Like it or not, at some point each of us will be asked to solo. Maybe you love soloing; here’s an overdue chance to emote after a set’s worth of selfless support. Alternatively, you may loathe bass solos. You feel under-prepared. Maybe you’re philosophically offended—the bass is supposed to play bass, you think. Perhaps you’re intimidated—nobody likes following up a searing bebop tenor-sax solo replete with reharmonizations, clever quotes, and beautiful melodic content with a muddled low-frequency morass. 

Wherever you stand, learning how to solo is maximally helpful for musicianship. Soloing, especially over chord changes, is an entrée into harmony outside a purely academic context. In contending with chord changes, we force our synapses to fire rapidly, to deal with the language of music in real time. To do so, we must develop a robust soloing vocabulary, aiming for coherence and fluency stripped of musically meaningless ramble. 

Here’s a cool soloing exercise that will help bring both melodicism and accuracy to your lines. Come up with (or steal!) a short lick over a particular chord made up of diatonic chord tones or scalar notes, like the one in Ex. 1. Analyze the lick in terms of diatonic intervals from the chord’s tonic. The numerals next to each note in Ex. 1 reflect these intervals. Now, play the lick through a set of chord changes, modulating the notes to accommodate the shifting chords so that the interval structure and rhythm stay intact. Ex. 1 is over a minor chord, but note how the line moves through the changes in Ex. 2: The 3rd in Am7 (C) is minor, but in D7 the 3rd in our lick is major (F#). Similarly, the Gmaj7 and Fmaj7 chords in Ex. 2 take major 7’s, but the minor 7 and dominant 7 chords have the appropriately flatted 7th. Play through my example to get the idea, but apply it to different changes (try a fake book for some ideas) and licks for further practice. This exercise is also an excellent way to incorporate licks you’ve transcribed (see last month’s Homework) into your own repertoire. 

Exercises like this one help you create melodic phrases that nail the changes. The listener hears the initial motif, and as it logically adapts to the shifting harmony, a sense of melodic connectedness emerges. It’s the kind of thing horn, guitar, and piano players work on all the time, and it’s partly why they’re not nearly as shy as we are when we get the solo nod.