If playing at blazing tempos on Jazz standards is challenging for you I'm about to make things a
whole lot easier let's go over some strategies for improvising at fast tempos without actually having
to play fast now the problem with improvising over fast tempos tends to be two things number
one getting lost in the form the time is going by so quickly you easily lose your place because
your fingers can't keep up and you get lost and it's embarrassing number two is not having enough
chops you just don't have the technical ability to play eighth notes or triplet eighth notes at those
kinds of fast tempos and the three strategies I'm about to share with you will help you with those
things but first let's talk about A Tale of Two Jazz musicians the scene is the song the bridge
by Sonny Rollins from his album The Bridge it's a song so fast it will make your eyes water and the
two characters are saxophonist Sonny Rollins and guitarist Jim Hall Sunny Rollins has a whole lot
of chops a whole lot of techniques so he's able to play an amazing solo with blazing fast eighth nose
and triplet notes and it sounds absolutely amazing seriously if you've never heard this song before
you should definitely go check it out after this video now guitarist Jim Hall doesn't have as much
chops or at least that's not how he plays so his solo is simple and sparse but incredibly melodic
it sounds absolutely amazing as well why because Jim Hall figured out how to use his limitations
to his musical advantage and he's not the only one by the way for example pianist Thelonius Monk
tends to play very sparse and simple lines even at blazing past tempos so here are the strategies
that are going to help you with playing over fast tempos but not having to play Fast necessarily so
strategy number one is to use larger subdivisions so take a look over here at my shining hour this
is a jazz standard that can be played at very fast tempos so if we take a look at what we
have here we have a one chord a six chord A two chord a five chord and then a one chord then we
go to a two five one in in the key of C minor so here's what the melody sounds like when we
play this tune at 250 BPM which for me is really starting to push my limitations on my instrument
[Music] and for now let's just focus on these first nine bars here but you could
hear it's pretty fast even though the melody is pretty sparse and slow and melodic in the
first place so when we're talking about playing larger subdivisions over top of a jazz standard
like this what we're going to first focus on is whole notes now whole notes of course means
that we're going to play four beats per measure because we're in the 4-4 time signature here so
the idea here is to start practicing what it would feel like if at a fast tempo we were
to play fewer notes with bigger subdivisions right the times going by slower even though
it's still going by fast so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to improvise just
using whole notes over these first nine bars of my shining hour and it sounds like this [Music]
so super simple stuff here but again I'm feeling the time in a completely different way which is
really the key when playing at fast tempos is feeling the time slower than is actually going
so this is a great exercise to get you started so now let's make the subdivision just a little bit
smaller and move to half notes so we're starting to break this down just a little bit more but it's
going to start forcing us to feel the time in a different way now so let's try improvising just
half notes over top of these first nine bars [Music] now technically speaking that feels
really manageable for me and honestly it allows me to sort of think of more melodic ideas and
sort of think more about what chord tones are actually important to hit to get those changes
to start coming out so now let's break it down just a little bit more and move to quarter notes
so now we're going to be playing four notes every single measure and it sounds like this
[Music] so it almost kind of sounds like I'm playing a walking bass line and by
the way for the bass players who are actually watching this it's totally acceptable to play
quarter note solos like you're playing a bass line for your solo it happens all the time in
jazz but us other instrumentalists can certainly benefit from practicing this way now let's open
things up just a little bit and I'm just going to improvise over top of these first nine bars using
whole notes half notes and quarter notes and just seeing what happens so here's what it sounds like
[Music] so it can be a bit of a challenge to stick to these subdivisions but I really challenge you
to do this over the entire form of the tune that you're trying to play quickly because it will
force you to think about the song slower rather than feeling this anxious feeling like you have
to play a bunch of eighth notes and really once we start feeling the time slower that's going
to open us up so this is a great exercise to do even if ultimately this isn't the way you would
want to improvise okay so at this point you might be thinking all right Brent that's really great
obviously that's a strategy but I do actually want to play some fast lines over top of fast
tempos I just can't really do it because my chops aren't good enough so in comes strategy number two
which is using rhythmic space so rhythmic space means we're going to use Rhythm and
space meaning we're not going to play anything in order to space out our faster lines and of course
we're going to combine this with using some of these bigger sub divisions that we just talked
about and Jim Hall actually does this a lot in his solo on the bridge he plays a lot of these
bigger subdivisions melodic lines and then we'll play a quick flurry of eighth notes and arrive at
that next chord and sit there for a little bit so take a look at this example of rhythmic space over
these nine bars of my shining hour and so as you can see I've written out just rhythms and so we
have space right here we actually have space right here because that's a dotted quarter note so it's
a longer subdivision we have space right here we have space right here here here and finally
here at the end okay so we're including space in our lines now in between all that our fast lines
even if it's just two eighth notes here or four eighth notes tied into two eighth notes during
the last two bars we actually have a flurry of faster notes going on so this makes it a little
bit more manageable though for us to work on doing this so let's take a listen to what it sounds like
[Music] so this most certainly still is playing fast however it's making playing
fast more manageable by planning in space and certainly we could do that even more if we
wanted to if we're really struggling to play Fast lines which leads us to strategy number
three strategy number three is to avoid playing every single chord but emphasize important ones
the great jazz guitarist Peter Bernstein once told me when playing at fast tempos you're not
going to play the same stuff that you would be playing at a medium Tempo in other words
you have to change how you play because it's really easy to look at these chords going by
so quickly and thinking I have to play every single chord change I have to hit every single
chord tone I have to make everything happen all at once that I would do at a slower Tempo and
that's not realistic for most people so instead we have got to identify those core changes that
we really want to emphasize and the chord tones that we really want to emphasize so take a listen
to this composed solo that I wrote over top of my shining hour here the first nine bars and
then I'll talk about it [Music] okay so in this compose solo essentially what I started doing or
thinking about was what are the most important chords to Target so the first one that I really
want to emphasize is the one chord that's the E flat major seven chord the first chord of the
song it's the parent key center of the song and the next one I decided I really want to Target
is this B flat 7 chord because it's the five chord that resolves here to the E flat major
seven chord which is the next one that I want to emphasize because when we're doing a five to one
we want to make sure we resolve to that one the next one that I want to emphasize is once again
this five chord over here that was dissolves to C Minor 7 where I'm going to obviously play some
resolution notes to make that chord pop so playing at this at a much slower tempo for demonstration
purposes the way I started this was simply which is essentially just going down uh arpeggio of the
E flat major seven chord so really nailing just the chord tones resolving to the D natural here
which is actually the ninth of C minor seven now the ninth isn't a strong chord tone but again I'm
actually not really focusing here on emphasizing this six or this two chord right here I'm really
worried about the five chord coming up which is why I left space for pretty much both of these
bars now over top of this B flat seven the five chord going back to the one I decided to play
this altered line so basically what I'm doing is outlining the flat nine past the flat nine
right there okay and then arriving the last note is G of E flat major 7 which is the third and so
the third is a really strong chord tone that will make the chords pop out and when we're
not playing every single chord and we're really trying to emphasize the chords with playing less
we want to be focused on playing those chord tones that will really make it pop out so right
over top of this G7 I wanted to play ideas that were going to really emphasize
the altered nature of the G7 so we went these notes right here are approach tones
that lead to be natural be natural is the third of G7 so again emphasizing the Third
so in this particular case I'm actually landing on the sixth so it kind of is outlining a C minor six
sound but that was just a choice that I made for color purposes so again the concept here
is we can still play Fast lines but we're playing them for shorter periods of time and we're playing
them for Less amounts of time so you may be wondering like hey this is all really great
but how do I actually play the changes in my solos no matter what tempo I'm actually playing at like
what are the fundamental building blocks of really getting that amazing sound that your favorite jazz
musicians are doing well on the screen right now I have a video called how to play the changes in
your solos okay so click on that right now if you're interested to learn more about that if
you're someone interested in learning a new Jazz standard every single month that's exactly what
we do in my ljs inner circle membership so check out the link in the description down below or I'll
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