I'm about to show you a powerful three-step process for how to get jazz licks to come out
naturally and effortlessly in your solos coming up so i hear from a lot of students this frustration
that when you learn jazz licks or lines it's not really coming out in your solos naturally when
you improvise and that's because there's a few things going on there that we need to solve so
i'm going to teach you my strategy called the lci strategy it's going to help you start seamlessly
integrating these licks into your solos what we're trying to do is avoid this copy and paste tenancy
we seem to have that doesn't really do us any favors when it comes to actual improvisation so
the very first step is l and that stands for learn so a pretty obvious first place is we need to
learn a jazz lick or a line but quickly before we go over that why do we do this in the first
place well for example it's really just the same as trying to learn anything in a different kind of
language like if i walk into a greek taverna and i want to order some wine i would say
faith la ligo cressi which means i would like some wine well someone had to tell me how to say that
so i could ask that particular situation so for us it's the exact same thing with jazz so for example
we're going to learn a jazz lick right now that is based off of a context which is yardbird suite so
that tune right so our context is the first two bars of yardbird suite which is c major seven or
c six followed by f minor seven to b flat seven right so
okay kind of some interesting chord changes and i'm kind of wondering how do we go from this
you know one chord to this minor iv chord the f minor seven to the b flat seven which is
a backdoor dominant but that's for another time so what can we play over top of that
here's a lick that we can play let's take a listen
okay so pretty simple line
but it fits perfectly over top of those chord changes right
so we're going to learn the language first now i would recommend doing this by year because
when you're doing this by ear off of the recording just simply learning it note for
note one at a time you're really internalizing it better and that's half of the battle that we're
dealing with here is actually internalizing these sounds as well as the muscle memory so
if you need help learning how to learn things by ear i would highly recommend my learn jazz
standards the smart way it's a free guide you can sign up for at learnjazzstandardsthesmartway.com
also link to that in the show notes and in the description down below so now that we've learned
this lick to play over top of these chord changes what i would highly recommend to further get your
muscle memory synced as well as internalize this lick is to transpose it so for example instead of
doing this in concert c major we could go to concert f major and it would sound like this
right
right so now i'm able to learn this in a different key and get a different context
around it and it's going to change your fingerings on your instrument whatever instrument you play
it's going to help you get this further into your ear and into your muscle memory so
that it's really more of a part of you okay so that's the first step is learn learn it by ear
learn it from the recording and then transpose it preferably into all 12 keys since it's a
small piece of information if you truly want to get it inside of your fingers and up here
okay the next step is c and that stands for compose now this is the process that
most people like 95 of people completely skip and i highly recommend that you do not skip this
process because once we learn some language what we need to do now is start shifting it towards
making it our own because ultimately the music that we create for ourself and we can dream up
up here is truly the stuff that is more likely to come out in our playing so we also want to slow
down the improvisation process and that's just a fancy way of saying compose give yourself the time
to actually think about what you want to play but when we're composing we're going to be sort of
using our lick that we learned as inspiration ideas that we can possibly play hopefully some
new information that we actually learned so for example if we take a listen to
this line i composed we can kind of hear some of the similarities
okay so if we actually compare the direction of the first line it goes up down up and then
down whereas the line that i composed i specifically chose to use some of the same
notes but i went down up down and then another passage a brief passage up and
then down one note up and one note down okay so really i'm kind of using the same concepts
just kind of rearranging some of those notes really there's only one different note in that
lick and that would be the b natural that i play here on the and of four right so i'm giving myself
the opportunity to take what i've learned and then apply it for myself and really and truly this
flips a switch in our brain that starts to bring us closer to what the actual improvisation process
is like now of course just as i recommend before when you learn the lick i highly
recommend the lick that you compose to actually transpose it so in the key of f major it would be
right and go through all 12 keys because again you're trying to internalize this actual music
that you created now so now you technically have two pieces of jazz language in your repertoire
now to take this step a little further of course i would recommend composing maybe two or three
more licks based off of what you've already learned and internalizing those as well but
another thing that you can actually do that would really be helpful is essentially using it
in a sentence if you will so take maybe more of a compose like an eight bar or even an entire chorus
of a solo but specifically try to use the lick you composed or the lick that you learned with inside
of your composition so that it actually makes musical sense it is kind of like
copy and pasting but by composing you're really giving yourself the opportunity to
figure out how you musically connect that idea and integrate it into your solos so
that would be another version of composing that you could try okay the next step is i
which is improvise okay so now we're gonna actually practice improvising and a big mistake
a lot of people make with practicing improvising is they take an entire jazz standard like 32 bars
or even up to 12 bar blues and they're practicing over the entire thing but really a great idea
is to just take two bars or even four bars at a time and loop them over and over and over
again so you get comfortable with improvising now when i'm going to improvise i'm obviously
thinking about the licks that i've composed and different ways to use them i'm also just thinking
i don't need to particularly play anything i'm just really exploring the chord changes
so we don't have to feel forced to do anything really we just need to explore these changes
and allow ourselves to just start reacting which is what improvisation is reacting
so you could do this for like five minutes 10 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes one hour if you
want is just loop over and over again slow it down speed it up try to integrate the licks try
to compose spontaneously new licks at the same time and once you're done doing this obviously
you repeat the process over and over again you learn a new piece of jazz language you compose a
new piece and you start improvising over it again and you can do this as many times as possible and
eventually down the line this stuff starts to sink in you're playing more naturally so
now learning licks is a good thing to do but actually learning entire solos is even better
thing to do because it gives you more context so on the screen right now i have a video how
to learn a jazz solo by ear step by step i'd love to show you how to do that so go ahead and click
the link right now on the screen of course make sure you subscribe to the channel make sure you
like this video if you found this helpful and then we'll see you in the next video cheers