Motivic Soloing for Jazz Guitar
How to combine motifs and bebop scales to create melody-driven jazz guitar solos

Are your improvised solos full of good ideas, but lacking a compelling story?

Many guitar players know their scales and arpeggios inside out but still find it difficult to improvise solos that draw in an audience and make them feel something.

The secret used by the great bebop guitarists isn't only great vocabulary, it's motivic development - the art of taking a small musical idea and evolving it across the harmony, so your solo unfolds like a conversation.

In Motivic Soloing for Jazz Guitar, acclaimed guitarist Eleonora Strino shows you how to combine bebop scales and phrasing with motif-based thinking to create highly melodic solos that naturally flow through the chord changes.

Jazz Guitar Skills You Will Learn:

Motif-Based Soloing Skills. Learn how to develop small melodic ideas and adapt them across chord changes, so your improvised lines sound musical and connected

Bebop Language That Works in Real Music. Discover how authentic bebop language is created using chromatic passing notes and enclosure patterns to weave around the harmony

Chord Tone Targeting and Voice Leading. Understand how the legends of jazz guitar add gravity to their lines by aiming for strong harmonic notes, making complex lines sound grounded

Implied Harmony and Advanced Bebop Devices. Discover the powerful tools of superimposing extended chord tones, side-stepping, augmented and diminished ideas, and altered dominant sounds

How to Solo Over Major, Minor and Blues Progressions. Work through three full-length soloing etudes to understand how bebop language can be adapted to different harmonic settings

Motivic Soloing Over Complex Standards. Playing over the progression to Stella by Starlight, apply all the ideas you've learned over a fast-moving harmony. Discover how to maintain melodic flow, even over shifting tonal centres

Bonus! Gain Insight Into the Chord Soloing Techniques of the Jazz Greats. Each etude ends with a passage of chord soloing. Eleonora unpacks her approach and teaches you how to support strong melodic lines with tasteful modern jazz chord voicings

Get Inside the Language of Melodic Bebop

Each solo etude is broken down into smaller sections and explained in detail. You will learn exactly how each motif was developed, and how each bebop technique was applied.

Instead of memorising endless licks, this book shows you how great jazz improvisers think, enabling you to build solos from simple motifs that evolve naturally into great storytelling

By studying and absorbing these ideas, you'll develop:

Stronger melodic phrasing
Better note choice over chord changes
A deeper bebop vocabulary
The ability to build solos that sound intentional and musical