You don't have to want to play like a jazz legend to practice like one.
Intermediate
Intermediate
- Develop a systematic method for mapping out arpeggios all over the fretboard.
- Learn to develop your own practice material.
- Understand how world-class musicians seem to never run out of ideas to practice.
Do you want to play like Pat Metheny? Me too. But truth be told, I have no idea how to do so, though I’ve really tried. It was very difficult to wrap my head around writing a lesson on Pat because the elements that make up his style are so varied and complex—the result of decades of investment on his part. Since he’s one of my very favorite musicians, the thought of writing a lesson about him seemed even more daunting. Of course, if it was easy, we’d all sound like our heroes.
So, where do we start? When studying great artists, it’s usually a good idea to study their process—not necessarily their final products. I’ve found that when you study the creative process, you can apply it to your own music and come up with your own individual style, rather than just resorting to mimicry and copying licks. Pat has a few signature licks, but mastering those don’t really get you that close to sounding like Pat. One thing we can say about Pat Metheny with confidence is that the man knows his guitar, music theory, and fretboard at a higher level than 99.9 percent of guitarists. I recently stumbled upon a video that proves this. It’s a rare glimpse into how Pat practices that will serve as the creative spark for this lesson. Maybe we can learn to practice like Pat.
The story goes that Pat was doing a clinic in Italy and had just answered a question from the audience. While the interpreter was translating Pat’s response for the audience, Pat started to practice. (Why not practice when you get a few spare minutes?) What an amazing glimpse we get into his mind during this time. The audience knew it was something special as they sat in stunned silence and let Pat play for nearly eight minutes. And the resulting music is incredible in its own right. I mean, who on earth practices this musically? There’s a lot of music in those eight minutes and we could study it for years at a time, but let’s focus on one aspect. It’s striking that what Pat is practicing sounds nothing like how he plays when he is improvising. And this is the central concept to our lesson and the key question to answer. What building blocks do great players study and practice that allow them to create? We’re going to focus on just the first element that Pat played: major 7 arpeggios.
You can and should study the rest of the video—it’s full of amazing ideas you can spin out into amazing things to practice. A great companion to this lesson would be Pat’s book, Guitar Etudes: Warmup Exercises for Guitar.
If you’re an improvising guitarist, major 7 arpeggios are one of the central building blocks you’ll need to improvise. Learn these really, really well. Jazz is largely made up of three arpeggios that serve as building blocks: major 7, minor 7, and dominant 7. Let’s tackle just part of the arpeggio puzzle here. In Ex. 1 you can see a simple Gmaj7 arpeggio (G–B–D–F#).
Ex. 1
We’re lucky that not only do major 7 arpeggios sound good, but we can easily take this particular fingering pattern and move it up the 6th string to transpose it. For example, shift Ex. 1 up three frets and you have a Bbmaj7 arpeggio (Bb–D–F–A), as shown in Ex. 2.
Ex. 2
Now, to make this much more interesting, we’re going to link the arpeggios together and follow the cycle of fourths to keep jumping from key to key. The pattern is going to go as follows: Ascend two octaves in 16th-notes and then descend until reaching the end of the measure. You’ll end up playing 16 notes and at the end of the measure, you stop on the 3 (B) of the Gmaj7 arpeggio (Ex. 3).
Ex. 3
Ending on the B is awesome, because the next arpeggio in the cycle is Cmaj7. And wouldn’t you know it that C is just one fret higher than B. We can now elegantly jump from the Gmaj7 arpeggio to the Cmaj7 by moving only one fret. Let’s do the same thing we did before: ascend and then descend, again stopping on the 3 (Ex. 4).
Ex. 4
We end the example on the 3 of Cmaj7 (E), which is yet again one fret below our next arpeggio of Fmaj7. We now have a quick little pattern that we can loop around the neck (Ex. 5).
Ex. 5
At this point, we have traversed from the 2nd position to the 10th position. We are not only learning about arpeggios, but we’re also getting a chance to explore the upper regions of the fretboard.
Now, we can’t keep looping like this indefinitely. We’re going to run out of room if we take the Bbmaj7 arpeggio up the neck like this, so we’re going to have to be flexible with the pattern. We still want to keep the cycle of fourths going, but we can’t continue the exact pattern. Thankfully, we can just drop one half of the arpeggio pattern down an octave and keep moving (Ex. 6).
Ex. 6
Now that we moved to a lower place on the neck, we can use the earlier pattern to take us from Fmaj7 to Bbmaj7. You basically have only a few shapes: one with a 6th-string root and two with roots on the 5th string.
Now it’s time for you to learn to fish. I’m not going to write out any more of the patterns—you have enough building blocks to complete this. What I will provide is the full pattern of the cycle of fourths, so you can play the right arpeggios in the right sequence to loop this around. Here it is:
G–C–F–Bb–Eb–Ab–Db–Gb–B–E–A–D
The pattern of fourths is symmetrical. The goal is to be able to start anywhere, in any key, and loop your arpeggios through the cycle of fourths. Once you get the hang of it, you should be able to loop this endlessly.
Beyond just learning the examples above, there are a couple of things to take away from this set of exercises.
Ditch the Patterns
If you watch the video a few times, you’ll quickly realize that Pat isn’t playing a set pattern. It’s not a specific etude that he’s practicing, but rather he’s generating music within some simple boundaries. Pat has created an algorithm for generating practice material: Play a measure of a major 7 arpeggio, smoothly transition to another major 7 arpeggio in the cycle of fourths, and repeat.
He’s jumping around the neck, changing octaves, sometimes playing some scales to connect. It doesn’t matter that it’s morphing and changing a little over time. What matters is that he’s sticking within the harmony for some set period of time and being creative about how he generates materials. And that’s the trick. The building blocks allow for tons of flexibility, especially in jazz. Next time, instead of thinking about this as a strict practice exercise, imagine this is a jazz standard that only has one chord per measure, but the tune is just major 7 chords that ascend in fourths. How can you take these arpeggios and add some passing tones to make them into jazz lines? (Hint: “Autumn Leaves” has two major 7 chords a fourth apart in the changes.)
It’s the Notes, Not the Shapes
You have to learn the notes in the arpeggios. To players at Pat’s level, they’re not just fingering patterns—they are collections of notes. It’s totally fine to start with shapes and refine as you go, but if you want to operate at this level, you’re going to have to know the names of the notes on the fretboard and the notes that belong in any arpeggio, chord, scale or key. This is just a single exercise to help you get there.
Move Beyond Major
You can now easily take the major 7 arpeggios and morph them in minor 7 and dominant 7 concepts to generate additional material to practice with. This lesson is just one example of arpeggios you can move in the cycle of fourths; dominant 7 arpeggios work exceptionally well in this context.
Your Job
Now it’s up to you to generate your own musical materials. This lesson was just a single example. But go back to the video for inspiration. Could you just play freely for seven minutes like Pat did? Could you play in a structured enough way that you’re improvising ways to practice and generating material like he can? Not everyone can do this for that long, but you’ll hear Pat joke that he could continue for hours ... and I totally believe him.
Find the elements that make up your own style and find interesting ways to apply them to the neck. Constraining yourself to a single measure per key and shifting in the cycle of fourths is a super fun way to give yourself just enough structure to follow, while staying loose enough to create something. Pat has been doing this for over 40 years, so we all have a lot of catching up to do!
Intermediate
Intermediate
•Provide more structure to your lead lines.
•Give your solos a sense of movement with approach notes.
•Learn how to apply scales and arpeggios for a more intentional sound.
Do you feel like your solos lack focus or that there isn’t any underlying structure to your lines? Does it seem that you are wandering around the neck, hoping that what you are playing “looks like it sounds cool”? Would pushing peas around a dinner plate with a knife be more riveting than the last lick you played? If any of these statements are true, then you need some guide tones, my friend.
Guide tones, also known as target notes, are commonly used in jazz improvisation and usually refer to only the 3rd and 7th of a chord. But, for our purposes, we’re going to apply a more generous definition where all notes of a chord can be used. There are two benefits to using guide tones: They create a predetermined melodic structure that serves as a framework for your solo, and they provide an inner melody to your lines that carry the sound of the chord changes.
The first two examples show a couple of possibilities when building a guide tone melody over a ii-V-I chord progression in the key of C major. The only requirement is that the guide tones should be played on the strong beats of the measure (beats 1 and 3). Next, spell each chord to see what notes you have to work with. For our progression, our choices will come from Dm7 (D-F-A-C), G7 (G-B-D-F), and Cmaj7 (C-E-G-B). Since these examples have one chord per measure, I have chosen to use only one guide tone in each measure. But, I could have used two guide tones in a measure, one on beat 1 and the other on the beat 3. Other than what has already been discussed, there is no right or wrong way to do this. Basically, pick some chord tones, put them on the strong beat(s), and see how it sounds. Change or edit as you see fit!
Take a listen to Ex. 1. The guide tones create a descending melody that leaps up at the end. Using one note per measure, the line starts with C (the 7th of Dm7), then to B (the 3rd of G7), to G (the 5th of Cmaj7) and finally E (the 3rd of Cmaj7). Ex. 2 has a guide tone line similar to the first example, descending for the first three measures and a leap up at the end. It begins with F (the 3rd of Dm7), to D (the 5th of G7), to B (the 7th of Cmaj7), and then to E (the 7th of Cmaj7).
Ex. 3 is an eight measure progression, similar in structure to a popular jazz standard. Harmonically, the first half is a ii-V-I-IV in C major and the second half is a ii-V-i in the key of A minor. In the first six bars, there is one guide tone per measure, and then concludes with two guide tones in each of the last two bars.
Once you have decided on a framework for your solo, use scales and arpeggios to add notes before each guide tone. By doing so, you create motion in your line that sounds musical, and not like you’re choosing notes at random. Listen to Ex. 4 where each guide tone is approached from above by a scale step. Since all the chords are in the key of C, my approach notes are from the C major scale. I can also think in modal terms, where I would use D Dorian in bar 1 to approach the G7 in bar 2. Then, I can use G Mixolydian in bar 2 to approach the Cmaj7 in bar 3, and C Ionian to approach the next Cmaj7 in bar 4. Ex. 5 is the same scalar concept, this time approaching the guide tones from below.
Ex. 6 and Ex. 7 use arpeggios to approach the guide tones from above and below, respectively. I prefer to do this by using the arpeggio of the chord I am going to, not the one I am playing over. So, when I am playing over the Dm7 in the first measure, I will use the G7 arpeggio to approach the guide tone in bar 2. Then, when playing over G7 in the second measure, use the Cmaj7 arpeggio to approach the guide tone in bar 3. This concept is a little easier to see in Ex.7. Dm7 is the chord in bar 1. You approach the guide tone in bar 2 with a G, which is not in a Dm7 chord, but it is in G7.
To get longer lines, use two, three, or more notes from the scale or arpeggio when approaching the guide tones. Ex. 8 approaches the guide tone from above and below, using two and three notes from the scale. Ex. 9 shows the same approach methods, but with notes from the arpeggio.
After you get a handle on the guide tone concepts, experiment with rhythms, rests, and an ever-increasing number of approach notes. Check out Ex. 10 as an example of what is possible. It’s the guide tone line from Ex. 2 fleshed out with a mixture of scale and arpeggio approach notes of various lengths. Ex. 11 is an expansion of the guide tone line from Ex. 3. I used an increasing number of approach notes in the first half of the line. The second half is more rhythmically complex, ending with the triplet figures in the last two measures.
Applying these concepts to something more familiar, Ex. 12 is one possible guide tone melody over an A minor blues. Give it a listen to hear how the first two phrases are relatively scalar, but the last phrase has more of a “sawtooth” vibe. Ex. 13 is the completed solo, using the ideas discussed previously. Throwing everything into the guide-tone blender yielded different types of approaches combined with a variety of rhythms and rests.
Once you get a foothold, substitute different modes, scales, arpeggios, chords, and time signatures to achieve some different sonic flavors. Remember that you are restricting yourself to these few concepts in order to get a more melodic and meaningful solo. If you practice it enough, your brain will start working this way on its own!
This time on Wong Notes, guitar legend Kurt Rosenwinkel joins Cory Wong to go deep on all things jazz. The genre has always been a haven for free-thinkers and adventurers, so it’s little surprise when Rosenwinkel reveals that he’s incorporated a Fractal FM9 into his live rig—though it’s still working in tandem with a good ol’ Fender tube amp.
Season of Stream Vol 1, Ep 11 | Kurt Rosenwinkel
Rosenwinkel divulges the details on his “softer, darker” attack, which combined with his approach to tone—including a fair bit of top-end roll-off—constitutes a big piece of his signature sound. Rosenwinkel’s forthcoming live record, The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls 1996), captures this sound in the place that formed it: New York City. Rosenwinkel takes Wong back to the halcyon days of the city’s kinetic 1990s “hardcore” bebop and free-jazz scene, where Mitch Borden’s legendary Smalls Jazz Club was an artistic hotbed (and crash pad) for players of all stripes.
Nowadays, more and more artists are forming their connections online rather in a jazz club. But can TikTok and Instagram replace an all-night jazz joint for up-and-coming players?
Tune in, and be sure to check out Kurt’s career-spanning new Ultimate Book of Compositions.
