3 Pivotal Exercises To Improve Techniqu... Your Instrument - Learn Jazz Standards

4/10/2018 3 Pivotal Exercises to Improve Technique on Your Instrument - Learn Jazz Standards
3 Pivotal Exercises to Improve Technique on Your Instrument

By Josiah Boornazian - April 4, 2018
https://www.learnjazzstandards.com/blog/learning-jazz/jazz-theory/3-pivotal-exercises-to-improve-technique-on-your-instrument/?utm_source=LJS+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dd5464d157-newsletter%3A+bluesette&utm_medium=emai
As jazz musicians, we are all on a lifelong journey to constantly improve our technique on our instruments. Anyone who has tried to
master a bebop tune or improvise at a fast tempo knows rsthand that jazz music is highly virtuosic and technically demanding.
If you’re looking for practice ideas to improve your technique, there are innumerable great resources in books as well as here on LJS,
and I encourage everyone to tackle technical exercises from as many diverse sources as possible.
However, when time and energy are limited, I recommend prioritizing the technical exercises that are most likely to have direct
applications to our jazz playing.
A thoughtfully structured practice routine can enable us to simultaneously work on our instrumental technique, our understanding of
scale/chord theory, our ears, and our jazz vocabulary.
In this post, I’ll talk about just 3 of the most useful technical exercises I’ve explored. I hope you nd, as I did, that these exercises not
only help us master our instruments but also strengthen our ability to hear and play jazz harmonic structures on our instruments.
But rst, I want to take a moment here to share my philosophy regarding practicing technical exercises.
I encourage everyone to try to “think” on 3 levels while practicing technical exercises:

#1: Firstly, we want to develop muscle memory and sharpen our physical intelligence. I call this “thinking with our ngers.”
Strive to practice technical exercises slowly and methodically, gradually increasing the tempo, until you get to the point where you
have developed muscle memory. You know you’ve achieved this when you know how a scale, pattern, melody or exercise “feels,” and
you don’t have to think about the notes or the ngerings. Being able to execute an exercise on the rst attempt at a very fast tempo
rst thing when you start practicing for the day good sign that you’ve developed muscle memory.
#2: Secondly, we want to improve our ability to recognize chords and melodies by ear. I call this “thinking with our ears.”
This is important because we need to have strong ears in order to improvise with con dence. Having good ears empowers you to play
the melodies and chords you hear in your head, to hear any variations or alterations to a melody or chord changes on the y, to correct
any “wrong” notes if you hit a note that doesn’t t the music (or that you didn’t mean to hit), and to communicate more uidly with
bandmates while improvising.
So I encourage everyone to listen actively while practicing technical exercises and really try to hear the relationships of the various
melodic intervals at play. With all technical exercises, try singing the exercises very slowly in one or two keys rst.
You can use a piano to help you if you have access to one. You can play the exercises on a piano or guitar and sing along, or you can play
them slowly (in short chunks if necessary) on your instrument and try to sing them back call-and-response style.
Singing the exercises rst strengthens your understanding of the intervals involved in the exercise. This is important because intervals
are the fundamental harmonic and melodic building blocks of music.
Also, if you can sing the exercises (and don’t worry if it’s not perfectly in tune), it means you’ve aurally absorbed the sounds of the
exercises, which means you can trust your ears to guide you. If you know how each exercise is supposed to sound, your ears can help
correct your ngers if you make mistakes while practicing.
#3: Thirdly, we want to sharpen our understanding of jazz theory, especially scale/chord theory, because it is so helpful for learning
how to improvise uently. I call this “thinking with our (theory) brains,” “thinking with our intellect,” or “thinking using concepts.”
Even though we’re trying to develop our ears and muscle memory, we shouldn’t “turn our brains off” while practicing even the most
seemingly mundane technical exercises. There are many levels to thinking theoretically while practicing.
On the most basic level, you can think about the scales/modes/chords you’re practicing as you play them. Think about the pitches by
trying to visual their note names or try to visualize them in written notation. Or if this seems too simple, you can try picturing or
thinking about the chord that goes with a scale while you’re playing it (or vice versa).
At an even higher level, you can try visualizing the same technical exercise in different applied contexts as you’re playing it. For
example, I might arpeggiate an E half-diminished 7th chord many times in different inversions and with different rhythms, and with
each repetition I try to visualize (and hear) it as if I were playing it over a variety of different chords: E half-diminished, G-13, C9,
F#7(b9,b13), etc. (it will sound good over all of the chords).
As you’re practicing technical exercises, I recommend switching back and forth between all of these three focuses: ngers (physical),
ears (aural), and conceptual (theoretical).
Most of us are stronger in some areas than others, so ideally you’ll spend the most time practicing while trying to think in the are you
are weakest. For example, I am con dent in my muscle memory and my knowledge of jazz theory, so I engage on those levels while
practicing my technique, but I try to spend most of my time trying to improve my ears by really trying to sing and hear the exercises
I’m working on.
Now that you have an idea of how I like to think about practicing technique, here are 3 exercises that I think really maximize the
bene ts of practicing technique. Included are brief explanations of why and notated examples.
Scales in intervals
Intervals are the fundamental building blocks of melody and harmony in music. In order to execute melodies you hear in your head or
read on a page of sheet music, you need to have technical mastery of as many intervallic combinations as possible on your instrument.
Likewise, hearing intervals clearly is the rst step toward being able to hear melodies, bass lines, and chords. One great way to tackle
intervals is by playing scales in intervals.
Here’s what I mean (Note: pay attention to how, for the sake of variety, sometimes I alternate the melodic direction of the intervals.
Also, I recommend trying all the intervals you can think of in as many inversions as possible for both the diatonic and chromatic
patterns – and keep in mind that you can, of course, continue to play these types of melodic patterns over the full range of your
instrument whenever possible for maximum bene t).
Diatonic and chromatic 7th chords

7th chords are the fundamental building blocks of jazz harmony. Jazz musicians very rarely playing triads by themselves. Most of the
harmonic vocabulary of jazz music is based around 7th chords and 7th chord upper structures over different bass notes (which is just
another way of thinking about extended chords – chords with 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, etc.).
Knowing and being able to hear and play all the diatonic 7th chords in all 12 keys will be really helpful for understanding tonal
harmony in jazz.
Additionally, practicing 7th chords chromatically helps prepare us for those tricky moments of chromaticism which pop up frequently
in jazz chord progressions.
Finally, arpeggiating 7th chords also gives you a good foundation of melodic vocabulary you can use while improvising since one of the
surest ways to “nail the changes” is to artfully arpeggiate chord tones with interesting rhythms. Here are some examples of the
exercises.
Arpeggiating basic piano voicing upper structures
Building on the concept of outlining chords discussed in the examples above, I also nd it incredibly useful to arpeggiate the upper
structures (i.e. the right-hand part) of standard jazz II-V-I piano voicings on my instrument in at least the 2 basic inversions.
It can help train our ngers, ears, and brains to voice lead more clearly and to really nail chord tones. Here’s what I mean notated.
Although these are of course not the only approaches to practicing technique, these exercises have greatly helped me grow
technically as a player, and I hope you nd these concepts and exercises bene cial for your practice routine!
About the Author

Josiah Boornazian
http://www.josiahboornazian.com/
Josiah Boornazian is an award-winning saxophonist, composer, and educator currently active in New York City, Miami, California, and Washington state. Josiah has performed with a wide
variety of artists including Jimmy Heath, John Faddis, Dave Holland, Mark Farina, Dave Liebman, Diane Schuur, Dave Grusin, Arturo Sandoval, Ignacio Berroa, the New York Voices, Tom Scott,
Cyrille Aimee, Dafnis Prieto, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Shelly Berg, Chris Potter, Drew Gress, David Binney, Wayne Krantz, Tom Scott, Ari Hoenig, Dan Weiss, John Escreet, Jacob Sacks, Fima Ephron,
Jonathan Crayford, Obed Calvaire, Will Vinson, Matt Brewer, Ben Wendel, Eivind Opsvik, Ferenc Nemeth, Alan Ferber, John Daversa, Donny McCaslin, and the Gil Evans Orchestra. Josiah
holds a Master of Arts degree in music from the City University of New York's City College campus and a Bachelor of Music degree from California State University, Northridge. In 2016, Josiah,
who has taught on faculty at the City College of New York and given masterclasses at various colleges and high schools in California and Washington, began pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts
degree at the University of Miami's prestigious Frost School of Music as a Henry Mancini Fellow. Josiah also teaches at the Frost School part-time as a graduate assistant. In 2017, Josiah's
ensemble was selected to participate in the Bucharest International Jazz Competition and he was awarded a Björn Bärnheim Research Fellowship at the Hogan Jazz Archive during the 2017-
2018 academic year. For more information, please visit josiahboornazian.com.

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4/10/2018 3 Pivotal Exercises to Improve Technique on Your Instrument - Learn Jazz Standards

3 Pivotal Exercises to Improve Technique on Your Instrument

I encourage everyone to try to “think” on 3 levels while practicing technical exercises:

Diatonic and chromatic 7th chords

Arpeggiating basic piano voicing upper structures

About the Author

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