Want Stronger Chops? Start Here! (feat. Cecil Alexander)
Today we’re going to look at something every jazz guitarist thinks about at some point: chops. We’re going to share a few concepts that really helped Cecil build confidence with his jazz guitar playing, from technique and articulation to time feel and fretboard fluency.
For him, the challenge was always connecting those skills to actual music. So let's dive into some ideas that helped him make that happen. This is also exactly what we work on throughout our Guitar Chops Bootcamp course. Inside the course, we cover everything from picking mechanics and articulation to bebop vocabulary, fretboard fluency, modern jazz language, and real-world improvisation strategies.
If you want to check out this course to dive even deeper, check out Chops Bootcamp. And if you want to hear how Cecil plays through anything we talk about today, make sure to watch our accompanying YouTube video, Want Stronger Chops? Start Here! (feat. Cecil Alexander).
Now let’s get playing!
Contents
Picking mechanics and technical facility
For concept one, we're going to tackle picking mechanics and technical facility, which comes from the first section of our course.
Let’s talk about developing rest stroke picking. Rest stroke picking is a really useful tool for not only getting a strong and full sound out of the guitar, but also building speed and accuracy with your right hand. So the basic principle of the rest stroke is that you have it available in both directions. Cecil primarily does only downstroke rest stroke picking.
So if we play a downstroke on the low E string, for example, the pick is going to rest on the A string. You’ll hear a little bit more volume and a little more full of a sound compared to a free stroke, which would be doing a downstroke that escapes into the air.
With a rest stroke, you're really able to get more volume without exerting more physical force. So, the way that this applies to a musical context, if we take something like a pentatonic scale, A minor pentatonic, for example, you can play where all the down strokes are rest strokes. Whereas all of the upstrokes escape the strings, and it has the motion of almost turning a door knob.
That upstroke escape motion allows you to cross to any string freely from there. And the idea is that playing a string skip or a string change is efficient, whereas with a free stroke, there's going to be a lot of wasted motion, basically because the pick is moving on both ends of the string.
Modern vocabulary workouts
The next concept is vocabulary. A lot of players learn lines, but the challenge is in making these lines work in every key and every tune. Let’s look at moving a ii-V-I phrase through all 12 keys. Moving things around in 12 keys poses a slightly different challenge on guitar than it does on other instruments. Guitarists will have to deal with a wider or smaller stretch depending on the key and the position where you're playing the phrase. For example, if we play this ii-V-I phrase.
That technically is a little bit different than playing it up here, right?
Because we're higher on the fretboard, our fingers are a little bit closer together, whereas down closer to the nut, the stretches are going to be a little bit wider, especially for that portion of the phrase.
Now looking at what we have here on Dm7, we have a 5, 3, 2, 1 cell, and then a line cliche, which is just lowering one voice of the chord to change the chord quality. So we’re going from kind of a minor-major sound to m7 to m6 sound, and when it goes to m6, that also happens to be G7, right? And we're also using that A as kind of a pedal point within the phrase to anchor us to the key center, basically. So once we get to that B on G7, we go up this Bm7b5 arpeggio, and then we have an enclosure to get us into the 3 of Cmaj7.
This next concept comes from section three of our course, which tackles time feel and fretboard fluency. We're going to be talking about playing more horizontally in your phrases and playing phrases that cover a wide range without staying in one position.
So similar to playing on one string, this can really open up some different phrasing options and some different melodic choices.
So in addition to practicing scales on one string, Cecil also likes to practice scales so that they cover pretty much the whole fretboard. So we might take something like C major again as an example, and to get used to visualizing the fretboard in this way, we’ll start with something simple, but approach it from the lowest note to the highest note that we can reach on our guitar.
We’re trying to improvise fingerings along the way, although you can fall into four notes per string and five notes per string here and there. So if we try starting from E, which is going to be the lowest note that we have available within that scale, and just go up.
And similar to the one scale per string concept that we did before, we could move this through the circle of fourths as well. So going then to F major and playing from the seventh up to the highest note that we have available.
This is going to open up different phrasing possibilities and get you used to playing more horizontally across the neck. Playing horizontally can also alleviate some technical issues that we sometimes run into with connecting the left hand to the right hand.
We've talked about this idea of rest strokes a lot and using an even number of notes in your left hand to inform the approach in the right hand, taking advantage of the rest stroke on the downstrokes and upstroke escape picking, but this is made especially easy by or easier by playing more horizontally, so that you can take advantage of having an even number of notes in the left hand.
So if we were to play through, say like an F major scale just from C.
We covered a wide range, but by just alternate picking with our left hand and really trying to chase an even number of notes in our left hand.
We have four notes on the second string, four notes on the third string, four notes on the fourth string, fifth string four notes, and then just two notes on the sixth string.
What you find is that left hand fingering is kind of challenging, but it just opens up so much for the right hand in terms of articulation and time feel.
Modern jazz guitar language
Once your fundamentals are solid, you can tackle some of the modern sounds that show up in contemporary jazz guitar vocabulary. Things like side slipping, pentatonic shifting, and intervallic shifting. This next concept comes from section four of our course, and it tackles advanced jazz guitar language.
We're going to start by getting into some more advanced harmonic vocabulary. We're going to start by talking about side slipping a little bit more in depth. So side slipping is something that you can do to create tension in a melodic phrase, but you don't always have to do the exact same idea transposed up a half step.
You can think a little more about voice leading sometimes, and you can also think a little bit more about phrase shapes or line shapes. If we were to take a static Dm again, we'll use Impressions as an example again.
We can fit this within the D minor pentatonic scale. So we have 4, b7, 1, 5. We could move this up a half step, but play a different collection of notes in the next key, right? So this would be Dm moving up to Ebm. So then that's going to be on Ebm 1, 4, 5, and 9.
Or we could even keep it within the E-flat minor pentatonic scale. We’re still moving up visually, but technically we’re moving the phrase down range-wise, right? And we’re also playing a different collection of notes.
Another example might be taking a similar shape. This would be something that would fit more within like the mode of D Dorian, for example, and then move that up to E-flat Dorian, for example.
This is first highlighting the 9 of Dm, and then highlighting the 6 of Ebm.
Especially when you get deeper into outside playing and really dense harmonic vocabulary, it's important to be able to play the same sort of gesture, but in an outside key, and not always have to think about it like directly transposing whatever that phrase is, because sometimes that can sound a little bit too predictable to the listener or “patterny.”
For example, if we were to take that first phrase and just move it up a half step and down a half step, it kind of defeats the purpose of outside playing.
But if we were to voice lead a little bit more carefully through those different keys and jump around through the harmony, it sounds a little bit more interesting from a listening perspective.
Integration & application
For our fifth and final concept, we're going to tackle time-feel and connecting everything together.
Rhythm changes, which is a really common jazz form that everybody should know, is characterized by its fast-moving turnaround changes, and the B section is a series of extended dominant chords that kind of obscure the key center.
It’s usually played in the key of B flat, but can be played in any key really. So we have to start off a I-vi-ii-V progression, so B flat major, and then usually a G7, so the V7/ii or VI7. We have the Imaj7 into the V7/ii, into ii7, and then V7, and then usually the second time around the progression, we have Dm7, so the iii7 into the V/ii or VI7, and then into ii7, V7, and then usually a ii-V that sets up the IV chord.
So Fm7, Bb7, and then IV chord in this measure is usually major, sometimes dominant, and then in the next measure, you'll see a handful of different things depending on the version of rhythm changes that you're playing.
Sometimes you'll see Ab7, sometimes a quick ii-V, so backdoor Ebm7, Ab7, and then other times you might see #iv7b5, so Em7b5, moving up to the tonic chord over its fifth, and then the turnaround progression over again.
Then the B section, we're going to move to the series of extended dominants. Like we mentioned, this is going to be D7, so the V7/vi into G7, V7/ii, C7 is the V7/V, and then just V7.
And there are a lot of opportunities for you to explore altered tensions over those chords, and also substitutions. But just revisiting the A section, there are a lot of different ways to play over that fast-moving turnaround progression that makes up the bulk of the A section. So a lot of times, especially when you're analyzing solos over rhythm changes that are at a pretty fast tempo, you'll see the soloist kind of generalizing the changes.
Here we have one measure of the tonic chord into one measure of the V chord, or one measure of vi, or V7/ii into one measure of the V, or a ii-V. This slows down the harmony, so that you don't have to always highlight the sound of those changes with arpeggios. This is something that, depending on the tempo, you can feel a little locked in when you're doing that.
Still it’s important to practice voice leading using arpeggios, trying to place chord tones on strong beats at a slower tempo, and a lot of that is going to inform your melodic approach when you speed things up.
Well that’s all we have for today, but if you want to dive even deeper into this, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video Want Stronger Chops? Start Here! (feat. Cecil Alexander) and be sure to check out our Chops Bootcamp.
We’ll see you next time!
Comments