Major and Minor Scales

Major and Minor Scale Practice and Its Shortcomings

The adapted exercise with random chord changes (cf. end of section) is an exercise for beginners that will help them to:

• learn minor and major scales
• internalize the weight and direction of each scale
• understand and hear the relationship between relative major and minor
• experience the weight of the lowest bass note, which changes the perceived harmony (minor or major)

The major scale and its relative natural minor scale are a minor third apart and share the same notes. A typical scale practice exercise uses a G major or an E natural minor scale in one position up to the octave, ascending and descending.

In this situation, although the repeated G in bar 3 is quite common, it is not a very musical way to practice scales over a backing track because chord tones in the second half will not fall on strong beats. In the last bar, the F# is played before going back to G, which smooths out the line. For the E minor scale, the final E is doubled, which breaks the flow.

Furthermore, although the same notes are to be played in the two scales, no connection is revealed to the student. The following exercise is an adapted version where the flow is maintained throughout and the two shortcomings of the base exercise are addressed:

• chord tones now fall on strong beats in the descending scale
• the two scales are linked visually and in terms of practice
• the exercise becomes musically circular

Here is a seven-bar circular version of the same exercise. The harmony starts to blur, with the lowest note influencing the perception of minor/major. This exercise could also start on E:

The accompaniment track with guitar and piano either plays a G chord at a slow tempo (80 bpm):

or an Em^{7(add 11)} voicing:

Learning Objectives with Randomized Chords

This is the randomized exercise. Every two bars, either an Em^{7(add 11)} or a G will be played on guitar and piano. The main objective for a beginner will be to use the correct fingering and aim for legato playing at a slow tempo. A more advanced student can focus attention on the sound and emotional effect produced by randomly changing chords.

Continuous Scale Exercise

Altered and Octatonic Scale over ii^ø7-V⁷-i and ii-V⁷-I

Learning Objectives for the Continuous Scale Exercise

Several standard jazz improvisation methods¹ list the continuous scale exercise as one of the main exercises to master. It can be adapted for beginners and more advanced students. The example above only uses two chord progressions with an altered chord resolution going to a minor or major chord. The preceding ii will give away the continuation of the exercise and could be left out.

Randomized Chord Progressions

When the two progressions are randomized, the student (intermediate to advanced in this case, especially if played in thumb position) has to make minor adjustments in bar three when resolving. This helps students rely on their ears to anticipate the resolution and trains them to differentiate altered chords and their respective resolutions.

This exercise can easily be extended, and the evaluation and learning points can be gradually integrated and checked by adding more chord progressions or more difficult ones. The student can use the same exercise to train at home and during class.

Pentatonic Exercise

Strength of the Pentatonic Scale

Pentatonic scales are used extensively in many different musical styles and have been widely adopted in jazz. Pentatonic scales have a strong independent sound and “it is very easy to perceive them as bitonal elements on top of the harmony” (van de Geyn, 2011, p. 8).

In an instructional video from the 1980s, John Scofield¹ discusses his approach to pentatonic scales. The following table summarizes the available inside-sounding options² according to chord type:

Single Pentatonic Major Scale Over Changing Chords

The following is an exercise I designed for intermediate-level students that helps them perform pentatonic major (and their relative minor) scales all over the neck on all four strings in different positions. It’s built around the chords of “Sunny”³, a tune with a melody based solely on minor pentatonic notes but with changing chords.

In the following version in E minor, adhering strictly to the E minor/G major pentatonic scale will create tension on certain chords, but overall strong melodic motion will result. In “The Serious Jazz Book II,” B. Finnerty⁴ lists similar exercises with arpeggios or different cells.

Here is the exercise with piano and bass:

Here is the exercise as I uploaded it to the MuseScore website, with advanced MIDI playback (but no chord playback):

Time Feel

Breaks and Drum Fills

In pop music, drum fills are often played at specific points in the cycle—for example, every 4 or 8 bars—and are often improvised. The following exercise will help you keep time during the fill. The first example uses simple in-time fills with no rests. The learning objectives in this case can be loosely defined—for example, use an easy, well-mastered exercise to play along and keep time.

Exercise 01: Fills

Note that the 3-bar groove consists of 3 different drum groove alternatives, and the 5 fills are played randomly every 4 bars. The groove is inspired by “Kissing My Love”¹ by Bill Withers.

Exercise 02: 2-Beat Rests

Exercise 2 is more challenging, leaving two beats of rest in bar 4.

Exercise 03: Start With Rest During Break

Exercise 3 reverses the concept of ex. 2 and starts random breaks with two beats of rest.

Exercise 04: Full Bar of Rest

Exercise 4 stops right before beat 4 of bar 3 and leaves a full bar of rest. This exercise can now be extended to two or even three bars of rest.

Random Mix of Rests and Fills With Count-In

The next iteration would be very difficult to recreate in some DAWs, even Ableton (especially if non-metered audio files were used). It leverages the adaptive audio features by creating a mix of all preceding exercises. Now, for every cycle of four bars, the following happens at random:

• one of 4 drum patterns is picked
• one of 5 fills is selected
• one of 5 exercises is selected

Behind the Scenes

On the technical side, the same short drum loops are used in all the preceding examples and then recombined, which multiplies the number of possibilities from simple base material. Please refer to the chapter from the main thesis for further technical details and the problems with creating perfect loops and testing all possibilities.

Randomized Hits

Chance Options in DAWs and Apps

The Time Guru metronome (see methodology section) uses a random slider with a percentage setting to select the probability of drum hits being played. A gradual fade option is added to this “random mute slider”:

▶ Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/d8G2jdRN1xE

Many DAWs and plugins offer functions to set playback probabilities, although as a standard feature in some DAWs, this is a recent¹ development.

Drum Kit Mutes

The next exercise applies this idea to a drum kit by randomly fading out certain parts of the drum kit, limited for the sake of this example to bass drum, snare, and hi-hat. Although fades happen randomly, the exercise was constructed so that there are no long blanks with every element of the kit being muted. This silence setting is one key element in finding the right difficulty level for this exercise.

The objectives can be varied—for example, as in the previous exercise, use a simple exercise and play along without losing time, or for more advanced players, increase the fade times and play more advanced improvisations or exercises.

Rhythmical Displacements

Melodic Displacements

The following example uses 4 rhythmic displacements (eighth note, quarter note, and sixteenth note). These rhythmic devices are used extensively in composition¹ and improvisation. This is a basic example, though only the eighth-note and quarter-note displacements might be appropriate for beginners.

Randomized Displacement With Different Exercise Options

Options a, b, c, and d are played randomly, with a 15% chance setting for option d, which can be considered the most difficult performance-wise.

Also note that:

• the drum groove is 4 bars long and randomly plays 3 different variations
• there are 2 possible drum fills, one with a 1-bar drum silence
• the guitar part is 8 bars long with different rhythmic variations on E^7#9.

This is a good example of the potential for spontaneous variation by using short, similar loops of different lengths.

Based on this simple example, many variations can be created. By muting the drums, the guitar, or both, the playback becomes a time-keeping exercise. The quantize setting can be randomized, and more advanced subdivisions become imaginable, such as transformations² into other beat subdivisions (triplets, quintuplets, septuplets) and their respective displacements.

Swing Ratios

Swing ratios are commonly used in music notation programs to emulate swing feel. Expressed as a percentage, the ratio refers¹ to consecutive eighth (or sixteenth) notes performed as long-short patterns. Microtiming² studies have shown that these ratios vary widely depending on style, tempo, musicians’ affinities, and cultural background.

In a fascinating article³ on the impact hip-hop producer J Dilla had on live drum kit performance and pedagogy, Daniel Stadnicki analyzes “how the so-called ‘Dilla-feel’ is emulated by drummers and rhythm section players through a range of informal learning strategies and extended techniques, which include practices of online teaching and learning.”

J Dilla used⁴ the Akai MPC music workstation, which offers sampling and sequencing capabilities. Swing ratios can be set as a percentage. In DAWs, different names are used—for example, grooves in Ableton, groove quantize presets in Cubase, or groove templates in Logic. Another way to express this swing ratio is by using tuplet notation. This approach certainly doesn’t do justice to the different shades of microtiming, but it has the merit of offering a clear approach to these types of grooves.

The cowbell from the Afro-Peruvian Festejo rhythm is an example of an original swing feel between binary and ternary time:

Festejo with cajita, quijada, congas, bongo, and cajon:

Feel the Swing

I took inspiration for the next exercise from a 16-year-old beginner student who, while working on shuffle songs, asked me why the groove of some hip-hop tunes felt⁵ so different from, for example, blues shuffle songs. In the next example, the drum groove over the first 2 bars is straight, which corresponds to a 50% swing ratio or no swing at all; the two notes on the hi-hat have the same length. The swing feel on the hi-hat in bars 4 and 5 equals a 66.6% swing ratio, or a perfect triplet division, with the first note taking up 2/3 of the beat division and the second 1/3. A 60% swing ratio would correspond to 3 and 2 quintuplets (bars 5 and 6). A septuplet division (5 and 3 septuplets) yields approximately a 57% swing ratio.

Guess the Ratio

When randomizing this example with two-bar fragments, different exercises are conceivable for beginner to intermediate students:

• try to identify whether a change happens (a two-bar sequence might be played twice or more; 25% chance setting)
• identify the ratio
• play along with only quarter notes
• try to emulate the feeling by adapting your bass line to the drum groove

Blues Turnaround

Typical Turnarounds on Rhythm Changes or Blues Form

Here are four patterns (a, b, c, d) used in bars 9–12 of a typical F jazz blues:

Randomized Turnaround Options

The following playback will select one of the four options by chance. The 8-bar piano part is underlaid with a 6-bar drum groove grouped in sections of 2 bars each, with loops randomly picked from 4 options. This creates additional layers of variation.

Objectives

Here again, the basic principle is an audio flashcard. Students of different levels can focus on specific things:

• recognize the changes as quickly as possible
• sing along
• learn one option at a time
• master all the changes and force yourself to pick one in advance and play it even when recognizing another option. This is an interesting exercise and will help students think less rigidly about harmonic forms—for example, a student plays option d while hearing c, which functions as a subV.

Rhythm Changes

Chord Change Variations Over a Rhythm Changes Form in the B Section

Many jazz tunes use the rhythm changes harmonic progression as a base template. The B section is a playground for different¹ reharmonizations.

Here is an audio example of the three options, preceded by four bars over Bb6:

Randomized Versions

This is a variation of the blues turnaround memorization exercise. Each option (a, b, or c) is played twice. This allows the student to hear the progression once and then repeat it, or at a later stage, play each option two times.