Learning Patterns

I’ve been practicing jazz piano recently. I’ve been working on learning standards by ear, improvising over them, and playing walking bass lines in my left hand on piano. Improvising over changes is something that I did on guitar, same with learning by ear. Playing walking bass lines is new though. It’s taken some practice, but I’ve improved quite a bit since I started practicing this summer.

Some things that helped me a whole lot were Aimee Nolte’s videos on playing solo jazz piano. She has some great videos about how to play standards on solo piano. She has a video on how to play walking bass lines on piano.

In practicing this I’ve learned that playing an instrument, and playing jazz is playing a lot of similar patterns. The walking bass line pattern that Aimee Nolte suggests is incredibly useful to play basically any type of walking bass line. I’ve talked to my bass player friends, and my jazz musicians friends about this, and none of them are as surprised as me. They’ve literally said, “yup that’s how you play walking bass.” That’s what jazz is. Obviously I’m using one method of playing a walking bass line, and there are tons of different patterns and ways to play walking bass lines, but they all follow similar patterns. It’s just that there are a ton of patterns to use and learn.

The same could be said for comping chords on guitar.

I remember when I was first starting to learn jazz guitar in high school my guitar teacher had me buy a book called “Jazzology” and I learned a few of the comping patterns in that book. I started improvising using those patterns. And then once I was comfortable with those I learned more patterns. It’s all about learning patterns and slowly adding more patterns and more ideas and eventually you’ll “speak the language.”

I’ve been doing the same with soloing and improvising.

I’ve learned a few jazz solos and used some of those ideas in my own playing. The more you do it the more comfortable you get. And you start learning those patterns slowly, and then you add slightly more patterns and more ideas.

At first this is difficult. It’s hard to focus enough and even harder to play something you think is cool, especially if you’re starting with simple materials. But the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. The more you’re able to add and eventually you’ve gotten to a whole new level of complexity in your playing. But it’s about slowly adding new patterns to your playing.

Another great thing about the whole pattern idea is that you notice patterns between songs. Many of the standards I’ve learned have similar chord progressions. Not just small pieces of chord progressions, like ii V Is, but larger chord progressions. Or literally the same chords, but just mixed around. That’s the case for “All of Me”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, “Autumn Leaves”, and “Moon River.” If those were all written in the same key there would be many similarities with the chord progressions.

So once you get used to soloing over a few of those tunes it opens up the ability to solo over so many other tunes.

It’s one of the reasons why jazz musicians are so comfortable in so many different situations. They’ve played over so many different things in different keys and different situations where they’ve just practiced a ton of different music and a ton of different ideas.

Go learn some patterns.