Jazz Guitar Licks Tabs
Kody Chavva
Could you tell me why the lick in Jazz music is called the lick? The verb Lick is referred to licking such as licking an ice cream, and I wonder what is the correlation? Thank you for your explanation.
I just want to say how much I appreciate your lessons. Thank you very much. What would be most helpful would be some great swinging backing jazz blues tracks to play and practice our licks over. Especially in the key of Bb at about 160-180bpm and about 5 minutes long. Are you able to provide some CDs or MP3s for us to use? Thank you.
An enclosure is the technique of approaching a target note (often a chord note) with notes above and below the target note. These approach notes can be diatonic or chromatic (or both).
This major scale lick works over an F pedal bass note and is basically a simple 6th interval pattern transposed down the scale, a typical Jim Hall technique that also inspired Pat Metheny, who uses similar kind of ideas.
This first Dominant Lick blends the Mixolydian mode along with a blues note (the b3), used to bring a bluesy vibe to any 7th chord soloing phrase. If the Mixolydian scale is new to you, check out this lesson on guitar modes.
Notice that there is also an Am triad near the end of the first bar that helps to reset the lick back to the D that was played right before the triad. Triads are a helpful way of running up a chord line to avoid sounding too scalular in your playing.
While this approach works well for bringing a bluesy sound to your jazz lines, you will want to be aware of how often you use the minor blues scale over a 7th chord in any given solo, as if you overdo it, you might end up leaning towards a rock/blues feel a bit too often.
Check out the guitar solos of Kenny Burrel, Wes Montgomery, and George Benson for classic examples of how these legendary players use the minor blues scale to create a bluesy vibe in their 7th-chord soloing ideas, without overdoing it at the same time.
Built by combining the 1235 pattern with the b3, 4 and #4 intervals from the minor blues scale, this line mixes major and minor tonalities to create a classic jazz blues line in the style of the great players mentioned above.
The Lydian dominant scale (the 4th mode of melodic minor scale) brings a 7#11 color to the underlying harmony, and here is a great example of how to address that #11 tension in a musical and proper fashion.
By adding chromatic notes into your lines, you can create a sense of tension and release over minor 7 chords, which is an important ingredient when learning how to bring a jazz sound to your improvised solos.
Though the C major pentatonic and A minor pentatonic scale contain the same notes, by starting on the note C and thinking of the scale from that root, you will focus on non-root notes for the underlying chord. This is a great way to use pentatonic scales in your solos without always starting and stopping on the root of the chord.
Here is an example of that approach over an Am7 chord, where he starts on the 9 (B) and continues with a Cmaj7 arpeggio, creating a 3 to 9 arpeggio. Try it out and see if you can bring a bit of a Martino vibe to your next jazz guitar solo.
By breaking down long lines into short, easy-to-play licks, you will not only add some great-sounding Bebop lines to your vocabulary, but you will give yourself the building blocks needed to create hip-sounding lines on your own.
It would be good to start this lesson by playing through each of these smaller ideas, learning how they sit on the fingerboard and how they sound as individual ideas. This will help you learn to recognize these small yet important licks later on when you begin to explore the longer jazz guitar phrases below.
Feel free to refer back to this master list as you work through the longer Bebop lines in order to refresh your memory with these short licks, as well as use these short ideas to create your own bebop lines later on in the practice room.
This second example, which you can see at both slow and fast tempos in the video below, uses some of the same licks as the previous line, but now adds some new ideas to the mix over the course of these 3 bars.
If you can get the long line under your fingers, as well as understand and hear how it was built by connecting the smaller ideas, then you not only get a cool-sounding lick to use in your solos, but you are well on your way to building lines such as this on your own.
Though not every note of this scale will fit over each chord individually, when navigated in the right way, you can hear how this scale can produce just the right sounds needed for each chord in the progression.
In the first bar, Jim often uses an A7alt chord instead of Am7b5, creating a V/V to V to Im7 progression in place of the normal ii-V-I chords you are used to seeing. This is a fun and relatively easy way to spice up any minor ii V I phrase that you are playing, using chord and/or single notes to outline that sub.
When you move 1235 to the 5th degree, you happen to have chosen the only scale degree that preserves the intervallic shape without using accidentals: what if you moved to say the 2 or 6? Would the 3 be flatted?
Jazz is often made more complicated than it needs to be. And whether you are setting out on a journey to explore Jazz guitar or just want a different sound to use in your solos, you can get incredible sounding Jazz licks with some very basic Bebop building blocks.
A simple place to start is to play it as a triplet and add a leading note before the arpeggio. You can add more dense and complicated chromatic phrases which will give you some pretty advanced sounding lines, but that will come later in the video. This simple version is actually Bebop gold:
As you can tell, this already starts to sound like Bebop and it is something you can move around to pretty much any chord or arpeggio that you can think of, not only 7th chords, it also sounds beautiful on a for instance a m7(9) like this:
The formula for this first enclosure is diatonic above, chromatic below, so the target note is A and the note above that in the scale is a B. The chromatic note below is a G# This is a very useful way to create some chromatic movement and still have melodies that sound natural and make sense.
Adding a more extensive chromatic phrase like this is a great way to lead into the arpeggio and it makes the line more surprising and moving before really connecting to the chord, which is really what we use chromatic phrases for small bits of outside melody. In this example, the lick with a short enclosure around the 5th, before the last note, the 3rd, on the 1&
This example adds a leading note before the arpeggio and then tags it with a more extensive chromatic phrase to the last note. The way this is done then it adds a nice large 5th interval skip to the line.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for topics then, please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.
Very often when I listen to the jazz guitar solos that I love, like Wes on Four on Six or maybe a Kurt Rosenwinkel, then some places really stand out to me, and when I transcribed those passages they were always using very basic things but just creating great melodies with that.
So this is more about getting great melodies or licks out of basic things and that is what I am going to show you a way of exploring in this video because you can make 1000s of great licks with stuff you already know.
In this video, I am going to start with a simple Pentatonic lick and then gradually add things to it to make it sound like a Jazz or Bebop line. This is useful if you want to experiment with adding some jazz ideas to your playing or if you want to check out how good you are at using some of the key Jazz Skills.
In Jazz, and especially Bebop, the melody follows the chord progression. One way of doing that is to use the arpeggio of the chord.
When you start to work with this it quickly becomes a lot easier not to think too much in Pentatonic scales, but more in 7 note scales. In this case, I am going to use a C major scale for my D minor chord.
We are playing over a Dm7 chord so we can use that arpeggio (play the Dm7 arpeggio) and another great arpeggio is the one from the 3rd of the chord. The 3rd of Dm7 is F and the arpeggio we have there is an Fmaj7.
Another very typical Jazz thing is to use chromatic notes. You use chromatic notes that are either between two scale notes, these are called passing notes. (play the E. Eb D fragment)
Another option is a short melody that points towards a target note. These are called enclosures. (play the enclosure
There are two main ways of working with Chromaticism in lines like this one. In general, there are two types: diatonic passing notes and chromatic enclosure. Most of the time you use both types to target chord tones.
I think The most important part of Jazz is actually rhythm. There are many things to get right about the rhythm, but one thing to work on is to add some upbeats and upbeat accents to the melodies you play.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics then please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.
Learning the rules of a jazz language like Bebop can be a really useful way to study and internalize that sound. In this video, I am going to use some Jazz Licks to cover some of the techniques and how you use them on a Maj7 chord. The 5 examples will show you how you can use Chromaticism, Arpeggios, trills and octave displacement on a maj7th chord.
When playing bebop we often think about long rows of 8th notes. But it is important to break up that flow to keep it interesting. This example starts with an 8th note triplet which is a chromatic run. This is already adding a different feel fromt the beginning.
From there it continues with a C major triad. The Triad is a great arpeggio to use on a Cmaj7 chord. Charlie Parker plays major triads all the time. From the triad the melody skips up to the 6th(A) and via a chromatic passing note ends on the 3rd(E). Notice how the line is ending on the 2&. This keeps the energy higher than ending on a beat or even a strong beat.
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