Expanding Your Improvisation Vocabulary: Beyond Major and Minor Scales
When you’re ready to move beyond the basic major and minor scales in your improvisation, it’s time to explore other scales and techniques. This article will guide you through a journey of learning diminished scales, whole tone scales, and other advanced scales, along with the importance of chord tones and modes.
Learning New Scales
After mastering the major and minor scales, it's crucial to move on to more complex scales like the diminished and whole tone scales. These scales offer a rich palette of sounds and enhance your improvisational abilities.
Diminished Scales: The diminished scale is a symmetrical scale that consists of alternating whole and half steps (W H W H W H W H). Learning this scale helps you navigate through complex chord progressions and offers a myriad of sound possibilities in jazz and other musical styles.
Whole Tone Scales: The whole tone scale is another symmetrical scale consisting of only whole steps (W W W W W W). It is very useful in creating unique and mellow tones, often found in impressionistic and impressionist music.
The Minor Pentatonic Scale and Its Modes
The minor pentatonic scale is a fundamental scale in improvisation, and it is a great place to start when learning scales. Once you have mastered it, moving into its modes can greatly enhance your improvisation skills.
First, you need to learn and practice the minor pentatonic scale from every fret on every string, both ascending and descending. This exercise helps you to become familiar with the scale in a variety of positions on the fretboard. After this, memorize each mode of the scale.
Every mode of the minor pentatonic scale is simply starting on a different note and playing the remaining notes in the scale in their correct order. For example, the Dorian mode of the minor pentatonic scale is formed by starting on the second degree of the scale and continuing to the seventh degree. There are only 5 notes in the minor pentatonic scale, which means there are 5 modes.
Understanding Chord Tones and Modes
The key to improvisation is understanding the relationship between chords and scales. Specifically, you should focus on chord tones and how to play around them. Chord tones are the notes that belong to a chord and are the foundation of jazz improvisation. Learning to play around these notes will help you create more meaningful and cohesive solos.
When improvising, think more like a doodle around the chords than a scale. This means that you should aim to play notes that are close to the chord tones, rather than playing a full scale. This technique allows for more creative and innovative improvisation.
Variations of Major and Minor Scales
Beyond the basic major and minor scales, you can explore variations such as the harmonic minor scale. This scale has a unique sound due to its raised seventh degree. Another approach is to use different modes of a given scale, such as the phrygian dominant mode, which is the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale and has its own distinct sound.
The Skeleton Key to Extending Your Vocabulary
One of the most effective techniques for extending your improvisation vocabulary is to use the 1 2 3 5 step approach. This involves using the first, second, third, and fifth notes of the major pentatonic scale over different chords. For example, you can superimpose these notes over a Bb major chord using the notes in the C minor, Dm, F, Gm, or Ab scales.
Another useful scale is the Lydian dominant diminished whole-tone scale, which is essentially the ascending melodic minor scale starting on the seventh step. This scale offers a rich palette of notes and can be used to add color and complexity to your solos.
Connecting Notes and Techniques
To further enhance your improvisation, you can connect the dots between the notes of a given scale section. This means that you can explore using chromatic tones, borrowing notes from the chord form, and adding notes higher and/or lower than the melody line.
When you are improvising, use downbeats at the point of chord change and upbeats to lead into downbeat notes. If you are starting with a simple melody, you can borrow chromatic tones and “outside” notes and play them on the upbeats so that they resolve into the downbeat. This technique allows for a sense of adventure and creativity in your playing.
Practical Application
To practice these techniques, start off by playing four-measure sections of the tunes you are working on. Sprinkle some chromatic tones and “outside” notes on the upbeats to maintain the stability of the melody. Play with these techniques and give yourself time and circumstance to explore your options.
Start by familiarizing yourself with your routine tunes and using the suggestions provided in your warmup exercises. As you incorporate these concepts into your current routines, you will find a new source of music power. Keep practicing and you will find that your improvisation skills will improve greatly.
Good luck!