Jazz players I need help building Bepob scales

[fatfinger]

First please forgive me as I am not a Jazz player at all but is there anyone out there that can explain to me how I would go about building the Bebop scales: the bebop dominant scale, bebop Dorian scale ,bebop major scale, and the bebop melodic minor scale....from the standpoint of the Major scale?

I am going to be adding these scales to a virtual guitar app I run at DragonGuitar but first I need to know how to build them to tell the app what to do.

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Aion]

Okay, so first you pick the scale you want. And then, and this part gets kind of tricky... write Bebop in front of it.

No, but in all seriousness, the only one of those that is actually a named scale is the Bebop Dominant, but even that just kind of exists as a cross between the dominant and major scale. If you're playing the C scale, sometimes you flat the B. But that's it

As for the other ones, dorian is just the second mode of the major scale (play a C major scale, but start on D), and the melodic minor scale is just the major scale with a flat 3rd (so in C, you have an Eb). Additionally, if you're playing classical music (and sometimes in jazz as well), when you descend you also flat the 7th and 6th (so Eb, Ab, and Bb when going down, but A and B are naturaled when going up).

If you want my advise, have the major scale, melodic minor, harmonic minor, and harmonic major.
Major: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C
Mel Min: C-D-Eb-F-G-A-B-C, C-Bb-Ab-G-F-Eb-D-C (optional descending scale)
Harm Min: C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-B-C
Harmonic Major: C-D-E-F-G-Ab-B-C

In addition to those have the pentatonic, blues, whole-tone, and diminished/octatonic.
Pentatonic: C-Eb-F-G-Bb-C (technically any scale with just five notes is pentatonic, but this setup is the most common in western music)
Blues: C-E-F-F#-G-Bb-C (pentatonic, but with F# added)
Whole tone: C-D-E-F#-G#-Bb-C
Diminished/Octatonic: C-Db-Eb-E-F#-G-A-Bb-C
And then there modes listed as, "X mode of the X Scale," and if you can, also include the additional names some of them have. There's a bunch of scales here List of musical scales and modes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(This bit is pretty much entirely extra info, probably no help to your app, but if you like theory you might find it interesting) For the most part the "jazz/bebop" scales don't so much come from scaler or melodic ideas, but rather from harmonic ones. If you have a dominant chord, it was discovered that you could alter the five or the nine of the chord and have it still function the same way. This meant that if you had G-B-D-F in the piano, you could change the G to Ab, A, or A# and the D to Db, D#, and even E, and as long as the bass still played the G under it, you had the same chord (functionally, at least). This was Bebop. Due to this, the solos became very chormatic and that was how Bop players made line. An obvious listing suggestion is Charlie Parker.

As a reaction to this, modal jazz emerged. Rather than having the intense chromaticism and fast moving chords of Bebop, Modal took a root note, and stuck to it for a huge stretch of time. This gave musicians a chance to explore the same harmonic idea they had, but from a scale-based perspective.

So why does everyone think of jazz scales when trying to learn the theory behind jazz? To oversimplify a little bit, because of Berklee. It was one of the first places you could study jazz as an art form. In the 1970's, right when fusion was about to approach its zenith, a bunch of students put together the Real Book. A bunch of lead sheets from their favorite musicians (including themselves, I mean hey, I'm my favorite musician!). As a result, it included a lot of modal (say, Miles Davis), and more tradditional fusion (Chick Correa, for example). At the same time, in part because Berklee was still one of the only places you could study jazz, the way it taught music became the way jazz musicians taught around the country. In other words, you learned scales, because that was how people understood and analyzed the modal and fusion tunes that were in the Real book. But if you look at early modal recordings, as well as most of the great modal and fusion jazz players, you'll realize that in reality they aren't sticking to a single scale, but their lines are essentially still chromatic Bebop lines. One of the ways you can tell a mediocre jazz musician is they'll stick to the scale pretty closely, with maybe a few, very considered chromatic notes. That's all fine and dandy if you're doing it on purpose or that's how your ear is directing your music, but it's a problem if it's limiting the connection between your ear and your hand. An improvised line shouldn't be hampered by anything, it should be free to be as expressive and chromatic as the player wants and needs it to be.

Basically the point I'm getting at is that you don't play jazz with scales, but rather with an understanding of chromaticism that breaks them. Of course, as a musician, one should still learn all the "standard" scales and modes. If only to better understand how to move between them and how to ultimately subvert them. Jazz and Bebop specifically, is all about NOT playing a scale, but rather a chromatic line.

So... that might have been more information than you wanted but hopefully it was interesting and even more hopefully, it was useful. I totally nerd out over theory, and I'm happy to help and/or give my opinion on any other music theory stuff. Thanks for giving me an excuse to talk about it

 

[celticelk]

I would hesitate to call "bebop dominant" a scale. It's more of a stylistic gesture: when playing a straight Mixolydian scale as 8th notes over a 7th chord, you add the natural 7 so that you can have the chord tones hit on the beats. Don't make it a bigger thing than it is.

 

[wizbit81]

^^This.