This post will be about a rhythmical concept I have picked up many years ago when I first started checking out Jerry Bergonzi Books. Especially his book Rhythmic Concepts Vol4.

In a few words it’s this. Pick any rhythm and use it on repeat while practicing scales on guitar or jazz tunes and changes. Got it?

That’s Pretty much it.

Jazz cat was upset about this …….. hehehe… ( credit to AI 😉 That guitar in the background sure looks strange .. )

Well, just kidding ….. It’s not totally untrue though … But I will go into it a little bit more with some examples for your guitar practice routine.

Let’s take a rather simple rhythmical example.

And here how it sounds if repeated 4 times in midi generated swing feel…. ( not the real feel… but you get the idea..)

Play it over and over. Play it faster. Play with metronome only placed on the beat 4. Then repeat metronome beat only on every 2nd bar beat 4. Until it feels like walking. ( Although it’s not exactly walking bass..)

Ok, now…

Take any scale. You can use any scale or arpeggio or even a tune changes .. but I will use D melodic minor scale in 2 octaves from 5th string root note as an example.

Now, let’s add that rhythm example to it…

Here is how it sounds.

Of course this is just a beginning of how much stuff can be done with this approach. What if you repeat this jazz guitar scale pattern in a different way… from each next note and again…. Pattern played from D, then next time from E, next time from F etc. etc. .. I don’t know how much this makes sense? But I may return to this concept in future posts.

I do take zoom students so be in touch if interested here.

Thanks for checking this out. Any thoughts appreciated.

Nora