How to Construct Strong Bebop Lines Using Approach Notes and Enclosures

Hello everyone and welcome to my channel. My name is Noah Kellman and today I want to show you some cool enclosure patterns that you can use to get that

bebop

sound in your

lines

and really understand how to form good chromaticism around chord tones. those of you who don't quite know what a chord tone is, well, a chord tone generally refers to just the one, three, five and seven of a chord. I've seen people sometimes include nine as a potential chord tone, but really one, three, five and seven are typically what we're thinking about here now, many

strong

bebop

lines

will actually place chord tones on the beats. powerful.

The downbeats in 4 4 will be one and three, so let's take a quick look here. one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four so if you were paying attention, you saw that I was landing a lot of chord tones on the

strong

rhythms there, so how do we make sure that we have those good landings, well that's a great question and in bebop we use something called

approach

notes

and

enclosures

, so an

approach

note is just a little extra note that we can use to land those chord tones where we want, so Let's say we're playing a G Dorian scale and we're going to a c7, so we're going from G minor to C7, well here we're landing on the 13th over that C7, what if I really wanted to land on the G so that the fifth So how could I do it?

There are a few different options. We could do it like this or we could do it right, so some of these

notes

are addressed now, so look at this in F sharp, G, that F sharp is a little approach note and if We do this, there's our little approach note up to the g right now, an enclosure is similar, but instead of, you know, just moving chromatically towards a note, we can actually enclose the note to play some notes around that note and be able to do the same thing. Okay, so we're on the C7, we're doing 13 sharp 11 flat 6 sharp 11 to land on the G, so it doesn't really matter if these notes are super chromatic or non-diatonic, right, they're leading us to that. g and that's a little enclosure, so it's actually a great pattern to start with, so we enclose the five of a chord here and start with the six and that's pattern number one.

Now let me show you another very, very typical one on this one. we start at four or eleven, so we're going to circle around it good and then we land and you'll hear it a lot in the context of a look like this. Now I'm going to add a Here's a little rhythmic pattern that's going to make this little enclosure even more idiomatic, so we're adding a little sixteenth note pattern, which is actually very nice and typical. So far, we're just working on enclosing the fifth on the right, but we have Other chord tones we have the one, the three, the five and the seven, so some of these patterns can transfer to the others and you know, I think I played a major 7, but obviously we're doing a c7 here, so our 7 would be a flat 7, so what would happen if we did the same enclosure pattern around the 7?

See how this works now in this case, I don't love this pattern around the one because we have to start with a major seven that really clashes here, right? so not all of them work here, but they would probably work with all three, let's see, it works for me, okay, let's look at some others on the seven, okay, that's good, it's the same one we talked about with the fifth, so this would be more use of approach notes, check this out and now we get into another concept here connecting one uh approach note or enclosure pattern to another and now we're starting to use them to form bebop lines around those chord tones.

I'm going to the three on the right, these are just taking these little micro enclosure cells and combining them around the chord tones to form bebop lines, so we're going to create a full lick

using

these patterns, all on a c7, okay , let's include the fifth first. and then we'll go up to the third and see where we go from there, so we just made a bunch of these little patterns and created a pretty long beebop all over one chord. Now, obviously, I was kind of pa

using

on the chord tones. just to show you where I was hitting them, but it might sound a little more normal that way, so I challenge you to work on not just learning some of these little patterns that I showed you today, but see if you can come up with them. some of your own and then use them to formulate some licks and lines to see if you can really work to make them work in real time and I know some of this stuff can be complicated so if you want more help I have a In a few different places I you can go to do specific exercises, you can go to jazzpianoconcepts.com and look at actually 20 modern bebop licks that might be a good option to work on, or if you really want to work together one on one, you could do that. click the link below in the description and schedule a quick call which will either be with me or one of my teammates depending on the time and what we can do is just have a quick and totally free chat about your goals and what you think they are.

They are their weaknesses. and what you want to work on and see if we can really help point you in the right direction or even if working together would be a good option. Thank you so much for watching and if you enjoyed the lesson, be sure to share it. A like if you are new to the channel, consider subscribing and clicking the bell, turn on notifications so you don't miss more videos like this, as always, thank you very much for watching and thank you very much for your support and subscription see you next time