Breaking it Down for Better Soloing

If you really want to hear where you’re at as a soloist, try jamming with either a bassist or a drummer – but only one, or the other, and never both together for this exercise.

That’s right, just you on sax, with bass or drums for accompaniment.

Don’t just free-form it. Work on an actual melody from beginning to end. Play the head, the bridge, and then the solo. Go back to the head and finish the song, as if playing with an entire band.

If possible, record the session.

On playback, listen and ask yourself: was the melody recognizable? When you soloed, did the playing reflect the changes and the melodic/harmonic structure of the song? Or, did your playing veer off into left field somewhere? Did you work the changes, and hit the tone centers and the 3’s and 7’s on downbeats?

This exercise is a skill-builder because there are no other instruments to hide behind. Working without a net shows how structured your solos are in terms of melodic technique, instead of just blasting away using scale-based runs or your own stock riffs.  

It puts the entire burden on your shoulders.

You are the soloist, and as such, you alone have to give the entire song its melodic shape. There won’t be a guitar or a keyboard to do that for you. You will be carrying the heavy weight here.

How to get started: take it slow and easy at first. Pick something with a strong melody and few changes, a blues for example like Tenor Madness or Blue Monk. It may be frustrating in the beginning for newcomers to improvising, so allow for that (without allowing yourself to feel like a failure.)

Keep coming back to the melody in your soloing and in your explorations. Play just the chord tones on some passes, and just the 3’s and 7’s on other passes. You should be able to 'feel' the melody of the song in whatever you play, even with just those two notes, okay?

And as always, have fun.

sax lessons, improvisation, soloing hints, improvisation exercises, jamming