Warmups are an important part of a practice routine, no matter how long you’ve been playing, and it’s important to have warmup exercises that tie into what you’re working on as well.
Today we’re going to look at four great exercises that you can use to get your ears and fingers warmed up and increase your fluency with chromaticism.
But before we get going, if you want to really dive into this concept deeper, we have two resources that you’ll love — Chad LB’s 10 Warmup Exercises for Jazz Musicians and Cecil Alexander’s 20 Essential Jazz Warmups. If you want to see how Nathan plays these exercises through, don’t forget to watch our accompanying YouTube video 4 Great Jazz Warmup Exercises.
Now let’s get warmed up!
Contents
Diatonic seventh chromatic approach warmup
One thing to talk about before diving in on this one is how we build diatonic seventh chords. When we take the notes of the E-flat major scale and stack thirds above it, we get the seventh chord for each scale degree.
Let’s start by thinking of this exercise in terms of arpeggios of those chords. Here it is with the chord tones outlined.
And here it is descending.
But now let’s add chromatic approach notes before each of the chord tones.
This gives us a strong foundation of not only playing arpeggios, but also thinking about how chromatic approach notes can be used to target any degree of a diatonic seventh chord.
Enclosure exercise
Now let’s check out the second exercise. For the first note of each measure, we’ll walk up the major scale and play a 1, 2, 3, 5 shape. This means we’ll walk up a scale step, then another scale step, and skip to the next note. Then after this shape we’ll walk down a scale step and play a three-note chromatic enclosure (two notes above, one note below the target note).
On the descending version, we’ll do something similar, but this time, the first half of the measure will be 1, 2, 3, 1, then we’ll walk up the scale step and play our three-note enclosure.
Major scale enclosure exercise
Both of the previous exercises came from Chad LB’s 10 Warmup Exercises. These next two exercises come from Cecil Alexander’s 20 Essential Jazz Warmups.
Let’s break things down before trying this one. We’ll start by taking a major scale in thirds. Now within each of these two-note cells, we’re going to target all of the lower notes with a two-note enclosure, one scale tone above and one chromatic approach note below.
Now give it a try!
Bebop scale arpeggio exercise
We’re on to our last exercise of the day, if you made it this far, you’re probably feeling pretty good!
This exercise is a fascinating take on the G dominant bebop scale. A bebop scale is when we take the common seven-note scale and then add one or more chromatic passing tones. There are several ways to create a bebop scale, but in this case, Cecil takes the dominant scale then inserts a chromatic passing tone between the root and flat 7 so that he’s able to start the next measure on 1, ensuring that we land on a chord tone on the downbeat.
However, where we find ourselves landing on the sixth for the downbeat, Cecil adds a chromatic passing tone between 6 and 5 to ensure that we land back into the original dominant bebop scale.
Let’s check out the first half of each measure. Each of them is a diatonic seventh chord from every chord tone of G7 — here’s a seventh chord from the root which gives you a G7 and here’s a seventh from the iiiº which gives you Bm7b5. Then the seventh chord from the v which gives you Dm7. And finally the seventh chord from the bVII, which gives you an Fmaj7. After each of these, we descend down bebop scales with those passing tone rules from earlier in mind.
Here’s where it gets cooler. How we’re going to descend back down is by using a pivot arpeggio. Essentially, to create a pivot arpeggio is to take the last three notes of your arpeggio and flip them down the octave so that they end below your starting note. Now watch as this exercise plays itself descending easily.
That’s a really great exercise that’s worth taking through all 12 keys.
If you’re hungry for more warmup exercises like that, make sure to check out Chad LB’s 10 Warmup Exercises for Jazz Musicians and Cecil Alexander’s 20 Essential Jazz Warmups. And don’t forget to watch our accompanying YouTube video 4 Great Jazz Warmup Exercises to see how Nathan plays these through.
See you next time!
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