It’s already May and before you know it those lazy months of summer are going to sneak up on you. And just as quickly they’ll be gone, leaving you wishing you had more hours in the day to devote to your music. Before you find yourself in this all too familiar situation, here’s a quick question to ponder: What exactly do you want to accomplish musically this summer?

If you’re not sure and you have yet to give it any thought, chances are you aren’t going to get as much accomplished as you could as an improviser.

For many musicians the summer months are a time when we lose our drive and end up getting rusty. I mean it makes sense, why stay inside a dreary practice room working on ii-V’s all day when you can be outside enjoying the sun and warm weather. However, chucking your practice routine out the window for the entire summer can leave you musically stagnant or worse by the time the fall rolls around.

The encouraging news is that you don’t have to lock yourself up like a prisoner in a dark practice room to see improvement. With a little planning, the summer months are a time when you can take advantage of some extra practice time and still get out and be a normal human being.

You might be a student looking to transform your playing for the next school year, a player looking to capitalize on a few extra hours of daylight, or an aspiring improviser looking to set some meaningful musical goals. Whatever your motivation, the summer is a great time to beef up your repertoire, to expand your technique, to improve your ears, and to fortify your harmonic understanding.

If approached correctly, your summer practice can transform the way you improvise.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew

The first thing a lot of players do when they see an extended period of summer practice time is to think of as many goals to accomplish as humanly possible. “I’m going to learn 100 tunes! I’m going to transcribe 50 solos! I’m going to memorize every bebop head in all 12 keys! I’m going to learn every scale, in every key, in every possible inversion and variation…”

This enthusiasm is great. At one time or another we’ve all gotten inspired and made declarations like this. We want to improve and we have visions of making great leaps ahead. The only problem is that this little thing called reality gets in the way. We jump right into these huge projects and after a week or two we lose momentum or get sidetracked, trying to accomplish everything at once as fast as we can.

Even more disruptive than our naive enthusiasm however, is the fact that these common “jazz practice goals” rarely lead us to our main objective: becoming a better improviser. If you’re truly looking to transform the way you improvise, to actually make a noticeable improvement in soloing over chord progressions, one question you have to ask yourself is: “How effective are my short term goals in achieving my main objective?”

Are you making these goals because they seem like the right thing to do? Are you jumping on the bandwagon and practicing the same stuff everyone else is? How exactly are those typical goals of learning a bunch of tunes and transcribing dozens of solos going to change your level of improvisation in the space of a few months?

“Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.”~Friedrich Nietzsche

Think about it. After spending a few months learning a ton of melodies and memorizing dozens of chord progressions, are you going to improvise over these tunes any differently than you are today or will you just know more tunes that you have trouble playing over?

Week after week, you can transcribe solo after solo after solo, rushing to get the next one done in order to meet your lofty goal, but will you have time to absorb and develop that language that you’re taking from the records?

You can even spend hours of your time on scales, arpeggios, and patterns in the hopes of finding the secret to improvisation, but will this new technique help you to play logically and musically over chord progressions?

In each of these scenarios you’re getting some sort of improvement, but it is not significant overall. It’s not creating the game changing type of transformation we’re looking for. But wait, transcribing solos and learning tunes has to make you a better improviser right??

Well yes, if it is done in the correct way, but figuring out the notes to a solo and leaving it at that is not going to automatically make you a great improviser. In the same fashion, spending a few minutes to learn a melody and a chord progression will not magically make you sound better as you solo over that tune. Learning tunes and transcribing are beneficial to the improviser, but these two simple tasks won’t add up to a great improviser in themselves.

Learn more with less

One of the main factors that is working against you when you attempt a huge project is the volume of information. It’s not that you’re not trying or you’re incapable of attempting these tasks, it’s simply just too much information to absorb in a beneficial way.

We’ve covered the idea of information overload before. If you don’t think you have access to too much information, just take a look at your record or mp3 collection. For most of us, we’ve collected thousands of songs, hundreds of albums, recordings that we didn’t even know we had. This is both a blessing and a curse, we have access to a plethora of music, but the pure volume of information is so great that we get overwhelmed.

A quick scroll through the average jazz collection yields something like 10 Coltrane albums, 20 Miles Davis albums, dozens each of Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Garret, Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel…the list could go on and on. It would take months just to listen to everything, let alone actually getting down to business and learning some individual tunes and solos.

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”~Gertrude Stein

Instead of making enormous and vague goals this summer, try something different: pick 5 tunes to work on for the next three months. Yes, you heard me right, five tunes. This summer, one improviser, three months, 5 tunes…

With these 5 tunes, you’re not just going to learn the melody and chords (you can do this very quickly), instead you’re going to actually improve your entire level of improvisation. Conquering the chord progressions, transcribing language, taking melodies through all 12 keys, analyzing language, altering it, applying it in new ways, expanding your technique through transcription, identifying melodic intervals and chord progressions, expanding your ears…

These are the skills and the type of focused practice that will make you a better improviser.

Make a plan right now

The key lies in planning ahead and setting achievable goals. If you just kind of glide through the summer with no plan you’re going to end up in the same place you are right now – wishing you were a better improviser. Relying on the quirks of random practice, you might hit on a few tunes or concepts by chance (or you might not), but without continued and focused study, that jump to the next level of playing will continually elude you.

Make a plan for your practice schedule, right now, before the summer even begins. Take advantage of the time during these next few weeks and pick out the tunes you want to focus on and single out the players and albums that you really love. Write down your goals as a musician and think about the areas of your playing that you wish were better.

Physically take out a sheet of paper and make a list of the tunes, players, goals, and weak spots in your playing. All of these factors will contribute to the plan that you’ll make for yourself. Your goal is to have a concrete plan with the specific tunes and the specific solos that you’re going to work on.

The place where a lot of improvisers go wrong is carelessly scribbling down a huge list of tunes to learn. You may have your five tunes in mind, but don’t let your entire practice plan be the titles of five tunes scratched on a piece of paper:

• Blues
• Rhythm Changes
• It Could Happen to You
• On Green Dolphin St.
• Stablemates

Get specific…start naming names

The reason that most players don’t get much out of their long lists of tunes or follow through with learning them is that they are incredibly vague. In order to make progress musically, you need to know exactly what you’re going to work on. For each of those tunes on your list have a specific recording, a specific player, and a specific solo that you want to work on.

For example you may really love Clifford Brown’s playing, and you feel that you need work on blues, and you want to expand the range on your instrument, and you need some ii-V language – make a plan that includes these areas and a schedule that will facilitate these goals.

Simply saying: “I’m going to work on a blues” won’t get you very far. To see what I mean, let’s take another look at the first two tunes from the list above and determine exactly what areas we’re going to practice to improve:

Blues

Specific tune: Sandu from the Clifford Brown album Study in Brown

Click here to view the embedded video.

List of specific goals:

• Learn the melody by ear
• Figure out the chord progression by ear
• Work out the melody in all 12 keys
• Transcribe  Clifford’s solo or learn a few choruses by ear
• Isolate language and lines that you like, analyze them, and learn them in all 12 keys

Rhythm Changes

Specific tune: Oleo from the album Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet

Click here to view the embedded video.

List of goals:

• Learn the melody by ear
• Figure out the chord progression by ear
• Work out the melody in all 12 keys
• Transcribe Miles’ first chorus and Coltrane’s first chorus
• Analyze this language and isolate ii-V’s and iii-VI-ii-V’s to learn in all 12 keys

You get the idea. Do the same for the other three tunes on your list. Instead of just having the name of a tune or a form on a piece of paper, you have a specific recording, a specific solo, and a list of specific goals to practice. When you see the specific goals on the page, instead of just the song title, you’re much more likely to practice and accomplish them.

The nice thing about tackling less information is that you have more time to absorb everything. You can take a week or more to learn the melody and chord progression by ear. You can spend a few week transcribing a chorus or even an entire solo. Don’t move on until you’ve mastered the information that you’re working on.

When you spend the time and do things the right way, that is when you’ll see big results. And, things will get easier in no time. Learning that first tune by ear may feel like pulling teeth, but the second one will be significantly easier because you’ve developed important skills (skills that you miss when you rush through things or cheat by looking at sheet music).

When you break things down like this, it looks like you could spend the entire summer on blues or rhythm changes, and you know what? That’s perfectly OK.

Quality improvement not quantity

You will improve more spending months on a few tunes than the alternative of trying to cram dozens of tunes into your head each week. Every standard pretty much has the same elements (Major, minor, and V7 chords, ii-V’s, minor ii-V’s, turnarounds) and requires the same skills from you as an improviser (hearing melodies and chord progressions, applying language over chord progressions, etc.).

When you narrow down the amount of information that you’re working on and you master it, you’re gaining skills and knowledge that can be applied to any tune that you play. Every tune is a window into learning and improving at this music, it really doesn’t matter which one you pick.

You may only be focusing on a 5 tunes, however you’ll cover every aspect of your playing within these 5 tunes. Ear training, technique, time, rhythm, language, repertoire, theory. When you’re trying to grow as an improviser, these are the musical skills you need to focus on and improve upon. More information won’t solve this problem, however quality time and practice will make all the difference.

There is room for improvement no matter what your skill level as an improviser. Maybe you’re trying to navigate a ii-V for the first time or trying to sound good over the blues (no small task!!). Maybe you’re looking for a new way to play over those same old tunes and progressions or maybe you’re eager to integrate some new language and harmonic concepts that you’ve stolen from your favorite player.

All of these goals can be accomplished with just a few tunes. You don’t need to learn 100 tunes to start improving as an improviser, you can do it right now with just five tunes…and the best part is, choosing those five tunes is completely up to you.

So take this next week or so and pick out the tunes, players, solos, and concepts that you want to focus on this summer. Picking out records is the fun part and when you do it correctly, so is learning by ear from the records. Feel free to try memorizing 100 tunes on your path to improvement this summer, hell, make it 200!, but if you actually want to transform yourself as an improviser, focused practice on 5 tunes is where it’s at.

Each day when you get your instrument out of its case and set out to practice improvisation, your goal is to play the right notes. Whether it’s playing with great technique and great sound or finding the best line to play over that new tune, you’re looking for the fastest way to sound good over all those chords that you stumble upon.

Lucky for us, the right notes have been laid out for us in theory books and on the pages of play-a-long tracks. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: “Why exactly are those notes the “right notes?”

What is it that makes them right and the other notes wrong? Are we just following the rules of music theory on blind faith or are those “right notes” right because we hear them that way?

Music theory is important in understanding the inner workings of harmony, but the true test of the “right notes”comes with your ear. What does it sound like? The interesting aspect of music is that this “sound” is different for every person. Listening is a truly subjective endeavor. What one person hears as pleasing, another person can find unlistenable, even unbearable.

Sometimes it has to do with personal taste, but more often not it has to do with exposure and experience. I remember the first time I listened to Schoenberg’s Pirot Lunaire:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To my untrained ear, it sounded overly dissonant, almost like noise. However, putting it on today it sounds surprisingly accessible. The piece of music is exactly the same, but the listening, performing, and other musical experiences that I’ve had in the intervening years have changed my ears. My definition of dissonance has evolved, my ears have changed.

You’ve probably had the same experience listening to recordings or checking out players that you were unfamiliar with. On that first listen you unconsciously make judgements based on your musical experience and the styles and harmonies that you’re familiar with. Your perception of “great improvising” evolves the more you learn and the more you listen, over time your ear slowly changes.

The same should be true of the way you hear melody and harmony. Your conception of the “right notes” should evolve and expand the more you are exposed to musically. But sadly, this is not always the case. A large number of improvisers are stuck clinging to the rules of harmony that they dutifully memorized as a beginner.

Year after year, improvisation remains addled with strict rules that are cast in black and white, right notes vs. wrong notes. You become boxed in to this rigid mentality and as a result, every solo starts sounding the same.

Don’t be limited by the rules of music theory

It would be a shame if you limited yourself to the bare basics of music theory when you improvise: Ionian over Major chords, Dorian over minor chords, and Mixolydian over V7. This is a good place to start building your harmonic foundation, but it’s going to get boring and predictable if left undeveloped. Musical interest at its most basic level comes from tension and release, the opposition of consonance and dissonance.

Think of harmony like a painter’s palatte, an expressive collection of color with limitless variations and options. You don’t have to paint only in primary colors or relegate your thinking to black and white. There are infinite shades and nuances to explore, there are varying levels of harmonic dissonance and consonance that can be applied to each musical situation depending on how you feel at that moment.

Just as you had to learn the sound of the root, the 3rd, the 5th, and the 7th of a chord, you need to familiarize your ear with the other notes: the 4th, the 6th, the 9th and even non-diatonic notes like the #11, the #5, the #9, and so on. These notes aren’t wrong, they are just a different color, a different source of harmonic tension that you can use in your lines.

“To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must forget them.”~Nadia Boulanger

Try to get away from the mentality of right and wrong when it comes to harmony and think in terms of different colors or shades of sound. Every note is fair game when it come to improvising over a chord and the only limiting factor or “rule” is the sophistication of your ear.

The reason that some notes sound wrong is simply because your ears are not accustomed to them. You need to acclimate your ear, you need to expand your options beyond the basic chord tones. The good news is that this transformation doesn’t require a huge undertaking. With some focused practice on a few key exercises, you can spend a few minutes in the practice room every day and completely expand your harmonic conception.

Below we’ll take some notes that are commonly looked at as “wrong” or avoid notes and figure out how to make them a useful part of our harmonic palatte by changing the way we hear them.

The 4th scale degree

The 4th scale degree is commonly looked as an avoid note on Major and V7 chords. Don’t sustain it, don’t play it on a strong beat, and never ever start a line with it. It clashes with the third, arguably the most important note of the chord. Because of this, many improvisers avoid this note altogether, playing it safe and sticking the chord tones.

But, this doesn’t mean that you have to leave this note out altogether or only use it sparingly as a passing tone. With a little practice the 4th can become a useful part of your playing.

The first step to mastery with any scale, chord tone, chord progression, transcribed line or musical technique begins with getting the sound of it in your ear. If you can truly hear it, chances are you’re going to be exponentially more successful at playing it on your instrument.

Approach each of these “dissonant” sounds in the same manner: Start by simply playing the chord and singing the note over top of this harmony. An easy way to do this exercise is to go to the piano. Play the chord and sustain it with the pedal and play the dissonant note on top of it. (Unsure of how to voice a basic chord at the piano? Check out this article.)

Absorb the sound of that note and how it feels in relation to the accompanying chord and then sing it. Once you can confidently sing that note, play it on your instrument along with the chord.

Let’s start out with the 4th scale degree over a Major 7 chord:

Next, do the same for the 4th scale degree on a V7 chord:

Remember, to get control of these sounds you need to ingrain them into your ear, and the fastest way to do this is through singing. After you can successfully hear, sing, and play the 4th over both a Major 7 and V7 chord, apply this sound to a tune or chord progression that you’re familiar with. The blues is always a good place to start:

You are going to want to resolve down to the third or up to the 5th, but resist the urge. Push through the dissonance until your ear is acclimated to the sound.

Once you become comfortable hearing that 4th, try creating some simple lines over the blues that utilize the 4th scale degree. In the line below the 4th is emphasized, but the tension is resolved each time:

Another example is Charlie Parker’s tune Relaxin’ at Camarillo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Notice how Bb, the 4th scale degree of F7, is emphasized in the opening measures of the melody:

It is not merely a passing tone, but a goal note as it lands on strong parts of the beat and is the repeated high point of the melody.

#11 over V7 and Maj.7

While it is one of the more common dissonant notes, many improvisers don’t have the sound of the #11 in their ears. They understand it in theory, and consequently insert it into their solos as a mental exercise rather than a natural part of their line. This is not musical – you can do better.

Again, start by familiarizing yourself with this sound and getting it in your ear. Play a major chord at the piano and play and sustain the #11 on top of that chord.

Then play a V7 chord and play the #11 on top:

The result is slightly different with each chord. On the Major 7th chord there is a 4th relationship between the #11 and the major 7th and on the V7 chord there is a major 3rd between the #11 and the b7. Manipulating each of these relationships will create a different effect.

When you can confidently hear and sing the #11 over Major 7 and V7, play that note on your instrument. Again, take a familiar tune or progression like the blues, and apply this note to each chord. Get this unique sound in your ear, to the point that it feels like a different color, not like a mistake:

After you’ve done this preliminary exercise, apply some language that utilizes the #11 over these chords. For example, over a C7 chord you could play this g minor line that emphasizes the #11:

Notice how the top F# is the goal note of the line and is further emphasized by its placement on the downbeats of the second measure:

#5 over Major and V7 / Major 7th over V7

The next “avoid notes,” the #5 and the major 7th over a V7, are a step up in dissonance from the notes we’ve covered so far. Both of these notes are a half-step away from a strong chord tone (the 5th and the 7th). As a result the sound of these notes clashes with the harmonies that we are naturally accustomed to.

Again, go to the piano and sing and play both of these notes to ingrain the sound in your ear. The #5 over Maj.7 and V7 chords:

And the Major 7th scale degree over V7:

Chances are that these less common sounds will be more dissonant to your ear, so spend some extra time on the preliminary exercises hearing, sing, and playing these colors.

For a great example of this dissonance in action, check out how Freddie Hubbard employs both the #5 and major 7th on the tune Birdlike (2:32 in the video):

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the beginning of this chorus, Freddie plays this line to create some harmonic tension:

Pay special attention to how he emphasizes the Major 7th scale degree over these V7 chords, a definite “avoid note”:

Now Freddie is not thinking about inserting the major 7th or highlighting the #5, he is clearly thinking B major over G7. In effect utilizing the sound of a slash chord over the first few bars of the blues:

As with the dissonant notes we’ve explored so far, each slash chord also has a varying level of dissonance. For example, slash chords a half-step away from the root (C#/C or F#/G) create more tension while those a whole-step or 5th away from the root are more consonant. In the example above he uses the slash chord a major 3rd above the root (B/G7) and a half-step below the root (B/C7).

When these individual dissonances become more familiar to your ear, start implying entire melodic fragments in different keys on top of these chords in the fashion Freddie uses in the example above.

Major 3rd over minor 7

The last dissonant sound we’ll look at is the sound of the major 3rd over a minor 7 chord. This sound is similar to the 4th scale degree over a major or V7 chord in that it is a half-step away from the third of the chord.

After you’ve ingrained the sound and applied it to a familiar chord progression or tune, start incorporating it into your improvisation. Try a line like the one below, which is essentially an F# minor triad with the addition of the major 3rd:

Simply by inserting that major third into a minor triad or even a minor pentatonic pattern can add interest and tension to that minor 7 chord.

Practicing dissonance

The important point to remember when practicing is to apply these dissonant notes musically. Even the “right notes” sound strange when they are inserted mechanically into a musical line. Think about how a beginner sounds as they try to improvise for the first time, picking random notes from a scale. Without time, rhythm, sound, language, and technique any note, no matter how correct it is, will sound bad.

As shown above, incorporate these concepts into language and lines that you already know. This can be as simple as taking some minor language and applying it to its related V7 chord (as with the G-7 line over C7 to emphasize the #11). Or, you can slightly alter lines, language, and technique that you’ve learned to include these dissonant note choices (as we did above with the F# minor triad).

Keep in mind that the way you hear things is entirely unique to you, dependent upon your listening, practice, and performing experience. Finding the “right notes” in an improvised line is a subjective pursuit based on the experience of your ears. However, contrary to what some people think, this aural perspective does not have to remain set in stone. Over time it should shift and evolve and using the techniques outlined above, your ears can change very quickly.

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”~Friedrich Nietzsche

The greatest improvisers can use any note they want in a solo regardless of the chord progression or key of the tune. Listen to Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Freddie, or Michael Brecker. Harmony for these masters has no limits – Any note over any chord! Think about that.

Once you’ve mastered the elements of musicality, once you’ve explored harmony both aurally and mentally, and when you’re truly playing what you hear, there are no rules. The only barrier is the limit of what you can hear, the limit of what sounds “right” to you. Lucky for you, this doesn’t have to be some far fetched musical fantasy, if you start today, you’ll be there sooner than you think!

If there is one thing about playing jazz that’s shrouded in mystery, it is improvisation.

Improvisation exists in other types of music, even in musical traditions from the far reaches of the globe, but in jazz it goes much deeper. It is somehow vitally tied to the spirit of the music, and it’s not just musicians who recognize the power of the improvised solo. This essence has been captured in everything from literature to movies to pop culture.

There is something alluring about the idea of the jazz musician; a creative soul channeling the intangible through their instrument, essentially creating something out of nothing.

However, despite all of the attention, we still can’t seem to define this creative endeavor. You can get a degree in jazz studies, you can study the philosophy behind improvisation and creativity, and you can even scan the brains of improvising musicians to discover the secret pathways of the mind in its most creative state, but there still seem to be more questions than answers.

Alas, improvising continues to remain an elusive mystery.

As musicians hard at work developing this skill in the practice room, we often get lost in the music. It can be all too easy to lose the ability to look at the music objectively from an outside perspective and after some time, we’re no longer able to hear music with a naive untrained ear.

We become part of the music and suddenly we see the world in a different way. It’s true that we can’t go back and look at the music from an outsider’s vantage point, but the way improvisation is perceived affects the way we approach improving at improvisation and more importantly performing on stage.

Misconceptions about improvisation

The band takes the stage. A tune is quickly counted off. After a short melody, a soloists steps into the spotlight and up to the microphone, eyes closed in concentration, and begins to play the first notes of a solo. In the heat of the moment attention is focused, ears are opened, and technique is put to the test. But are those notes and lines coming from the soloist completely original? Is that improvised solo really improvised?

Well…it depends who you ask.

Anything goes

One widespread myth about improvisation is that it is completely made up on the spot. No preparation, no memorization, and nothing that isn’t completely original.

For many, especially those watching from a distance with little musical experience, this is the most logical explanation for improvisation. After all, how else do you explain those musicians playing without music?

However, as anyone whose tried their hand at soloing over a chord progression knows, jazz improvisation is not a completely random free-for-all. You can’t just play whatever you want and sound good. Yet, it’s not all predetermined either.

What musicians present on stage can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people. Take a quick look at this Stefon Harris TED talk:

Click here to view the embedded video.

From watching this video, you get the impression that any group of musicians can get together and just start playing, improvising without any preparation. What this uninitiated audience (in their business suits and name tags) is missing is the caliber of the musicians performing on that stage.

They’ll walk away from that presentation with the misguided idea that any group of musicians can just get up on stage and improvise like that. “There are no mistakes in jazz, it looked so simple when they just started improvising.” What they can’t see is all the preparation behind the scenes that led to that seemingly effortless ability, the “prerequisites” to achieve that kind of creative freedom.

Imagine the same presentation with a different set of musicians. Say that instead of that group of accomplished improvisers, Stefon Harris had picked some random players with proficient instrumental technique, but no ear training skills, no knowledge of form, and no study of the jazz tradition.

Would the result be the same? Would there be no mistakes on that bandstand?

Don’t think so.

For the player that isn’t using their ears, even the “right notes” can sound strangely unfamiliar and out of place. A lack of study, technique, or practice can destroy the creativity on any bandstand. On the other hand, an experienced improviser can make the “wrong notes” sound natural, even pleasing to the ear.

Played with musicality, knowledge, and openness to the spirit of the moment, there truly are no wrong notes, there are no mistakes.

It’s just music theory

Along with the view of complete freedom and risk is the opposing view of structure and intellectual knowledge. For this group, effortless improvisation can be achieved solely through scale practice and theoretical analysis. You often hear people say: ” If you want to improvise well, learn all your scales and arpeggios” and many take this advice to heart, spending hours in the practice room each day on scales and theory.

But the fact is that thousands of musicians know all their scales and arpeggios. They can play them in any key, in 3rds and 4ths and arpeggios, but how many are great improvisers?

In your practice, you can analyze solos on paper, you can look for voice leading and the 3rds and 7ths, and you can practice arpeggios for hours at a time, but if you stop with only this theoretical knowledge you are missing the point. This is the reason that the act of transcribing (listening and learning by ear) is just as important as the final result of transcribing, the names of the notes.

Armed with only theoretical knowledge and scales, improvisation will still remain just as elusive.

Yet, this is the mentality that is pervading the education of improvisation. If you know your scales, have the chord progression memorized, and know a few ii-V lines – then you’re improvising. It can be easy to forget that the act of improvising has many factors and that they all don’t involve music theory.

Enabling improvisation

Neither of the above theories for improvisation is entirely accurate. However, each explanation contains a piece of the puzzle in creating the environment for a great solo. The truth is that our goal is somewhere between these two poles, in the gray area. We’re not actually making up everything that we play spontaneously, yet we’re also not just rehashing lines we’ve memorized note for note.

One of the drawbacks of effective practice, is that it can become creatively stifling. Hours spent practicing the same line, the same technical exercise, or the same three chords. Over and over and over again until we don’t even have to think to produce these sounds. After some time it can feel as if we’re not improvising anymore, just inserting the same old techniques and concepts that we’ve drilled for weeks in the practice room.

The saxophonist Mark Turner talks about this struggle in this interview (check out the others as well on this page from the Stanford Jazz Workshop).

This type of practice can be repetitive, however it is necessary to attain that level of freedom that we desire on the bandstand. However, many of us do not put in enough work to get to this level of creative intuition. Even though we know better, we get sucked into the belief that improvisation is magic. Sure, we start out in the practice room studying and ingraining the pieces of a good improvised solo, but we rarely go far enough. We stop with a few scales, arpeggios, and memorized licks and we expect something magical to happen when we get on stage.

With this mindset, you’re more like the general public that knows nothing about music, a player just gets up there and creates great lines out of thin air.

“What matters most to me? To work with my model until I have it enough in me to be able to improvise, to let my hand run free…”~Henri Matisse

Improvisation is a curious endeavor. It’s both studious preparation and intuitive risk taking. You need each to set the stage for a successful solo. A solo that is planned out and memorized is boring and not in the spirit of the moment. And in the same vein, a solo that follows no rules, ignores the progression, form, harmony, time, and other players on stage, is just as unmusical and counter-intuitive to the spirit of the moment.

Improvising is like conversation

An apt analogy for the mindset of improvisation and the struggle between structure and memorization vs. spontaneity and freedom is that of an everyday conversation.

In any conversation there is a format that you follow, a “form” if you will. It is something that we all unconsciously learn through listening and imitation: a greeting, a response, a question, a response, another question and so on, back and forth. We don’t just start blurting out statements or inappropriate words, this destroys the moment and blocks communication.

For each of these parts of the form we have common phrases that we use for any number of situations. It all depends on the moment. We can ask questions, comment on an item of interest close at hand, or even crack a joke. With each statement we wait for a reaction and gauge our next direction.

There is no set script for any conversation, rather a common format that can lead in any number of directions. Some conversations stick closely to the phrases we know and are expected to use. Some can be incredibly boring where nothing creative or personal is shared, while others can go in directions we never expected and be incredibly fulfilling. It all depends on your intent, your feeling, your openness to interaction, and finally, the reaction of the other person.

It’s all about preparation and being in the moment

Just like a great conversationalist, an accomplished improviser is equal parts experience, practice, and creative inspiration. You must react and respond to the players and situations around you with your knowledge, ears, and practiced technique.

In performance the entirety of your musicianship is tested all at once. Every skill is connected and dependent upon the other for true creative freedom. Without technique, harmonic knowledge, and great ears you have a huge barrier blocking your creativity and communication with the other musicians on stage. And, without creativity, you’re left with music theory.

It’s practice and experience that allow spontaneity and create the right environment for improvisation. And, spontaneity transforms those scales, techniques, and hours spent transcribing solos into something greater than you could have possibly imagined.

“It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”~Mark Twain

The more you’ve learned, the more you’ve studied, the more experience you have soloing, the more you have to draw from when you improvise. You can take bigger chances and explore uncharted creative territories. Sure, you might play some lines or ideas that you’ve worked out in the practice room, but you are adapting them to the moment – the music happening right now.

In the end, this is the kind of improvising that really is improvising.

One of the questions we’ve been getting a lot lately is where to start learning jazz improvisation. There’s so much information out there, that knowing where to start is a complete nightmare.

If I could start again today, I’d ignore nearly all the information out there in terms of method books and do my best to learn this music the same way that the greats learned. They didn’t have books filled with transcriptions of their favorite players. They didn’t have real-books or fake-books packed with sheet music of tunes. And they certainly didn’t have play-along records that they could pop in and jam with.

They learned from the recordings of their heroes, coupled with playing with others.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s up to you whether you use any of these materials and even play-alongs can be used effectively, however, why fix it if it’s not broken?

In other words, people were learning how to play jazz long before any of this material existed and they certainly sounded just fine Sure, the convenience of playing with a play-along record when you have no one to jam with can be fun and beneficial, but in my experience, as well as observing countless other musicians’ experiences, nearly all these resources distract you from the pathway that will get you where you want to go.

Where to start

Here’s a checklist to get you started learning jazz improvisation. If you simply go through the checklist, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a fluent jazz musician.

There are two groups of topics that you want to start focusing on today. The first group is stuff you can do away from your instrument and the second group is stuff you’ll do with your instrument.

Things to do without your instrument

Listen

The number one thing you can do to get started learning and constantly improve at jazz is to listen. Sounds simple right? But how much have you really listened? With the advent of phones that carry gigabytes of music, there’s no excuse not to be listening all the time. Invest in a music player that you carry with you all the time and carry a small set of ear-buds. Whenever you can, listen.

Fill your head with the stuff you like the most. When you wake up in the morning, on your way to work, at work if you’re able to, while you work out, when you’re cooking dinner, when you’re cleaning up your house or doing laundry. Listen, listen, listen, and then listen some more!

Understand the culture of jazz

There are many myths about how jazz came to be, and even more mysterious than the music are the players themselves. With so much intellectualizing of jazz, we often forget how deep this music really is. Pick up some autobiographies of some great jazz musicians and you’ll begin to understand what life was like for these people.

Checkout:

Miles Davis’s Autobiography

Art Pepper’s Autobiography

Count Basie’s Autobiography

Jimmy Heath’s Autobiography

Many more autobiographies exist, as well as many biographies of the greats. Pick one and read it to absorb the culture that these people lived in. Believe me, you’ll enjoy it. Reading about jazz musicians is always fun and entertaining.

Understand chords, chord progressions, and chord-tones from a theoretical and aural basis

“That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”-Bill Evans

I could have said “Learn music theory” or “Jazz theory” but this would over-emphasize the point, not to mention that it would make it seem like a bigger task than it really is.

You hear so much about how complicated jazz theory is that when people start to learn jazz, they think they have to learn a ton of theory.

In actuality, there’s only a minimum amount of music theory required to understand jazz lines and progressions and the bulk of it has to do simply with chords. What do you need to know about chords?

You need to understand how chords are built. This is actually quite easy. A simple Wikipedia search around a chord will present you with more than enough information than you need to know about each chord quality.

The chord qualities you’ll want to study are: major, minor, dominant, half-diminished, and diminished. A firm understanding of how to build these chords will allow you to branch out to modifications of these chords, including dominants with altered 5s and 9s.

While you’re learning how chords are built, make sure to think of each chord tone as a number in relation to the chord. This is very important. 1-3-5-7-9-11-13. You want to be able to quickly (immediately and intuitively) know what any chord tone of any chord is, so for example, if I said, what’s the third of an Ab major chord? You quickly respond…”C.”

A great way to start ingraining the structures of chords into your mind is visualizing them in your spare time. Again, this is all stuff you can start doing today even without your instrument!

Study these posts to start to acquire the needed chordal knowledge:

Visualization for Jazz Improvisation

How to Put Chord Tones At Your Fingertips

10 Visualization Exercises

A Free Jazz Visualization Ebook

Now when you go from one chord to the next as you do in a tune, it makes a chord progression; one chord progresses to the next. Once you gain a firm grasp on chords and chord tones, the next step is to understand how and why one chord progresses to the next. This is also quite straightforward when it comes to most jazz standards. As you begin to study your first several tunes, you’ll notice the same chord progressions used over and over…things like ii V I.

Equally if not more important to understanding chords, is to learn to actually hear chords and chord tones. We’ve written at length about how to hear chords:

Fundamental Ear Training Exercises

Hearing Seventh Chords

Hearing Chord Tones

Learning Your Four Triads

You should always understand why each chord is there. It should never be a mystery. Many people who learn tunes from sheet music are still in the dark. They wonder why a particular chord is there in a tune, and why they’re having such a difficult time playing over it. Most of the time, it’s because they picked up the wrong chord from the sheet music. As I’ll discuss later, learning tunes from recordings will ultimately save you years of frustration.

Where do scales fit in?

Today, scales are overemphasized as they present a pool of notes that “work” over a particular chord. Let’s look at an example:

The chord D minor arrpegiated to the 13th will include all of it’s chord tones: D-F-A-C-E-G-B

If you rearrange these notes in stepwise ascending order you get: D-E-F-G-A-B-C

A whole paradigm around thinking this way has been created. It focuses on a particular “mode” of a scale which works over a particular chord.

These scale association techniques do help you understand what notes are contained in a chord as a whole and that is why they are not “bad” to know.

However, what happens, is people use modes as the basis of their soloing concept and end up flailing endlessly within that mode and think that that’s improvising. It’s not. Jazz is a language. Chords and scales are not the language of jazz; that’s like saying the alphabet is the language of English. It’s not. The language of English has words, phrases, and inflections that make it a very specific thing.

To read more about scales, checkout why they are not the secret shortcut to jazz.

Know the chords, know the chord-tones, know the scales, but at the end of the day, the language you learn from recordings, the concepts you emulate from recordings, and the concepts and language you create yourself, are the things that formulate the basis of your musical concept.

Understand ii Vs and how important they truly are

ii V progressions make up the bulk of any chord progression you’ll ever encounter within the jazz standard repertoire. They are extremely important to study. Read two five progressions made easy to get started with them.

Things to do with your instrument

Pick one tune to study

Now that you’ve got the non-playing aspects of improvisation marinating in your mind, it’s time to apply what you’re thinking about to the music.

In all your listening that you’re now doing, you’re bound to come across a jazz standard that resonates with you. Find a recording of any standard that you love where the instrument playing the melody is the same as your instrument. Here’s some suggestions of what tune you might pick:

• Autumn Leaves
• On Green Dolphin Street
• A blues (any tune with a blues form)
• A rhythm changes tune (Any tune with the chord progression from Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”)

To clarify, if I play trumpet, perhaps I’d choose “Freddie Freeloader” from Kind of Blue. It’s not too fast, it’s a blues, and it’s some of the best music on the face of the planet to ever exist. Understand how to make your selection?

First learn the melody note-for-note by ear.

If you don’t have Transcribing software, I highly recommend you get it. It makes navigating any track much simpler and saves you hours of time by being more efficient.

It’s quite simple in theory. You put the tune into your transcribing software, you loop the first phrase of the melody and copy it note-for-note until you can play it perfectly. Then onto the second phrase. Then connect the first two phrases. Next, add the third and so on and so forth until you’ve learned the melody completely by ear from the recording.

Once you’ve got the melody down, it’s time to turn to the harmony. I can hear you whining already. “But that’s too hard!” It’s really not, and the sooner you get into learning melodies, harmonies, and rhythms straight of the recording, the faster you’ll get to playing how you want, not to mention having a ton of fun because while everybody else is flailing over what scale choice to make, you’ll be hearing and playing the language of jazz.

Use this site and your teachers to guide you through learning your first tune from a recording. It’s all hear. Pun intended.

Learn your first piece of jazz language

As you’re learning your first tune from the recording, start to pay attention to what the soloists are doing. In your hours of listening, just as you found a tune you love, you’re bound to hear a line on that particular recording that makes your jaw drop.

You guessed it. Your next step is to rip that jazz language right off the recording. Again, match it note-for-note, writing nothing down as you go. It may be quite difficult at first, but if you stick with it, you will get it.

Absorb the feeling of jazz

This is one of the most important things to do, yet very difficult to describe to another person. Play along with that same tune that you’ve been working on and really try to emulate the feeling, the vibe of what you hear.

Pretend that you actually are the soloist. So, as in the earlier example, I’d try to feel as if I were Miles Davis. How would he stand? How would he hold the horn? It may sound dumb, but the idea is to get into his head as much as possible. Only then will you truly absorb the feeling of what’s going on and this is where the magic lies.

Your goals as you start

As you start to learn jazz improvisation, you should have a clear vision of what your goals are. It may not sound glamorous but your goals as you start out (assuming you want become proficient) should be to develop solid fundamentals through building the right practice habits:

• Listen to jazz everyday. Enjoying it and feeling a true passion for the music.
• Learn and study tunes straight recordings rather than reading them from sheet music.
• Transcribe and learn language from recordings
• Understand how chords are built and why each chord “exists” in a tune, and how and why each chord progresses to to the next in  a progression. Make sure to use your ear and learn to hear and recognize these chords aurally.
• long term goal: transcribing your first solo, with the aim of emulating language and concepts from the soloist and integrating them into your own playing

It may sound like a lot of work to start out this way, but I promise you, not only will you excel at lightning speed if you begin this way, but you’ll build the strong practice habits that will keep you improving and having fun playing your entire life. Use this article as a jumping off point to get started; of course not everything is covered here, but don’t let that be your excuse. Search for answers on this site, from your teachers, from your friends, and most importantly on recordings.

You have the knowledge to get started in jazz improvisation, so make it so!

As an improviser, you can transcribe solos. You can improve your technique. You can listen to your favorite recordings for hours each day. You can practically live in your practice room.

But, no matter what you do or how much time you spend, at the end of the day you still have to deal with tunes. Despite all your hard work and preparation, there are still those tunes you don’t know. Lot’s of them. Hundreds of tunes. How exactly are you going to learn all these tunes?

The truth is that you aren’t going to know every tune ever written. Try as they might, no one does, not even the greatest players out there. However what you can do is slowly but steadily add tunes to your repertoire, one by one.

Each day you can make a little headway. This is the mark of a great player. Aim to know more tunes this week than you did last week. Work tirelessly on your ears and playing what you hear, so you can figure out the tunes you don’t know. Strive to learn something new everyday.

Expanding your repertoire is something that every improviser must deal with, it’s a process that never ends. However, this process of learning tunes doesn’t have to be a recurring nightmare that’s constantly holding you back and preventing you from going out and playing. It can be simple, even fun.

Here are three things that you can do in your daily practice to make the process of learning tunes simple, easy, and enjoyable:

I) Make a plan

Getting organized and working towards a long term goal. Structuring your daily and weekly practice routine. Believe it or not, these simple tasks are the single most important factor in building a solid repertoire of tunes. It can mean the difference between having a solid base of tunes 6 months to a year from now or being stuck with the same few standards that you know today.

The secret to memorizing a bunch of tunes is not related to natural talent or technique. It all comes down to motivation, organization, and some serious time spent with the records. You have to consciously say to yourself “I am going to learn more tunes and here’s exactly how I’m going to do it.”

You can wish to know more tunes all you want, but until you do something about it, you’ll be stuck with your limited repertoire months or even years from now. Whether you like it or not, you need a plan.

“At night, never go to bed without knowing what you’ll write tomorrow.”~Ernest Hemingway

The problem with the way that most people are learning tunes is that they are stuck in the day to day view of practice, choosing things at random to work on. One day they focus on one tune, the next it’s something completely new. A week later it’s yet another set of exercises and a new batch of tunes.

They are constantly starting new projects and focusing on new tunes, yet never actually completing any of these projects. Time is faithfully spent in the practice room, but no tangible results are actually achieved.

If you are serious about achieving a big goal like learning a bunch of tunes however, you need to stop this cycle and take a different approach. Take a step back and look at what is actually happening in the practice room. Look at the big picture a month, 6 months, even a year down the road. You need to have a goal and each day you need to slowly work towards this goal.

Make a list of tunes

Step one is to create a list of tunes that you want to learn. Quite simply, if you haven’t identified what you’re going to learn, you’re not going to learn it.

Off the top of your head, think of the tunes that you need or want to learn. What was the last tune that someone called that you didn’t know? What are the tunes on that favorite record you’re always listening to?

Having trouble thinking of tunes that you should learn? Here are some articles that we’ve written about learning tunes and building your repertoire that should give you some ideas:

• 5 Tunes to Know and Why You Should Know Them

• Building Your Repertoire Part II: 10 Key Tunes

• 10 Thelonious Monk Compositions You Need to Know

Also, check out the websites of the major jazz schools and conservatories around the country. What tunes do they require on an audition tape? What tunes are the students expected to know on a jury? The jazz program at the Manhattan School of Music has a list of tunes that students are expected to know at the end of each year and this is a great resource for creating your personal tune list:

• MSM Jazz Arts Handbook (pdf)

Another easy thing you can do everyday to build your list is to write down any and all tunes that you find yourself listening to. If you’re at a concert and the group plays a tune you like or a composition that you’re unfamiliar with, write it down. When somebody calls a tune at a jam session that you don’t know, add it to the list. Always be on the lookout for tunes that you can add to your repertoire.

After some time, what you’ll end up with is a “master list” of tunes that you want to learn. And, this list is always going to be growing and expanding. From this big list, pick 2-3 tunes that you want to learn first. You are going to focus on these tunes exclusively for the next week or so.

You don’t want to try to learn the entire list at once, this will just lead to frustration. Instead, pick a few tunes that you can easily learn in a short amount of time. If the melody of the tune is pretty simple (Solar, Now’s the Time, Oleo) you can attempt to learn multiple tunes at once. However, if you choose a more complex tune, Donna Lee for example, you’re going to want to focus on only that tune for an extended period of time.

II) Listen, listen, listen

Once you’ve picked out the tunes you are going to focus on this week, it’s time to find versions of these tunes to listen to from your collection or online.

One of the main reason we think learning tunes is so hard, is because we try to jump right into the learning process without any preparation. The first time we seriously listen to a tune is the moment when we start trying to learn it in the practice room. This shouldn’t be the case! You want to go into the practice room with the melody in your ear and the ability to sing each pitch spot on. This will make things so much easier for you and will cut the time it takes to learn these melodies in half.

When searching for recordings, find as many versions as you can (like we do with On Green Dolphin St. in this article). Search for them on YouTube, borrow recordings from your friends, look for them at the library (…do people still go to the library??). Pick the versions that you like best and seek out the players that you want to sound like. Remember that the process of learning tunes should be fun, not a dreaded chore.

When you’ve got the versions you like best, put them on your phone or ipod and listen to them whenever you can. Put on the recording first thing in the morning as you wake up and right before you go to bed. Aim for focused listening and aural analysis instead of treating this as background music.

The goal is to be able to sing these melodies note for note before you get to the practice room. By doing this simple step, you’re making the next step learning process that much easier.

III) Learning it

So you’ve picked out your tunes, you’ve listened to them, you’ve got the melodies in your ear, and now it’s time to actually learn them on your instrument.

For starters, break up the tune into sections. Don’t try to tackle the entire melody at once. For a step-by-step description of this process, check out this article.

Remember, not everything in practicing improvisation is going to be creative and intuitive. Sometimes we have to switch to the left brain and become an unrelenting task master; and learning tunes is definitely one of these cases. Stay focused and disciplined. You’re goal is cut and dry here: Learn a phrase, repeat it a bunch of times, and move to the next phrase.

After some time, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll pick up tunes in this fashion. If you’ve pre-listened and you focus in the practice room, you can learn a melody in minutes. And, if you’ve laid out an organized plan for yourself, you can rapidly increase the number of tunes you know in the space of a month (2-3 tunes a week = 8-12 tunes a month).

The weight of building a repertoire of tunes is always going to be there. You’ve got a choice, you can stay on you’re current random path of learning and continue to be stressed out under this weight, or you can get organized and do a little bit each day, confident that you are steadily making progress.

If you approach them in the right way, tunes aren’t really that big of a deal. So, get a plan and don’t get caught up in the hype.

Just learn a few ii V licks in all keys, learn how to use them, and that’s jazz, right? Unfortunately not.

ii Vs make up the bulk of chord progressions found in all western music from classical to pop music, hence, ii Vs are necessary to master. However, a common result from working on ii Vs a lot is something that sounds like a combination of noodling around and plugging in ii V licks. We never want to sound like were noodling around, and we’d much prefer to sound spontaneous and interesting than uninspired and predictable.

When we finally decide to start devoting time to studying ii Vs, our ears open a ton and we get excited, as if we’ve found the key to unlock everything. Studying ii Vs does unlock a ton of mystery and will greatly help you improve as an improviser, but know that that this study is only part of the picture.

Getting stuck in ii V land

We all practice ii Vs. We practice lines over them, we practice freely improvising over them, and we try to figure out how to use any concept we’re working on over them, but to what end?

Somewhere in this mess of working on ii Vs, we lose track of the real goal: to sound musical. That’s right. To actually say something with what we’re playing. But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What happens when we get enthralled with ii Vs is that everything else falls to the wayside. The result: we have to wait until ii Vs occur in a tune to play our lines and concepts. So, basically we spend a lot of our solo meandering, and then when a ii V arrives, we play over it in a fairly boxy and predictable way with the stuff we’ve practiced.

ii Vs are just part of the whole. Yes, they are a very very important part of the whole, but you must balance your ii V study by working on other parts of the whole.

Focus on non ii V language

One of the major pitfalls in many people’s playing is that they spend little time studying language that’s not a ii V.

Believe it or not, the most commonly overlooked chord is the major chord. For some reason, perhaps because we perceive them as easy, we think we can get away with knowing the bare minimum amount of knowledge to play successfully over major chords.

What’s the bare minimum amount of knowledge? The bare minimum amount of knowledge is knowing the chord tones and the scale of any given chord. Yes, that’s the least you should know. Many books, teachers, and friends will claim that this is what you need to know, but really it’s the absolute bare minimum.

Like we say all the time, what you really need is a firm understanding of a chord through the study of language. And this language is actually most easily gained for ii V situations because we’re all familiar with the idea of a ii V line, so learning lines for this harmonic situation is second nature, however, chords like “major” need just as much attention.

A chord and scale is not enough. It’s just barely enough to play. I remember one day having trouble over a tune and Rich Perry stopped me and said, “You sound fine in the ii V spots, but everywhere else is not nearly as good.” I was stuck in ii V land and it showed.

It doesn’t seem natural; the ii Vs are the more difficult sections as compared to the major chord or minor chord spots, but it’s this very perception, that they’re easy, that causes us to gloss over them…

Then Rich asked me, “A Major chord. What you got.” I didn’t know how to respond. Should I arrpegiate the chord or play the scale? Should I try to improvise over it? I was clueless. Put me over a ii V, and I could give you a bunch of lines, but here I was completely stumped over a simple major chord. Stumped over the easy stuff. Stuck in ii V land.

You need language for every chord and it should be just as accessible as your ii Vs. If it’s not, any ii V you play over will stick out because you’ll flow nicely over them and then go back to meandering aimlessly when you’re not playing over them.

This is the test to do on yourself with all the other harmonic situations you want to play over: “Major chords. What you got.” If you don’t have several pieces of language that you can use as a melodic springboard for your creativity, it’s time to transcribe some and make them your own.

Think through this test with yourself with your instrument in your hands and see what you have at your fingertips. You may be surprised that the “easy” stuff isn’t so easy.

Lengthen those note values

Another problem with the way we commonly practice ii Vs is all the eighth notes. We fill up every ounce of space with running eighth notes in our practice and what comes out during performance? Eighth notes.

Now, nothing against eighth notes. They’re essential and of prime importance, just like ii Vs, but just as you must balance your ii V language with the practice and internalization of  language of equal value for other harmonic situations, you must learn to approach ii Vs in other ways than a constant stream of eighth notes.

Why do many of our ii V lines consist of only eight notes? When we practice language, it’s out of context of a complete solo and we tend to focus on lines that are full of motion, hence, a lot of eighth notes. The problem: when we use them in context, we always play a bunch of eighth notes over a ii V. This is the second part of being stuck in ii V land (the first is meandering over chords until you get to ii Vs to really play a line of value).

The cure to this eighth note dilemma is simple in theory, but difficult in practice. The goal is to be able to switch from playing many eighth notes over ii Vs, to playing a line with longer note values and mixed rhythms. Both of these perspectives are necessary; that’s why you need to be able to switch between them.

By playing with longer note values, mixed rhythms, and perhaps over the bar line phrasing, you disguise the harmonic motion of the ii V rather than directly bringing it to the foreground of the music as eighth-note lines do.

This is something you hear a lot in all the best players. Even guys like Coltrane who play a lot of eighth notes still occasionally play in this less eighth note oriented way over ii Vs every few choruses or so to mix it up and add balance to their solo.

Getting unstuck

keep working on your ii Vs. Never stop. But don’t let the constant eight-note ii V line consume you. Focus some of your time on other chords and harmonic situations, making sure you have language and a firm understanding of the other things you may encounter in your harmonic journeys.

Constantly ask yourself what knowledge you have to draw from for the non ii V situations to ensure the “easy” chords keep up with your knowledge of ii Vs.

Then, learn to approach ii Vs without playing a constant stream of eighth notes, disguising the harmony to provide contrast in your solo. Just like playing over major chords, this should be easier because it’s less complex, but again, things that we haven’t worked on, no matter how simple remain a mystery.

ii Vs are extremely important, but so is everything else. If you find yourself wandering during a solo except when you encounter a ii V, or if you seem to be always approaching your ii Vs the same way, you know you’re getting stuck in ii V land. It’s okay to be there; it’s almost essential at some point in your development because ii Vs are that important.

Just know that no matter how great you get at playing over ii Vs, that there’s many other things to focus on to keep everything in balance. Use the techniques presented in this article and you can be sure that not only will you never be noodling around during your solo, but that the way you approach ii Vs will fit beautifully and musically into the rest of your musical concept.

Transcription can be a real struggle sometimes. Some days it feels like you can spend an hour trying to learn a few measures, and after a dozen frustrating attempts, you end up in exactly the same place you started.

If this feeling rings a bell with you, you are definitely not alone. Many of the questions that we get every week have to do with this exact problem. How exactly do you make the transcription process easier?

In a perfect world transcription would be a breeze. You would hear a solo that grabs your attention, bring it into the practice room, and figure it out in a matter of minutes. The entire process would be seamless and easy: hear it, sing it, and play it; translating those harmonies and melodies right to your instrument and on to your solos.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, this is actually closer to reality than you might be willing to believe. You can get to this point in your playing, however, the path there is not what you may be expecting.

Getting simple with it

With any complex technique, advanced skill, or in-depth harmonic knowledge that you wish to acquire as a musician, the process has to begin with a very simple concept. A small exercise or idea that you expand, explore, and expound upon. You take this simple idea and master it; building it up step by step, until you are playing at an entirely new level and using skills you never thought possible.

“If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.”~Carl Jung

This sequence is true for any musical skill, and it’s especially relevant when it comes to ear training and transcribing. But for some reason, we tend to think about these aspects of our practice in terms of black and white – either you have them or you don’t. Either you have great ears and you can instantly pick up any line or melody or you don’t, and the simple act of learning a tune or transcribing a solo becomes this insurmountable struggle.

But does it really have to be this way? No, of course not! From simple beginnings and limited skills you can produce fantastic results. It just takes some focused practice and a willingness to work on the right areas. Simplicity before complexity.

Therefore, if you can sing Happy Birthday and you can play it by ear on your instrument, you have all the basic skills you need to transcribe any solo. And yes, you heard me right…Happy Birthday.

Start at the origin of the problem

If the process of transcribing feels like the description above, a constant struggle and a daily source of frustration, the obvious culprit is your ear. You aren’t hearing the intervals, you are missing those lines and melodies, and there is a troubling disconnect between your ear and your instrument.

Coming to this conclusion isn’t the hard part, you’ve probably realized this already. The hard part comes in trying to fix the problem.

When we hit that skill barrier, the first thing we try to do is more of the same – repeating the same broken process that isn’t working over and over again. If we’re not getting the notes of a solo, we continue to hammer away at it hoping for any sign of progress. If we still can’t seem to figure this solo we jump to another one and start all over again.

In these situations, it make seem like you are focusing on your problem areas by starting the transcription or learning process over and over again, but in reality you’re running away from your musical weaknesses. As soon as something gets hard you jump ship and start a new project. That weakness is always going to be there unless you focus on it and get to the root of the problem.

When things get tough and you’re feeling frustrated, take a step back from yourself and look objectively at what is going on. Instead of trying to force that solo by any means possible, look for a better solution.

“All things are ready, if our minds be so.”~William Shakespeare

Transcription is a process that demands some skills from you as a musician. You need to bring something to the table mentally as well as aurally. When you don’t seem to be getting the notes of a solo, it comes down to the fact that you’re trying to achieve the end result without the necessary skills or preparation. You’re jumping to the final level without any of the preliminary work.

This is like trying to run a marathon after laying on the couch all winter and once you’re in the middle of the race, wondering why you’re hitting a wall after the first mile or so. Without any training, preparation, or skill building you aren’t going to see the results you want, you are just going to get frustration and failure.

You can keep trying to start that marathon or solo transcription over and over again, hoping that this time will be the one you finish, but until you prepare yourself for the demands that this effort places on your body, you’re going to get nowhere.

Transcription can be an enjoyable part of your practice routine that leads to continuous musical growth and language or it can be a frustrating struggle that always seems to lead to a dead end. It all depends on the skills you’ve developed and your approach to this integral process.

The key is to start simple, build up your skills, and then you can aim for the end result.

Building up your skills step by step

You may not be able to transcribe your favorite solo right now. You may be having a hard time learning jazz standards. But one thing I’m pretty sure you can do is sing Happy Birthday.

If you can sing this simple melody then then you shouldn’t have to much trouble playing that melody on your instrument. And, if you can figure out Happy Birthday on your instrument, then you can transcribe your favorite solo. You just proved it to me.

Right there, in the above process, lies the foundation for transcription. The cycle of hearing, singing, and playing. It all goes back to your ears.

Let’s assume that you’ve done some basic ear training exercises and can identify the basic intervals in a chord or melody. The first step on your path to making the transcription process easier is to pick a simple tune that you know by heart. Not something that you have to think about to sing, but something ingrained so well that you can easily sing it perfectly on a moment’s notice.

This could be a favorite song or a melody that we remember from our childhood. We all know Happy Birthday, so why not start with that. The first step is singing. Not approximating, but singing each note perfectly and locking in each interval. Try it right now, sing each note of Happy Birthday.

Now slowly take a few notes at a time and identify each interval. The first interval: major 2nd, second interval: perfect 4th, and so on. Go through the melody and hear and sing each interval. If you ingrain the melody like this, you can play it in any key and translating it to your instrument will be a breeze.

Once you’ve got the shape and intervals of the line down, play the melody slowly on your instrument. Then, play the melody in all 12 keys. Remember to hear it first, before you try to play it or guess the notes at random. If you’ve got the melody like this, then translating it to other keys should be surprisingly simple as well.

With this simple process (taking a familiar melody, singing it, identifying the intervals, and playing it on your instrument) you’ve laid the groundwork for transcribing any piece of music that you come across…all with a tune as easy as Happy Birthday.

Simple beginnings produce big results

The great thing about Happy Birthday is that it is already ingrained in our ears. You are starting with a melody that’s internalized and by translating this melody to our voices and our instruments, you are strengthening that vital connection between your inner musician and your instrument

Happy Birthday seems like an easy, inconsequential melody because we’ve been hearing it and singing it since we were children. But, it’s just a melody like any jazz standard on your favorite record. If you can sing Happy Birthday and play it on your instrument, you can do the same with the countless jazz standards or solos that you’re trying to add to your repertoire.

Think about it, every jazz standard or musical line that you encounter is just another melody. If you can sing Happy Birthday, you can most definitely sing There Will Never Be Another You, or Body and Soul, or Oleo. If you can hear, identify, and sing each interval of Happy Birthday and you can play it on your instrument, then there is no reason why you can’t transcribe some lines from Lee Morgan’s solo on Ceora:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s just another melody – everything is a melody.

Once you have it ingrained in your ear and you can sing it, you just have to translate this melody to your instrument. The process is the same for any melody or solo that you learn, whether it’s a nursery rhyme from your childhood or a chorus of a Charlie Parker solo.

Just remember that you can’t just jump right into complex bebop solos or chromatic melodies right off the bat, you need to start simple and build up your skills. There is a natural progression to follow here:

Happy Birthday—> Simple Jazz Standards —> Bebop heads —> Transcribing Solos

The progression looks pretty simple, right? You start out with a basic melody and slowly work your way up until you are transcribing solos from the records of your musical heroes. Each step of the way you gain and refine essential skills that will allow you to achieve your goal of effortlessly hearing and transcribing complex lines.

I think you’re starting to see the process here. As these melodies get easier to hear and sing and play, start introducing more difficult melodies like bebop heads or highly chromatic melodies. Each step of the way, you use the same process that you used to figure out Happy Birthday. Sing it, identify the intervallic content, rhythm, and melodic direction with your ears, and translate this to your instrument.

It’s all the same stuff

The key to transcribing any solo lies with your ability to learn melodies. However, as you advance musically, these melodies become much more complex and fast than your average jazz standard, but you’re still learning a melody. As you progress from simple melodies to solos, don’t be afraid to slow down the tempos so you can clearly hear and sing each interval. If the tempo of the solo or a double time section is too fast to hear, slow it down with a program like Transcribe.

Remember, if you can’t hear the melody or sing it note for note, transcribing that line is going to be terribly frustrating, so do yourself a favor and slow it down.

When you look at the entire process like this, it becomes readily apparent how ridiculous it is to jump from no ear training skills to transcribing lines from a complex solo. Of course you can’t go from zero or limited ear training skills directly to transcribing the lines of your favorite solos. You need to progress step by step and gradually improve, building on your skills daily.

It will take some time to build up these skills and everyone starts at a different place. But as a preliminary exercise, take a second and look at your own musical skills and level of ear training. Can you sing the melody to Happy Birthday perfectly? Can you play this melody by ear on your instrument? Can you play it in all 12 keys?

Now what about a simple jazz standard like There Will Never Be Another You? Can you sing the melody and then play it by ear on your instrument? If that’s easy, try it with a bebop head like Confirmation or try Confirmation in another key.

Lastly, listen to the clip above of Lee Morgan’s solo on Ceora. Take the first few bars: sing it, lock in all the intervals, and then try to play it. You’re probably starting to see a pattern here – it’s all the same skill! Each step of the way you’re using the same basic musical skills.

As the melodies get more complex it will take more time and effort to learn them, but each step of the way you’re utilizing the same aspects of your musicianship.

If you can’t do the first step, you’re not going to be able to do the second or third step. If you haven’t built up your technique or ears, you’re setting yourself up for failure. If you can’t sing Happy Birthday…you can’t transcribe solos.

When we practice jazz improvisation, we zoom in on one area of study so much that we often lose sight of the whole. How do we practice in this truly focused way, while simultaneously train ourselves to perform in a way that expresses all of what we know?

In other words, how can we shift our perspective from a one-pointed zoomed in view to a wide angle lens where we’re capable of drawing from many concepts, lines and techniques?

The answer: practice mixing.

Mixing is just that. You practice mixing multiple techniques during a chorus or several choruses of improvisation. By doing this, you learn how to widen your gaze and not get hung up on playing the same thing every time around.

The more you learn to mix everything you practice, the more it will be available in live performance as it will be natural for you to move from one idea to another, or to sprinkle in some new concept you’ve been working on at just the right moment.

What to mix

What can you “mix”? Well, when you think about it, in general, anything you play is either a piece of language, or a concept. Really, even a piece of jazz language is an example of concepts in action, so essentially everything is a concept, but for sake of clarity, I prefer to think of language and concepts as two complimentary entities.

So, you can mix:

• language with language
• language with concepts
• concepts with concepts

These are all equal in terms of their relative importance. You should practice all of them.

How to practice mixing

There are two primary ways to practice mixing.

The first way to practice mixing is to choose one of the combinations above and pick two distinct areas of a tune to implement them over. For example, supposing I select the “language with language” mixing option. I’d then take language piece #1 and find a place in a blues where I could play it, and then take language piece #2 and find different place where I could put it during the same chorus.

If I selected two dominant pieces of language maybe it would like this:

This is just one of many ways you could practice mixing. By interspersing your predetermined parts with improvised parts, you learn to integrate the language or concepts naturally into your playing.

You could instead choose to only use predetermined material throughout the entire chorus, or you could use three pieces of language. There’s many options, but the gist is: select multiple concepts or lines and use them in different spots during the same chorus.

The second primary way to practice mixing is to use two pieces of language, two concepts, or one piece of language and a concept over the same area of a tune during different choruses.This might look something like this:

Again, this is just one sample of many ways you could chose to implement this exercise. Another option would be to cut down on how much you’re improvising during a chorus, and any time you can possibly use one of the pieces of language, use them; alternate which line you play each time you encounter a place where you could harmonically implement the language, especially from chorus to chorus.

Which one of these two mixing exercises is better?

They’re both great and they both yield slightly different skills. The first exercise teaches you how to think of multiple places in a tune in a static way. It introduces you to the idea of utilizing two techniques in a very prescribed manner, which will help ingrain the concepts and lines in your ear, fingers, and mind, while teaching you how to use them in real-world context.

The second exercise is more dynamic as you’re thinking about the same part of a tune in different ways each time you encounter it. This is slightly more difficult, but will help you learn to intuitively mix up your habits, ultimately leading to a more fresh overall concept.

Start with the first exercise as it will introduce you to the notion of mixing, then proceed to the second exercise.

How mixing translates to live performance

Live performance is all about listening to your inner voice and letting go, while at the same time, perhaps, having some sort of a road-map, or a general idea of where you want to take the solo. Now, everybody has a different balance of how they approach this.

Some people like to completely let go and see what comes out. Actually, to be more accurate, it be “hear” what comes out…

Others are known for planning out the general architecture of a solo before they play it.

Where ever you may lie on this spectrum is completely up to you, but no matter how you want to approach things, practicing mixing techniques allows you to get there because mixing takes everything you’re working on and helps bridge the gap between practice and live performance.

During live performance you want to be able to access anything you’ve ever worked on. Well how do you do this if you haven’t practiced mixing everything you’ve worked on in the practice room?

Take the exercises presented in this article and mix your language with other language, your concepts with other concepts, and your language with your concepts. In doing so, you’ll transition all your musical ideas to the band stand, which is where they belong.

Great solos don’t come from nowhere.

The ability to apply innovative harmonic concepts, flawless instrumental technique, and appropriate musical language doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. These prized aspects of excellent musicianship have to start somewhere. However when it comes to pondering our musical idols, for some reason we can’t help thinking in this illogical and romanticized way.

From Charlie Parker to Miles to Michael Brecker we see the staggering end result of their work and can’t imagine it being any other way. They never had to work hard, those amazing solos just came out naturally, right?? The reality though, is that each great player and more specifically, each great solo has an exact origin and a traceable path from idea to implementation.

Now this idea is nothing new to musicians, but an area of contention among many is what exactly it is that goes into creating a great solo. There are many theories out there as to what it takes to become a great improviser. Just take a look at all the different concepts and methods you can study in books and the DVD’s put out by dozens of big names.

Even between great players, there are discrepancies as to what works and what doesn’t work.

Despite all of these personal methods, there is one consistent truth that can’t be ignored. When you improvise a solo, you can only draw upon what you’ve practiced and ingrained in the practice room. It’s as simple as that – if you haven’t practiced it, it’s not going to come out of your horn.

Stopping the cycle of stagnation

We all have days that are difficult and frustrating in the practice room. You’ve run out of ideas to play over the changes, you can’t seem to get your technique working, and every chorus you keep playing the same line in the same spot. The natural tendency when you run into a little bit of difficulty in your soloing is to look anywhere but yourself.

“These changes are really difficult, this tune is boring to play over, this chord progression keeps going back to the same chords…”

The fact is that the tune is not at fault here. More specifically, it is your approach that is stale, you are out of ideas to play, you are playing the same boring licks…

You can play a tune hundreds of times, even thousands, but unless you practice and ingrain some new lines or ideas, unless you spend some time learning some new language and repeatedly practicing it, you’re going to have the same old material to work with every time. This state of stagnant playing could go on for years and does just that for many frustrated players.

Let’s say for instance that you’re working on rhythm changes in the practice room right now. You’ve got a couple of lines to work with and you have some harmonic concepts you’re using in your solos. There are a couple of rough spots, but for the most part you are satisfied with the way you sound.

Now fast forward 10 years from now. Rhythm changes is still going to be the same tune, with the same changes, and the same form. Unless you’ve evolved and planted some new ideas, language, or concepts, you are going to be playing over the tune in exactly the same way.

If you can’t play it in a different key right now, it’s going to be the exact same story in the future. If you’re having trouble with technique or range, same story a decade from now. You don’t just magically get new technique, new harmonic ideas, or new language that you can put into your solos because time has passed. If you don’t practice these ideas and plant them into your mind, they will never come out in your playing.

It’s inevitable that the tune will be the same in the future, but your playing and language should definitely not be.

This is something that many musicians don’t realize, or choose not to confront. They think that if they simply keep playing a tune for years that they will automatically get better and have new, fresh ideas to play over those changes. Well, I’ve got news for you…

You harvest what you plant

Imagine that your ability to improvise is like a farmer’s planting field. A big open field of freshly plowed dirt waiting to grow the crops of your picking. The seeds that you plant and the time you spend cultivating these new crops in the practice room will determine what you will be able to do in performance.

It’s important to remember that everything that you do in the practice room will take root and shape the improviser you are going to become weeks, months, and even years from now. You have a choice here, so be careful as to what you plant and cultivate on a daily basis. You can cultivate a variety of ideas and and tend to them everyday, or you can carelessly throw a few licks into that dirt every now and then and how for the best.

There is a consequence, however for the work that you do or don’t put in during your practice.

This moment of truth for the farmer is harvest time, the time when he can reap the fruits of his hard labor. For the improviser this moment comes in an improvised solo in performance. On stage, some players have a bountiful harvest to pick from, many different kinds of ideas and techniques that they’ve developed for months. These players can play with freedom and ease, sustained by the confidence and knowledge gleamed from hours of practice.

For others less prepared, they are left with a barren field; a few crops that were carelessly planted and tended to very rarely. Come harvest time they have a few withered plants to choose from: a couple of scales scales barely practiced, a melody and chord progression quickly learned from the real book, and one line memorized in one key. It’s safe to say that this player is going to have a tough time surviving the winter months.

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce.~Thich Nhat Hahn

Just as a farmer can only harvest what was planted and carefully tended to during the spring and summer months, an improviser is limited to the skills and language that they’ve ingrained through long hours in the practice room. You can’t blame the tune or chord progression for a bad solo, you can only blame the soloist and the preparation they’ve made in the practice room.

Careless practice and stale ideas lead to a bounty of mediocre solos every time.

Planning for the future in your practice

One of the hardest things to deal with in your development as an improviser is the time it takes to see improvement, actual results in your day to day improvising. With most things we deal with on a daily basis, you get what you ask for right away. Pay for X at the store, you get X. Put the time in at the office, you get a paycheck. Plain and simple. You put in the time or effort and you see the results right away.

With learning to improvise however, this is not the case at all. It takes weeks sometimes even months for the ideas you’re practicing to show up in your unconscious, everyday playing playing. The things you are working on in your practice today somehow shape the player that you’ll become a few months from now.

This is a challenging concept to grasp and one that is difficult to stick with. The ideas and techniques you focus on this week will slowly make their way into your playing and be fully usable at some point in the future. Today you can transcribe a solo or learn a line in all keys, but when you go to solo tomorrow, they won’t be there and this can be frustrating.

Why does this tune still feel hard to play over? I memorized the changes and melody, I learned some lines and harmonic devices to use over the progression, I transcribed that solo two weeks ago…

Trust the process

Ideas need to incubate. Technique needs time to develop in your muscle memory. Harmonic concepts need to marinate in your mind and ears. You need to sleep on it.

This is what it takes to eventually see these ideas and techniques come out in your playing one day in the future. Michael Brecker mentions this in passing in this interview. Those ideas that you start today might not be a solid part of your playing until months from not, but if you want to evolve as an improviser, this is the direction you must take.

Apply this concept today

Take a tune that you’ve been working on recently. Instead of playing it over and over with a play-a-long, using your same old lines and patterns, try something new. Plant the seeds of change.

Take the blues for example. You probably have some lines you’ve worked out and some harmonic concepts that you rely on to get through the changes. And, chances are you might be getting bored using these ideas all the time. No worries. It’s time to slowly work some new ideas into your playing.

Start by picking a piece of language or a harmonic idea to apply to the predictable motion of those 12 bars. For example, try inserting a ii-V in some key places into that standard progression (see this article). Or try employing some V7 language or ideas that you’ve transcribed over the major chords in that blues progression. The possibilities are infinite.

This idea is the same with learning to play in a new key or introducing a new technique into your playing. Start slowly and be consistent. It will be difficult at first and you may not see change for some time, but keep going. You are introducing skills that you don’t have and if you stick with it, you’ll have these skills in a relatively short amount of time.

This whole process may seem like a lot of work, and honestly, it is. But, look at the alternative. You could stick with your “go to” licks and safe, familiar tunes and keys in your solos. Practicing with this mindset is not challenging and you don’t really have to practice at all. You’re playing the same lines you’ve learned years ago and five years from now, you’ll be playing the same solo. Ten years, twenty years from now – you guessed it, same solos, same lines, same licks.

If this sounds good to you, then by all means keep on truckin! However if decades of mediocrity is not your cup of tea, then start planting some new ideas and techniques into your practice today. One small idea cultivated carefully today will produce big rewards for the improviser that you will become in the future.

I practice a lot. Some days more than others, but I try to get in a couple hours everyday no matter how busy I am. In many jobs I’ve had, I’ve even been known to take my horn to work and sneak away in a spare room once everyone leaves.

I bet your life is just as busy as mine. Between work, family, and personal obligations, our musical endeavors fall to the wayside and end up in a chaotic mess; you scramble to find an hour to practice and when you finally do, you’re not sure where you spent your time yesterday, where you should spend it today, and what you should spend it on tomorrow.

Relax. It’s time to get organized.

Documenting what you know

The first and main step in getting organized is documenting what you know. This is an easy step to pass by. Believe me, I still have much of what I know undocumented. Why is this bad?

It’s not necessarily bad that not everything you know isn’t documented and it’s probably impossible to document literally  everything you know, however, conversely, the more you can document what you know, the more you will understand where your greatest strengths and weaknesses lie. Think of your documentation as a visual representation of your arsenal.

Document language you learn

Every week you should be further ingraining the language you know, and introducing new language into the mix. With all this language coming in and out the door, it’s easy to lose track of what you know, how much you’ve practiced it, and what you don’t know.

Start a line journal and keep it up to date. As you progress, it will be more and more difficult to keep it up to date. Nearly every time I practice, I stumble upon something that could be of some future use; a line, a concept, a particular rhythm. All of these are valuable bits of information that could potentially be added to my overall playing concept.

It’s up to you to get them down on paper so you can remember to practice them in the future.

As you organize all the language you know, put it into various categories that it primarily works over. Sure, one line can be used in many different harmonic situations. Choose one, and document it there. By storing your language into building blocks like this, you’ll be able to easily scan what’s there and what’s not there.

Record as well how much you’ve worked on it. Perhaps a tally mark for each practice session you hit it. Somehow you want to quantify or qualify how well you know each bit of language.

Document tunes you learn

Any tune that you’ve worked on, list here. Mark down whether it’s to the point you would record it, or wherever it may be in its development. Do not include tunes you kind of know. Just tunes that you feel fairly solid about. It’s okay if this is not many. That’s the point of this. To get it all down on paper so you can organize what you know and what you need to learn.

Not only list tunes, but keys and tempos as well. For these, use blues and rhythm changes. What keys do you feel ultra comfortable playing a blues in? Which ones are really difficult? Can you play uptempo rhythm changes? Where does it get difficult?

The more you can list about each key and tempo for blues and rhythm changes, the more you’ll be able to improve at these essential forms.

Document concepts

Just as you documented your language, go through the concepts you use frequently and list these out. This is a very broad subject that includes any sort of concept to do with music; harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, or sonic.

Talking to some of my favorite players, they commonly have told me they created their own scales. These are concepts that they can then apply to a variety of harmonic situations. Other people have told me they have rhythmic devices at their disposal which they tend to rely on for rhythmic variety.

What concepts have you worked on? Write them out as best you can and give them a name so you can easily identify them in the future.

Document solos you’ve transcribed

Write down the name of any solos you’ve transcribed or worked on at all. Often times you’ll realize that you’ve spent a ton of time on one soloist and perhaps neglected to checkout other player’s perspectives.

Or, by remembering what solos you’ve worked on, you’ll think back and wonder, “Did I get everything I wanted to out of that solo?” Then you have a mental note to get back into something that you forgot about. Something that at one point helped you a lot and something that could continue to help you improve.

Filling in the gaps

Once you’re clear what’s in your arsenal, it becomes very apparent where you should be spending your time. Where do you need more strength? Where do you lack knowledge entirely?

After documenting your language, chances are there are big holes in specific places. And then you’ll think to yourself…”Now I know why I botch that chord progression every time in that standard,” or something of that nature.

Look at your knowledge on paper and view it from a birds-eye perspective; see it in its totality. Perhaps you’ve learned a ton of lines, but very few concepts, or maybe you know more concepts as compared to lines.

Deal with the places you lack information entirely first, then work on strengthening areas that need it. Perhaps you review your language documentation and see you have over ten ii Vs at your disposal, but not a single minor ii V. Obvious where you should be spending the next month?

And remember that just one idea makes a world of difference. And with each new idea, your knowledge grows exponentially.

Expanding your knowledge

Getting organized will allow you to not only fill in the gaps in your playing, but it will allow you to expand your knowledge to untraveled places as well. You can never have the fundamentals down enough, but beyond that, what you choose to integrate into your concept is completely up to you.

After seeing what you know in front of you, make some decisions in which direction you want to be influenced. Perhaps all you see is influences from your own instrument, or maybe all you see is influences from jazz players. Who said you can’t transcribe a sitar player? Or where is their a rule that says you can’t learn from Stravinsky?

Anything can be an influence. Look at what’s brought you this far to help determine where you want to go.

Staying organized

Staying organized is a pain, but well worth it. Keep what you’ve learned and what you’re learning well documented so you can be sure to strengthen what you know and expand to new areas of study in the future.

Do whatever you have to do. Get organized. Stay organized. And you’ll be glad you did.