as a beginner improvising can seem really hard and difficult but I can tell you from experience that if you know what to practice you will quickly see progress and it will become easier in this video I will show you three exercises every beginning improvisor should do these exercises will teach you essential skills you need to play a great solo let's get started it can seem like an impossible task to keep track of where you are when you're improvising but good improvisers always know where they are in the form when they're soloing and they don't even have to think about it they just feel when to go from one bar to the next if you have trouble keeping track of where you are in the song when you're improvising the following exercise can help you with that you simply take a chord or a scale that you're comfortable improvising over let's for example take an A minor pentatonic scale and the exercise goes like this we start on the one of the first bar and our goal is to stop on the one of the next bar and the space in between we fill up with cons consecutive e notes let me show you how this exercise sounds [Music] like there are two things that are really important about this exercise first we really try to do it without any help of a metronome or a Pome the second thing is that we want to do it so slowly that we are able to count one and two and three and four and one in our head when we improvise this can be really challenging at first so really try to slow down the exercise and do it as slow as you need [Music] to over time this exercise will give you a really good feeling of when to move from one bar to the next and this will allow you to much better follow where you are in the form when you're improvising and of course the aim here is not to always count one and two and three and four and one and so on when you're improvising this is just for the exercise our goal is to develop our intuition with this exercise so we don't have to count anymore when this works well we can level up the exercise now we start on the one end of the first bar and again end on the one of the next bar [Music] one one you can take it even further and start on the other places of the bar so you could start on two on two and three three and four and even four and as I mentioned before this can be really challenging at first but this exercise is really worth it over time it will allow you to always keep track of where you are when you're improvising and this is one of the really essential skills you need as an improviser another skill any improviser needs is to play lines that work well over the cords you're improvising over and the first step to get there is to play cord tone solos so let's say we have a Blues in G you might have already improvised over a blues using the blue scale and now it's time to take the next step and improvise using chord tones in our Blues here in G we have three different chords G7 C7 and D7 and each of these chords has four chord notes the tonic the third the fifth and the seventh now before we start improvising with these C tones we have to get them in our heads and under our fingers the first step to do that is to play 1 3 57 over each chord throughout the form [Music] if this goes well we can mix up the order of the cordones and for example play 3157 [Music] [Music] I would recommend that you do this for a while until you feel comfortable and really don't have to think about the C tones anymore additionally to that you should also practice playing the chord tones over the whole range of your instrument and then it's time to improvise using those chord tones [Music] you can practice chord soloing like this over any other tune and it will really help you to hear the chords and to be able to express the chords properly in your lines maybe you know this from yourself beginning improvisers are often overwhelmed by all the chords and scales they're supposed to learn and think of when improvising and one aspect of the music is then often overlooked looked as a result of that rhythm in fact every professional Jazz improviser would agree that great Rhythm beats great Melody anytime but how can we develop a great sense of Rhythm it's actually fairly simple there are actually many rhythms that are commonly used by improvisers that we can use for our own solos let's come back to the Blues in G that we talked about before what you could do is to just select one of those typical rhythms and practice improvising using core tones over this blue [Music] G another great thing is to practice combining two different rhythms in your soloing [Music] when you focus on Rhythm like this for a while you will see that you will have many new ideas for your solos and it will help you to make your solo sound like real Jazz solos that's it for this video guys thanks for watching let me know down in the comments what you think about these three exercises and if you want to learn how to spicen up your solos and make them more interesting make sure to check out this video next if you want to support me click like on this video And subscribe to my channel and see you next time