Preparing to Improvise: Broken Chords and Arpeggios

One of the most useful ways of preparing to improvise over a bunch of chords is to work on:

• Playing arpeggios of those chords
• Practicing broken chords

What are Broken Chords?

A broken chord is like an arpeggio, but it moves up the chord. It's a bit like going through the inversions.

Basic Broken Chord Routine

Here's a basic broken chord routine for C triad:

• Ideally, if you are learning a new tune and want to take a solo on it,
• It's quite useful to:
  • Work out the chord shapes
  • Practice that broken chord routine on most of the chords in the tune.

Importance of Fingering

The reason for doing that is not just to get the notes right; it's also to get the fingering right, because it's not always going to be the same in every key.

Example: D Major

For instance, if you had a black note in the middle, like D major, now you're going to need to think about the fingering:

• Try to avoid:
  • The thumb on F sharp
  • The thumb on A
• Use your little finger on top.

Example: E Flat Major

If you had a tune that had some chords whose root was a black note, like E flat (not that we have any in "Take the A Train"), you might need to do this for another tune:

• You probably want to start with the second finger
• Avoid the thumb on the black notes.

Swing Feel and Displaced Accents

These triplet patterns are really useful, especially in a swing feel. They become even more interesting if you start displacing the accent like we did with four-note groups when we were playing scale patterns.

Example: Key of C

In the key of C, like in "Take the A Train":

• That sounds kind of better than just playing straight because we've started on before the bar line, introducing a little bit of a pickup.

Alternating Notes

Another thing you can do, or another pattern you could try, is alternating notes.

Note on Swing vs. Straight Eighths

All of these patterns in triplets are great if you're playing in swing, but they won't work so well if you're playing in a straight eighth feel.

Example: Key of D

Let's change to the key of D. Here's the same three-note group, but played in straight eighths (in other words, not triplets).

Putting It into Practice

These are all great things to practice. We're going to have a chance to put this into practice, and I'll demonstrate them in the next track, A Train Improvisation.

Taking a Solo

Now, let's move on to taking another solo.

• There was no space to do a solo with the first track, but now we're going to repeat the tune this time with bass and drums.
• I'd like you to follow my lead and maybe listen to my solo, which I'll play using my right hand only.

I'm only going to use triads. I just want to demonstrate that it's perfectly possible to play a decent jazz solo using just:

• Roots
• Thirds
• Fifths

I'm not even going to include any sevenths.

Sevenths in the Chord Sequence

While I know there are some sevenths in the chord sequence, like D7, A7, and G7, I'm not going to worry about those sevenths.

Here we go!