Here is the new video of the week with an exercise that completely illustrates my article “HOW TO APPROACH A CHORD CHART”.
I therefore invite you to read it again and work on the arpeggios with, for example, “I can’t give you anything but love”, as I do in this video. It is obvious that these exercises apply to the study of any standard! So if you are working on another piece, you can apply the exact same principle in your study of this theme!
Work on the the 4-step procedure in the article, which will allow you to go further towards this objective: be able to play the arpeggios on each chord, and in all directions.
Later in this article, I will explain in a little more detail how to play arpeggios in all directions in 2 steps, as well as 3 good reasons to study these arpeggios, in case you get discouraged! Only after you have worked out the procedure for the other article, look at this one, in order to go a little further!
Here is a video of an arpeggio exercise:
2 steps to be able to play the arpeggios in all directions
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practice playing arpeggios up and down,
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start the arpeggio with the third, the fifth or the seventh
For example, on “I can’t give you.” on the first chord GMaj7, you can play the rising arpeggio, then on the second Bm7, the descending arpeggio, go up on the 3rd chord B°, etc.
This means that you don’t always have to start with the fundamental, and that you have to know all the arpeggios going up, down, and starting from any note! It’s is why you have to work on the arpeggios starting from the fundamental, then from the third, the fifth, the seventh…
3 good reasons to do this arpeggio work:
- Play the notes that appear in the chords: since the arpeggios are the same notes as those of the chord, we are sure not to make a mistake and we do not make a “wrong note”!
- Hearing the chart: by knowing the arpeggios, we learn the chord progression by ear as we would memorize a melody. As a result, we are much more comfortable improvising on it!
- Creating muscle memory in the fingers: indeed most jazz phrases are made from arpeggios and scales
These arpeggio exercises may seem a bit tedious and demanding, but their usefulness for language development is invaluable. Listen to improvisations by your favorite soloists, and try to analyze the content of their solos. You will most likely hear scales, phrases typical of jazz or gypsy jazz depending on the style, and above all, lots of arpeggios!!
Small parenthesis: you can even pick up the choruses and write them down if that helps you analyze the phrases: indeed, if to integrate the phrases into the improvised playing it seems to me more useful to pick up a solo by ear as I explain in my article on the subject in the form of a Q&A. For the analysis of jazz licks and to understand what is happening in the solo it is very useful to have the score to visualize the chorus as a whole and to see the details of its content.
If you liked this article, do not hesitate to share it on social networks!!
Below, I have created a summary sheet of this article! I also added a new summary sheet on the page of the other article HOW TO APPROACH A JAZZ CHART.
These two sheets are complementary, as are the two articles! Here is the summary of it to download:
[sdfile url=”http://www.apprendre-le-violon-jazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/resume-article-56-i-cant-give-you.pdf”]