Cycles II-V-I

Jazz Practice Routine: Scales and Arpeggios

So, practicing scales, arpeggios, licks, chord voicings, basslines, whatever you like, around a 2-5 progression is the quickest way to get familiar with all the different keys you need to become fluent at playing jazz. This is important because not many tunes stay in one key all the time.

The Cycle

Here's a cycle that starts on:

• A minor 7
• D7
• G major

In other words, it's an A 2-5-1 in G major and goes down in tones. You could play this many different ways:

1. Start with the Chords: Play them as long as you need.
2. Change Keys: Transition to G minor (down a tone), then to F minor.

Chord Shapes

The shapes I'm using start on:

• Root position
• Second inversion
• End on root position

Of course, you could also utilize:

• Two-handed voicings
• Bass lines

There's no end to the different approaches to this. The important thing is to start doing things in these six keys. However, that's only six keys, and as you know, there are 12.

Expanding the Cycle

If you start the cycle in a different place, such as E minor, you'll get the other six keys.

Practice Suggestions

1. Two-Handed Voicings: I suggest you do each one at least twice, just in case you get it wrong the first time.
2. Timing: Make sure to play in time.
3. Shells in the Left Hand: Let's go back to the first cycle and remember we did this routine just now.

New Challenges

Now, we're going to do the same thing, but it's going to be a bit more challenging because we're going to start on the third.

• We've moved everything up from starting on the root to starting on the third.
• This encourages you to be flexible when using scales.

And then we could start on the fifth. Remember, it's always the same scale. We're in G major, so it's just one black note: F sharp.

If you play these correctly and start on the right note, you'll finish on the beat on a chord note as well.

The Second Cycle

Let's go to the second cycle. Just to vary it, we'll do a long 2-5-1:

• 1, 2, 3, 4
• 1, 2, 3, 4
• 1, 2, 3, 4

And we'll go to the sixth. So instead of starting on the root like we did before, we'll now start on the third.

Feel free to have a different ending if you like; not everything has to be learned by rote.

Moving to the Fifth

Now I'm going to start on the fifth of the chord. You'll notice that I used the opposite shells, so this will be great practice for the next tune.

Arpeggio Workout

Arpeggio Workout: Although it's called an arpeggio workout, when you play with a backing track, you can, of course, try all these scale ideas as well to make things easier for you.

Key Selection

Rather than go through all 12 keys in this workout, I've chosen the six easiest keys.

• First three keys in the A minor cycle
• First three keys in the E minor cycle

These keys contain up to two flats and two sharps. This is why there's a change halfway through.

Not only are we changing from the first cycle to the second cycle, but we're also switching from root and third in the left-hand starting place to root and seventh in the left hand.

This adjustment is partly because when you practice in different keys, you sometimes need to change to get the right register. If you played root and third all the way through, it could become too low.

A good solution is to switch to root and seventh or vice versa.