Licks to Riffs Guidebook: Jazz

In the blues edition of Ton van Bergeijk’s Licks to Riffs Guidebook, he showed you how to turn licks into riffs for simple blues and jazz blues. Here in the jazz edition, you’ll dive deeper into jazz blues, work on rhythm changes, minor and diminished tonalities, different concepts of riffs, and riffs that you can use over a non-standard chord progression.

”Once you’ve gone through the additional concepts in the first part of this course, you’ll be able to adept your licks to any song you may encounter. We'll then study 9 essential licks and turn them into riffs; each on a jazz-blues and rhythm changes. We'll put them to work over two jazz Standards, using the progressions of Sunny Side of The Street and Indiana.”

Riffs are versatile and powerful tools, which will lift up your song, enhance song-identity, accompaniment, solo lift-off, and solo-support. Whether you’re a soloist using riffs to give structure to a solo, or an accompanist providing a strong background for singers and soloists, crafting compelling riffs can be a challenge for any musician.

You’ll work with 9 essential licks and learn how to turn them into riffs; each on a jazz-blues rhythm change. These licks range from a New Orleans style pianistic background a la James Booker, to licks used by horn sections in the great Riff Orchestras, to licks composed by the great Jazz guitarist George Van Eps. You’ll then apply all of the concepts and techniques to work over two Jazz Standards; using the progressions of Sunny Side of The Street and Indiana.

"If we want to create a riff for a song that doesn’t fall into a standard 'chord-progression category, we need a little strategy. I usually break up the chord progression in 2-bar sections and simplify the chords, so we get an idea of the basic structure without any substitute chords. You can take 2’s: 2 bars riff, 2 bars solo, or play 4 by 4, or even take 8’s. After that you can look at the riff over the whole song, just to get the practice and the material in case you need the other odd bits later in the song.”

Ton will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way.  You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the rhythm and soloing Performance Studies. Plus, Ton includes all of the rhythm tracks for you to work with on your own. In addition, you’ll be able to loop or slow down any of the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace.

Grab your guitar and let’s get riffin’ with Ton Van Bergeijk!