A few weeks back, I wrote about how I get my students who need to get solos together quickly (but are still getting comfortable with tunes, forms, and changes), to use rhythms from the jazz etude books that we’ve worked on. Here’s the next steps after they’ve dealt with the initial rhythm that they have chosen.

We start by adding a half step approach tone, an eighth note in front of beat one. I want the student to pick a non-chord tone, because of the tension and release from the last note of the bar into the consonant downbeat. Here is the original (done up in Dorico, instead of my sloppy lines on the dry-erase board. Haha!), and the example with the approach tone.

After we’re comfortable with this idea, then we add another eighth note that is a chord tone to have a consonant sound, that sets up the tension and release.

One of the parameters that I set is that we can’t have any repeated notes – in the first bar the G could be repeated, and the 7th is a more interesting note than the 5th of the chord, but I find that when students start repeating notes as a default, they create lines that aren’t as strong.

As the bars start to fill up, we can start to edit, and the student can find ideas that work in their solo. As I mentioned in the first post – As this (“stage one”, and two, and three) becomes more familiar, and my students can start to play this idea without writing it out, we start to add and subtract notes, apply different patterns, and hopefully, get away from this entirely, as we gain more confidence.