Jazz Guitar Lesson: 5 Minutes to Create a Cool Jazz Guitar Lick
Thursday, August 1, 2013 at 9:24PM
Are you tired of playing jazz standards only to hear the same boring old licks you played again and again?
You know how it goes. You learn one lick from a YouTube video and then another from a guitar magazine, all these random things. Then, you don’t really know what you’re doing. Everything is random!
Do something epic in 5 minutes
But what if you could use just 5 minutes to create a new jazz guitar melody that you can use. Imagine if this was something so simple that you can do this again and again so that you’re never in a rut?
Welcome to the 5 step guide jazz lick rut buster:
Pick a scale - This could be any scale. For instance, a major scale, a Dorian scale, a pentatonic scale, altered, whole tone - basically anything you want.
Select 4 notes from the scale - You can pick 4 different notes or repeat some notes. The important thing is that we’re choosing only a fragment of the scale instead of the entire scale. This avoids our line sounding like a boring scale exercise. You can choose to write a scalar line or a line that has skips and leaps (more fun!).
Choose an arpeggio - Pick 3 notes of an arpeggio, that is from the same scale. Later on, you can mix different scales but this is for another lesson.
Connecting it all - Connect the arpeggio to the scale and play around with it until you find a rhythm that sounds good to you. You can either start with the scale or the arpeggio. For more adventurous jazzers, try both to get two different lines.
Practice - play it again and again until you get the flow of this new line.
Tada! And there you have it, a new musical idea for your jazz guitar explorations.
BONUS STEP: Play the same line in a few keys or in the same key but sequence diatonically. (This take more time but can produce epic results.)
Interested to discover more? Learn how the great improvise in the jazz guitar masterclass: http://www.azsamad.com/jazz
Brought to you by Az Samad, dedicated to helping you become a better improvising jazz guitarist.
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