Jazz Improvisation Exercises

Master these 10 Jazz and Blues licks to use them in your songs.

If you want to learn improvisation, this is the lesson for you. These concepts are VERY IMPORTANT for creating both bebop lines and general improvisational lines. Think of a line as a lick or phrase. In this lesson we will cover several lines and their construction. These ideas will quickly help you in 2 ways: 1) it will make your playing sound more sophisticated right away and 2) you will start to understand how to create and "weave" an improvised line through a set of chords. (Faster Fingers 3c)

Learn how to use cells, sequences and rhythmic variations to improve your improvising.

In this lesson I will show you some of the techniques I use to create improvisation lines over a steady bassline. We will be using my lesson on Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island to create our improvisation.

In this lesson I’ll show you how to create different improvisation lines using a variety of techniques like chord tones and approaches. These techniques work over ANY kind of song or style.

Improvisation Over Standards in 5 steps teaches you the 5 steps that are critical for students to learn in order to effectively improvise over jazz standards and other songs. You can build upon these 5 steps to create more in-depth arrangements. We will use the song "For Heaven's Sake" as an example.

In this first lesson we will be covering scales in broken thirds, free-style practice, bebop scales, scale approaches and more improvisation using the 1/2-whole diminished scale. These exercises are a great way to improve your jazz improvisation skills. (Faster Fingers 3a)

In this second part, we will cover over a dozen different melodic approach techniques and was to practice them. Using these approaches, your improvisation lines will sound more sophisticated, you will gain a lot of dexterity and you will get to know your chords inside and out! In part 3, will put together parts 1 & 2 to show you several more ways of creating lines using these techniques. (Faster Fingers 3b)

Quartals give your improvisation a modern sound.