Here is a sequence of exercises to help you master a key building block of jazz improvisation: approach notes. You can auto-load the exercises into Random Roots or use them on their own.

Background: What are Approach Notes?

Target Notes

Approach Notes

Often, a target note is preceded by one or more nearby notes that we call approach notes. Approach notes are of less intrinsic interest and importance than target notes. They are meaningful because of the tension they produce and how that tension resolves when the target is reached.

Choosing approach notes is more a basic skill than an art—it just requires familiarity with the idiom… and practice. Ideally once we’ve decided on the target notes and the shape of our musical phrases, the approach notes just roll off our fingers with little if any thought.

These exercises will help you achieve that.

The Exercises

Here are the exercises, as a four-page pdf file for you to download:

A Few Points to Keep in Mind

Every Key

Don’t read while you practice

Handling difficulty

Approach any target

1. Target single notes, starting with the root… progressing to other simple scale degrees such as the major and minor third and the perfect fifth.
2. Target the notes of ascending and descending major arpeggios. This is not so much in order for you to use these arpeggios-with-approaches in your playing (though you’re welcome to) but rather that it gives you practice targeting a series of notes with approaches in quick succession. It’s important that you be able to hear the notes you target before you play them, and major triads are easy to hear. When you’ve mastered those you’ll have a terrific foundation and ought to find you can approach arbitrary targets quite well. But by all means create additional arpeggio exercises for yourself, using minor & dominant chord arpeggios instead of major, and arpeggiating upper chord extensions—the possibilities are endless!
3. The last group of exercises are idiomatic phrases that make use of the skills you’ve been practicing.

Execution: Ghosting

A few words about executing the phrases when you play them. The execution will vary depending on your instrument, but on most instruments you’ll want to be familiar with ghosting. Ghosting is a technique of de-emphasizing certain notes that fall on upbeats (not beats 1, 2, 3, 4 but the eighth note beats between them) so as to make the downbeat notes that follow them “pop”. Standard jazz phrasing emphasizes upbeats; ghosting provides exceptions, creating rhythmic variety.

On some instruments such as piano, it is achieved simply by sounding a note with less force. On wind instruments there are more options, and they let the player affect other qualities of the note as well. (On the saxophone, for instance, you can play ghosted notes with your tongue actually touching the reed lightly; in results in (1) a darker sound, (2) a decrease in volume that’s more sudden than you can achieve via breath alone, and (3) a useful accentuation of the following note when you remove your tongue.) If you have questions about how to ghost, ask your teacher about the details; we’ll discuss when to ghost.

In a nutshell: we will only ghost upbeats—never downbeats, and only in the middle of a phrase. Most often, a note we ghost will be lower than the notes that surround it, though sometimes it may be in the midst of an ascending line. Here’s a step-by-step guide to deciding whether to ghost a note:

1. Is it on a downbeat? → Do not ghost ✘
2. Does it follow a rest? → Do not ghost ✘
3. Does it last longer than an eighth note? → Do not ghost ✘
4. Is the followed by a lower note? → Do not ghost ✘
   Otherwise → Probably ghost ✓

D1 — 2, 4
D3 — 2, 8, 12
D4 — 2, 4, 8, 12, 16
D5 — 4, 8, 12, 16…
D6 — 2, 6, 10, 14…
D7 — 2, 6, 10
D8 — 4
D9 — 8, 10, 16
D10 — 6, 8, 14, 16, 18

Feel free to mark these notes on the PDF file. Often ghosted notes are indicated by parentheses surrounding the note head. I didn’t mark them here because you’ll eventually want to learn to ghost the appropriate notes automatically as you read a phrase, without any indication.

Practicing with Random Roots

I’ve discussed elsewhere why it’s so beneficial to practice through the keys in random order. For the exercises on the last page you may decide instead to practice through the keys chromatically, or in the circle of fifths. But for the shorter exercises it’s essential to randomize the keys. The Random Roots app for iPhone & iPad is great for that—plus, it’ll play the roots along with you and keep track of your keys and tempos for each exercise.

Auto-loading these exercises

Once you’ve installed the app (it’s free to download it and try), you can easily upload all these approach note exercises into the app with a click. If you’re reading this on your iOS device, just click here. Or, if you’ve printed out the exercise sheets, you can just point your device’s camera at the QR code on the sheet; a button will appear for you to press at the top of the camera window for you to auto-import the exercises.

More about Approaches & Enclosures

I’ve written a blog post about some of the concepts behind approaches (diatonic, chromatic, enclosures, delayed resolutions, etc.) that sheds some more light on these exercises—have a look at antonjazz.com/approaches-enclosures if you like!

Have fun! Let me know how it goes, ok? (You can drop a line here.)

best wishes,
Anton