How do you craft amazing bebop lines over a minor blues so that you sound like a jazz
pro i'm gonna walk you through the perfect minor blues solo coming right up so i'm gonna
show you this incredible minor bebop jazz solo and i'm gonna walk you through what
makes it so awesome and how you can apply these concepts in your own playing today
super awesome solo and shout out to our in-house composer keilan dimick who composes for our minor
blues accelerator course in our inner circle membership so let's go ahead and jump right in
to this solo here let's start out right here over this d minor and i think it's important that we
look and see what's actually the chords in a d minor blues so we have d minor seven for one bar
e minor seven flat five a7 to d minor seven that's a two five one and then we go two five
two four right that's what the blues is all about it's about that one four five relationship so
to the g minor and then back to five to the one chord the d minor then we do this
b minor seven flat five right that's our sixth chord and then two
five one so what makes this so awesome so the first line goes like this
okay really awesome now essentially the note that i really want you to pay attention to is this one
okay and that is the c sharp note that's in there
right c sharp is basically coming out of the melodic minor scale that's the c sharp
okay and so that's very common by the way in jazz improv and even technically if you
harmonize for example the melodic minor scale with seventh chords the d minor
seven is actually the d minor major seven for the one chord so like this
so very common to make your minor one chords hip by adding the major seventh in there right so
right super great sounding when we do that adds a lot of color a lot of interest right so turn
around back to the c then what makes this really cool is basically we start
kind of copying what we did before but moving it somewhere else so we go
right so again we're hitting that c sharp
now what makes this super b boppy is what's about to happen
right here we're going to go chromatically approach into that 2 504 so we're going
right now we chromatically approached the a natural over the a minor seven flat five so
chromatically approaching to get to that root note basically the root note is a target node
now this is what makes it truly bebop right here basically we want to look at
this f sharp the f sharp is the third of the d7 the five that's going to the four
so what we're going to do is an enclosure like this
right that's starting at that g note then we go e natural then we go f let me go f that's
our third so this is what we call a chromatic enclosure our target note is that third but we're
going above in pitch below and then chromatically approaching to the third so above and pitch below
diatonically chromatically arriving at our third and so basically anytime you want to make your
solos sound super b-bopy try to add what we call these enclosure patterns using target notes like
the thirds like the sevenths important chord tones to really draw out that sound this is
what charlie parker dizzy gillespie all the guys are doing so if you're doing it too you're gonna
sound a lot more like them now another thing that's really classic about this line here is
after the enclosure we hit this e flat note over the d7 now the e flat is the flat nine so it goes
right so that's so classic
right really really really be boppy really outlines that d7 making it a flat nine
so adding more tension with altered extensions is also a really really good
idea again we have an enclosure over top of this g minor seven so it went
right so dramatically walking down below above arriving at the g so below with the f sharp
and then above with this a natural and then arriving at the g so always always always think
about enclosure patterns and how you can arrive at target notes now we're doing more enclosure
patterns here when we go to the e minor seven flat five a7 back to the one chord right transitioning
from the four to the one so we have okay so our target note is a a natural over the a7 so we're
going b flat g sharp to a right so again i can close your pattern above below arriving
and then above below arriving at this e natural over the d minor seven now the e natural is the
ninth so again now we're actually not targeting just chord tones we're targeting extensions
right so really hip but still an enclosure above below the c sharp arriving at the e
now that is simply just walking down a d minor arpeggio
okay now i love this part right here because this is quintessential
bebop rhythm and this is over top of the b minor seven flat five we went
so the triplet there triple it with two eighth notes
right we're gonna see those triplet patterns again coming up in a second but this is
something that happens a lot in bebop adding these tripletty lines in there so that's also
something to consider when building out your solos as well let's move on because
we're gonna hit those triplets right now with the e minor seven flat five this is the last
the last two five one ending off the solo here so we go
okay this is like charlie parker wrote this himself
right so the triplet and basically it's chromatically walking up to this g note right
now the g again that's the third of the e minor seven flat five so the third is our target note
and then our target note is e natural
over top of the a that's the five right so we're always thinking about target notes
so chromatically walking up and then we step down to the fifth of the a7
now honestly basically walking down using different notes from
a harmonic minor scale so it's like you're playing a d harmonic minor
so that's a little lesson for you is that if you want to
outline sort of some of the flat 9 sounds of the a7 you could play a harmonic minor of the
chord that you're targeting the chord you're resolving to from the 5. so in this case a7
to d minor seven you can play d harmonic minor right but of course this is much more musical
now i love this line at the end again we're using enclosure patterns but we're targeting this b
natural that's another note from the melodic minor scale okay that's the sound right there
so basically we're superimposing a d minor six over top there so when we target the six or the
major seventh on the minor one chords it really sounds cool really sounds hip right so we have
again enclosure patterns there
but using that minor six color tone as our target note ends again with an enclosure pattern we go
b-flat g-sharp a right so we're targeting the fifth then we just played an octave
up higher right so the three takeaways that i really want you to consider here
is enclosure patterns targeting chord tones but also targeting extensions
and playing melodic minor ideas as well as adding those triplet rhythms in is going to
give you great bebop sounding minor solos now i talked about those enclosure patterns and i
have a video up on the screen right now that really focuses hard on that it's called how
to play instant bebop and it really talks about those enclosure patterns a little bit further so
if you need a little more help with that definitely click that video right now
and watch that next one it's really gonna help all right 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 video cheers