I Couldn’t Play Bebop Jazz Guitar Until I discovered These Amazing Elements!

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So how do you take something like a simple C major scale

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and make it sound more like a jazz bebop line? Maybe something like this

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Practicing Bebop Techniques

Well, a few things you need to practice. First thing might be the bebop scale and the second thing might be the enclosures. After that, it’s just like a language. You gotta listen, you gotta transcribe, and get all of those chops into your fingers and ears.

Bebop Scale

The first bebop scale is what I like to teach, calling it “root goes to the five goes to the root,” meaning that I’m gonna have one chromatic note from the sixth to the five. So we get this:

• Root
• Goes
• To
• The
• Five

So that “duh” was a chromatic note. So we had root goes to the five goes to the root. So we had root, seven, six, chromatic note, which is a flat six, into a five. That way, our chord tones are landing on strong beats: root goes to the five and again goes to the root, always landing on strong beats with the root and the five.

Let’s practice that:

• Root goes to the five goes to the root
• Goes to chromatic five goes to the root

Let’s practice that going up:

• Root goes to the five goes to the root
• Goes to the five goes to the root

Okay, so you can practice that also from the third as well as practicing that in other tonalities other than C. So let’s say you’re playing your bebop scale, but you want to aim into the third now, right? So you can do something like this:

So you see these two notes approaching the third. So we get this:

• This is more what I call approach tones.

I’ll show you what an actual enclosure is in a second. But this way, listen now, that’s starting to sound like a bebop phrase. And I can see my first inversion C over here and I can create that phrase with it: root goes to the five goes to the third.

Starting from Different Notes

Now let’s say I’m not starting from my root; I want to start from my five and I want to go to my root. Well, maybe I can also utilize the same thing:

• Five goes to the third
• And then I can just play a chromatic approach all the way to my root

Third goes to the root:

• Third chromatic note goes to the root

And I get this:

• Again one e and a two e and a three and a four

So you can see I’m landing on strong beats: one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and.

Now I can complete it by going from this root to this five just like it is from here.

So this is essentially what is more looked upon as the bebop scale approach when the six is going to the five. Right? So we can do that. We just practice that, right? And then from the five to the root, we’ll be just playing the scale, so:

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Right, all of these stuff are things you can start practicing and also in minor chords. Let’s take D minor for example and I want to, you know, take this triad and start implementing these enclosures and employ approaches.

Enclosures

The perfect enclosure is kind of like a cage surrounding that note. So let’s say I’m in D minor right and I want to take that third and I want to play it in my solo. Well, a thing I can do to make it sound more jazzy, more bebop is to enclose that note. For example, take that third and approach it with this type of enclosure:

• Third so that was the cage going to the third and one e and a two

So you see I’m landing on a strong beat. Another thing I can do is, let’s say I’m going to five, I can do:

• Five
• Five

So let me show you a few different approaches now combined. I can do:

Here’s D minor:

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A good way to practice it is counting:

• One and two and three
• One and two and three
• Or Juanienna one e and a two
• I prefer Juaniena one e and a two a and a three

Enough one.

So I aim to land on a non-chord tone right here. That was the two, so that’s more advanced, but you can start, you know, once you can aim into chord tones, then you can start aiming into other stuff like maybe the two.

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Combining Techniques

Another thing that is happening a lot in bebop is that there’s kind of like a compensation of whenever you have these strong movements such as chromatics, scale movements, enclosures. There’s kind of like this compensation of a bigger leap like an arpeggio, something like that, for example:

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So you see this is a bigger, kind of arpeggiated sound. So you can start doing those three things:

1. Practicing your bebop kind of scales
2. Movement
3. Starting surrounding notes with things such as chromatic approaches, enclosures
4. Also kind of like compensating your phrases and balancing them out using arpeggios

Hopefully, this was helpful. If you want to be able to see all those triads, arpeggios, chords, scales with tabs, notation, 95 examples, everything you need is really organized in 15 modules. So you’re welcome to access my Galactic Modern Guitar series in the description of this video to really go way deeper.

Anyway, please like this video, subscribe, support this channel by sharing this video, commenting. I’ll see you in the next video. New video every week, so stay tuned.

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