STOP Practicing Scales – Do THIS Instead

Check out the audio podcast version of this post on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Seriously, once you know your scales stop practicing them and move on to what I’m about to show you.

Nearly everybody gets taught that improvising is a matter of applying various scales to chord changes. I was taught this, and practiced scales in all the keys like a good student, and while it is necessary to know yours scales.

Practicing them up and down is not going to help you play solos like the great improvisors you want to sound like. And that’s because jazz improvisation is not a matter of just applying various scales to chord changes despite what you may have been told. In fact, when you just apply scales to the chords it ends up sounding a bit amateurish.

So I’m going to show you what you should be practicing instead but first let me give you a very clear example of what I’m talking about in context.

September in the Rain Transcription

I recently transcribed a solo as part of this coming month’s material for the BetterSax Studio that’s my online saxophone and improvisation study group.

The saxophone player is Scott Hamilton and the first chorus of his solo on September in the Rain is relatively easy to play. But it’s also a perfect example of good jazz improvisation that we can learn a lot from. So let’s quickly go through this transcription and talk about what’s happening musically.

Absence of Scales

It starts out with this 3 bar lead in to the top of the form. Listen to these notes, Look at them on the page, and tell me if you see any scales? No, it’s very clear that there are not any scale passages whatsoever in these three bars.

Looking at the chords though, you can see that this section is entirely diatonic, meaning that all the chords are coming out of the same key, and you could play the same scale notes over all of it. What Scott plays though is a lot more interesting, and comes straight out of the vocabulary and tradition of the music. He hits the lower neighbor to the major third 4 times here.

The line is very melodic, rhythmically interesting and instead of being scale based, it is chord tone based. Every note is either a chord tone or an embellishment of a chord tone.

Next 4 bars, same thing, chord tones or embellishments of chord tones, like this enclosure here. Next four bars, same thing chord tone based. The entire chorus of this solo is based on outlining the harmony by targeting strong chord tones and connecting them.

Go ahead and listen to the entire solo chorus once. I want you to pay attention to the total lack of any scales being played.

Learn Your Scales, Then Move On

It is important to clarify once again. I’m not saying, don’t learn scales, I am saying that once you learn them, move on to this next step because the scales on their own won’t get you very far.

Now you can choose to connect your chord tones with scales, but in the bebop tradition, we very often navigate through our chord tone waypoints using enclosures, chromaticism and arpeggios. And it’s not just this solo, if you listen and transcribe music from the great players, you’ll notice that this is happening all the time.

If you want to sound like the real thing, you need to know your chords and be able to improvise based on chord tones.

So What Should You Practice?

Once you know your scales, and the one’s you should learn first in all keys are major, harmonic minor and the jazz melodic minor, you need to work on arpeggiating chords. There’s so many ways to do this, I give various chord tone exercises each month to the members of the BetterSax Studio and there are endless other resources you can refer to.

Spell All Your Chords

The big picture is, you need to be able to spell all your chords. In September in the Rain, we have major 7, minor 7 and dominant 7, there are a few other chord qualities you need to be able to spell from all 12 starting notes.

Play Chord Tones Over Progressions

Then you have to practice playing chord tones over chord progressions.

Another great resource for learning to do this is the Rhythmic Pyramid course by Adam Larson available on BetterSax.com

Language and Vocabulary

Once you can arpeggiate all your chords, you want to start working on language and vocabulary. A great way to do this is by transcribing and analyzing those solos like we just did here.

My Two, Five Win! course is a perfect place to start for anybody who wants to take their improvisation to the next level and start sounding more authentic.

Chord Tones are More Important

The main thing I want you to take away from this video is that, chord tones are way more important when improvising than scales. Once you make that shift in what you practice and how you improvise you’re going to start sounding a lot better.

Now I’ve got 9 more essential tips about learning to improvise jazz that I wish I learned earlier, go watch this video to find out what they are, you’ll be glad you did.