I think that I am finally ready to depart from technical arpeggio soloing into a new era of soloing by ear. From this point forward I am going to try much harder to do some transcribing and trying to excercise my ear.
I think every guitar player should go through this phase where they need to build a basic vocabulary first before they try to put together fancy words with it. I spent the last year seriously focusing on learning arpeggios and patterns and soloing with these tools.
Everyone knows that this isn’t the real way to play guitar. Sadly, most guitar teacher will tell you from the beginning to learn to play by ear without allowing you, as a student, to develop a platform from which to grow from. Don’t let people talk you into skipping this process. I think its important to delve into it but its also important to know when to come up for air.
From this point forward its time to start transcribing. I am going to start by re-memorizing 2 Minor Swing solos from transcriptions. After that I am going to re-memorize “la Gitane”. When I have finished those tasks I am going to start transcribing and I will probably start with Si Tu Savais in Bm and Cm because its a song I really like. After that I think I want to learn an I’ll See You In My Dreams solo, being inspired by hearing Stephane Wrembel play it once.
-Jon

I was thinking more about my earlier comment: “If you analyze the melodic minor chord scale (with 7ths), you will notice the 4 and 5 chords are both dominant and the 6 and 7 chords are m7b5 . Also the first chord is minMaj7 , which is a popular voice leading chord isn’t it? If you take out the sevenths then you have a chord scale which approaches utmost simplicity: Am, Bm, C+, D, E, F#dim, G#dim. With 2 minors, 2 majors, and 2 diminished chords in that scale, you can see why it lends itself to some sort of ingenious simplicity.”
After I thought about this for about an hour I think I am noticing two sweet spots in melodic minor theory. First of all, in the chord scale I describe above you see that the 3rd of the chord scale is an augmented arp at the relative major position. Second, the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale seems to be the most important and is often called the “altered scale” or the “super locrian”. The first half of this scale resembles a diminished pattern and the second half resembles a whole-tone scale, which explains why Romane spends so much time talking about the whole-tone. If I can manage to teach myself to grasp the relationship between these two ideas then I think I might be onto something.
I am not saying that it is important to learn the augmented arpeggio itself. I actually think that if I approach it correctly that I can indirectly reference the augmented arp through proper use of diminished and whole-tone scales.
I got a few new ideas from someone who helped me in this area. Over the next few weeks I will hopefully make some progress with melodic minor theory. My approach to gypsy jazz is to search out and find the convenient and easy way to grasp these concepts without bogging myself down in useless theory. I think I am close to a new discovery… I can feel it. I just wish it didn’t take so much time to figure out things like this on my own.

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