will be something like this
and then instead of going off to Eb, I can also
go down to Db, and then go up
and then resolve that, and if I do that
in a line, it sounds like this.
(jazz guitar)
So with these scale exercises, we kind of can only
make one type of movement and we always get stuck
in the fact that the structures that we are playing
are moving in step wise within the scale
and that means that the D minor might be really
related but the E minor is a little less
and then the F major is again and G will then be
a little bit less and then A minor works
a little bit better again.
We might want to try and change the scale exercise
a little bit and then try and make some exercises that are
little bit easier to turn into licks
and one way we can do that is to start
working with third intervals within the scale
so, let's see, if I do the triads again
and then, now I'm going to do them within the scale
not step wise but in triads, that means first D minor,
and then F major and then A minor, C major,
E minor, and G major.
So that scale exercise just like this.
(jazz guitar)
If we think of this from a sort of a D minor
point of view, which is 'course the way I try
to lay it out here, then we have D minor
which worked really well, and F major of course also,
and A minor will work and then now we get the ones
that are a little bit more big on the D minor
because C and E minor and G are probably not going to be
that useful, but we have these other ones that are
close to each other that we can start using.
And if we play those in a pattern, then we can
make a line and that could sound like this.
(jazz guitar)
So this line is using the same idea,
so we first are playing a D minor pattern,
but the pattern I'm using is like five, one, three
and then F, five, one, three, A minor,
five, one, three, and then we get on the G7
it's a, just the first, also three, one, five,
again a pattern of a B augmented triad
and then F half diminished arpeggio
and then that resolved to C major.
Until now I've been mostly focusing on the triads
and of course triads are important
and they are a very strong melodic tool
but you can also use other things
if we try the same ideas so maybe using the
third distance, and then play shell voicings
then that could be an exercise like this.
(jazz guitar)
So her I'm just starting on D and then I'm playing
the shell voicings that are found, diatonic shell
voicings from C major,
so Dm7, Fmaj7, A minor,
and then Cmaj7, and then this sort of strange
two string version of a Em7 shell voicing.
If I turn that into a line, then that
could be something like this.
(jazz guitar)
Using this approach where you are trying to move
your scale exercises from being more than just
step wise but then maybe using the
diatonic thirds a bit more, is a really useful thing
because the structures you end up with, as long
as you're doing arpeggios, so just triads
or seventh chords or stuff like that
are gong to be a lot more easy to put together
because you are going to have a more common note
they're going to be closer to being inversions
of each other and that means that they work really well
if you want to put them together
as a melody over a chord.
So, that will be useful to check out
and as you can tell also with another thing
that is quite useful to check out
is also that if you look at the shell voicings then,
(jazz guitar)
I'm moving around in positions, I'm not staying
in the same place on the neck, and the same goes for the,
(jazz guitar)
this type of exercise, so in that way it's opening
up the neck a lot more and that's a really useful
thing to also try to incorporate both into how you
practice but also how you try to put that to use
and really take advantage of the fact that you
are practicing like that, 'cause it does open
up certain things and they're just a lot
of things that are easy to play.
So the cascading triads that I'm playing
are really hard to play if you play them in position
so that's why you kind of want to check them out
on a string set like this.
If you want to try, so for the major scales
I think you want to stay mostly with stepwise
and also using the third motion.
If you are playing something that's coming out
of a melodic minor, like in this case the G7 altered
you can also start experimenting with sort of
moving around in fifths and fourths, so that could
be something like this.
(jazz guitar)
Where I'm using first, like an F half diminished,
then a B,
Bmaj7#5,
and then I'm actually kind of
just using the F again.
But the adheres here, you actually just get away
with just moving like, like that
so from the F to the B,
and that will work really often over
so here I'm using Bb,
so Eb7 arpeggio,
Bb minor arpeggio and then resolving that
and that will also work, actually as a G7 also lick.
We an also try to apply this to other types of scales
like Pentatonic scales, or use it with chordal harmony
or maybe try to add some other rhythms
like the triplet rhythm like I did a lesson on
a few weeks ago, so if that's something
you are interested in and want me to do a lesson on,
then leave a comment on this video
and then maybe I can get to that later.
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That's about it for this week, thank you for watching
and until next week.
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