The 4 Chorus Lesson

In this lesson I have made 4 choruses of exercises: The chords, the

arpeggios that go with the chords. The scales that fits with the chords and
arpeggios and finally a solo chorus which demonstrates how you might use
the other exercises when playing over the F blues.

To keep it simple I have kept all exercises in one position so that if you go
through the exercises you should begin to have a tool set to improvise over
the Bb blues in that position.

The chord voicings

To improvise over a song you probably need to be able to play the chords
so you can hear the harmony and how it moves. In the following example I
have written out a set of voicings to play the F Blues.

The voicings can also be played from these diagrams:

You’ll notice that I in general don’t write out which extensions I use, so I
write out the basic type of chord and if whoever is playing a chord he can
fill in extensions to his own taste. This is common practice in Jazz in
general.

The F Blues Arpeggios

When playing over changing harmony the best way to really follow the
chords is of course to use the notes of the chords in your solo. Therefore it
is very important to be able to play the chords of the progression as
arpeggios. In example 3 I have written out the arpeggios in this position.

To make it easier to connect the different arpeggios I have written them

out in a similar range which means that I don’t always start on the root of
each chord.

You should practice the arpeggios like I’ve written them out, but you would
get a lot from also improvising over the progression just using the
arpeggios.
The Scales for the chords
In the 2nd example I added a scale to each chord. The way I am playing
the scales is that I start on the root and run up to the 7th, this gives you a
bit of time to switch to the next chord. This way of applying scales to a
progression is the same as you’ll find in Barry Harris exercises. It is a nice
way to add the scale in a musical way so that you hear how they spell out
the harmony.
The F7,Bb7, Gm7 and C7 are easily understood in terms of where they sit in
the key, since they are all mixolydian or dorian scales.

The B dim scale is in fact an C harmonic minor from B to Bb. You can see
how I arrive by this by looking at it from the Bb7 scale:

Bb C D Eb F G Ab Bb

If I need to fit an B dim in there then an easy way to do that is to replace

the Bb with a B.

B C D E F G Ab which you can write out from F to recognize that it as an C

harmonic minor scale.

For the D7(b9) you need to look at it as a dominant resolving to Gm7, which
tells us that we should use a Cm scale for it. In this context the (actually
in most contexts) that means using the G harmonic minor scale. You can
use this approach to determine what scale you should use for any auxiliary
dominant.

The F Blues Solo

As an example of how you can use the material I have written out a short
improvised solo on a F blues.

I hope you can use the exercises and the materials to get started
improvising over a Jazz Blues progression. You can check out some of my
other lessons on Blues, arpeggios and target notes for more ideas.