If you're feeling stuck in your jazz playing today it's likely because of one of the reasons i'm
about to share with you so i'm gonna be your jazz doctor today diagnose your issue and tell you how
to fix it coming up reason number one is you're trying to copy and paste licks into your solos
you're going out and you're learning jazz licks from the records which is an excellent idea but
then you get frustrated when you go out to play because those licks aren't naturally coming out
and you're playing you're trying to force them at the beginning of your solo you're trying to
force them in the middle of your solo they don't really sound natural or organic and sometimes
you just mess them up because you're thinking too much about actually playing it so what i want you
to do instead is yes of course learn the licks but then go and compose as many different ideas
of your own based on that lick as possible and then practice improvising just over those two
or three chords that that lick is based over top of trying to implement those ideas by practicing
the reacting process of improvisation playing the stuff that you create is much more likely to come
out in your playing than what comes from somebody else reason number two is you're not learning
enough jazz standards so jazz standards really to me are the secret to learning how to play jazz the
more jazz standards you learn the more familiar you get with the common chord progressions that
come up time and time again in jazz standards of course you learn more contexts that come up within
jazz standards and therefore you're just gonna be more used to playing them so learn more jazz
standards regularly for example in my inner circle membership we learn one jazz standard a month
because it really helps you learn one jazz standard really well but continually learn
more because there's so many more lessons to learn reason number three is you're not learning jazz
standards very well you may be just going to a piece of sheet music going open the real book
you're reading through the melody you're reading through the chord changes it's likely that you're
kind of stuck there because you have to bring it along with you to a jam session just to remember
what you're playing you're not memorizing it very well because of this and so therefore you're
really getting stuck in this same vicious cycle so instead what i want you to do is i want to at the
very minimum learn the melodies of jazz standards by ear and memorize them that's the main minimum i
would always say for learning things by ear is at least do the melody you'll learn it so much
better you'll know it so much deeper you'll be improving your ears and then as far as the chord
changes goes just make sure that you're memorizing them so even if you're learning them from a chord
chart make sure you're memorizing them but also make sure to challenge yourself and see if you
can start recognizing patterns like two five ones and one six two fives that you're learning in jazz
standards like i said the more jazz standards you learn the more used to hearing these sounds
you're going to be so try to figure out before you even look at a chart what they are and then slowly
but surely you'll get better and better at doing this and by the way if you need help learning jazz
standards by ear i have a very simple five step process in my free guide learn jazz standards the
smart way so make sure you sign up for that at learnjazzstandardsthesmartway.com or i'll leave
a link in the show notes in the description down below as well reason number four is you're stuck
playing scales over chord changes now there's nothing wrong with learning scales for jazz
improvisation however if you're just only using scales to try to improvise you're missing out
on the fact that jazz is actually a language and that there is terminologies and vocabularies and
certain ways of saying things that scales by themselves can't really help us with so we do
need to be listening to lots of jazz we do need to be learning licks and solos from great jazz
musicians to kind of complete the picture scales and technique is only one part of it so don't get
stuck just playing scales and also be careful not to get stuck in playing scales linearly like learn
scales but then try to figure out how to make actual melodies out of them otherwise it's just
gonna sound like you're playing scales over top of chord changes reason number five i just alluded to
and that is you're not learning solos from great jazz musicians the jazz solos are really where the
money is at right i mean if you want to learn how to speak a different language you're going to have
to just go and ask someone a question like how do i say this because i'm trying to ask for some food
or how do i say i want to go to this place right without learning that information from somebody
how are you going to know to ever say it right it's the same with jazz so when we're listening to
great jazz solos from the recordings that's really what it's telling us like those are our teachers
they're telling us the way that they would say something over top of a chord progression and by
learning that from them now you have some tools to work with to start creating your own ways of
saying things over top of those chord progressions so make sure that you are learning solos and
you're learning them from the recordings regularly reason number six is you're practicing random
stuff you're on youtube like right now and you're off practicing melodic minor one day and you're
off practicing a cool new jazz lick one day and so on and so forth but you're not really practicing
anything in a meaningful order you're just kind of going from one thing to the next so what you want
to make sure you're doing is that you're really focusing on one concept at a time what i always
recommend is basing everything off of a jazz standard so be learning a jazz standard and let's
just say over the course of one month you're going to learn part of a solo from a recording over top
of that jazz standard you're going to work on mapping out chord tones over top of that jazz
standard you're going to take that cool little idea you learned from youtube and apply it to
that jazz standard and that way you're not really just practicing a bunch of random stuff you're
practicing something cohesive that ultimately is going to help your brain learn reason number seven
is you don't have a long-term strategy right you're really just kind of going from one thing
to the next to the next but you don't really know where you're going and even though it's not very
sexy to say setting goals for your jazz playing is kind of important even just saying to yourself
well by the end of the year i want to learn 12 new jazz standards that's one new jazz standard
a month like we do in our inner circle membership right having that goal says that by the end of the
year i'm going to learn all these different jazz standards and i can break that down into one month
and then in one month i can break that down even further so that you end up creating a strategy
where like in the first practice session you're learning half of the melody or a quarter of the
melody of the jazz standard and the second one you're learning the next bit and so on and so
forth and so you can really tackle your goals if you create a long-term strategy for your growth
where you can look back and say i accomplished this i was able to learn these 12 jazz standards
or whatever your goal might be and therefore you know that you're progressing because one of the
worst things is you don't feel like you're progressing because you don't really have a
direction you're going in so make sure that you have a long-term strategy for your jazz growth
reason number eight is you're not composing and when i say composing i mean primarily jazz solos
but it could be your own jazz tunes as well but when i like to think about composing i think about
it slowing down the improvisation process a lot of us get frustrated that we're not able to improvise
great jazz solos even after we've learned the scales and the jazz licks and the jazz solos and
we are missing the fact that we have to give ourselves some practice time for what we
are hearing in our head and imagining our head how do we actually get that out on our instrument
so composing is something i regularly recommend to my students to slow that process down dream
up the best solo that you can come up with now in this moment and as you continue learning more jazz
more theory more lessons you're going to create better and better solos because you're going to
be hearing better and better jazz language so compose regularly reason number nine is you're
not practicing improvising the right way so a lot of us we go and we learn a new jazz standard and
we consider practicing improvising meaning we turn on a backing track or a metronome or even
play with somebody else which are all great things and we just go and we try to improvise over the
entire tune we might spend an hour we might spend forever and still feel frustrated that we're not
really getting it right but when we're practicing improvising what we want to be doing is isolating
chord progressions right so we go through a jazz standard and we look at the first four bars
what's the challenge it's a two-five-one chord progression for example so how do i improvise over
that so what i would recommend doing is go through the piece bar by bar and loop that over and over
and over again until you can spend 30 minutes just going over two bars or three or four bars and
figuring out as many different ways as you can to improvise over that like not even thinking like we
have to play hip lines or anything but like what does it sound like to play just quarter notes over
top of this what does it sound like to play just eighth notes over top of this or triplets what
does it sound like if i really try to play the chord tones what does it sound like if i just play
whatever's coming to my head you can experiment as much as you want but just isolate it and then slow
it down a lot like you don't have to improvise really quickly or play it the regular speed of the
tune you can go as slow as you want and that gives yourself the opportunity to practice the reaction
phase that is really required of improvisation reason number 10 is your technique is limited on
your instrument you can't ignore the fact that if you're continually stumbling on
your instrument trying to play lines and ideas you can't just ignore that like you have to go
where am i getting stuck like if you're a trumpet player and you're not able to play the high notes
you really need to be focusing on that if you're a piano player and you feel like your left hand and
right hand coordination is not together you need to practice that if you're a guitar player and you
feel like you can only improvise or play in one part of your fretboard you need to tackle that
because ultimately that's going to hold you back regardless of whether you learn all this amazing
jazz language and all the stuff i've been talking about if you don't have the technique to back it
up then it could be holding you in this circular pattern but i'm not really saying that you have
to have great chops or be like a pat martino or charlie parker or john coltrane i'm not saying
that you can play very simply but what we don't want to do is find that we're not able to execute
the ideas that you want to be able to execute and to me that's what great technique is all about so
after hearing all this and kind of knowing what possible things could be holding you back you're
gonna be really interested in the video that's on the screen right now which shows you how to
go from beginner to intermediate to advanced and i really go over in detail the different phases
the things that you need to be working on the things that you need to be knowing through each
phase to get to the next level and it's going to further help you with things that you learn in
this video so go ahead and click on that screen right now make sure you like this video if you
found it valuable make sure you subscribe to the channel and we'll see you in the next one cheers