I just happened onto this thread, very good stuff here.

Scott, loved what you did in the first clip, hated what you did in the second clip. That synth doesn't work for me at all.

Mac (of course) caught the same thing I did. You should put an arpeggio in there and yes, pentatonics, pentatonics and more pentatonics.

I posted earlier this year that I was taking an online jazz course from an old timer jazz trumpeter, Willie Thomas. He's all over pents. They're 90% of what he teaches. Learn all the pent scales and really pay attention to where the fifth is and what that scale looks like starting on the fifth. That alone opens up a lot with these tunes.

I'm not going to reiterate the theory here, Mac and Zero have covered that well. I'm going to throw in some fast ways of thinking. Take the Eb pentatonic scale. Eb, F, G, Bb, C. What does that form? A Cm7. The classic C blues scale as Mac said. Willie says many times you want to start your pent solos on the 5th so that's Bb but you're just running a C blues scale if your target key is Eb so that's Bb, C, Eb, F, Gb, G.

One last quick cheat tidbit is chromatics. Not just one approach note, no a full chromatic scale for as long as you need it. There's another video by another very good online teacher who spends 10 minutes doing nothing but chromatics to Giant Steps. He's breaking them up for sure and he's starting and stopping in different places on the keyboard but it sounds pretty good nonetheless. Nothing but chromatic runs. I was amazed at that one and I now use that sometimes.

It's great that you're doing this Scott and I can hear that you're making good progress already.

That vid that Zero posted is a guy named Julian. He's got 72 vids and I've downloaded about 40 of them. He's very good.

Keep it up buddy!

Bob

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