The Most Important Scale for Jazz You’re NOT Using

Use This Instead of the Blues Scale

You already know your blues scale. Hopefully, you know your major scales and some minor scales. But there’s a scale you probably don’t know or at least you aren’t using yet that can transform the way you improvise in every style of music, making you sound better, more modern.

Best of all it’s ridiculously easy to learn and start using right away. This lesson comes directly from our brand new course, Blues Evolution, which is taught by one of my all time favorite saxophonists, Vincent Herring.

First, take a listen in the video to Vincent improvising using only this scale I’m going to share with you, on a blues progression. Notice that the blues scale is not being used in these examples. Typically, students start out learning the blues scale and applying that over everything.

I remember when I learned how to play as a kid and you got that blues scale, and it was over. While there’s nothing technically wrong with doing this per se, it leads to a range of bad habits that tend to hold students back, sometimes for years.

Dominant Pentatonic Scale

The scale we want you to learn is called the dominant pentatonic scale. It has five notes in it, like the major and minor pentatonic scales you may already be familiar with, but this scale works particularly well over dominant seven chords, like the ones you typically find in blues progressions.

In the video, I demonstrate playing the scale over a standard 12 Bar Blues progression. Watch the video and please feel free to play along with me or practice this on your own.

The first step, we identify the dominant pentatonic scale that works for each chord in our progression, and then we practice moving between these three scales as we go. Now, once we get those scales under our fingers, we can begin improvising using the scale.

The Key to Sounding Good When Improvising

Every note in that example is using this very simple technique. Only five notes per chord, only three chords are being used, yet it sounds much more sophisticated and complex than it looks on paper.

That is really the secret to sounding good when playing jazz and improvising. You don’t need a ton of notes or to get very complicated to sound great.

Now this technique doesn’t just work on the blues progression. It can be applied to many other chord progressions and musical styles. Pop and rock music in particular have a lot of dominant 7 chords where this can be used very effectively. Watch the video and have a listen to another example in a different musical context of this dominant pentatonic scale in action.

Blues Evolution Course by Vincent Herring

This technique of using the dominant pentatonic scale as an improvisational tool is just the beginning of what gets covered in detail in Vincent’s new BetterSax course Blues Evolution.

It really is the story of how we can evolve our playing beyond the basics. How we can learn to skillfully navigate through chords and play with confidence, and is a course about developing a more sophisticated approach to improvising that is actually based in simplicity.

It is such an honor to work with one of my musical heroes on this project and I’m so happy to be able to share this resource with you. What a difference this would have made for me when I was in the early stages of learning to improvise.

Having one of the great masters of the saxophone and Jazz improvisation share their detailed thought process and how their approach has evolved over decades is immeasurably valuable. But we’re providing it here in an easy to digest course format along with backing tracks and a PDF guidebook.

There’s also some bonus content from Vincent you’re not going to want to miss. We will be offering a special discount, EVOLVE, for a limited time for the launch, so be sure to use it.

Vincent Herring is a walking treasure trove of saxophone information. I sat down for an interview with him that you can watch here next.