Lately I've been starting to get into listening to and playing jazz, and I've been working on improving my improving (haha) skills. Basically, I'm having trouble making anything that sounds like music when I'm improvising. When I'm playing, it sounds more like a computer is just randomly picking notes from a scale and throwing them together than an actual melody. It's not that I'm hitting the 'wrong' notes, but more like I'm just not hitting the rights ones. Sometimes I do something right and get something that sounds like a melody, but it's always accidental. I just don't know what I'm doing! Help!
I don't have this trouble with blues soloing. I can usually hear what I want to do and hit all the changes, making something that sounds at least like I know what I'm doing.
I feel the same way, and i also agree with blues. Whenever i improve, its mere luck when something melodic comes through
i know the feeling, thats something i cant wait to pass :?
Learn some actual solos and licks: I've found that after a while I just am able to pull of some licks in improvisation that seem to come out of nowhere and sound really good... other times it sounds horrible, it just takes alot of time and practice.
Steve-0
Jazz, like all musical forms, has it's own way of doing things. To sound good playing jazz solo's you have to sound like a jazz soloist.
Learn some jazz solo's note-for-note to get a sense of what improvised solos feel like.
Then pick up the book:
Building a Jazz Vocabulary
by Mike Steinel
It is a great study in how jazz soloists solo. It's watered down, but not by much. It alone can take you far. You do have to read music to use it.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
Get some Jamey Aebersold CDs to practice with.
It's hard to learn to sound jazzy unless you're working with jazz (ii-V-I etc.) progressions.
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A problem mgiht be that your ears are used to the pentatonic sounds but less used to major/minor scales. In other words, you simply don't know the sounds good enough to transfer whatever is in your head to the fretboard. Play plenty of jazz music and see how other people turn that scale into music. Improvising in a different genre is far more complex then just picking a different scale. Have fun and good luck!
I think Arjen has a very good point. One needs to develop a sense of the the intervals and various color tones that are the hallmark of a particular style. It's often just as difficult for jazz players to develop a good style and feeling for blues and rock soloing. The other aspect that is somewhat different among various genres is the rhythmic feel of each. For example, a lot of "traditional" jazz translates eight-note pairs as written into a triplet feeling (trip. with tied pair) as played -- it's all part of the various musical dialects. Play, listen and it comes eventually.
-=tension & release=-
Get some Jamey Aebersold CDs to practice with.
It's hard to learn to sound jazzy unless you're working with jazz (ii-V-I etc.) progressions.Thanks for the tip noteboat. I actually have been trying to improvise over jazz progressions like the the ii-V-I using Band-in-a-Box (which is really a great program, I highly recommend it). One thing I'm wondering about soloing over progression is, if the progression is entirely diatonic, should I switch scales over the chords? I realize if I end up doing something like D Dorian-G Mixolydian-C Major it all ends up sounding like C anyway, but what if I mix things up and use, say, D melodic minor?
Well, you could change to another scale. No way to give a definite 'yes' or 'no'.
D melodic minor would be an odd choice for the whole progression, because it won't match up well with the I chord. But you're on the right (or at least one possible) track with the idea - you could use D melodic minor over the D, change to D major over the G (rasing the 3rd, F to F#, and the 6th, Bb to B).
From there, you could drop back a whole step to finish up in C.
When you start improvising in jazz, though, I'd advise against mixing a lot of different scale types. It's hard enough to 'think' about jazz while you play... and the guitar is just too darn tempting to fall back on patterns. If you want to start working on changing scale roots with the chord progression, start in a minor key - and use the Dorian over every chord. Since Dorian doesn't have the leading tone 7th, it'll tend sound more 'finished' over the i chord than the harmonic minor might.
Then (and this is really, really important!) Play those Dorian tones in the same position! Don't rely on moving your hand - that'll make relying on memory just too tempting for most folks. If you play in C minor, pick a position and keep your hand there. You'll need to then focus on the notes that make each scale different from the others...
Let's say you've got Aebersold's Vol. 1 on, track 2 - the first progression on the CD. The chords are Fm, Ebm, Dm - a iii-ii-i in D minor. By staying in one position, you need to think about flatting A, B, and E in F Dorian, adding Gb and Db to the mix for Eb Dorian, and returning all five of those notes to naturals in D Dorian.
It'll give your mind a workout :)
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Thanks!
Oh, and I didn't mean using D melodic minor for the whole progression, just the Dm part.
