Martin Taylor
Adding a little jazz flavour to your blues licks can open up a wealth of new possibilities in your playing – this exclusive six-part series shows you how!
The Final Countdown
This is the final column of our series of six. There’s no more left to learn, no more intervals to insert into the pentatonic scale – we’ve covered them all. What’s left for you to do now is to consolidate everything we’ve looked at so far. I realise that it’s bewildering to try to take all of this information in at once, but if you find yourself floundering or suddenly out of your depth, go right back to where we started and revise the work we’ve covered thus far. The chances are that your fingers know the basic pentatonic shape really well and so they’ll struggle and resist a bit when you direct them towards intervals such as the 6th and 9th and so on.
Furthermore, your ear is going to take a little bit of reconditioning, too. Whereas it might have been used to just those five notes that are covered by the pentatonic scale, we’ve introduced some strangers in there. The answer is, as always, practice. The more you work with this information, the more you will find your ear encouraging your fingers to incorporate it into your playing. Gradually, it will become second nature and all the hard work will have been worthwhile.
Of course, as we all know, there are more pentatonic positions to explore after you feel yourself on firmer ground with this one. My advice is to take a similar approach: move to another position and find where, say, the 6th is within it. All the while, make sure that you practise with a backing track so that your ear gets the best possible chance to hear the intervals in their proper context. That way, you’re learning the language of jazz not only with your fingers and eyes, but with your ears as well. Good luck!