A bebop exercise that will help develop your use of arpeggios
This bebop exercise or calisthenic, will help you in developing your use of arpeggios into your improvisation skills. The bebop exercise goes up the dominant scale with a half step before each arpeggio. Once you get the pattern down, you’ll be able to incorporate the pattern into a Jazz lick you can use to start bebop licks off with.
I also think it’s important to let you know where I got this bebop exercise from. I got this bebop exercise from The Be Boppers Method Book Volume I with CD. This Method book has a lot of great practice material and bebop licks to work on.
Here is a sound sample played on trumpet:
How to memorize the bebop exercise in 12 keys:
The half step between each arpeggio is what makes this harder to learn than most exercises, every thing else is within the bebop or dominant scale. The exercise just repeats itself over and over going up the dominant scale one note at a time. Once you start incorporating the pattern into your solos you can start on any note when starting off your Jazz licks. This is a lot easier because you will generally only play one arpeggio of the bebop pattern above.
You’ll notice in my video demonstration that a doodled a little bit. I like to doodle in every key to help build my technique in every key. This helps me break away from being only comfortable in certain keys. The only way you can get better in keys you don’t normally play in, is by practicing in those keys.
This is an interesting pattern, but I’m more partial to using licks from actual solos than using straight arpeggios. I find that with patterns like these, it’s too easy to get locked in to the fingerings, and applying them to real solos gets tough. It actually gets harder to adapt instead of easier. An arpeggio pattern that I really like comes from Bird’s Ornithology solo