Improvising - tricks, cheats and shortcuts From what I've seen, I believe this theme causes more pondering and worrying amongst jazz guitar learners than any other. It certainly took me several years to get the issue into some kind of order for myself. It concerns how the learner should handle the three apparently contradictory approaches to improvising that he's presented with: Theory tricks - for example, when C is acting as the IV chord in the key of G you play your C major scale with a #4, because that's what the theory books say is correct. Fretboard tricks - for example, repeat your Dm7 phrase 3 frets higher over the G7. In fact this could be justified from theory too, but you don't need to know that to use the trick. Play what you hear - i.e., you just get cool and hip melody ideas popping into your mind straight out of your creative spirit, and you play them. Some beginners come to jazz guitar asking eagerly about cheats and shortcuts, so they can play cool jazzy solos immediately. They soon wish they'd never asked. Scales to use over chords, as an improvisation shortcut? Well, in jazz there are 7 chord scales or modes derived from the major scale, with Greek names taken from medieval church music - ionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, locrian (no, I'm not making this up). Then there are 7 more modes derived from the melodic minor scale, and another 7 from the harmonic minor scale. Then there are the symmetric scales - the whole-tone, and two species of diminished scales. And the major and minor pentatonics. The blues scale. The bebop major, the bebop minor, the bebop dominant. That's thirty scales in all so far, leaving out the exotic ones. Each scale can be used over numerous different chords, each chord has numerous scale choices. And the fretboard tricks are no better. Over that G7 chord you can play Dm7 lines shifted 3 frets up, like I said. Or shifted 1 fret down. Or you can play lines from the dominant chord a tritone away. Or from the maj7 chord 2 frets down. Or from the min-maj7 chord 1 fret higher, or from the dim7 chord 1 fret higher. Or use a minor pentatonic 3 frets down. Or a whole-tone scale. Or buy yourself a book of 500 ii-V-I lines and try memorizing all of those. It's not surprising why many beginners (myself included) feel overwhelmed with all this, and ask themselves, why bother? Isn't all this theory and shortcuts a bit like painting by numbers - simply dishonest and cheating? Aren't my jazz improvisations supposed to originate in my own head, and not out of the pages of a theory book or from pre-learned fretboard patterns? Didn't Charlie Parker say "forget all that shit and play"? So you try to do like Bird said, you just listen to the changes, close your eyes and play what comes into your head - which turns out to be vanilla, boring and painfully slow. So, out come the theory books again... That's the dilemma, and the following are my conclusions on the issues - partly my own thoughts, partly what I've heard from experienced jazzers and can see the truth of. Why think about theory at all - why not just be spontaneous? The problem with just playing what you hear right from the beginning is, your ears are full of all the diatonic western music you've been hearing since your infancy - nursery rhymes, kids' songs, pop music, classical music, movie themes, TV themes, advertising jingles... this is ingrained in you. Try taking your guitar, playing a chord, and singing just one note that goes with that chord. I'm sure you'll be singing the root, the 5th, or maybe the 3rd. I bet you don't sing the #4! Therefore, before you can get hipper, jazzier ideas to happen, you have to get those sounds into your ears - and into your fingers. This means taking the time, working with, studying and practising those chord-scale relationships and other theory-derived and fretboard pattern approaches. So should I really be thinking about theory when I'm soloing? No! After puzzling about this for a long time, I finally realized that the above advice refers only to practicing, not performing. I never saw any teacher really advocating the use of formulaic approaches on stage. Even if they don't say so clearly, what they mean is to work with these approaches in your study time, but as far as possible to put that out of your mind and be spontaneous when performing. The new cool sounds you're learning should come out in your solos spontaneously, not by you forcing it. Obviously, performing is also something you need to practice - so you should divide your time into study, where you consciously work with the theory and fretboard devices, and performance practice, where you do the "forget all that shit and play" approach. But how can I learn all this when there's so much of it? It is important to be aware from the beginning that jazz theory and its application to jazz improvisation is a big subject. The good teachers and educators nearly all studied this at college, so you're not going to be able to master it quickly as a weekend warrior. Right from the beginning, you have to pick and choose from what's on offer, taking one aspect at a time and getting it in your ears and fingers before moving on. And how to decide what to work on? Here I'm a little embarrassed how long it took me to figure out the simple answer to this: don't work on anything until you recognize that you're ready for it and you need it. At the beginning, I quickly jumped on things like mel minor scale and tritone substitution as the way to get cool altered sounds over dominant 7th chords. But I couldn't get those things to work for me, and I couldn't figure out why not. In retrospect the answer is obvious - how could I expect to be able to use the G7 scale over Db7 before I'd learned to use the G7 scale over G7? After getting that little insight, I made a deliberate "back to basics" decision: until I could solo fluently over a ii-V-I using the I major scale, I shouldn't try to get fancy. I stuck with that, and then later, step-by-step, I found myself needing a little more - for example, how to tackle the dim7 chord in a particular tune I was working on, or how to use the #5 and b5 sounds to make my dom7 lines a little more interesting. Going to the textbooks with specific questions arising from your current state of development is a very different experience - you know what you're looking for, you're prepared for the information, you can use it properly when you find it. I believe that approach is working for me, and I recommend it. It takes a little patience, but it may well get you to your goal more quickly. Why does jazz have so much theory attached to it - and is this a good thing? Here's my personal, non-expert opinion: I'm not a music theorist, but I am an academic and I know how academics' minds work. The best way to get successful and famous in your field is to say something really radical that contradicts everybody's previous assumptions. My speculation is that this was the motivation for whoever it was who first "discovered" the parallels between what jazzers play and medieval church music. It was a clever and radical idea, and it probably made a great Ph.D. thesis. But this was all about post-hoc analysis of what jazz soloists played, and I'm not sure if the originator of these theories ever intended them to be used as a basis for making jazz. Nevertheless, it's still a useful approach in my opinion. Take the altered scale as an example. You could forget all the theory and just give students a list of the notes that modern jazzer play over dom7 chords, with a description of their functions and how they're used. But that would be even harder to learn and remember. "7th mode of mel minor" is a handy summary of all that information in just 5 words, easy to follow, easy to remember, and easy to apply in practice once you've found the mel minor scale on the fretboard. It's a way to organize the information, and in fact not a bad one. You just need to keep in mind that this is not the actual reality. That applies to all theories and constructs about music, and even to the notes on paper in standard notation. It's not music, it's just an imperfect representation of music. It only becomes real when you get beyond the organization and representation of information to the actual sounds. If you're having trouble understanding, remembering or using any aspect of jazz theory, the problem is almost certainly that it's still just at the level of a representation on paper for you. As soon as you really have it as music in your ear, you'll have no further problems with it.