Jazz guitar solos

Scrubucket7

Scrubucket7

New member
I've been playin guitar for about 6 years now, 3 of which have been in jazz band at my school. Lately, I havent been happy with my ability to solo. I have an easy time playing blue's solos, but when i listen to jazz solos, they seem to have so much more going on in them. My biggest problem i guess would have to be that i cant get out of using penatonic scales, but there has to be more to it to lay down a real fluent solo.

When i listen to most guitar solos, they seem to be playing alot of interesting scales, without alot of random notes. They also play very fast, use alot of slides instead of bends and things like that. But when i try to do that, it never sounds right.

Are there any other pointers that you guys could throw at me?

p.s. I have a big solo in 'mercy mercy mercy' on tuesday that im still working out. I cant really get the second half right, mainly the high parts and the parts he plays with the trumpet section. If anyone has any pointers on that, please help me out asap. Thanks.
 
Learn the melodies inside-out, and have an understanding of the scale it's based on.

Once you KNOW the melody it's just a matter of adding passing notes or inverting the melody or whatever you want to do. A really fun thing to do is figure out what other melodies you can play over a given progression.

I once knew a guy that liked to throw Third Stone From The Sun in anyplace it would fit. :D
 
There´s a lot of very good books,and the first point is to listening a lot of jazz players.

Pentatonics ever will be usefull, not to play "up and down" as on a rock/blues solo, but as an easy form to "see" the basic notes of a major/minor/7° chord as a block,and use it with the basics of jazz improvisation:
relation harmony/scales/modes/arpeggios (the "jazz" approach, thinking as extended chords) /key changes/use of passing/neighbour tones,... That´s the right way to learn and identify exactly how each one of the 12 chromatic notes will sounds on each chord you´re playing.

Listening tradicionall jazz players are the obvious choice, but Larry Carlton and Robben Ford are players that I suggest you to listen to.They have a superb jazz/blues style, which I think can help you to understand and apply better the jazz (for the blues "side").

Ciro

My songs here:
http://www.soundclick.com/openstation
 
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I think about each chord individually and how I can link a melody over them. In a blues/rock setting, there's usually one pentatonic scale you can use over all of the chords. I arpeggiate all over the place, either in quick succession to get to a different octave, or I'll elaborate them with passing tones. It takes a lot of experimentation, and a lot of listening to other improvisers to get comfortable with it.
 
CIRO said:
There´s a lot of very good books,and the first point is to listening a lot of jazz players.

Pentatonics ever will be usefull, not to play "up and down" as on a rock/blues solo, but as an easy form to "see" the basic notes of a major/minor/7° chord as a block,and use it with the basics of jazz improvisation:
relation harmony/scales/modes/arpeggios (the "jazz" approach, thinking as extended chords) /key changes/use of passing/neighbour tones,... That´s the right way to learn and identify exactly how each one of the 12 chromatic notes will sounds on each chord you´re playing.

Listening tradicionall jazz players are the obvious choice, but Larry Carlton and Robben Ford are players that I suggest you to listen to.They have a superb jazz/blues style, which I think can help you to understand and apply better the jazz (for the blues "side").

Ciro

My songs here:
http://www.soundclick.com/openstation
Click to expand...


I couldn't agree more- especially about listening to Robben Ford. His playing makes obvious how playing over changes (jazz) works seamlessly with the blues. He plays the shit out of the blues. If you learn even one of his solos note for note, you will have increased your jazz vocabulary phenomenally. I like "Talk to your Daughter" as a starting point, despite the cheesy 80s keyboard patches that Russ Ferrante used on that record. Don't get me wrong - great keyboard playing, but the sounds were crap (as were a lot of FM keyboard sounds in the late 80s).

Best,

JD
 
Jazz solos are usually based on the chords, not playing one scale over a bunch of changes. You need to know what scales work with what chords (and more importantly, understand why), and then you need to learn how to connect them together smoothly. Doing it at lightning speed isn't something you're gonna learn quickly.

My suggestion is to get this book, and start studying...

The Jazz Theory Book, by Mark Levine.

http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Theory-B..._bbs_sr_1/002-1550966-2897622?ie=UTF8&s=books

If you're serious about learning jazz, this can be your new bible.
 
First of all, there is nothing which is going to get you there by Tuesday. Soloing in jazz is a life-pursuit, and if you want to get good at it, you will need to spend the rest of your life working on it. The real key is to learn to solo over changes, which is to say you need to learn to learn to change the scale you are playing based on the chord changes.

The best thing you can do is to start transcribing solos. And I do mean transcribing, not learning solos which have been transcribed. Transcribing a solo yourself does more than teach you how to play the solo, but it is also a very valuable form of ear training. The guitar guys I would suggest more than any other are Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery and Pat Metheny; but it is important not to constrict yourself to only guitar players. Make sure you also spend time transcribing other instrumentalists - including piano players and horn players - because they will give you a different perspective on soloing. Horn players tend to have a more sophisticated view of melodies than guitar players (after all, that's all they can do), and piano players will give you a very different perspective on chord soloing because the chords which fall under the hands of a piano player are very different than a guitar player's hands.

Of course, transcribing won't be of much use if you can't understand the theory underneath what they are doing, so learn as much about theory as you can. You will at least need to understand contemporary tonal harmony (including tonal minors), modal harmony, whole-tone and whole-tone/half-tone scales, and arpeggios; and advanced modal harmony will be a good thing to learn as well. You need a strong understanding of the chord progression, because the scales you will base a solo on are all coming from the chord progression and (as csus7 said) from the melody, at least at first.

Next, get a book call "The Advancing Guitarist" by Mick Goodrick. Mick is one of the premier jazz guitar instructors on the planet, having taught (among many others) Mike Stern (one of many teachers Stern has had over the years). He is also one of the guys Pat Metheny credits as a teacher, though in a less formal fashion (they were in Gary Burton's band together for a time in the early seventies). EVERY good jazz guitar soloist I've ever known will tell you that "The Advancing Guitarist" was a very important book in their progress as a player. It is not, in the traditional sense, a technique book, but is more of a series of lessons in how to think about playing guitar, and in particular how to develop your own style.

And of course, my final piece of advice is to learn everything you possibly can, and then do everything you can to forget it completely. If you are thinking about it, your solos will be intellectual and boring. If you want your solos to have some soul or feel, you need to learn to do it without thinking. More than anything else, THAT is what will take you a life time to really get down.


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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
No quick way to get there. Follow all above advice. Yu may also try the "Mastering Jazz Guitar Solo" Series. They are awesome. Good luck. I have been playing Jazz or at least some approximation of it for YEARS. Still learning. And still lame by pro standards.
 
Kenny Burrell. Get the one with Coltrane, amazing album.

I can' do any jazz soling by a longshot, but everyone above has it down as best as i can figure it- scale is defined by the chord at the moment in the prgression and changes as the chords change, and the difference scale types can give a different voicing of flavor.

I preactice this with simple well known progressions like 12 bar blues or somethign similiar. Play over the chords, get used to how root notes, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 7ths sounds withing the context fo the chord(s) and then use those to build from.

Daav
 
Oh, two other suggestions:


1) Jamie Ambersol recordings (I think that's how it's spelled). These are bands playing the changes for various songs without anybody playing the melody or a solo. They give you a back drop to practice soloing over. They are a great help.


2) Play with other REAL musicians. Find other guys who are where you are, trying to learn, and get together to jam a lot. Once you can kind of hang together, find some guys who are WAY better than you, and jam with THEM. Nothing will kick you in the ass like playing with better musicians.



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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Oh, and one more. Learn to play over ii-V-I progressions. You'll spend more time doing that in jazz than ANY other thing. Learn your ii-V's like the back of your hand. Hell, even Giant Steps is mostly just ii-V's (except those four measures which are, well, NOT, and of course it's wicked fast).



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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Jamie Ambersol recordings (I think that's how it's spelled).
Click to expand...

You must be confusing it with the mouth antiseptic ;)

It's Jamey Aebersold:

http://www.aebersold.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc

There are something like 150 of those recordings now, and they are great practice tools.

Hal Leonard:

http://www.halleonard.com/instFeature.jsp?featureCat=590001&location=BandOrchestra

has also started a series like these but there are far fewer. There are also some good ones from the Gernman company Advance Music:

http://www.advancemusic.com/cgi-bin/music/index.pl?currency=dollar
 
WillWork4Pussy said:
If I were you I would give up guitar all together. Take up cross stich or something.
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your act is not amuzing in the cave; what makes you think you should take it on the road? Go away, please.
 
apl said:
May I please get a couple of Metheny
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For Pat Metheny;

Bright Sized Life (his first one, with Bob Moses, and Jaco - totally cool, one of my all time favorite albums)

The first Pat Metheny Group album (really, any of the Group albums, but the first is my favorite)

(by the way, a lot of the songs on those two albums are in the first two Real Books - the ones which used to be illegal)

Question and Answer (with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes - closer to straight ahead jazz than most of the group stuff, with a few standards thrown in, and totally cool)

Reunion (with Gary Burton - actually, you'll probably find it under Gary Burton's name, if you find it at all)

and, if you like stuff that's a bit (O.K., a LOT) outside, Song X with Ornette Coleman.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
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