Ways to Add Chromaticism. How to add more chromaticism to your improvised lines This is a fascinating topic, and a popular one tooHow not to learn jazz fiddle When you study classical violin, you learn to reproduce exactly the notes written on the page. You learn to play. Lots of students, online and off, have been asking about chromatic lines and fluidity. In this blog, well discuss three straight forward way you can integrate more chromatic sounding melodic lines in your improvisation. Adding Chromaticism Download Your PDFThis is a rather big lesson, so Ive included a PDF file for your convenience. List compiled by Joy Morin. ALLINONE APPS. Music for Little Mozarts 0. This app corresponds with the the Music For Little Mozarts piano method books published. Playing Chromatically Where does it hurt In my teaching, these kinds of questions often come up. People ask All my lines sound inside. What can I do about it Which notes should I play to sound outside on purpose when Im soloing I often wind up going updown the scales and arpeggios while improvising. What else is there to do If youre in the same boat, dont worry. You need to start slow and play very well inside the changes, and then start adding outside notes slowly. For starters, here are three ways you can add a refreshing breeze of chromaticism into your own playing. Learn and Practice the Chromatic Scale. First, learn the chromatic scale. This is a no brainer, right We want more chromatics on the instrument, so we learn the chromatic scale. Quite frankly, this can get pretty boring pretty quickly. Ive included the chromatic scale in the PDF attached to this blog post, for reference. But we wont dig too deep on it. A Crack In The Floor Trailer Livestock. And feel free to look at this lesson discussing strictly the chromatic scale if you have some catching up to do. Lick-1.png' alt='Bebop Licks Guitar Pdf Sheet' title='Bebop Licks Guitar Pdf Sheet' />Learn a Happy Birthday Chord Melody Arrangement with lead sheet, tab, notation and an audio example. JamieHolroydGuitar. Improve Your Jazz Guitar Playing Today. Look-Inside/covers/4913883.jpg' alt='Bebop Licks Guitar Pdf Sheet' title='Bebop Licks Guitar Pdf Sheet' />You can think of the chromatic scale like learning the alphabet. We know the chromatic scale contains all the 1. Just learn it ascending and descending. In the PDF youll find the 4 note per string version and the 6 note per string version. Get familiar with Bebop Scales. Another interesting way you can add chromaticism to your lines is by practicing bebop scales, and they are a neat way to add chromatics because you add notes to the scales you already know and use. Their fingerings on the guitar are awesome. This will be the topic of the next video lesson, so stay tuned. Practice These 3 Chromatic Exercises. Lastly, the third way you can practice chromatics is to use exercises. More precisely chromatic exercises. This is the focus of this post. Ill show you three precise chromatic exercises, so you can start practicing right now. Chromatic exercise number one is using 4 note groupings. This is a great way to ingrain the chromatic scale deeper in your ears and fingers. Simply take the chromatic scale you already know, and apply a pattern to it, such as 1,2,3,4. Then 2,3,4,5. Then 3,4,5,6, etc. Heres one possible fingering for 4 note groupings, for the beginning of the exercise There are plenty of other fingerings you could use that are appropriate for this exercise. You should also learn the descending versionChromatic exercise number two is the constrained improvisation chromatic scale exercise. This is where well actually improvise purely chromatically. Youll have to use your creativity to come up with ideas, and to avoid repeating yourself over and over. In a way, this is great chromatic ear training so to speak. Heres the exercise chose an interval to solo within. Then solo chromatically strictly by using the interval as your constraints, or your boundaries. This means that we are allowed to play all the notes that are chromatic within the interval inside of the interval, right For example, lets pick the F note, and the interval of a perfect 4th. So, from F to Bb. In the video, theres a short demonstration of yours truly soloing with that concepts. Here are the only note Im allowing myself to play with for this exercise This is fun, but make sure you really hear everything that you are playing. Of course, you should modify the exercise by imposing different constraints on it. You pick a different range a different interval. The example above was just using a perfect 4th. You could also decide on a position on the fretboard, or also can add interesting pre defined rhythms to your improvisation. The third and last example is a chromatic exercise called  root to root. It is is somewhat of a mechanical one to finish with,  its also amazingly beneficial for your ears. With root to root exercise, we play through the 1. We play the chromatic scale ascending, but we keep repeating our root, in this case C, in between every note. Heres the ascending version Notice that we repeat our root high and low in every bar. This can prove quite technically challenging at faster tempos Constantly repeating the root makes it ring within your ears. In our case, the root is C, here. Of course you have to try the descending version on your own, as you can find it in the PDF. Try to play the root to root exercise for chromaticism in eighth notes and sixteenth. C. There are several good fingerings, so find what works for you and then stick to it. Rhythms and Applications How to Add Chromaticism Wrapup. Thats it for the chromatic exercises for now. Theres two more things we need to discuss before I let you go First, time and rhythms. With impeccable timing, you can really get away with murder while soloing. Let yourself play anything, note wise, that you desire, so long as the lines are in solid timing. Lots of great jazz artists do this in their solo. Its worth giving timing and rhythms 1. Day Of Doom Epub here. If youre playing free as all the exercise in this blog post, the focus should be on rhythms As a side note to, issues I personally come across in teaching private lessons are related to timing and rhythms 8. It dont mean a thing if it aint got that swing, right Secondly, I wanted to talk about applications. Dont force it and use these exercises verbatim in your solos. You dont need to. Your aim is to get and hear more ideas while you are improvising, so let the ideas play you, and not the other way around. My advice is, just practice the chromatic exercises without expecting anything in return, and then someday, some chromatic idea will pop up in your ears while you are soloing. Thats how our ears work, really. Go Further With Chromaticism. If this topic is fascinating to you, you should definitely check out our new jazz guitar video tutorial about adding chromatic notes in your solos. Here it is A Blast from the Past. Side note this video was published as part of a five lesson series published on True. Fire in November 2. TNTGI2. 01. 4. These lessons have been re published on this blog for your viewing pleasure. The second lesson is bebop scales, their modes and fingerings for jazz guitarists. Up Next More Interesting Jazz Guitar Materials for You.